If you wern't at PAX (this happened, but I still <3 you.) then you would have missed out on an awesome display by the Bioshock 2 Guys. There's this little website you guys may have heard of called theressomthinginthesea.com. If you live under a rock, when you go there you are greeted with a pretty unassuming office you can explore, owned by a man whose daughter was abducted by the Big Sister. This awesome teaser came to life at PAX (and E3 as well, apparently.) Everything was meticulously crafted from the books on the shelves, the cork board of evidence of abductions, there was even a reel-to-reel recording machine that played some creepy monologue about a man in prison.



Anyways, there is a puzzle that the people monitoring the booth were encouraging everyone to solve. To get an idea, imagine a picture swapping puzzle, and then put 5 sides on it, and you kind of have an image of what I had to deal with. Since I wasn't leaving the booth until I got my Johan Vasquez print that day (that's for another post,) I decided to pit my hungover brain against the puzzle at hand. It didn't take very long, once you got the basic idea behind the puzzle, but it was impressed upon me that it's mind numbing difficulty proved too much for people to handle.



So, here are the scans of my prize, enjoy!

1) Gillette Fusion Hydra Gel
Because a gamer's beard is made up of some of the worst god forsaken rocks ever to be forged in the depths of hell and is therefore a formidable opponent. But I have the answer.

2) Body Wash
To clean off the crabs that will no doubt take every chance they can to launch themselves at my crotch.

3) Shampoo
To clean off the head crabs that will no doubt take every chance they can to launch themselves at my head.

4) Dental Travel Pack
Because this is a vacation, a time to relax in the comfort of luxury. And nothing spells luxury quite like brushing your teeth with the dental equivalent of steel wool!

5) Hand Sanitizer
An acid to burn off the quarter inch layer of filth and disease accumulated by handling the same objects as thousands of other gamers.

6) Ear Plugs
Because sleeping on a plane is difficult without these babies.

7) Compressed Smelly Air
Because I care about the Ladies.

Sweet home is a very scary game. Famicom fans in America, however, never got the chance to experience its' gruesome story and frightening atmosphere because of a halted release. Mostly due to Censorship issues with the story line and what was considered really graphic gore for Famicom titles around 1989. Luckily today, fan translated roms are floating around the interwebs and give us an opportunity to experience what is considered by many as the first Survival Horror game. More importantly, door for door, Sweet Home inspired Shinki Mikami's ideas of what Resident Evil should be.


And that is the subject of this Cblog. My attempt is to draw a direct line between the roots of a much loved game and its' probably lesser known influences. By comparing inspiration to popular franchises, we can gain a better understanding of how things have evolved from their storyline, gameplay, and more. Over the weeks, I'll go in-detail about the 'games before the blockbusters' with the likes of Fallout, Diablo, The Elder Scrolls, and on. So welcome to 'The Foundation: Examining the Roots of Todays' Popular Franchises.'



The largest comparison to be made between Sweet Home and Resident Evil is the setting of each title. Both largely take place inside a mansion littered with monsters and puzzles to challenge our attempts at escape. Outside the walls of the veritable death traps seem unimportant while being inside the mansion, and surviving are main objectives. Shinki Mikami, in an interview about Resident Evil, said his idea was not to focus on story, or to even have a story, but to focus on conveying fear effectively. Sweet Home can be looked at as the epitome of style over story. You have very little background, initially. The team of 5 enters the mansion of a deceased painter to find a particular piece of art. The mission turns to survival once the ceiling collapses around the front door and the ghost of the painter claims 'Fools! Those who defile my home will feel my wrath!' Other information is scattered about by notes, much like the notes of the infected Professor in RE. These notes as story telling mechanics have, over time, become great additions to the main plot and don't disengage the player from the gameplay any more, making them choose to ignore the side story over the main. Examples being the audio logs of Bioshock and Dead Space.



The opening door animations in Resident Evil have been borrowed directly from Sweet Home, to fill the otherwise black loading screen between levels. Shinki Mikami liked the idea because he said it created tension. Sweet Home did a lot of things differently for the time it was released. For one, you start with a party of 5 members, and if one of them dies, they are gone for the rest of the game. This lead to a possibility of 4 different endings, one for however many members survived till the end. The endings vary depending on how many of your teammates you rescue in RE as well. Each of the 5 characters only had 2 inventory slots, a mechanic now looked at as a staple for defining what a Survival Horror game is. You would find yourself constantly backtracking to pick up items you didn't think you would need for puzzles later on. Resident Evil remedied this with the weapons Cache at each of the Save Rooms where you could store weapons, keys, and puzzle items. The puzzles in Resident Evil are clearly connected by it's predecessor, let's just say you will be pushing things around. A lot. As games evolve, developer-made obstacles and how they are overcome evolve as well, but at times, still fall back on collecting an item in one place and using it somewhere else.

