see what ur describing is horror, not specifically survival horror, never mind... all the points you made are perfectly fine, its just they have little bearing on what survival horror is...

of course story is important. I agree... im not repeating myself all over again, so please, read above! If you dont care about the survival part, then i guess your not talking about survival horrors... which is what the post is about... i dunno if you forgot that or if im missing something from your words... having good story is crucial. i agree. Why would anyone want a crap story!? it makes no sense. that is why i play games. I like story.

anyway i think this is gone on enough... I still dont believe that horror can really be done on video games anyway which makes discussion of the specifics rather redundant. My original argument was that Horror and Survival Horror are indeed two seperate though closely related genres of video game. I still believe that. I have immersed myself in horror for a long time. This maybe why i dont agree with you on your choice of games above. To me, they didnt do the trick. Its actually very annoying, i have seen every movie on every list and have read all the books by the best the genre has put out and i think i may have done what the title of this thread mentions. Desensitized myself.

Its certainly true that if you expose yourself to horror it lessens itself considerably... I suppose my advice is, if you like horror, dont expose yourself to it too much? I dont know. I hope to hell i can get my sensitivity back up, until then this argument is utterly pointless, because you might be right maybe those games are survival horror and i just dont find them scary... whatever... im going to go now and watch Carrie...

wow those predators must have the stupidest looking spaceships in the galaxy, aw the Space Jockeys must make fun of them all the time... poor ugly bast4rds...

BTW Aliens are like a bazillion times cooler than any stupid space orc... the alien vs predator thing was totally rigged... no way a predator would beat a queen. NO WAY. hell Arnold beat a predator. If Arnold can beat a predator, how exactly is a junior predator meant to tackle THE KILLING MACHINE. no way... stupid misrepresentation... grr...

Xenomorphs, f***ing rock. The End.

theres absolutley nothing wrong with story, its games where the emphasis is taken off of survival, where your thoughts are less on omg omg i need to get out of this room, and more on, ok i need to get that red pass so i can get to the reactor blow up the planet and take back that seal album from the evil professors 300 disc changer...

i dunno, personally i think that horror games are way too driven by what you HAVE to do and not on, trying to get the f_ck away from the monsters. thats what im talking about... if you class survival horror as where ur underpowered then fine, to a certain extent that works, but then your basically saying that the entire genre is just form of all other genres... but weaker... i dunno, not good enough for me. I think its has a much firmer grounding then that.

the fatal frame i played made it so you could stop the ghosts with your camera, it was awhile ago so i might be wrong. But isnt that just another form of fps horror? i admit it had a different style then say fear, but i still wouldnt say it breaks into what i thought survival horror was about. it was a good game though...

I think the problem with making survival horrors in game formats is that well, stringing the nesecary interactions together is pretty hard to do on a game. In a movie its easy to make the protagonist do what is nesecary to keep the internal group dynamics, tense, in a game, well players, being detached from the experience in a way that actors are not, are less likely to make decisions that keep the group tension tangible. A good survival horror could replace the zombies with anything and still be a great movie/game.

I think an easier way to define the genre is to remove it from the Hollywood style run & gun antics of games like Res, and to a certain extent Silent Hill. I know fatal frame does this to a certain extent and so in this definition it is a survival horror. So i suppose we could say that a survival horror is where, (this sounds like a bad definition to me) the player has the easy ways of survival removed. I guess that would put the emphasis ON surviving, but it puts games like Dead Rising ( a survival horror, if only it werent so funny...) in a difficult position... i prefer horror where the protagonist has really no say in the matter, their just trying to survive, If dead rising was scary rather than funny, then that would be an excellent example of a survival horror...

haha well then by your definition, any game in which you need to survive (i think its safe to say i can think of one or two!) which includes horror elements in it, is a survival horror....

sorry i was assuming that you were actually making a distinction between HORROR and HORROR WHERE DEATH IS NOT GOOD...

guess i was making an invalid assumption...

when IM talking about survival horror, as i said RIGHT THERE ABOVE... im talking about games where the game mechanic itself, is less about driving a story along so you dont get bored, and more about simply trying to survive... its like comparing Dawn of the dead, or SOME of the bits from movies like 28 days or At Your Door, with movies like suspiria, the shining, excorcist. Those are all good horror movies, but the aforementioned are more specifically, survival horrors... get it?

:(...

none of these games are scary to me! Ive tried all games i could find, ive finally decided that real horror just CANNOT make it on games... i dont know why... i think most of it has to do with graphics, CG images just dont do it for me... music is another thing, anyone whos seen the Italian classic Suspiria knows that music is SO important to the atmosohere... i have the soundtrack to that, listening to it late at night with the lights out gives me a serious scare rush!! :D

anyway until graphics reach life like quality, i dont think its possible for a game to scare...

although when i played silent hill 1 i got pretty scared... i was like.. 6? playing it with my crazy aunt... that was a bit scary in itself but anyway...