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RightClickSaveAs
Mar 1, 2001

Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...


Bulkiest Toaster posted:

I just heard about this game called The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. It looks like some sort of spooky adventure game where you play a detective who can talk to the dead trying to find some kid who went missing.

It might not be jump scare type horror but judging by the gameplay video I have seen it definitely looks like just the thing I have been looking for after playing P.T. Just an atmospheric first person puzzle/exploration game with some occult H.P. Lovecraft stuff thrown in. Looks pretty awesome and comes out in September.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q_aNw4pTqc
Yeah it looks really interesting. I was surprised how quickly it's coming out though, I only heard about it a couple months ago and there's not much info about it. There's a thread for it too: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3640669

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Oxxidation
Jul 22, 2007
Worth noting that the game studio behind Ethan Carter is made up largely of former People Can Fly employees, so there's a pedigree there.

DeathChicken
Jul 9, 2012

Nonsense. I have not yet begun to defile myself.

ayn rand hand job posted:

They should have removed the combat, fixed checkpointing, added a better map, and actually give the player a reward for acing cases.

The combat was sparse enough that I didn't even give it much thought. There's like one area where you can't just murder every demon in five seconds then go back to what you were doing. That area takes about ten seconds.

OJ MIST 2 THE DICK
Sep 11, 2008

Anytime I need to see your face I just close my eyes
And I am taken to a place
Where your crystal minds and magenta feelings
Take up shelter in the base of my spine
Sweet like a chica cherry cola

-Cheap Trick

Nap Ghost

DeathChicken posted:

The combat was sparse enough that I didn't even give it much thought. There's like one area where you can't just murder every demon in five seconds then go back to what you were doing. That area takes about ten seconds.

I agree, it was so utterly inconsequential and tacked on to be irrelevant and time wasting at best.

SomeJazzyRat
Nov 2, 2012

Hmmm...

RightClickSaveAs posted:

Yeah it looks really interesting. I was surprised how quickly it's coming out though, I only heard about it a couple months ago and there's not much info about it. There's a thread for it too: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3640669

Yeah, this looks like a prime spooky October game.

Accordion Man
Nov 7, 2012


Buglord

Cardiovorax posted:

SH2 is supposedly really bad, but then again I only know that from the kind of people who would call anything bad if it came out on PC.
Those people are horribly wrong and you shouldn't be friends with them anymore if you are. :haw:

ayn rand hand job posted:

They should have removed the combat, fixed checkpointing, added a better map, and actually give the player a reward for acing cases.
Ethan Carter should probably end up being mostly want you want.

The founder and some other former members of People Can Fly are working on it. I've been following the game for the past couple of months and it's mostly likely going to be a freakin' great game. Definitely keep an eye on it, comes out September 25 on PC.

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.

Accordion Man posted:

Those people are horribly wrong and you shouldn't be friends with them anymore if you are. :haw:
Ethan Carter should probably end up being mostly want you want.
I am a dumbshit and I meant to say SH4, but I agree with you completely so there you go

Accordion Man
Nov 7, 2012


Buglord
Oh I forgot to add Cardiovax, that I agree with SH4 is ultimately rather silly. 4 has a lot of great ideas and atmosphere but it failed to stick the landing on a lot of it. It's my second least favorite game after Homecoming.

Homecoming actually had an entire log pertaining to Walter that got cut that was actually pretty funny. It was him as a kid being interviewed by a shrink and the shrink was showing him a picture of a door and Walter keeps calling it his mother and the psychiatrist is just utterly bewildered.

HellCopter
Feb 9, 2012
College Slice
My exposure to Shattered Memories was an LP of it, and the player hated it. I ended up feeling pretty negatively about it too. I guess that's not the prevailing opinion? It looked pretty shallow, like it didn't really take advantage of its concepts.