For a game with 8-bit graphics, based on a movie, Sweet Home conveys fear with a technique that holds up to modern games. You won't find dogs jumping through windows for cheap scare, but the presentation in design and from orchestration is very ambient and tense. Particular cut scenes are genuinely creepy, I won't go into those because I would rather you play the game through and experience them yourselves. Watch the video below only if you want to see what I think of as the most gory presentation in 8-Bits since Hitlers Exploding Head. Spoiler Alert as this scene occurs over half-way through the game.


If Sweet Home the film was never made, or was a commercial failure, or was simply never considered to be optioned into a game, the Resident Evil we know today might be a very different game than it is. So for that, Sweet Home, I salute you.

Thanks, AgentBBJ for suggesting Sweet Home, and if any of you have lesser known games that inspired today's big players, post them in this thread Thanks!

Left for Dead 2 is probably the biggest announcement of day one at E3 as far as I’m concerned. But I’m apprehensive at the same time excited..
It’s a fine line a zombie game walks to maintain atmosphere and pacing, in representing the tension of insurmountable odds, like being in a tank slowly filling with water from the underside. If there’s one thing in the new announcement that really could break what Valve has done so well on it’s giving the common infected a new ability. Before reading more into the article at Rock Paper Shotgun I was annoyed to say the least - one of the great attractions of left 4 dead 1’s common infected was that not only are there just a fucking obscene amount at any given time, but they were deadly en mass while indistinguishable from one another. And then someone figured to change things up and turn some of them fireproof. As if god saw fit to grant these people invulnerability so that in death, they could ruin a Survivors day a little better than the average Zombie. In reality though, it looks like Valve has taken what I’ve just mentioned and addressed the concern by placing fireproof infected in Hazmat Suits. Presumably worn by a bitten human before turning, the bright yellow suits do well enough to explain fire retardancy. Also making them stick out like a sore thumb, and unless used very, very carefully a bulky yellow suit running at me will break immersion in ways that will make me rage in ways I have never fathomed.



But for the sum of it’s parts LFD2 looks like it will be successful improving on an already winning formula. The AI Director has been improved by introducing a feature that will change the paths for the survivors must take to reach the next safe house depending on their performance. In one example, depending on if the AI Director feels you've been doing poorly or spectacularly well, a graveyard portion of a map will be either a single corridor affair or a deadly maze of catacombs.
The sequel is set in Southern America, which has a lot of potential for very nice maps, and portions will be played in Full Daylight, changing the intensity from the bright outdoors to pitch black interiors. Random weather has been introduced by the AI Director, another nice cosmetic addition. Death animations have been amped up as well as the Gore Factor. Melee weapons are now a part of gameplay also.



Not much has been said about the new infected other than the teaser video where we saw The Charger and a change to the Witch’s mechanic. Kind of a mix between a special infected and a tank, the charger has one huge arm used to shoulder slam the survivors around, damaging them, but not instantly incapacitating. In the daylight maps, the Witch is now up and about, wandering a path given to her by the AI Director. It was difficult enough to try and find an alternate route around the Witch in L4D1 but to have her suddenly turn the corner in front of you is going to cause some shitted pants. A new gameplay mode is going to be announced eventually, (Wild Speculation) possibly a last stand type of scenario with checkpoints and barricades? (/Wild Speculation)

Two publications have already had a hands on with one of the campaigns and even spoken about L4D2 with developer Chet Faliszek.

Sometimes it’s great to be able to turn off the brain for a while and enjoy something where thinking is optional. Burn Zombie Burn is a lot like that. All the great things about arcade enjoyment, and you can keep the quarters! And believe me, if this were a cabinet at the old Sharkade I’d have burned through a small fortune on it already.


Please insert 25c to continue

Burn Zombie Burn is purely based on scoring points and massacring zombies by the horde with an array of firearms, bats, and lawnmowers. The art style is cartoonish and your protagonist (if you want to use a term usually reserved for things with a medicorum of storyline) is Bruce, a kind of characture somewhere between Elvis and Duke Nukem. Don’t go looking towards this title for it’s depth, but I digress.


Not Exactly the Wanderer from SOTC

In as much as a person can enjoy a game for it’s story line and how immersive or involved you become, the way that Burn Zombie Burn does it’s thing makes it a great game in it’s own right.

For ten bucks you’re definitely not going to be dissapointed.

This blog is a repost in Memory of Vexed_Alex