penny for my thoughts?

short intro; been gaming since ive been able to push buttons really, put in a good 15 hours a week. planning to post on here atleast once a week with thoughts and theories related to the gaming community aswell as a "things to put in your bindle" an idea that came as a gift from the weekend confirmed podcast, if you havnt listened to it yet and you enjoy being upto date with games you should definatly give it a try. aniway this is verry early days so i wont promise too much and i wont waste any more time talking about me.

my thought for today and probably for this week came from a discussion about resident evil 5. The discussion was revolving around the idea that resident evil has lost all of its suspense and fear via its last couple of installments. People seem to agree that it got caught up with the popular games of its time and focused far too much on the combat and forgot the creepy suspense of searching from say resident evil 1.

Id say im quite a big resi fan so that may be why i searched for a reason to defend it. What gave the earlier games such tension was wondering, will i be attacked around this corner? can i afford to use theese bullets or is there somthing bigger waiting for me? etc. Obviously resi 5 had none of that (bar the dlc) because of its huge number of enemies and after a while trying to think why they went in that direction i stumbled accross somthing.

Resident evil one was set in a creepy mansion where some test subjects had gotten loose and gone crazy (roughly) then the virus escaped and spread/mutated through the sequals. In resident evil 5 the virus was set on a much larger scale way more people were infected in a fairly small area so it makes sense storywise for the game to turn out like it did. Im not justifying resi 5's downfalls that was just the thought process which lead me to realise its not often, if ever ive heard the story vs gameplay argument and with todays games becoming an incredable story telling method i think its about time.

Another example to try and get my argument across. Im a big alan wake fan also which obviously is a big name in games that tell a story, the main complaint ive heard about the game is its repetativeness of constantly running through the same woods to get from story part A to story part B. The game is set in a small town surrounded by a huge forest so again its repetative but i dont think it should be shunned for it if it can justify it. Would anyone call the woodland scene in the blair witch repetative? No because we accept that its based in a woodland (and thats the least of that films problems).

An example going the other way, The last remnant, another reccomendable game if your into your rpg's, ecspecially if your still in woe about final faintasy XIII. Theres a part during a cutscene !SPOILER ALERT! where a bigass dragon destroys a town and thats it for that town. I had side missions still left to do there that i was planning to come back to but the game wouldnt allow it, instead of having npc's ignoring the damage they all died so i couldnt do the missions or explore the town. !SPOILER OVER! It affected the gameplay but within the story it was completely justified.

in summery how much controll do you think the story should have over the gameplay? if any atall.
any other examples youve noticed?

sorry about the lengh of this one ill try trim down for future, if youve any ideas you want me to discuss feel free to email me and feel free to link me to your blogs.