Accordion Man
Nov 7, 2012


Buglord

HellCopter posted:

My exposure to Shattered Memories was an LP of it, and the player hated it. I ended up feeling pretty negatively about it too. I guess that's not the prevailing opinion? It looked pretty shallow, like it didn't really take advantage of its concepts.
It's not, it gets poo poo on by goons for whatever reason but its not at all a bad game, I'd say its the best post 3 Silent Hill and isn't that far away from them when it comes to quality, though its more psychological thriller than pure horror. It's got some laughably bad writing, but that only pertains to one character. Overall its got great atmosphere and solid writing that actually plays with SH1 in interesting ways. The chase scenes are kind of tedious, but they're still better than the combat in some of the other games so I don't think it really drags it down. It was also ambitious and was kind of precursor to the current crop of adventure games like Walking Dead. The choices you make do actually shape your experience differently even if you don't get different plot points and one of the endings you can get is pretty memorable. It's definitely worth checking out if you have a Wii.

Accordion Man fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Aug 27, 2014

DeathChicken
Jul 9, 2012

Nonsense. I have not yet begun to defile myself.

Yeah, it's available for other systems too, but I'd say it's one of the rare games that would lose something if you aren't playing it on the Wii. You need to be able to use your remote as a cell phone to get all the weird calls.

Hellburger99
Jan 24, 2006

"I don't like that mooch...
or her pooch!
"

HellCopter posted:

My exposure to Shattered Memories was an LP of it, and the player hated it. I ended up feeling pretty negatively about it too. I guess that's not the prevailing opinion? It looked pretty shallow, like it didn't really take advantage of its concepts.

I love Shattered Memories, but I understand a lot of the issues people had with it. It was really more of an exploration game than a survival horror game, and if they would have called it anything but Silent Hill it probably would have been better received. If nothing else, the Wii version does a great job of creating an immersive feel using the wiimote as both a flash light and cellphone. The "game changes based on your psychological profile" was a little over hyped, though the way you play/the questions you answer does affect your game, though it's more subtly than overtly.

cat doter
Jul 27, 2006



gonna need more cheese...australia has a lot of crackers
Shattered Memories becomes way more enjoyable once you realise that it's not a survival horror, but more of an adventure game. Also the story is loving fantastic and it's the best of the Silent Hill 'is a place in the mind' games apart from SH2 of course.

Also, in terms of PC versions of Silent Hill games, they're probably the best versions graphically. SH2 can be pretty annoying to work in widescreen resolutions but it still runs in 1280x960 without hacks, which is still higher resolution than the terrible, TERRIBLE HD version.

Silent Hill 3 is really easy to get running in 1920x1080, you just edit a config file, then don't go into the options menu or it'll switch back. It looks loving fantastic. If there was a way to add HDR rendering, subsurface scattering and ambient occlusion, it'd basically look like a modern game. You'll need an FOV hack from the widescreen gaming website though.

Last I played of the PC version of SH4 there was no way to get it running in widescreen, but apparently that's changed?

edit: Oh, also, if you happen to have a controller lying around that uses DirectInput instead of Xinput, use that instead. Those include early logitech controllers, as well as PS3/4 controllers. They should map to the correct controls immediately, whereas an Xinput controller will do poo poo like having the pause menu on clicking the stick in.

cat doter fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Aug 27, 2014

Accordion Man
Nov 7, 2012


Buglord
One thing I love about Shattered Memories is that there is absolutely nothing supernatural going on.

Spite
Jul 27, 2001

Small chance of that...
The one thing I didn't like about SH3 is how many drat enemies there were. In 2, you were always wondering if there would be something in the next room. In SH3, the answer was always "Yes there is, probably several."

It gave the game a much different feel for me. Though it did a great job of feeling incredibly oppressive.

I really enjoyed Shattered Memories as well.

Heavy Lobster
Oct 24, 2010

:gowron::m10:
What's the general consensus on Silent Hill 0/rigins? I played the PS2 port and thought it was actually pretty good, definitely not particularly subtle and the Pyramid Head fanfic dude was a bit on-the-nose, but I thought the post-asylum parts of the game were really neat (the theatre was a great setpiece and the apartment complex really hosed with you if you followed all the little plot points). Obviously not the best in the series, but definitely not as terrible as some of the other non-numbered ones.

