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[George_Chickens]

... RE4 is a terrible example of survival-horror, because it isn't survival horror. Even the early game covers (and Capcom, IIRC) said that it "moved away from survival horror to the fresher action genre", or something along those lines. Game reviewers of the time praised the change, or said that RE4 wasn't a Resident Evil game because it wasn't survival horror.

[Rolan7]

Huh that's weird, I thought it was pretty creepy and mysterious.  Idunno what makes a game horror exactly (and I'm okay with that).

So a strategy game must be any game that makes you use a strategy.

Nah see, in CS you use pro MLG *strats*.  Totally different

[George_Chickens]

Oh, nah, it definitely had horror elements. But the move away from survival horror was a controversial point, and even a part of its marketing, if I recall correctly.

[Rolan7]

Oh I see now.  I guess they did downplay scarcity a bit with all the shops and drops.  IDK if that changes the genre or just makes it EZ-mode, but meh.  It was definitely more action-y yeah.

[Arbinire]

New peeve.  People who call everything they don't like an exploit, despite every evidence that it isn't an exploit, up to and including the developers themselves saying that a feature was absolutely intended and a known use of game mechanics.  Especially when they use it as a justification to use actual exploits.

[Krevsin]

In my opinion, "game genre" is a thing that's done entirely for filing purposes based on things how a player's expected to interact with the game's mechanics, objects, story et cetera.

It's not a codified set of rules that a game must follow in order to be considered a part of that genre but rather a descriptor that gets applied to the game for purposes of book-keeping and managing player expectation.

If a game fits the criteria of a given genre poorly, it's not suddenly not a part of that genre, just a bad representative of the things that are associated with that genre. A bad RTS game is still an RTS game, despite being bad at providing the type of engagement usually expected of an RTS game. Likewise in films, a bad action film isn't just suddenly reclassified as a comedy and stripped of its action film status because it has terrible fight scenes and awful dialogue. It's merely a bad film.

Not to mention the fact that game genres often get merged and you just don't get clear-cut examples of a given genre anymore, with elements traditionally associated with say RPGs make their way into FPS games or RTSes or racing games or whatever and pinning down what genre a given game is is becoming really hard with a lot of them just going the tried and tested "Action-Adventure" route (i.e. one genre with definitions so wide and loose it doesn't really tell you how specifically you're expected to interact with a game from just reading "an exciting action-adventure game" in the blurb).

[Draignean]

Console ports that do not change the button prompts to the appropriate symbols.

Look, I have a board in front of me with more than 120 buttons on it, I don't want to have to press all of them to figure out which one you arbitrarily mapped the select button to.

Turns out it was g. Why? Fuck you, that's why.

[Shadowlord]

Resident Evil was survival horror? This is news to me. I tried RE4 and I thought the genre was "annoying zombie game."

[Neonivek]

Resident Evil was survival horror? This is news to me. I tried RE4 and I thought the genre was "annoying zombie game."

Well the very first survival horror game was Alone in the Dark. It is the genre definer.

Play that game... then play Resident Evil (a game directly inspired from it) and you will sort of get the idea.

[Rolan7]

My (very humble) understanding of survival horror is that it involves scarce resources, and creepy threats that you're tempted to over-expend resources on.
I didn't play much of RE3 but I'm pretty sure it counts...  Besides which, as far as I've heard, Resident Evil and Silent Hill kinda invented the genre.

Even 4 still has resource conservation as a mechanic... at least initially.  My impression is that you get a glut after the first couple hours.

Resident Evil was survival horror? This is news to me. I tried RE4 and I thought the genre was "annoying zombie game."

Well the very first survival horror game was Alone in the Dark. It is the genre definer.

Play that game... then play Resident Evil (a game directly inspired from it) and you will sort of get the idea.

Ah, excellent point.  Alone in the Dark is absolutely survival horror in the RE style, predating RE.
I like how Slowbeef and Diabetus kept joking that RE ripped it off...  Yet it's kinda true, even if RE did it better.

RE still brought the genre to prominence, I think.  Also it had less "walking dead" moments - as in, oh, your sword broke in this duel.  You can run, and save, but you cannot ever complete the game.

[Egan_BW]

Horror is a narrative genre, not a game genre like real time strategy or first person shooter. The fact that you're supposed to be scared says nothing about what you're actually doing in the game. "Survival" is... almost a game genre. I'd label Resi as a survival action game with a horror story.
But then, almost every horror game seems to fall into that category. Where are all the horror-RTSes? Horror RPGs? Horror MOBAs?

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Isnt The Secret World supposed to be a Horror RPG?

[ThtblovesDF]

Kickstarter has given me all kinds of new Pet Peeves, like a game still crashing on lauch like 5 years after development started (SE) or being a silly mess of bugs and glitches (SC Star Citzen). Especially when there are people that do it so very well (from the depths)...

[Rolan7]

SC?
I get SE is Space Engineers, but SC probably isn't Star Control (I wish) or StarCraft.

[Neonivek]

Resident Evil was survival horror? This is news to me. I tried RE4 and I thought the genre was "annoying zombie game."

Well the very first survival horror game was Alone in the Dark. It is the genre definer.

I'd heard that the first survival horror game was Sweet Home, for the NES.

I cannot remember the term... But sometimes people create something before the genre is a thing... but aren't themselves what eventually caused it to be defined. (I used to remember the term... For example there is a post-modern book that existed over a hundred years before post-modernism was even a thing)

Or rather... Yeah Sweet Home (oddly enough an adaptation) is a survival horror RPG. It came out earlier... and definitely deserves credit as the first survival horror game.

But it isn't the defining game that set the standards and ideas of the genre. That goes to Alone in the Dark.

Though the game that popularized the survival horror genre would also likely not be Alone in the Dark... but Resident Evil!

----

Another example I guess if I had to come up with is the "Psychological horror" game.

The first is 7th Guest (well that I can find... and it could be mislabeled)

Yet if I had to chose the creator of that genre within videogames... it would likely be based off of what Clocktower set up.

Clocktower is also a game that performed a miracle... because it is one of the few videogames that has EVER managed to make a gun scary... and in fact more scary than the monsters.