Right after GDC, I wrote about Akira Yamaoka’s talk on Silent Hill. The slides to his presentation are now available in PowerPoint format. If you are interested in the design of the Silent Hill games, you should check this out. Also available is notes from a technical discussion on the cutscene creation process from Resident […]
Thanks to Insert Credit for linking to an article on Gamespot abut From Software’s upcoming PSP title, Adventure Player. Adventure Player will run adventure games that user can create themselves on a PC with software called Adventure Player Studio. Several sample Adventure Player games will ship from From, the first of which appears to be […]
At the Game Developer’s Conference last week, Akira Yamaoka gave a presentation about how the atmosphere in the Silent Hill series was constructed. Yamaoka split his talk into two sections: Day and Night. The Day portion of his talk began with a discussion about how horror differs between American and Japanese cultures. Yamaoka called Silent […]
Thanks to Kotaku for linking to info about Resident Evil 4’s development cycle. This is just some message on some board for the moment, so until it’s confirmed in Edge, take it with a grain of salt. Some interesting details from the post: Resident Evil 4 as we know it is actually the fourth version […]
I’m almost all the way through Fatal Frame 2. The game’s been pretty easy, and after 9 hours I’ve reached what I believe to be the final save before the end boss. Before I get into ranting about the design of the end boss, I need to briefly cover some Fatal Frame mechanics for those […]
I’m trying to take more time to use this site as a place to write my thoughts about games down instead of just reporting survival horror news. Some of you may remember a post I wrote a few months back where I complained that Siren is too frustrating and difficult. Four months later I am […]
Lately I’ve been battling my way through Siren. I haven’t had a lot of time to play games lately, but a couple of times a week I am sitting down and trying to make some progress. Siren is an interesting game. It seems to be universally loved or hated (GameRankings’ page shows the reviews of […]
Kevin over at Game Hermeneutics has written an interesting guide to “generic” survival horror game design. Kevin seems to be mostly talking about Resident Evil, but his points are still valid. I’ve been thinking of writing an article in a similar vein for a while now. I think Kevin’s done a good job of scratching […]
I have a theory about Resident Evil games: I think that only every other game in the series is well balanced. The major criticism of the first Resident Evil was that it was too difficult, but RE 2 was inspired. RE 3‘s structure was somewhat disappointing, but Code: Veronica was amazing. And now, as I […]
I recently asked a poster named “spike” how he might correct the faults of Chaos Break, which he apparently hated. I’d like to extend this question to all of you for all the games in the database. Let’s say you get to decide how to fix one of the games listed here. You may choose […]