The problem seems to be that so many of you here on vgchartz seem to have an unhealthy obsession with "fun" and "gameplay". Now, I realize that good gameplay is important in establishing a good game. However a lot of people here tend to think of gameplay as an element of gaming head and shoulders above any other merit that games should be judged by -and that is simply incorrect. The other issue that comes into play here is peoples concept of gaming as being a "fun" passtime above everything else. This kind of thinking is inadvertently holding the industry back from giving birth to the likes of Shakespeares, Da Vinci's, Kubricks, Goethes and others who set out not to create "fun", but rather meaningful art.

Good gameplay is fine, but good gameplay shouldn't come at the expense of more core aspects of a video game. You said that a horror game will always be scary -that is not true. Take a look at Re4. There may have been a few sporadic, mild scares throughout, but almost everyone agrees that when it comes to instilling fear and delivering scares, Re1 and Re2 were leaps and bounds more chilling that Re4. A horror game should b primarily judged by HOW scary it is, not by it's gameplay and not by whether it is scary or not because, it's a given that there will be attempts at scares. The question is whether the game will be as scary as the originals or will it continue down the more action, less scares path Re4 begin, diluting it's roots as a unfiltered, 100% horror game through and through.

This made me lol.

DTG is one of those gamers that think awful controls are needed to make a game scary. Personally if my character controls excellently and the enemies are fearsome that makes the game scary. If my character controls like they are walking in quick drying cement it makes the game crap. Substandard controls are a lazy way to make a game scary. Limit the ammo, give the enemies random spawn points, make them smart, hard to kill, etc. but give me some controls that work for God's sake.

DTG, I am trying to decide whether or not to take you seriously.

I am close to saying "no".

I duuno this Resident Evil doesn't seem scary, i know its similar to Resident Evil 4 but that had a scary feel to it mainly due to its setting. But this is set in the sunniest country in the world and your just shoot Africans.

Which i find funny actually coz its unexpected.

What does 5 change from 4 that make some unsatisfied ? In the vids i see it beeing just as the previous one.

RE4 was a revolutionary game that basically rewrote the rules of 3rd person action and shooting.
Today all the games copied it (even MGS4). If you don't have a RE4-like third person perspective in a TPS nowadays, you might as well quit the bussiness. Why would they mess with the formula now? Sure, it was not as scary as the previous ones, but it resulted in a much more playable game in the end.

ITS A DAMN HORROR GAME!!! scary >>>>playable or gameplay.

What sales are lost in Japan will be more than made up in the Western world.
Considering the state of video gaming in Japan I would think it is actually a damn start move by Capcom....

To the first post:

I still think that it shows an immense amount of cultural insensitivity. Dropping a big muscley super American white guy in the heart of Africa so he can shoot a lot of AIDS victims pseudo-zombified black folks in the face is just crass. And I'm only half-joking about the AIDS thing, since zombification can so easily be construed as a metaphor for AIDS. Seriously, they needed to think this one through a bit more!

And just between you and me, I have never, ever, not in my life, been able to take the Resident Evil story seriously. Not as part of a larger whole, and certainly not since Code Veronica.

To the second post:

Well, I didn't say dumbing down was good. I just said that being scary is part of the gameplay in horror games. RE4 wasn't really a horror game, so it can't be placed on the same value metric as earlier games in the series.

PS3 + 360 = 11% of game hardware sold so far this year in Japan.

That is the reason why RE5 will not have huge sales in Japan.