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Game Statistics:
This particular graph is quite interesting: it shows us that the vast majority of games released in this genre are pretty mediocre. It's also interesting to note that then number of really good games is almost equal to the number of very bad games. I think that this means that a developer can make a average survival horror title without trying too hard: just plug in the standard features and make sure that the game can actually be played, and you're guaranteed a 60% rating (see Carrier). It's pretty hard to mess this up, though obviously a lot of developers manage to anyway. It seems equally hard to actually make a quality title that is not simply a derivative of Resident Evil. I'd wager that the 34 good games in this list either had significantly longer development cycles or were planned very well. So here is the lesson developers: you can make a boring run-of-the-mill survival horror game just by dumping in the standard features, but if you want to make something that really stands out you'll have to actually try pretty hard. We the gamers are rooting for you. Scores By Year: This graph shows the average score of games in this database plotted against the year they were released. This is my "fitness over time" graph, and it needs a little explanation. Note that the graph is all over the place before 1996. This is because there were very few horror games released between 1983 and 1995, and the quality of these titles varied widely. From 1996 on, each year contains the average of several games, so the graph is much more meaningful. We can see by looking at the graph that 2000 was a bad year for Survival Horror. This was the year that most of the Dreamcast horror games came out: Carrier, The Ring, Nightmare Creatures 2, Evil Dead, D2, etc. The Playstation 1 games that came out that year were not so hot either: Countdown Vampires and Vampire Hunter D received quite poor reviews. This year also saw the release of some great games, such as Resident Evil Code Veronica and Parasite Eve II, but their quality was not enough to raise year average above 65%. Platform Breakdown: This graph displays the total number of horror games released per system. It is important to note that the entries for "Mac" and "PC" are misleading, as only games that appear both on a computer and a console are listed on this site. Consequently, the number of games listed under "Mac" and "PC" is not the total number of horror games released for those systems, but the total number of horror games that came out for these systems as well as a console.. For more information on how I chose which games to include, see my omissions page. The graphs on this page update automatically when the database changes! They were generated with the excellent JPGraph. |
