Oh, in terms of presentation, Alone in the Dark is definitely the greater influence, but tone, concept, narrative design, and a lot of cool details are straight from the Famicom game.

@dipset said in Ludoarcheology - My favourite oldies:

Thanks for sharing. I didn’t know AitD was so clearly Resident Evil before Resident Evil. It almost takes the game down a peg for me because I’ve always seen it as such an original game.

So now where is AitD get its ideas from.....?

Sweet Home. RE was initially a remake of Sweet Home---it's a more fundamental influence on that game than Alone in the Dark is. There's almost certainly no relationship between AitD and Sweet Home though.

I should give Grave of the Fireflies another look. I really liked some things about it, but its design as a grim weepie turned me off. I really like some of Takahata's other films though, especially Only Yesterday and The Story of Yanagawa's Canals.

I didn't take part in this project, but I appreciated following it quietly. I haven't played a ton of games from the last 10 years, and the ones I have I haven't been too crazy about. Of the 50 games, I've only played 19 of them. Some I like very much (Obra Dinn, Portal 2, Bloodborne), some are decent (Journey, RDR, Last of Us, Dark Souls), and the rest I think are mediocre to bad (God of War, Mass Effect 2, Arkham City, Skyrim, Uncharted 4, GTA V, Shovel Knight, RE2, Smash Ultimate, The Witness, DOOM, Life is Strange).

Nonetheless, it's been nice following it, and it has reminded me of some of the games I should prioritize checking out when I have the chance.

GTA V is the game that made me stop buying new games. Everything about it is like a bad joke that someone keeps telling you over and over. There's no escape.

I don't read as much as I'd like to, and I've found it difficult to do so during the whole quarantine thing. But I like mostly older stuff, early to mid 20th century English language and Japanese literature; and 19th century French and Russian lit. Been meaning to get into some Germanic or South American stuff. Favourite authors are Faulkner, Kawabata, and Dostoevsky.

I've been reading a bit of Hemingway recently and it's almost ridiculous how much better he is at writing short stories than he is at writing novels. I get that this is a popular sentiment in some circles, but his novels are so canonical that I was expecting a lot more out of the couple I read.

Bizarre to me that PS4 beat the first Playstation and is running it close with the PS2. I really don't get the fuss over that console.

I think his stuff is pretty indulgent and derivative, but I like some of his films. Jackie Brown rocks, and a couple of his others I have a lot of appreciation for, but his latter work is a little too cute and self-aware in its handling of genre and history. He was a director I liked when I was 13 or so for his 'coolness', and I guess I've outgrown them, or at least can't appreciate them for that reason any more.

Arkanoid vs. Space Invaders

A phone game. I don't play many of these, but I like the classic games that inspired this one and heard it was good. It's fine. It's definitely more Arkanoid than it is Space Invaders, with the goal being bouncing shots around to break blocks or hit the invaders. The primary gameplay conceits of Space Invaders aren't really here; you try to get hit by their attacks, there's no cover, and they don't march to the bottom of the screen inducing a failstate. The invaders basically just serve as moving blocks that provide attacks to deflect. As the game progresses, there are boss fights, and special blocks that to be switched in order to be destructible, and other complications. There are a host of characters with different powerups and everything, but the loop stays pretty similar throughout. Often times success feels more like luck or choosing the right character for the level rather than making choice shots or deflections. I'd like to say it's more than a phone game, but it isn't. It's a new coat of paint slapped on an uneven combination of a pair of thirty year old games.

Colony Wars

What a cool game. I'm not sure if it's a very good game, but it does some really interesting things. So it's a space combat sim with a branching storyline dependent upon mission success or failure. You complete your mission, your army does better in their fight against the insurmountable; you die or fail your mission, the game continues with your faction in more dire circumstances. This means no 'try again', it's do it or don't until the story ends. When the thing's over, you can jump to any major turning point and replay the game from there. I was able to get four endings: 2 good and 2 bad, though none were the result of beating every mission.

The production value is really strong too. I like the UI, the cutscenes, and the scale of it---it creates an expansive atmosphere for big ships and vastness of space and the many objects in it, even if each mission is restricted to a battlefield. The gameplay is serviceable, with different weapons and pretty decent handling. The ships all decelerate and feel like they're underwater a bit, but it's not hard to get the hang of.

The problem with it is the mission structure. They're often single objective missions that range from incredibly easy to 'oh, I guess I just lost'. Friendly units are useless (especially anything big), which makes any kind of protection mission a real pain in the ass. And most of the game is protection missions. Miss a fighter a couple times strafing your battleship and the mission can go down the tubes. Mechanics unrelated to dogfighting, like using the janky tow line, or taking down bigger ships, can feel janky and underdeveloped. That the story is told rather impersonally, with no characters to speak of, can make it feel more like a series of unconnected, inconsistent but nicely rendered space battles, rather than the epic war that the architecture or grander design is working towards.

Luckily the game has two sequels, so I look forward to seeing what their approach is.