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0 rows returned posted:It's because he worked on some of the bad silent hill games. I never understood Void Burgers hate for ShatMemz. Was it an amazing game? No. Was it the worst Silent Hill? Definitely not. But she made it up to be the absolute worst thing for no apparent reason
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Sep 25, 2018 15:54
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Hating stuff is always cooler than liking it.
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Sep 25, 2018 16:11
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Her Story is an interesting video novel that probably takes about 2 hrs. I liked it, and it wasn't like offensively bad or anything.
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Sep 25, 2018 16:12
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Also Shattered Memories is good and fun and maybe people should stop having a fit over a game that's basically just an au silent hill fanfiction.
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Sep 25, 2018 16:13
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0 rows returned posted:I wonder how much of the hate boner for him is sourced directly from voidburger's lps of origins and shattered memories. Her Story is great and if you really dive into it it actually ends up different than Shattered Memories, I think Barlow just played around with using Shattered Memories themes again as kind of a joke. Barlow kind of has this sense of humor that both Shattered Memories and Her Story share. Tired Moritz posted:Also Shattered Memories is good and fun and maybe people should stop having a fit over a game that's basically just an au silent hill fanfiction. Accordion Man fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Sep 25, 2018 |
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Sep 25, 2018 16:15
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Shattered Memories is a really cool and interesting game, but it's kind of terrible as a Silent Hill game. It would have gotten a better reception, if a lot less attention in general, if it had been published as its own IP instead of trying to ride on Silent Hill's coat tails.
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Sep 25, 2018 16:30
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Shattered Memories needed more circumcision imo
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Sep 25, 2018 16:32
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Accordion Man posted:I think its mostly just that because I've only seen goons have any real vitriol for the guy, while both Her Story and Shattered Memories are mostly liked by the general gaming public. I saw "normal" people who liked his stuff sour on him a bit when they "played" the new wargames, since it was a bit of a mess. Whether that means they'll re-evaluate or be more critical about his other projects remains to be seen. I've only played Aisle and the amount of text spent on harassing a woman in a grocery store put me of his other works.
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Sep 25, 2018 16:32
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Accordion Man posted:It's genuinely a really good companion piece to Silent Hill 1. It's really not. The monster designs are great, but Shattered Memories lacks the sense of malice that Silent Hill 1 has. edit: It's Silent Hill 1 as filtered through some one who only sort of understood what made Silent Hill 2 good horror.
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Sep 25, 2018 16:33
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is the 'sense of malice' in silent hill 1 how awful it is to play
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Sep 25, 2018 16:34
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TGLT posted:It's really not. The monster designs are great, but Shattered Memories lacks the sense of malice that Silent Hill 1 has. edit: It's Silent Hill 1 as filtered through some one who only sort of understood what made Silent Hill 2 good horror.
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Sep 25, 2018 16:37
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Johnny Joestar posted:is the 'sense of malice' in silent hill 1 how awful it is to play Yes. Also the angry offputting music. Shattered Memories really has nothing like I'll Kill You.
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Sep 25, 2018 16:37
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TGLT posted:It's really not. The monster designs are great, but Shattered Memories lacks the sense of malice that Silent Hill 1 has. edit: It's Silent Hill 1 as filtered through some one who only sort of understood what made Silent Hill 2 good horror. Like I think it would not be the same game if it didn't have a connection to SH1.
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Sep 25, 2018 16:44
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Shattered Memories is bad. It's a narrative-focused game but the characters and plot are cheap stereotypes and cliche-ridden hackwork respectively, clearly written by someone whose only frame of reference for this sort of thing is other media. There's a blatant and discrete separation between the parts where you're in danger and the parts where you're not, so every attempt at a scare in the latter is pointless. The chase parts are essentially "better choose the right path or start again" (what everyone hates about Outlast 2). The solution to every puzzle is "call a number on your phone and get told the answer to the puzzle." Voidburger ain't got nothin' to do with my dislike for that game. But I also thought Origins was fine.
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Sep 25, 2018 16:44
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Bonaventure posted:Shattered Memories is bad. Agreed. What ShatMemz tries to do is conceptually interesting, but very, very poorly executed and organized. Bonaventure posted:But I also thought Origins was fine. Disagreed. It's better than Shatmemz in a number of ways, but Voidburger's characterization of it as having the "uncomfortably familiar feel of bad fanfiction" nails it. (though I also feel that way about the Shatmemz writing)
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Sep 25, 2018 16:47
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I didn't think it was a very spooky game but I did like how the game change stuff based on how you observe your surroundings. Even though it's pretty easy to get the good dad ending. And I enjoyed how all the things you collected are references to Cheryl's life
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Sep 25, 2018 16:49
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I like shatter memories as an alternate timeline sequel to the first silent hill's bad ending
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Sep 25, 2018 16:50
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Accordion Man posted:I should clarify that its a narratively a great companion piece, because of it how it plays around with the original game's plot and themes. That's really only to its benefit, not Silent Hill 1's benefit. Honestly the connection's a fairly tenuous one, and I think Shattered Memories would have served itself better by striking out on its own so you never have a "Wait why is Dahlia hot now?" moment. And also so I, personally, me, just me, no one else only me, don't look at it and go "but where's all my atonal hate noise?"
