The perils of an overactive imagination

[davidn]

But not, as you'll see, an overactive drawing ability. No game series should make you afraid of the dark all over again.

Comments

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

Laughing at this.

More importantly as soon as I saw this post my screen turned into:



Hoping that you actually have it memorized. I've always wanted to memorize it.

[davidn]

You recognized it! Yes, I'm afraid I am tragic enough to have it memorized - I used to know it off by heart when I was about fourteen, then forgot about it and had to re-learn it when I started including little in-joke SGA messages in my games.

I can now write in it pretty fluently (though the large amount of characters with extra dots makes it less useful as an actual shorthand), but reading it still takes a while.

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

I find your journal (and, obviously, the things you talk about in it) to be quite interesting, particularly in relation to video games and/or development.
You won't find anything of interest in my journal, I'm sure (I very rarely update it, even), but I hope you don't mind if I add you to my friend list?

[davidn]

Of course, go ahead! I'm very pleased that someone finds me interesting :) I'm guessing you found me through the videogame_tales community?

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

I did indeed. I joined quite some time ago but I haven't seen much activity there, so I dug a little deeper. :)

Also, while this particular comment doesn't seem to be plagued with them yet, please forgive my propensity for errors when I've just woken up. The other one I made has a couple bothersome ones. I'm not really too concerned, but this is a time for first impressions and all that. =P

[kjorteo]

Jason, Scissorman, the Welder, Cabadath, and Michael Howard? I don't like your chances.

(No Mysterious Lady though. :()

[davidn]

Oh, thanks for reminding me!

Of all the horror games I've seen, though, I think that Clock Tower is the only one that I genuinely can't play. From the five minutes I survived of it, it seemed like a classic nightmare scenario of being continually pursued by an unstoppable enemy - a 7 Days chase sequence expanded into an entire game, where this thing could appear at any moment and you had no way to fight or stop him. Even Michael Howard has nothing on that.

[kjorteo]

Oh, my. That certainly sounds...special.

So anyway...what's all this about, anyway? I don't think I quite follow.

[davidn]

The original diagram, or the game itself?

[kjorteo]

The original diagram.

(Also, Cocytusshire is my new favorite location name ever.)

[davidn]

Well, I'm in the middle of a period of being alone in the flat for just over a week, and unfortunately for times like these I have quite a vivid imagination. I remember you mentioned that you were afraid to pay attention to your DS the night after seeing Cabadath for the first time because he might just somehow be behind you.

This is much the same thing, and it isn't helped by the way that any light from the bedroom or bathroom stops short of the main area of the flat, causing everyday objects to take on terrifying new forms in the gloom. (It doesn't help that the floor lamp in the corner casts a shadow on the wall that looks exactly like him if it's got a shirt draped over it.)

[kjorteo]

Ah, yes. Well, what can I say? Cabadath is scary!

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

Despite its genuine atmosphere of fear (and the scary bad guy) what made the original SNES Clock Tower less thrilling for me than it could have been was the fact that the killer, wasn't completely constant, and most certainly wasn't dynamic. There were definite patterns and, I don't know, spawning points that could be more or less predicted, and rather than having some bit of code determine that he's in a certain room at a certain time and you could run into him anywhere, I think he was, in fact, spawned at various points close to you. Of course, that didn't prevent him from being mostly contant in that he'd show up pretty much all the time and you couldn't get a break in most rooms.
This isn't really the game's fault, I just had a certain image of it built up in my head and it didn't quite match it, despite being excellent of itself.

Clock Tower 4, Haunting Ground, whatever you want to call it, had less atmosphere overall, as far as I was concerned (but it was creepy nonetheless), but it did have the dynamic, organic (whatever you want to call it) chase, with the bad guy as an entity with its own life outside of your own field of vision. While the game had flaws, I loved this aspect.

I sometimes wish I hadn't inured myself to horror games to the point where they don't often scare me.

[davidn]

Being a horror game fan, have you gone through the 5 Days/Trilby/John DeFoe series? They've been a regular talking point on this journal for some time, and while I tend to be very easily frightened both by intentional and totally illogical things, they're the games that have left the biggest impression on me for some time (all the more because when I started them I thought I was in for a mildly spooky haunted mansion series).

I think the agreement was that the most frightening moments in them were the points where the game breaks the rules that you're comfortable with. Knowing that Scissorman would appear at definite points in Clock Tower would probably make the game much easier to cope with for me - I admit I didn't really play far enough to discover whether any encounters I had with him were random or not.

Like I mentioned in the comment you replied to, there's a couple of sequences in one of the Trilby games (I'm being vague just in case you haven't played them) that reminded me of what I had experienced of Clock Tower - sections where an instant-death-touch enemy can appear through any door at any moment, regardless of whether it's logical for them to be able to get there in that time or not (you can run away from them in one room, be almost all the way over to the other exit of the corridor you ran into and they'll jump out and kill you from that door instead). If you could at least know where they would come from next, I think I wouldn't have had to go through the final section with my eyes firmly closed.