Jimbo Jaggins
Jul 19, 2013
Shattered Memories is an exploration game with nothing worth exploring. The majority of the game is just wandering around locations that could be stock locations from another game in that'll you're not going to find anything relevant to the plot or themes to look at.

Kaboom Dragoon
May 7, 2010

The greatest of feasts

I just remembered a horror game I saw the trailer for a while back, probably about this time last year. It in first-person and was set in a space station where all the displays and so on were very lo-fi. Kinda reminded me of Soma. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Heavy Lobster posted:

What's the general consensus on Silent Hill 0/rigins? I played the PS2 port and thought it was actually pretty good, definitely not particularly subtle and the Pyramid Head fanfic dude was a bit on-the-nose, but I thought the post-asylum parts of the game were really neat (the theatre was a great setpiece and the apartment complex really hosed with you if you followed all the little plot points). Obviously not the best in the series, but definitely not as terrible as some of the other non-numbered ones.

Honestly, I absolutely hated it. The Room was boring, outside of the Room itself, and Homecoming was a glitchy mess, but I cannot think of a single redeeming thing about Origins.


Jimbo Jaggins posted:

Shattered Memories is an exploration game with nothing worth exploring. The majority of the game is just wandering around locations that could be stock locations from another game in that'll you're not going to find anything relevant to the plot or themes to look at.

There were bits worth exploring. Unfortunately, they were the bits you were getting chased through, so you didn't have a chance to stop and look at all the cool things going on.

Brovstin
Nov 2, 2012

Kaboom Dragoon posted:

I just remembered a horror game I saw the trailer for a while back, probably about this time last year. It in first-person and was set in a space station where all the displays and so on were very lo-fi. Kinda reminded me of Soma. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Routine maybe?

mysterious frankie
Jan 11, 2009

This displeases Dev- ..van. Shut up.

Kaboom Dragoon posted:

I just remembered a horror game I saw the trailer for a while back, probably about this time last year. It in first-person and was set in a space station where all the displays and so on were very lo-fi. Kinda reminded me of Soma. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

I think Routine is the game? http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92985806

Kaboom Dragoon
May 7, 2010

The greatest of feasts

That's the fellow. Guess we're still not seeing it any time soon though. Thanks folks.

oriongates
Mar 14, 2013

Validate Me!


I don't just hate Shattered Memories, it enrages me.

But I also freely admit that my perspective on it isn't 100% objective.

Basically I went into Shattered Memories hoping it was going to save the Silent Hill franchise for me, which has gone into a pretty sharp decline in quality since [insert silent hill game that ruined the franchise]. The talk about removing combat seemed like they were learning lessons from things like Homecoming which made combat too much of a focus and their talk of the game psychologically "playing" you brought back hints of SH2's themes. And I was a big fan of SH1, so the idea of seeing a new version of it with better graphics and controls appealed a lot to me. I even loved the fact that you could open doors partway to try and see what was inside before you went in.

The game was a huge disappointment, because it took everything I enjoyed about the Silent Hill series and threw it away. First and foremost it wasn't scary at all. Half the game involved just wandering through a perfectly normal, not at all weird or twisted, silent hill. There were no dangers, frightening events, not even anything to help build the atmosphere of fear and oppression that silent hill does so well. The only hint of anything abnormal were the occasional staticy shadows which were basically the game's equivalent of audio logs. And then once you finally finish wandering aimlessly through a level there will be a shadow on the wall which will unleash an incredibly cheesy scream and everything ices over. Then you've got to run like poo poo. No chance to take in the new world, the weird architecture, or even the monster designs. I've looked up the monster design for the Raw Shocks and some of it isn't half bad...but I didn't catch any of it in the game because I was too busy running or they all just jumble together when they catch you and hump you to death. Sure, the running was tense, but that was mostly just because I was trying to get through the level without having to start from the beginning.

