Virtual Photography

[Lindenbaum]

Some pictures of my favourite RE4 location






The blue medallion hanging from the tree is 1/15 medallions in the beginning areas of the game, if you find them all you get a reward. Looking for them is so cosy, they're often hidden in obscure, out of the way places. I only found about 13, the final 2 are still out there, hiding in the dark corners of the world...


This is the view from the cliffside right next to the graveyard. At around the time I started playing this game, I started having dreams about churches on the tops of cliffs overlooking beautiful views, very striking images.



This is what the inside of the Church looks like.

This graveyard area is where the game peaked for me, although there were still some great areas after it too. My favourite parts of the game were the beginning where you're uncovering a dark conspiracy in a small village community, there was something nice about how small it felt. As you progress, everything starts to feel "larger", you go from a small village to a castle and eventually to a large military base on an island, which is where I lost interest and stopped playing. The military base just couldn't hold my attention like other areas could. I still love the game though because of how much I enjoyed the first half.

[anthony]

I'm playing Dead Space right now, a game appraised by many as a successor to RE4. Like Resident Evil it has a nice attention to space. Like Resident Evil 1 is about the Spencer Mansion, Dead Space 1 is about the USG Ishimura, a planet-cracker spaceship. Like Resident Evil there's a great attention to detail room to room and scene to scene, and the whole game is about experiencing the entire ship. You go to every part of it at some point. It doesn't look amazing or pretty, but it looks good I would say. Wikipedia tells me this is considered one of the greatest games of all time. I disagree, I think it should have been considered a standard quality game of its time, and now looks better because the quality of AAAA American games started plummeting off a cliff not long after this one came out. What a shame. Here's the last screenshot I took, which was more showing off the physics than the particulars of how the game looks in its iconic scenes, but it's still a good start for looking at it. I'll get more now that I've raised it.



The monsters are beholden to the bizarre, exaggerated, weightless ragdoll physics that were all the rage at the time of release. But like the use of bizarre hair rendering graphics in Bloodborne, I think the wonky physics actually convey an intended effect in this game. Everything jitters spastically after its dead. In a game about deranged parasitic flesh-zombies that's a very fitting behaviour.