Mostly I wouldn't do it because it makes your art team look lazy, particularly if the graffiti clashes with the rest of the art in the game.

Depends what you define as a dungeon, because technically any non-town non-savepoint area is kind of a dungeon, in that it only exists for monsters, boss battles and loot to hide in.

If you meant dungeons that don't take place in typical dungeon locations - ie lost ruins of whatever the fuck like LoZ, then sure. 

Buy it for a console.

-SirNiko

That's the best idea I've heard all day.
It still makes me sad for PC games though. ):

I haven't actually played either of these games but these are some great videos:
Glitches in Red Dead Redemption
Watson is creepy

Silent Hill 3 is a game I did play. Here's a spoiler.

Someone should make an entire game around the Watson thing. <3

Nice to see you didn't learn from the Assassin's Creed 2 fiasco.

Did you ever play "s h i n e" from the Assemblee competition?
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=10407.0

Scared the hell out of me.

As for the abstractions taken by 2D games (floating platforms, invisible walls - or ceilings in top-down games), I don't think those things would break immersion if presented properly. Almost every play or TV show makes heavy use of rooms with one invisible wall, and it doesn't bother people. Film uses a huge amount of abstraction - the audience's viewpoint is constantly cutting to new angles, places where an observer could never be - when you get into something as abstract and sophisticated as a montage or a rapidly-edited action sequence it's a wonder that audiences can keep up and stay immersed at all. Games are much more direct and grounded in a sense of place, atmosphere and continuity in that respect.

One area where a 2D horror game might have an advantage over a 3D one is that it can provide some level of dramatic irony, where the player can see the monster approaching but the character can't see it yet. Films do this a lot. Sure, you miss out on the big shock moments if you can see the monsters before they attack but you get a better sense of that creeping, rising dread.

It's also wayyyy easier to change the environment unexpectedly in 2D games. B)

No matter what you do or where you go in an RPG the monsters in the next zone are just a few levels higher than the ones in the last. You always happen to live in the town in the lowest level zone.

-SirNiko

But would you really want to build a city in a place with lv100 monsters?

A while ago I picked up a game called Zack and Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure for the Wii. It was a point-and-click puzzle game with bright, colorful, kid-friendly visuals. As I started the game, I found a charming, simple little puzzle game that was actually pretty addicting (as the game progressed I went on to love the game, but that's another matter). As I progressed through the game, it got harder and harder, naturally. BUT by the end of the game, the difficulty became almost unbearable. It became one of the most difficult games I'd ever played.
A similar case happened with Professor Layton and the Curious Village for the DS, but that wasn't too bad.

Now, this hasn't just happened in puzzle games. This is from games like Mario Galaxy 2, Viewtiful Joe, and N+ (yes I know the original was also very difficult). Excellent, kid-friendly games. But sometimes the difficulty can just get rediculous. Now, I don't mind difficulty at all (unless it renders the game unplayable), but this led me to a thought.

Should games be rated according to difficulty as well as content?

I bring this up because if a game appeals to a wide audience, should it warn them that it has a high level of difficulty? And no, I'm not saying that all kid-friendly games should be easy.

"Warning: This game is really fucking hard.
 -contains non-nonsensical block puzzles
 -contains quests with no indication where to go
 -contains puzzles with no indication what to do
 -contains high precision jumping areas filled with knockback enemies
 -contains powerful enemies with cheap ai

- In any game where the player has the option to attack innocent civilians, children do not exist. The same usually applies to domestic animals. If the player does get to kill animals, then there won't be any baby animals, only full-grown ones.

Example A: Russian game Pathologic does have kids, but they're mysteriously invincible.  Despite how you'd really want to loot that they have.  

One substantial aspect of horror games that we haven't discussed yet is the sound design. Dead Space worked some real magic in that department by making the monsters' groans and roars sound relatively similar to the environmental noises. I stopped countless times to check whether those were really just Isaac's footsteps and breathing or whether something was sneaking up on me. I think it's safe to say I developed a heightened awareness of sound, at least temporarily, during my time with that game.

Another interesting example is Silent Hill where the music is substantially louder during the Otherworld parts so it gets harder to detect enemies by sound.

YES! Exactly!