And of course, needless to say the claims of psychologically profiling the player are complete BS and more or less amount to just switching out a few costumes, altering the monsters slightly, and a different ending.

The only thing that kept me playing the game were the weird cutscenes which at least gave me some sense of mystery and intrigue...only it turned out that none of them really mattered in light of the ending, let alone made much sense.

The Cheshire Cat
Jun 10, 2008

Fun Shoe
Seems like a lot of people have strong opinions on Shattered Memories and Homecoming, but I never really see anyone talking about Downpour. I honestly thought it was pretty good. I guess maybe the fact that it wasn't really scary at all is why it seems to have left such a non-impression on people? Admittedly that's a pretty big problem in a horror game, but it had a lot of other elements that worked really well - it was very exploration focused, the combat was difficult and awkward but in a way that actually worked rather than being annoying and clunky, and the story... well the story was okay at best. The fact that what has already happened prior to the game starting changes depending on what ending you get is kind of dumb.

Yardbomb
Jul 11, 2011

What's with the eh... bretonnian dance, sir?

The Cheshire Cat posted:

Seems like a lot of people have strong opinions on Shattered Memories and Homecoming, but I never really see anyone talking about Downpour. I honestly thought it was pretty good. I guess maybe the fact that it wasn't really scary at all is why it seems to have left such a non-impression on people? Admittedly that's a pretty big problem in a horror game, but it had a lot of other elements that worked really well - it was very exploration focused, the combat was difficult and awkward but in a way that actually worked rather than being annoying and clunky, and the story... well the story was okay at best. The fact that what has already happened prior to the game starting changes depending on what ending you get is kind of dumb.

Downpour seemed pretty alright from what I've seen. Never played it myself but watched I think two different LPs on it now and both seemed to receive it well enough too, despite being fans of the previous games more.

Accordion Man
Nov 7, 2012


Buglord

Jimbo Jaggins posted:

Shattered Memories is an exploration game with nothing worth exploring. The majority of the game is just wandering around locations that could be stock locations from another game in that'll you're not going to find anything relevant to the plot or themes to look at.
Somebody really wasn't paying attention to the game at all, practically every major area in the game is relevant.

Heavy Lobster posted:

What's the general consensus on Silent Hill 0/rigins? I played the PS2 port and thought it was actually pretty good, definitely not particularly subtle and the Pyramid Head fanfic dude was a bit on-the-nose, but I thought the post-asylum parts of the game were really neat (the theatre was a great setpiece and the apartment complex really hosed with you if you followed all the little plot points). Obviously not the best in the series, but definitely not as terrible as some of the other non-numbered ones.
I thought Origins was solid enough. It would have been so much better if it wasn't forced to be a prequel for 1, but the atmosphere is real nice (The soundtrack really add to it), the combat is better than Homecoming, Downpour, and 4 and its not padded to hell or anything. It's actually pretty short. I played the original PSP version because I always heard that the PS2 version sucks because they hosed up the audio.

Accordion Man fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Aug 27, 2014

Jimbo Jaggins
Jul 19, 2013

Accordion Man posted:

Somebody really wasn't paying attention to the game at all, practically every major area in the game is relevant.

Except they're not? I've played through the game more than once and there's virtually nothing of note. I'd be interested to know what interesting details I missed in the warehouse though.

Accordion Man
Nov 7, 2012


Buglord

Jimbo Jaggins posted:

Except they're not? I've played through the game more than once and there's virtually nothing of note. I'd be interested to know what interesting details I missed in the warehouse though.
Most of the game's areas all pertain to Cheryl's past. She was at the party in the woods, she was being ostracized at school, she shanked a security guard in the mall which was one of the major reasons she ended up with Kaufman, etc. There's a lot of unrelated echoes you can find that add to the atmosphere and at first you think they're just other lost souls in Silent Hill, but it ends up more that they're Cheryl's memories of things that she heard about and wasn't directly involved in.

oriongates
Mar 14, 2013

Validate Me!


