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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Okay? Again, who are you serving by choosing this specific forum to shout that messaging? I know you aren’t OP, so consider that the royal “you”.

    It’s just tiresome is all, and I’m on the “boo, capitalism” side of things. It’s like the folks who turn every thread tangentially related to Microsoft into a Linux advertisement. Or the involuntary ejaculation of a vegetarian when the subject of diet comes up. Like, yes, these folks are probably correct about the things they are saying; you’re never going to be wrong to consider the angle being worked by a corp. However, it’s infantilizing to suggest that people are unaware that a corporation wants their money. That’s a given, and without additional commentary, it’s a positively useless statement that only serves to make people tune out the messaging, even in contexts where it IS desirable to bring it up (such as when a company is doing shady shit in pursuit of your money). Releasing a mediocre graphical remaster of a title that people have nostalgia for hardly qualifies as “shady shit” in my book. Lazy, sure, but not shady.


  • Undoubtedly, yes, the fixed camera perspective of the original RE games owes a huge debt of gratitude to Alone in the Dark. However, Sweet Home predates the original AitD by 3 years, and has a direct lineage to RE through Tokuro Fujiwara, who directed Sweet Home and produced the original RE game. In fact, RE began its life as a SNES remake of Sweet Home in 1993, and it wasn’t until production had already begun that Mikami discovered AitD and reconfigured their plans. I’m not super familiar with AitD, so perhaps he lifted more features from that game than the perspective (that weren’t already present in some form in Sweet Home, at any rate), but I didnt see that mentioned in the interview.


  • It all depends on how you’re defining “influence”. As an example, let’s look at the first Resident Evil game and it’s predecessor, Sweet Home. More people have played or heard of Resident Evil than a movie tie-in game that was never officially released outside Japan. However, a huge amount of RE’s DNA (indeed, things that fans will say are necessary to capturing the feel of early RE games) stem from Sweet Home. Hell, RE was initially conceived of as a remake of Sweet Home, until they realized they didn’t have the rights. Below is an incomplete list of features from Sweet Home that were incorporated into the first RE.

    • inventory management puzzles
    • exploring an intricate, cohesive location inhabited by monsters.
    • narrative communicated through found notes and cutscenes
    • deliberately clunky combat to emphasize player vulnerability
    • protagonist characters each have a thing they can do that others can’t (presaging Jill’s lockpick and Chris’s lighter)
    • door loading transitions

    So, which is the more influential game? The one that popularized all of these concepts, or the one that originated the concepts? I think a case can be made for both, but I lean towards the originator.