I've followed this for a long while and it's quite interesting. They've done a lot of research into buddhism and hinduism and conceptions of the journey from life into death. I love me horror games with interesting things to convey in addition to the creep factor.I actually disagree completely. Silent Hill 2 and Fatal Frame 2 are still, to this day, playing them now, scary as shit. Fear has to do with balancing the sensation of empowerment versus the feeling of being vulnerable, it has nothing to do with whether the antagonists are rendered in HD or not. Sure, the initial impression of loading up a pretty horror game might lend it an immediate sense of place better, but once weird things happen and you're engrossed in the gameplay it really doesn't matter anymore.

Subjective indeed. I'm playing SH2 now (didn't back in the day) and I think it's a ton scarier than both Homecoming and Condemned. Heck, I think Dementium on the DS is scarier than those two.

Lower tech = cheaper development = lower risk = easier to experiment without going bankrupt.

Interesting games are often niche though unless they get lucky and recieve the hype train Braid and World of Goo did. You can't usually expect to sell an odd, unconventional idea to a load of people. Horror as a gaming genre is niche. There are essentially two franchises that have survived in some shape or form - RE and Silent Hill - and RE is pretty much an action game these days. Fatal Frame 4 is on the Wii for that very reason, the genre just doesn't really justify the HD graphics/sound investment these days, and a lot of genres are the same unless you've already built quite the legacy.

I agree with what you are saying, but in being right you're also furthering the point. If you develop for better hardware people expect more from the graphics. The result is you have to spend more resources on graphics to even be a viable product in people's eyes, inflating the dev costs and running a bigger risk of not profiting from the game unless you can sell it to a bigger audience. Movies follow the same truth, Eternal Sunshine doesn't have the budget of Transformers 2. I realise that there is room and even a need for progress in terms of graphics, but you can't expect the Eternal Sunshines of gaming to get the Transformers 2 treatment.

I've been hoping for that kind of evolution in gaming aswell and when I heard about Nintendo's plan I was sure the Wii would be it. In retrospect the PS2 has really been the one to step up to that plate so far, but things are arguably beginning to shake loose now however. Quite a few projects are slowly coming to frutition on the Wii, things that aren't quite XBLA material but also wouldn't realistically be able to compete with HD blockbusters.

I honestly don't even get the graphics thing anymore. I FEEL like we've gotten to a point where all platforms work fine if worked on with a good sense of their quirks and limitations, but maybe it's just that I'm older and don't give a crap about that stuff anymore. For me, a breathtaking DS game manages to be breathtaking even though it exists alongside Killzone and Gears of War, and whether a game is fun, suspenseful, exciting, scary, all comes down to its ability to manipulate how the player feels through gameplay. Resident Evil 3's Nemesis wasn't scary because he looked scary or realistic or whatever, he was scary because of how he was presented and how the player was haunted by him.

Michel Ancel did an interview with Gamespot once talking about this very thing, balancing the sensation of power within a game. It was really insightful, but I can't find it anymore. :(

To an extent that is true I think. I mean there's a natural evolution there aswell, as the money and resources required to build a PS2 game has no doubt dropped, but there are so many things that must be crafted now that people expect. If you walk into a house and there's stuff on a table that can't just be a texture or simple models. A vase has to be modelled, textured, given (increasingly) realistic physics so it can drop off the table, be modelled as broken, et cetera. On the DS that would be a sprite and none of the subsequent steps would be needed.

I mean sure there's the speedtree alternative, but how do you make that work without ending up with one type of realism throughout all expensive games?

Likewise, the very issue we're talking about is making games that aren't conventional, that are interesting and push genres in other directions and even to an extent break new ground. If indeed we have tools optimised for blockbusters we'll have an environment where it's STILL economically idiotic to go against the grain.

I mean don't get me wrong, in a perfect world you would be able to make a game with Wii/PS2 graphics/physics/sound et cetera for the 360 or PS3 without people going batshit insane, but gamers aren't there yet, it's a question of maturing as an industry. The PC has been there for ages, which is ironic because it sometimes seems PC dudes won't ever shut up about their hardware and how many frames they can push with it.

Your comments on creativity though I don't necessarily agree with. I think you can still make a NES game that rivals Bioshock in how genious it is. I've never, ever banked creativity on hardware, and what few limitations there are if you TRULY think something through have been decidedly eliminated already by the PS2 generation. Sure, we'll prolly see jumps ahead in areas in the future, but what is already here in no way prevents people from having totally insane, awesome ideas that shouldn't be bogged down by vases not falling off the table or news clippings on walls not being readable in HD.

You're absolutely right that the extra power only serves to make the development of any vision less cumbersome, but the benefit is only there when the industry and gamers mature enough to accept simpler looking games on the platforms that could technically do better. The cold harsh truth right now is that the games that are niche don't just earn less on the big consoles. In trying to live up to people's expectations they put companies out of business, and the alternative is simply to not even register on people's radars. Not every low cost game wears an attention grabbing gimmick on its sleeve, some are just fun, unpretentious action games like The Suffering and Psi-Ops - two great little Midway gems that surely don't warrant full fledged HD sequels but would make awesome PS2/Wii games. Meanwhile, hitting PS3/360 they'd likely just be scroffed at.

Provided pricing is dynamic (ie nothing like Microsoft's GOD pricing here in europe) I think digital distribution will eventually blur the line between the Dynasty Warriors and the Modern Warfares of the world where each game will be measured by what it's setting out to do and who it's setting out to appease, but it's a gloomy thought that it will require the death of sexy pre-order bonuses and awesome packaging just as LE stuff is really taking off. Atlus is going absolutely nuts with that stuff on the PS2, and it's exactly the kind of thing a niche audience to a niche game appreciates.