Sanity Meters

[Intoxicain]

Really, Shadow Hearts only gets a brief mention, and in a one liner in this thread?

Shadow hearts(1, 2 and 3) had a really interesting take on sanity, IMO. It WAS an rpg, but don't hold that against it for the purposes of the sanity mechanic. It had sanity along with the traditional HP/MP setup, and you lost points each turn, and some attacks (by monsters, usually bosses) and choices made by players during battle would cause that sanity to decline at a greater rate.

The Idea was that even the most hardened heroes would eventually lose their minds and revert to their most base state if they were forced in to battle with Eldritch forces for too long. (in the game, it was sort of a berserk/confuse state)

I think their take on sanity is worth a mention.

 

[GhostLad]

On the flipside, I think Fatal Frame (or Project Zero for us european types) is the only game that has managed to seriously freak me out. Playing the first one, I had to make a rule of never playing it after nightfall. Not only did I jump through the ceiling whenever a spook popped out of a door, but I had nightmares about small orange lights following me around.

And by the end of the first chapter I wondred if the kindest thing I could do to my poor protagonist wouldn't be to stop playing, because you just knew that everything was about to go horribly, horribly wrong for her.

That damned game messed with my sanity in ways a meter could never do.

 

[Brotherofwill]

Also, incidentally, CT3 contains some of the most spastic character animations I've ever seen in a game. In some cutscenes people throw absolute fits while conversing with each other. It's like they stuck all the motion capture balls on an octopus in an electric chair.

Hahaha. Reminds me of this:

 

[electric discordian]

Why don't Bathesda do a sequel to Dark Corners, imagine a sandbox R.P.G set in Lovecraft country!

I would never leave the house! It would be for me like the unholy union of Wow and Fallout3 two things I am addicted too even to this day!

Though I can manage my addiction, or has my invisible sanity bar just dropped and I haven't noticed!

 

[Chakanus]

I have long been fascinated by the Cthulhu mythos, so I guess I'm going to have to disagree with Yahtzee's assessment of the lack of impact of Lovecrafts' work nowadays.

Then, as much as now, there is an underlying idea of a True Benevolent God, a reflection of the perfection we should all strive to acheive, and no logic can ever shake the foundation of the Human Ego. Astrophysics do not correlate in any notion of our daily lives, and, as such, deep down most people still have an inconscient notion of being in the centre of the Universe.

For me, the lack of moral of the Outer Gods and Elder Ones was, and still is, a strike at those morals. Why, yes there are most certainly greater things than what our minds perceive, but our lack of capacity to understand them would make it all seem abhorrent and impossible for us to correlate with (unless you were driven insane). Sure, in Call of Cthulhu it is given the impression that Cthulhu will rise and eat everyone, bringing down insanity and fire and blahdly blah. But most of the stories are not so clear cut in the Evil department. We are just insignificant and THEY are so much greater, so eternal, so multi-dimensional, that our mere gaze at those fascinating creatures has a devastating impact in our psyche.

The main problem with Cthulhu games, lies not with the fact they decide to add an insanity meter (for me it is just a silly way of having a second heatlh meter). The blurry camera does nothing for me, that much is true, but the attempt of Eternal Darkness was a good one.

The main problem with a Mythos game lies in the fact, that in the books, the horrors which lie beyond the veil of our reality are never fully decribed. The picture is painted by explaining how utterly impossible for our feebles minds it would be to try and describe the eternal horror that was rising upon the character. The surrounding environments shift to geometries that are not related to this world, the air vanishes becoming a vile miasma, and even in blindness the astronomical horror can creep inside the mind of the viewer, forever etching a sign that would make sure that the routine world that we all live in is shown for what it truly is - a façade to keep us all sane.

Now unless you were playing one of those text-adventure games, it's hard to not show the monster, hinting at it instead. Even with groundbreaking graphics, it'd be hard to make a shift in the environment that would ammount to anything more than being slightly darker. In a videogame you cannot leave holes and hope that the imagination of the player fills the gaps, which the books and pen&paper can.

The monster will be shown eventually, and as big and ugly it will be, it will actually just be a giant blob with tentacles, something whose fear-inducind abilities have loooooong been destroyed by hentai.

 

[Yelchor]

I have no idea what sanity meters have to do with Lovecraft. As Yathzee said, it risks harming the elements of horror rather than infusing it.

A Lovecraftian horror game with more focus on actual horror and not the gameplay mechanic of... strangeness would add to the potential of the genre greatly I'm sure of.

 

[Gunner 51]

Personally, I didn't mind the Call of Cthulu: DCotE's sanity meter. I've managed to get Mr Walters to kill himself by constantly examining bodies in the morgue of the prologue. (He strangled himself.)

Allow me to come up with an alternative sanity meter.

Your character can only endure X amount of insanity throughout the game.

For example, your character will have 100% sanity. Differing things will take away different amounts of sanity. You can recover some of that sanity by leaving the area - but you can never truly recover it all, ever.

Say you end up rubbing shoulders with Cthulu or something he will take away 1% of your sanity per second upon contact and the longer you stay with him he will end up taking away 2 or 3% of your sanity.

Say he's taken away 10% sanity, you can only hope to recover something like 8% sanity. Seeing him has well and truly scarred your character's mind. The game can tweak the endings slightly judged on how much sanity you have left.

For example...

Good Ending - High Sanity: Hero saves the world, gets the girl and lives happily ever after.
Good Ending - Low Sanity: Hero saves the world but ends up in the local nut-house.
Bad Ending - High Sanity: Hero joins the bad guy as his right hand but keeps the girl.
Bad Ending - Low Sanity: Hero joins the bad guy but serves as a lowly mook.