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

I have indeed played the... well, the series, whichever name you prefer to use. In retrospect it's probably a bit judgmental, but I didn't expect a freeware game to have a dynamic chase sequence, just like I don't expect the games them to be very long. Something that would really annoy me in a game I paid money for and developed by supposed professionals doesn't bother me as much (or can in fact impress me) if I encounter it in an amateur game, which is where the judgment comes in, I suppose.

While I didn't have to close my eyes during the final sequence of 7 Days, I did cringe every time I walked towards a doorway, just in case.

But, yeah, Haunting Ground has the enemy patrolling the rooms independently of you, I believe, and for me at least that makes for much more tension. I think there may be times when they'll spawn as an event or somesuch, but that's to be expected. Of course, you're not necessarily going to know where they're going to come from, and if they're nearby at all or you even suspect it, you tend to spend a lot of the game hiding in closets. Oh, and the enemy can find you, too.
But you don't usually find yourself surprised. One of the main gameplay elements is a dog who can help protect you and, perhaps most importantly, growls when the enemy is near. I think the music flares up a little and you hear footsteps too, although I don't quite recall.
It's a fairly decent game, and a pretty good experience if you're a horror fan.

Anyway, I very much enjoyed the John DeFoe (or whatever) series, despite a few very obscure puzzles that I looked up the solutions for. I actually think I enjoyed 7 Days the most, so I'm slightly surprised to find that it's the least enjoyed overall (I think I liked 6 Days the least, although it is still very good).

I read that you've played some other of Yahtzee's games, but have you tried Art of Theft? It is, in my opinion, a very good side-scrolling stealth game, and although the tie-in is miniscule enough that you won't want to play it for this fact alone, it stars Trilby and can be treated as a sort of prequel to 5 Days a Stranger. Or at least it can be treated as a game set earlier in the chronology - I wouldn't really call it a prequel.

[davidn]

There's definitely a difference between how you look at something free and something you paid money for - and when you're aware that a game was a one- or two-man effort it makes you appreciate all the more what work went into it rather than what was left out.

I'm just trying to think of a quick way to do a dynamic (or at least physically possible) chase sequence, though it's difficult to say for sure without knowing anything about the AGS base that the game is built on - you could keep a tree of locations that the killer could be in, changing its location number to an adjacent room every X seconds, and in a game as small as 7 Days it's not a gigantic pathfinding job to find the route to take to get to the player. However, that would mean that once you had outrun him in one room and never had to double back (the chase is mostly linear after you've activated the spikes of death/"radio masts" on the roof), there would be no chance of him ever catching up, so the totally random appearance works better in that respect.

I have to admit that I did have a lot of walkthrough moments in the series - perhaps I'm just not particularly fantastic at adventure games in general. I didn't manage to spoil any scares for myself, rather using the walkthroughs when I knew I was in a section that I wanted to get out of particularly quickly. I respected 7 Days for being the only game in the series to actually make me scream out loud (the first time the possessed captain got me), but I think Notes is the cleverest of them, and the first time I found myself in the wrong game, it made me stop playing for at least a few days. Fortunately my first illusion was the 7 Days cargo bay, and it could have been a lot worse. 6 Days didn't seem particularly frightening to me, or even much of an adventure game seeing as you only pick up and use about four items in the whole thing - but it had a lonely and oppressive atmosphere that really stayed with me.

I have played Art of Theft - I really like the idea, but I had issues with the controls, finding myself (much like Flashback before it) stumbling over them and getting spotted because of missed keypresses much more than any mistake that was caused by doing what I intended. Good game mechanics other than that, though.

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

I had quite a bit of trouble getting used to the controls in Art of Theft, myself. Most of them were fairly good, but I found a few to be clunky and counterintuitive. You do make a good point that constantly flubbing due to controls rather than skill can be very offputting, and for that matter I am very, very picky about how a game controls. I wasn't too bothered in Art of Theft, though. I guess it's because I find it to be much more vexing in 3D games than in 2D games.

As for Flashback, I don't think I ever mastered those controls despite loving the game. Now you've got me all reminiscent about that, Another World, and Prince of Persia.

[davidn]

Interesting that you mention the divide between 2D and 3D games here - I can't actually think of any 3D games in which I found the controls particularly awful offhand, but I imagine that with a third dimension you have more to cope with and more to go wrong. The only 3D game I can think of where I couldn't stand the movement was Fur Fighters on the PS2, but that was mostly because the cel-shaded look gave you absolutely no depth perception.

I think the biggest control disaster I can think of is in the Prince of Persia series, actually - the PC version of the first game was fantastic in its fluidity and the way that there was automatic platform-edge detection for your jumps. Prince of Persia 2 removed that edge detection, or at least changed the way it worked significantly enough for me to fall off regularly (particularly in the infamous horse statue level that takes thousands of tries every time). And most of the console versions with the exception of the SNES one are hardly worth bothering with - each one of them has at least one catastrophic flaw in the movement or swordfighting controls.