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I played Clock Tower 3 but it was one of many unfortunate casualties to my general inability to stay focused on a game for very long. I really like what I saw, though. I actually think the controls in RE are good - we're too used to being able to somersault and wallrun that I think it seems weird to actually be grounded in a game like that. I don't know about you, but I have to turn to change direction, I don't just suddenly appear to be walking 180 degrees in the other direction like in a lot of action games. And don't even get me started on FPS, where you tend to be a floating gun with a hand attached, moving at 40 MPH and jumping about 20 feet at a time. I'm not saying that RE is 100% natural or anything, but it's one of the few games where you do feel similar in that situation to how you might in real life... If you were trapped in that mansion, you'd feel slow and clumsy when outmanoeuvred by the dogs or when a zombie lurches out of the shadows. Every encounter would be filled with tension. You wouldn't be running along the ceiling getting headshots with a railgun.

As for Haunting Ground, I really liked that game. I even managed to complete it! Woo. It's very underrated. The graphical style and quality is very good, the atmosphere can be pretty damn amazing and I think the way in which your only weapon is your loveable canine sidekick, who can actually be killed if you use him too much/inappropriately, is just a stroke of genius.

Well as for the fixed camera, I think it's more of an artistic thing and an atmosphere thing than a gameplay one. In the older REs you were in a horror film, that was the intent as you can see from the RE1 opening STARRING BARRY BURTON! You'd turn a corner and OHMYFUCKINGGODZOMBIEDOGS. In RE4 it's trying to be more realistic and less pastiche but ironically does so by "super-humaning" Leon, with him flipping out of second story windows and whatnot. Of course, there was also the technical side of enabling better graphics by just pre-rendering the backgrounds.

RE does seem to come under quite a lot of fire for various things it does where other games get away with similar or worse things. I mean, yeah, when I haven't played a RE for a while I do get the running-into-furniture issues but before long I could get from one side of the mansion to another with my eyes closed. On the other hand, in Mario games I'm always skidding off ledges and jumping into massive voids. Mario 64 actually made my friend say "It's really fucking stupid in games how they let you do things you obviously didn't mean to do, like jump off a mountain!" He was being angry at the time but it d was true that whenever I saw anyone playing that game there'd be a far higher than average amount of "control malfunctions".

Then again, RE is more realistic than a lot of games (in its own camp way) so whereas in RE you can say "But I'm a highly trained member of STARS - I shouldn't get trapped behind a coffee table!" you can't really say "But I've been a professional plumber for decades - I shouldn't be so easily defeated by a Hammer Brother!"

Didn't mean to make it sound like an RE only issue; bad Camera is bad Camera. A lot of games (ie, practically anything with a fixed camera or even some third-person cameras) have it (MGS3's camera makes me want to punch a cat/dog/wall/etc) and it's quite frustrating. Maybe it adds to the immersion of the game but, to be honest, if you're sacrificing FUN and GAMEPLAY for IMMERSION, you can go fuck yourself Developers.

I'd rather take slightly-less immersion but have more fun actually playing the game ... and it's not like "immersion" is a good excuse for the camera obscuring the view of something right next to my character (ie, something that'd be blatantly obvious from their perspective). Playing MGS3 in anticipation for MGS4 reminded me all to much of "lol I'm right here!" Guards that I don't see thanks to camera angles that'd otherwise be obvious.

It definitely is something you get used to, however, and this goes to a lot of games; hell, even "Action" RPGs have me doing that all the damn time (Tales games and re-adjusting to Free Run or something, for instance). Like you said, SM64 is a good example of a control nightmare in the hands of some people; try the Prince of Persia games without knowledge of what to do. It looks so amazing if you know what you're doing but ... man ... falling to your death over-and-over-and-over (thanks Rewind ability!) is pretty common.

Well you see, I totally agree with you when it comes to MGS3. The reason is that in MGS3 you're meant to be one of the best soldiers of all time (soon to become THE best soldier of all time) but you're constantly hindered by shitty camera controls (unless you play Subsistance or whatever the upgrade was called). However, RE is meant to be like being "in" a horror film - at least at first. Now it's got all tangled up in trying to be a cool action hero game. While you do play as a defined character in MGS3, he's still left fairly open for you to put your own character onto. Kojima is always trying to make you feel like you are actually Snake or Big Boss. However, in RE it was meant to be more like you were watching this unfold - it even opened with a credits sequence that announced the cast!

I'd say by about RE3 it was going more for "zombie sim" than "schlock horror homage" but by RE4 it had jettisoned almost everything that made it RE, including the zombies. I really enjoyed RE4 but it's the RE I've gone back to least (i.e. never) and while it's incredibly impressive to watch, a great showcase for whatever console it's appeared on, I really think it did lose a lot of the soul of the original games. Still, it was time for them to move on and RE3 did show how much they needed to reinvent the series. I'm just glad that the original games were that way because if they'd come out in full-3D they would have been obscured behind all the other "me too!" action games of the time.

I suppose it comes down to what I said earlier: I can't stand the horror genre. Guess I'm just not "into" games that try to shock me or something so the early REs were "fun" but I was more stuck on, "...please god, stop that you fucking camera," as opposed to, "HOLY SHIT ZOMBIEDOGS."

...well, no, I still went "HOLYSHITZOMBIEDOGS," a lot. I prefer RE4 (and RE5) though not the whole "RAR ONE MAN ARMY" thing Leon has going for him (and now Chris, though at least he has a partner ... I guess) to the older games. Silly contrived plots that make no sense and unintentionally funny dialogue with an overall fun experience is more than I could ask for, really, for a series as old as RE.

... though I could go without Quick-time Events but I guess RE4 has enough of them so it's not "OHSHITRANDOM HIT X TO NOT ... fuck you died sry," like some other games.

Speaking of the "horror" genre, Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit in Europe, I believe?) and the Condemned games were pretty good ... though Condemned suffers from, in my opinion, the worst thing that can happen to a horror game--the introduction of the totally out-there batshit surreal. Sorry, I liked it better when it was HOBOS KILLING HOBOS and not strange Cults (RE, take notes here please).