The Cheshire Cat posted:

Seems like a lot of people have strong opinions on Shattered Memories and Homecoming, but I never really see anyone talking about Downpour. I honestly thought it was pretty good. I guess maybe the fact that it wasn't really scary at all is why it seems to have left such a non-impression on people? Admittedly that's a pretty big problem in a horror game, but it had a lot of other elements that worked really well - it was very exploration focused, the combat was difficult and awkward but in a way that actually worked rather than being annoying and clunky, and the story... well the story was okay at best. The fact that what has already happened prior to the game starting changes depending on what ending you get is kind of dumb.

Personally, Downpour marked the point for me at which I just said "no more" and didn't buy it. After Shattered Memories I was bitter enough about the series that I resolved not to buy anymore unless I heard amazing things from reviewers whose opinions have previously matched mine on the series and I heard no such amazing things.

Oxxidation
Jul 22, 2007
Downpour wasn't bad, it just wasn't scary. Which is kind of a knock against it, considering. I'd say it had the best combat of the series, at least, since it took the Western SH titles' tougher enemies and actually made it possible to run away from all of them.

Also Shattered Memories was a sloppily designed and puddle-shallow sleep aid that served very little purpose other than to make some of the people playing it feel clever for riddling out its kindergartener symbolism, which might explain why its fans defend it so vigorously.

Jimbo Jaggins
Jul 19, 2013

Accordion Man posted:

Most of the game's areas all pertain to Cheryl's past. She was at the party in the woods, she was being ostracized at school, she shanked a security guard in the mall which was one of the major reasons she ended up with Kaufman, etc. There's a lot of unrelated echoes you can find that add to the atmosphere and at first you think they're just other lost souls in Silent Hill, but it ends up more that they're Cheryl's memories of things that she heard about and wasn't directly involved in.

There's nothing in them that suggests they pertain to Cheryl's past outside of the fact they're included in the game at all. You do realise the girl in the woods was called Jackie, right? I can't think of any of the echoes have anything to do with Cheryl and if "They may have been things that she heard about but wasn't directly involved in" is all there is too it they could be anything as long as they fit the place they happen in. For example, in the woods, I have no idea what a dad calling his son a queer for not shooting a deer has to do with anything other than it involves a father and a child. Even echoes that might be Cheryl sometimes even name a different name (jackie, caitlin) that show it's not her. The echoes come in sets and tell a short story in each area and the only one that could be Cheryl is the shoplifting in the mall. However, there's no reason to believe it is because none of the others are and even then thats one thing in the whole game.

I wasn't even talking about the echoes when I said there's nothing to look at. I mean the actual map and textures, they could've pulled a school map out of any other game and shoved their echoes in it and it wouldn't have mattered.

mysterious frankie
Jan 11, 2009

This displeases Dev- ..van. Shut up.

Kaboom Dragoon posted:

That's the fellow. Guess we're still not seeing it any time soon though. Thanks folks.

Yeah. And no Early Release plans either, which I think shows a tremendous amount of self control on the part of the devs, given how popular it is lately. I think the experience playing it finished is going to be way better than getting chunks of game in various stages of disarray dribble out slowly over the next three years, or whatever.

Klaoth
Oct 21, 2010

Sleep, Nyan Cat, Lie in peace.
Lest the doors open wide,
And nyan unleashed on all.

The Cheshire Cat posted:

Seems like a lot of people have strong opinions on Shattered Memories and Homecoming, but I never really see anyone talking about Downpour. I honestly thought it was pretty good. I guess maybe the fact that it wasn't really scary at all is why it seems to have left such a non-impression on people? Admittedly that's a pretty big problem in a horror game, but it had a lot of other elements that worked really well - it was very exploration focused, the combat was difficult and awkward but in a way that actually worked rather than being annoying and clunky, and the story... well the story was okay at best. The fact that what has already happened prior to the game starting changes depending on what ending you get is kind of dumb.

