I don’t think any videogame ever scared me as much as Silent Hill 2. And part of that was the combat. It wasn’t just, that combat was hard and could kill you. It was a truly awkward experience, it didn’t empower you the way killing things in game usually does and beating an opponent wasn’t satisfactory, at most you were relieved, that it was over.

After a combat in SH2 I’d allways feel revulsion, not only towards the creepy enemies, but towards myself as well. You often had to hit monsters when the were lying on the ground in order to finish them – abd even then the clunky controls made it an awkward task to hit them. I never felt like a hero or a skilled fighter but just like a clumsy, frigthened person, whacking away in disgust at some hellspawned (well not really hell – christian mythology isn’t complex enough to come up with such things) monster.

A horror game should never have smooth combat mechanics, otherwise it’s just an action game with zombies.

I really really really dislike the 3rd person camera and the fact that the character moves like he’s got lockstep and is wearing a hundred pounds of suit. If that’s intentional it doesn’t look good enough.

Well wait no longer, hot of the Phil press…
http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i10/grindFish/philcollinsnewalbum.jpg

I would say its his most brutal album since he left Genesis…

I’m there too.

Also, let me see if I can play out this game for you:

You walk into a room.
Bad guy attacks you, moving towards you.
You walk backwards, firing.
You walk backwards, firing.
You walk backwards, firing.
It dies.
You walk into a room…

And so on. Oh, add ‘You struggle with the awful camera view.’

As for the earlier RE games, I think that the change of control scheme in RE4, was in their own way an admission that things weren’t quite that good in the previous games.

Thanks for taking the time to reply, your points are more than valid and I largely agree. Except for the last sentence – I admit to bitching about things like that, alot, while playing the game(and secretly having a great time). Silent Hill combat is another good example of this, but that’s another story.
I’m not going to be ignorant enough, though, and dislike a good game because of that ;)

RE4 didn’t have fixed camera angles and instead went for an OTS viewpoint. The character was relatively athletic but couldn’t barrel through levels like a bunny on meths (which, if we’re honest, is how most FPS characters tend to move).

About the only real limitation I can see is the inability to strafe. You can call bullshit on that, but then what is the reason you believe that they removed it? It wasn’t removed for technical reasons, unless you’re arguing that Capcom have the programming and animation capability to implement everything else in the game but when faced with moving a character sideways encounter a brick wall.

So, it was a conscious choice then. The question then becomes why did they make that choice? This they’ve explained, and I actually agree with them here, it would have fundamentally changed the combat and gameplay mechanics. Instead of the stop-and-pop mechanic, the gameplay instead would’ve devolved into a circle strafing marathon. The OTS view and aiming and the rest would’ve gone out the window for what effectively would have become a 3rd person action game that was trying to be a first person shooter.

As for the camera being retarded, I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to disagree there. The camera was OTS, it was always looking straight ahead at what you were looking at, and if you needed you could pan it to the sides and up and down, though this was pretty rare. If they had implemented a free-roaming or automatic camera then I’d probably agree with you here, because those are almost impossible to get right in any game, but here I have to say the camera worked fine. It was always looking where you were aiming (something a lot of games fail on even today) and instead of giving a weird birds-eye view they gave you one where you needed to be mindful of your blindspots whilst being able to focus on what’s ahead of you.

If I’m honest, it sounds as if your complaints aren’t so much that the game itself was bad at what it did, it’s that the game wasn’t some other, totally different game that you wanted it to be.