In all my years of being a bachelor, I’ve become sure of a few things: 1) if she leaves her underwear on the floor, the only person who’s going to pick it up is you; 2) a messy girlfriend is way more fun than an non-messy girlfriend (better if she can dance, then keep her for sure); and 3) the difference between ordering takeout and cooking food for yourself is that the latter takes longer to enter your mouth.
As this is not a dating blog, you don’t have to take these suggestions to heart (just try to refute such sage advice, however). But as I shuffle away from my swinging bachelor days and stop ordering so much takeout, I find that while regulation #3 technically hasn’t changed, my perspective of it has.
You see, making food for yourself isn’t a chore, it’s a privilege. It may take up more of your time, but it’s going to be as good as you make it. You spend the time to make a nice meal, and when you’re finished, you’re rewarded with it.
Cooking is a story, one where you get the time to savour all its details. The same is true for the video game Dino Crisis where every detail is especially slow and mundane.
This sounds a little long in the tooth (as is this introduction), but for a survival horror game, the whole point is have slow and mundane details so the suspense can get drawn out.
Let’s say it to make sure there’s no ambiguity for naysayers of the controls: the gimped controls in Dino Crisis and its far more superior brethren Resident Evil are what makes these games great.
Even twenty years ago, audiences were too sophisticated to take a simple ghost story seriously. When it first came along, what Resident Evil did was to utilize a new game convention as a way to better tell stories, just not a way to tell better stories.
As great and fun as these games may be, nothing has changed except to change the half-gallon Big Gulp container with a brandy snifter. Half-Life is the same way. It has a very generic story about aliens and a government cover-up (uh, spoilers, I guess). What blew everyone’s minds at the time isn’t what the story was about, but how they told it: no division of levels, eradicating cutscenes, and providing rational explanations for power-ups that would otherwise be spinning and glowing.
Dino Crisis takes some generic story about secret agents and secrets labs and dials down the RPM so that you feel every analog bump. It gets gamers who regularly process information at the speed of Marvel vs Capcom 3 to slow down and savor the suspense that comes to us in the form of loading screens when our protagonists slowly open each door.
The slow pace and gimped controls are oppressive to a gamer who is more experienced to double-jumps and unlimited ammo. It’s supposed to be oppressive. An oppressive tone welcomes the dread that enables your fun. That’s survival horror.
Even though Dino Crisis has been doomed to obscurity, I have since learned to cook instead of always eating take-out, while Resident Evil has gone on to go full third-person action adventure to huge success. In both cases, better stories are being told, if you’re considering the horror stories they leave behind.
How far I got in 15 minutes: I met the first dinosaur, escaped, and then went back so that I could get properly eaten by him
Would I play this again once this year is over: Yes, just as I think secretly breeding dinosaurs on a secluded island is a good idea. I mean, anything to get Chris Pratt riding a motorcycle alongside a team of raptors, I’m in.
Numbers of days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 4
Play-a-Daystation 