 

[Traigus]

I swear Alice wasn't a shooter at all. Loved the Atmosphere, but the damn thing was a jumping platformer lol.

Spent more time falling off stuff than busting heads.

 

[Fearzone]

Now unless you were playing one of those text-adventure games, it's hard to not show the monster, hinting at it instead. Even with groundbreaking graphics, it'd be hard to make a shift in the environment that would ammount to anything more than being slightly darker. In a videogame you cannot leave holes and hope that the imagination of the player fills the gaps, which the books and pen&paper can.

The key to horror, IMHO, is never fully showing what is there--just pieces of an incomplete puzzle.

Your FPS horror-game will need to have minions and cultists to eat shotgun shells and generate some mild sense of threat and impediment to foward motion, and then evil lieutenant "bosses" to bring in the occasional difficulty-spike, but there needs to be a sense of something beyond that, some great and terrible mastermind lurking in the shadows, some greater evil going on all around you, that you can sense is there, somewhere, but never quite have the whole picture.

 

[sketchesofpayne]

Insanity in video games should work like dark-side points in star wars games. Basically they affect which story path the character takes. Too many insanity points and you get the 'Bad End.'

 

[TheMann]

Yahtzee took a shot at "Alice"... Oh good lord, is nothing sacred to this guy?

[small](Short answer: No...)[/small]

Well he never said it was a bad game. I loved that game with the brilliant trippy artwork that was insanely good, especially for 2000. Actually I go back and still play it sometimes.

But Yahtzee's right, while from the context of the story it made sense to called it a sanity bar as Alice is never physically hurt; she's just going insane. However, as a gameplay mechanic yeah, it's pretty much just a health bar.

It did look cool though.

 

[beema]

I have been thinking about maybe reading through some lovecraft someday, is the any book in perticular which would be the best to start with, or?

Any one of the collections will do you fine. They are all short stories, and there's no actual "books" per se, just collections of his work. There are actually a couple online sites where you can read through ALL of his work for free

I thought out of all those games, CoCDCOTE did it the best, as there was no physical "meter" on your screen -- the stuff just happened to you. Logically it never made sense though. You lose sanity when you see a dead body, but not when you kill people. Huh?

I think Indigo Prophecy's was probably the worst. First of all, you could only max out at "Neutral," which is completely stupid, considering some of the tasks you could perform to increase your mood included having sex (you'd think that would put you above neutral). Then other trivial stuff would lower your mood and make you depressed, such as standing around in a room a minute too long. Similar to Eternal Darkness, there were so many constant opportunities to refill your meter that it never really presented itself as a problem.

 

[beema]

my ed games design teacher worked on call of cuthulu, will have to show him this

I'm bit disturbed that anyone involved in making that insanely-buggy piece of crap is now teaching people how to make games. The beginning 1/4 of the game was fantastic, but the rest was complete garbage. Severely broken garbage. In fact, I have yet to finish the game because of a bug that prevents you from moving on near the very end.

 

[biGBum333]

he totally forgot to mention scooby-doo:classic creep capers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooby-Doo!_Classic_Creep_Capers

 

[Chakanus]

Snip

The key to horror, IMHO, is never fully showing what is there--just pieces of an incomplete puzzle.

Your FPS horror-game will need to have minions and cultists to eat shotgun shells and generate some mild sense of threat and impediment to foward motion, and then evil lieutenant "bosses" to bring in the occasional difficulty-spike, but there needs to be a sense of something beyond that, some great and terrible mastermind lurking in the shadows, some greater evil going on all around you, that you can sense is there, somewhere, but never quite have the whole picture.

It's true enough what you said, it's a staple of horror games the easy-to-kill jumpy monsters, together with the sense of dread of something larger than the barrel of a shotgun can handle. But, with Lovecraft in mind, the whole basis of his horror, was the fact that's utterly impossible to understand what was being reported, being necessary to circumvent the traditional ways of description. The imagery behind R'lyeh is a prime example of it:

"Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it
when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he
dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces - surfaces too great to
belong to anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and
hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told
me of his awful dreams. He said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was
abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from
ours."

Now, though this can be put into writing, and the readers' mind can try and picture something outside his/her own understanding it'd be impossible to translate into graphics things that are in itself beyond the scope of normal physics. You can create a good horror game, with cultists and tentacl-y monsters and a delightfully dreadful atmosphere, but I'm not sure how easy it is to create the same feeling that the Lovecraftian stories have.

 

[LividFiction]

Yahtzee took a shot at "Alice"... Oh good lord, is nothing sacred to this guy?

[small](Short answer: No...)[/small]

Long answer: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Best answer [http://vadercoaster.ytmnd.com/].

 

[heamrh]

Indigo Prophecy, yeah the good name, was very movie like, it's the only game, i feel, that has done interactive cinema correctly

 

[spartan1077]

so th game seriously did blue screens and volume tick downs or was that some more of ZP humor?

 

[gamer_parent]

Yahtzee also missed "I don't have a mouth and I must scream", which had a psyche meter that pretty much serves the same function. Raising it high enough and you get the good ending for that character, with the character getting cathartic vindication for his/her issues. Fall low enough and your character is eternally tormented for their character flaws by sadistic computer god.

 

[IMAGinES]

Yahtzee took a shot at "Alice"... Oh good lord, is nothing sacred to this guy?

[small](Short answer: No...)[/small]

Slightly longer answer: Portal.