I know a few people who strongly dislike Downpour and in generally comes down to the introductory segment and combat. It takes a fair while for the game to get to the open Silent Hill and it involved what was probably the least interesting area in the game. The game also isn't exactly big for hand-holding so people tend to take a long time to get anywhere early on and a ridiculous amount of people never found a radio in the game despite there being at least 3 you walk right by. As for the combat it tends to involve a certain enemy that just takes too many hits on Normal difficulty and it is really hard to know if you're even hurting it when it constantly does a block animation. On easy pretty much everything goes down like in SH2, power attack it in the face till it stops twitching, but for some reason people tend to be unwilling to drop difficulty to make it more fun (or just run away from enemies). From me personally the only other big annoyance of the game is figuring out some of the sidequests got a little too obtuse for me, which was disappointing considering quite a few of them have very interesting little segments that I had to come back to later with a guide. On the other hand I found it quite interesting what they decided to do in regards to the town as a psychological construct as opposed to SH2 and Homecoming.

For me personally I would say Downpour is a good game in its own right judged harshly by people overly fond of 2 and 3. It is not quite as good as them, but is happy to do its own thing and I can appreciate that. Then again I don't know why people are so against Homecoming either beyond it being a pretty close copy of the SH2 story, while trying to incorporate a little of the old god/cult stuff from the first game. Was it mostly just people really hating the repeat story along with combat requiring a bit more timing/finesse/effort?

Keep fighting the good fight Jimbo! I also find that Shattered Memories tried to pretend it was a lot deeper than it ended up being and there was very little relation between anything in the main game and their super twist ending. Also the psychological profiling stuff and coming up with a final profile at end stops making sense to me once you have context that it isn't you and you've just basically been picking random answers to a few questions on someone else's psych evaluation.

Klaoth fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Aug 27, 2014

Selenephos
Jul 9, 2010

Downpour had a lot of issues, most of which is that it isn't scary and it was very buggy and unfinished, but it felt like it had a lot more soul put into it than any of the other western attempts of Silent Hill. You could tell the developers really cared and they put in a lot of neat little touches into the game. The story was relatively simple too, but wasn't a retread of Silent Hill 2 nor did it involve cult bullshit and what story it wanted to tell, was told well enough aside from some of the endings not making much sense given on what Murphy did in the past.

I actually really loved the sidequests too. Yes, they didn't really relate to the main story much if at all and the rewards you got for it were really poor but they had some really cool and even kind of unsettling setpieces and puzzles to them and it made me want a game where you're some kind of psychic detective going around Silent Hill and trying to put ghosts of people who can't move on, to rest.

Downpour really needed more time in the oven and a much better creature designer but it is the only western Silent Hill game that was anywhere close to the first three games in quality I felt.

Edit: The Otherworld was really cool and trippy too in Downpour. Not scary in the slightest which is a large mark against it, but it felt so abstract and weird that I could overlook it not being scary to some extent. Certainly much better than blood and rust for the umteenth time or cartoonishly blue ice.

Selenephos fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Aug 27, 2014

Too Shy Guy
Jun 14, 2003


I have destroyed more of your kind than I can count.



Shattered Memories was meant to have a lot more depth to it, but development was extremely troubled and huge swaths of content had to be cut. The areas and echoes were indeed supposed to be reflections of Cheryl's life. Most of what was there was in from pre-alpha and was never tweaked or expanded on, so it ended up way more disjointed than intended. There were other plans like multiple paths through areas or multiple solutions to puzzles that all affected your profile more dramatically, but that was all cut.

The game had more problems that would have hobbled it anyway. The lead designer was adamant that the real world and nightmare worlds be separate. Of course, the moment the player realizes this all the tension goes out of most of the game. The psych profiling was never going to live up to expectations either. Whatever you tend to pay more attention to shows up more later in the game, but you'd never notice unless you did multiple playthroughs. And it's not even scary or anything. You look at lots of beer posters, so more beer posters show up later. So what? The devs didn't think they needed to twist it around or anything.

Jimbo Jaggins
Jul 19, 2013
Are you sure about that? Seems odd that they'd get voice actors in to record 3-4 variations of every echo voice message for a pre-alpha.