Making it hard to tell what you're dealing with through visuals and sound would make for a very scary game! 

How do you make a messaging system?

Say you have a dozen game objects all listening for commands on arbitrary channels, how would I dispatch a command from one object to all matching objects?  

Edit:
Say you have a switch that turns on all things with a tag of 100, and a dozen things tagged 100, how would I get that ON message to them without just stupidly looking through the object list for objects that have a matching tag?

MORE Edit:
I decided to just use an array, with each element acting as a channel and having objects poll its value.  It seems to work nicely for what I'm doing!

Ah, I've had that problem too with that game. )=
Silly broken TVs.


And no, I just mean shading things in the dark differently.  Old games like Doom and Abuse games do it like this.  ...unfortunately, it seems like its only possible with palettized sprites. 


notice how the sprite is shaded in different lighting?




Stumbling around in a pure black screen is really no fun at all at any rate.

The scariest videogame enemy I've seen lately, unfortunately, was out of a mod for ZDoom.
All it was is a black-skinned imp type enemy, but the trick is that it doesn't immediately charge at you when you see it and it zig zags around.

Scared the crap out of me every single time I found it in a dark room because you can only see the eyes. 


Which brings me to another point;
Why is it that games rarely reduce objects in the dark to unidentifiable shapes?  I can't count the times I've been startled in my own house by muddy shapes in the dark at night.

Like this:

You know what I hate? That thing where a character's writing is repeated a whole bunch to show that they're going insane. The Shining did it once and since then it's just looked ludicrous. It's just looked ludicrous. LUDICROUS LUDICROuS lUdIcRoUs LUDICROUS LUDICROuS lUdIcRoUs LUDICROUS LUDICROuS lUdIcRoUs LUDICROUSLUDICROuSLUDICROUSOh no, a cheesy and overdone trick to get out of writing actually unnerving things!

That's almost a bad designer, no twinkie moment right there.

ALL CLICHE AND NO ORIGINALITY MAKE DESIGNER LAZY
ALL CLICHE AND NO ORIGINALITY MAKE DESIGNER LAZY
ALL CLICHE AND NO ORIGINALITY MAKE DESIGNER LAZY
ALL CLICHE AND NO ORIGINALITY MAKE DESIGNER LAZY
ALL CLICHE AND NO ORIGINALITY MAKE DESIGNER LAZY

Not to mention the only 'crazy' people that write like that are obsessive compulsives.  So scary, they'll stop to turn every door knob 3 times and spin clockwise in a circle while chasing you. 

There really aren't too many different ways of implementing impossible spaces, I think. The idea of rooms occupying the same space is just about the maximum extent you can go.

Portal pretty much did this as well, although it wasn't so much of a trick since it constituted the majority of the gameplay.

-SirNiko

That's right, rooms occupying the same space is hard to do in 3D games, since they kind of rely on sensical geometry.  You'd have to make some kind of system that joins matching surfaces so you can walk through, much like Portal.

I think one of the problems with trying to make games scary is that what is scary in real life would not necessarily be scary in a video game.

Take for instance the lowly skeleton, or a monster.  Gamers would be completely unmoved by these things in a game these days, but you'd shit yourself if one really walked around the corner.

I'm not sure how we'd get around that.

ahem

?

Gentlemen.

Anyway, I agree with most horror games not being that frightening.  Startling or gross, perhaps, but not very many actually make me dread facing the denizens of the game world, or walking down a corridor.

That said, crawling woman still makes me hesitant to crawl into cramped video game spaces. 

[BOOM]

PUH-PUH-PUH-PUHHPUH-POOOWWER

BOOM

I also saw this advertisement on Youtube.
Blur looked like many other racers(fast and furious, need for speed, grid, etc, etc), but man, that cart game looked like it could be full of spunk and character.

If it was like mariokart, but with the snarkiness of Conkers bad fur day that'd be awesome.

Quick someone make Cutie Karts right now. 

Lol I saw this commercial earlier today.

I giggled when the Toad analogue gut punched the other guy durhurhur.  ...Although I'm still not sure how making MarioKart look wussy is supposed to make me want to play their bland generic looking game.

Especially when I didn't see any gameplay at all?