The 3rd Birthday Impressions

[lestatdark]

kristhreat said:

Sorry to nit-pick something so minor but the plot is heavily science fiction based in both of the previous games.. with "horror" elements.  You can be sci-fi and horror at the same time. (The movie Alien comes to mind)  The notion that our mitochondria can evolve and take over our bodies is based in factual science.  Mitochondria, has its own independent Genome and is what controls the growth of cells.  The idea of it acting on its own to kill or mutate its host is taking scienctific fact and stretching it into fiction...sci-fi.  So technically I'm right in calling it Sci-fi based.  I was sorta wrong saying that the 3rd Birthday isn't at all.  It is.  Time-travel and altering history is definitely in the realm of Sci-fi...but the reason I'm saying its more fantasy based is due to the craptastic ending.  I can't give away details cause I'm sure many people haven't played it all the way yet.  Also...In the previous games anything magical in nature was explained by the science elements...in this game its not at all, and it really bugs me because its just too far detatched from series. I had just finished it and was pretty dissappointed with it, to the point that I had to put my gripes out there.  I think if it was released as a game on its own with out reference to Parasite Eve I would have enjoyed it much better.  Again sorry about the nit-picking in the begining of this rant.  I just felt the games had enough sci-fi elements for me to classify it as such.  (I realize game genre-wise they are typically classified as horror/survival)

I understand your point of view and it's a valid one, but the reason why the first two games are qualified as horror, especially the first one, is that the concept is taken from the novel of Hideaki Sena which is parts both horror and Sci-fi.

True, the fact of mitochondria evolving in such a fashion is purely fiction, but everything else depicted in the game has some scientific truth behind it.

Of course, it's pretty impossible for the kind of mutations depicted to happen, but mitochondria are proven to relay the prime signals to cell deterioration and can cause fast acting mutators, such as superoxide agents, if their ATP output is severely increased (producing massive amounts of oxidized NADH and FADH2 which is then used in the oxygen transport chain). Even the spontaneous combustion, in theory, could be a viable scenario, if all the mitochondria in the body started started passing through a byproduct reaction called mitochondrial uncoupling, in which excess protons can reenter the mitochondrial matrix without contributing to the synthesis of ATP, producing a massive amount of heat. Thankfully that could never happen, given all the cellular and tissue homeostatic controls.