Too Shy Guy
Jun 14, 2003


I have destroyed more of your kind than I can count.



Jimbo Jaggins posted:

Are you sure about that? Seems odd that they'd get voice actors in to record 3-4 variations of every echo voice message for a pre-alpha.

Yeah, I worked on the game. Proper VOs for the echoes didn't go in until late beta. Before that some of the devs did placeholder readings for most of them. A few like the sewer echo didn't go in at all until beta, but they were all planned and written back in pre-alpha. I think testers wrote a few bugs like "this has nothing to do with anything" but those usually got sent back with a snarky "you just don't get it" from the writer, who was at all times way too close to the project.

Jimbo Jaggins
Jul 19, 2013

Zombie Samurai posted:

Yeah, I worked on the game. Proper VOs for the echoes didn't go in until late beta. Before that some of the devs did placeholder readings for most of them. A few like the sewer echo didn't go in at all until beta, but they were all planned and written back in pre-alpha. I think testers wrote a few bugs like "this has nothing to do with anything" but those usually got sent back with a snarky "you just don't get it" from the writer, who was at all times way too close to the project.

Is it true he used the confusion at Konami due to William Oertel leaving the project to push through things that wouldn't have been signed off on otherwise? Also how much of 'Cold Heart' if anything is left in the final game? From what I've read of the making of Shattered Memories there was a lot of evasion if not outright lying on Sam Barlow's part. It seems a lot of things people complain about were mentioned by Konami themselves, in his own words:

"Of all the pressures internally, in the publisher reviews the question would always be, ‘Are you trying to make a game where you just walk around and nothing happens?’ I was like, ‘No, but that’s a valid experience”

"We knew we were changing producers and there was confusion at Konami, so we quickly lopped the design into the shape we wanted."

"Leading into our vertical slice, we were still referred to as the remake of Silent Hill 1 on Wii,” Barlow remembers. “We were given the guidance that there shouldn’t be anything in the vertical slice that would cause people to question that this wasn’t a straight remake [...] It was less than all-out deception; it was just making sure we showed things that wouldn’t scare people away."

Jimbo Jaggins fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Aug 27, 2014

Too Shy Guy
Jun 14, 2003


I have destroyed more of your kind than I can count.



Jimbo Jaggins posted:

Is it true he used the confusion at Konami due to William Oertel leaving the project to push through things that wouldn't have been signed off on otherwise? Also how much of 'Cold Heart' if anything is left in the final game?

I was on the Konami side, so all I know about Climax is what they told us and what we could infer. We definitely noticed that Sam Barlow (the writer) had an unusual amount of pull, and stonewalled us on a number of issues he honestly should not have had the final say on. None of us were very fond of him by the end. He also had a pretty epic blowup in the comments of one bug that didn't do him any favors.

Can you remind me what Cold Heart was? It sounds familiar but I can't recall it.

Jimbo Jaggins
Jul 19, 2013

Zombie Samurai posted:

I was on the Konami side, so all I know about Climax is what they told us and what we could infer. We definitely noticed that Sam Barlow (the writer) had an unusual amount of pull, and stonewalled us on a number of issues he honestly should not have had the final say on. None of us were very fond of him by the end. He also had a pretty epic blowup in the comments of one bug that didn't do him any favors.

Can you remind me what Cold Heart was? It sounds familiar but I can't recall it.

It's the Silent Hill game they pitched to Konami before Sam Barlow noticed a Silent Hill 1 remake had been greenlit and decided to pitch that instead. It was basically Shattered Memories except with combat, puzzles and scavenging for clothes and food to keep warm so it had a proper survival element to it. The psychological profiling was still in, but that was brought forward from another game rejected by Konami called Brahms PD.

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DeathChicken
Jul 9, 2012

Nonsense. I have not yet begun to defile myself.

I think the only game you could get a bigger case of "I liked this game!" "No this game is bad and you're stupid!" with is Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes.

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