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Sep 25, 2018 17:00
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Cardiovorax posted:Yeah, that's really it. It looks neat and has some good ideas, but it just feels too different to really fit into the series. Ah yes the series that has been: Survival horror Visual novel Lightgun arcade game loving dungeon crawler With stories that range from cults to purgatory towns. ShatMemz is definitely too different with it's story about a person coping with loss to be a Silent Hill
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Sep 25, 2018 17:04
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sounds like you're forgetting the best silent hill game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ht4dbyPIcM
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Sep 25, 2018 17:08
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Len posted:With stories that range from cults to purgatory towns. When I say feel, I really do mean "feel," not gameplay or vaguely pop-psychological themes, because those are dime a dozen. Of course, I haven't played all of them, but of the main series I have played and many of the spinoff titles that I've at least watched, they've been all really really good at matching that shared shape and flavour. Shattered Memories, on the other hand, is the Pepsi to Silent Hill's Coca Cola. They're basically the same thing in terms of the broad strokes, but no one who has had both would confuse them with each other.
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Sep 25, 2018 17:15
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Len posted:Ah yes the series that has been: I mean at that point might as well bring up the pachinko game. But that's also part of the problem with every post SH4 Silent Hill game. The town's too nice. They all looked at SH2 and took it as a story about purgatory where you get better, and not the story it was - about a malevolent supernatural thing that wanted to hurt and destroy whoever it could. Like Downpour, Downpour's Silent Hill feels like it wants everyone to be good people and walk away from their experiences with the town as healed and better people. 2's Silent Hill wanted to demolish everyone whether or not they were bad people. Also Downpour's endings are just dumb and the wrong way to handle Murphy's backstory.
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Sep 25, 2018 17:16
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the previous page's conversation is pretty much exactly what i was thinking about when i said people interact with psychological horror really differently
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Sep 25, 2018 17:33
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I'm getting off topic a bit here but all this talk about "Her Story" made me remember a game I saw recently. if you want another experience kinda like if "Her Story" and "Orwel" had a baby : Subserial Network (available for 10 bucks on itch.io) is a weird ride. You play in a world after humans have disappeared and have been replaced by synthetics with the prime directive of "act human", you have to hunt down dissidents who want to be more "machine" then human by playing internet sleuth. At the same time, you slowly piece together an understanding of the world and what happened as you progress. It's worth the money if you are into that kind of stuff.
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Sep 25, 2018 20:54
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Double Post is Triple Bad
Cyberdud fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Sep 25, 2018 |
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Sep 25, 2018 20:55
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TGLT posted:2's Silent Hill wanted to demolish everyone whether or not they were bad people. the town in SH2 exclusively attracts people with serious crimes hanging over them so it's kind of a tautology anyway - James killed his wife, Eddie kneecapped someone at bare minimum but would have cheerfully done worse given the opportunity, Angela killed her father and was hankerin' to find her mother and finish the job the only odd one out is Laura and there's a fair case to be made that she's just another Maria-esque windup toy manufactured by the town to torture James
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Sep 25, 2018 21:02
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I feel the town in 2 is more neutral, it doesn't care if you redeem yourself or not, it just manifests what the people that come there wanted it to. The Hellraiser-esque "heaven to some, hell to others" idea for the town really was rather underutilized in the series post 2. They tease it in later games like 3 and Origins but they never really go all out with it.
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Sep 25, 2018 21:08
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It's never outright stated, but Silent Hill 2 all but had it as its tagline that "all you find in Silent Hill is what you bring there yourself." It's pretty much its big theme and, if nothing else, explains why the little unarmed girl really doesn't run into much of any serious trouble while strolling through the place. She's the only one who has no personal demons to chase her. I've heard people call it not so much the best game in a good series, but rather the one good game in what's otherwise a fairly mediocre series. In terms of the depth of the writing, I don't entirely disagree. SH2 is the only one where the story doesn't just involve the characters, but is really about them in every way from beginning to end.
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Sep 25, 2018 21:21
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1 is a really good game just for being a goddamn confusing nightmare hell where you can't see and nothing makes sense. 1 was the first SH I played and it was just exhausting to play, but that was a good thing. Siren captures the same sort of 'what in god christ's name is even happening' tone for me, which isn't surprising given the shared lineage. E: Also, 1 was the first time I ever saw that kind of weird, industrial, rusted vision of hell that it goes with. It's hard to describe but there's just something tiring about scenery that is constantly, aggressively unnatural and industrial that really grabbed me. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Sep 25, 2018 |
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Sep 25, 2018 21:24
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Shattered Memories is the worst Silent Hill I've actually finished, which I think in my mind gives it rank over Downpour (which I didn't bother to finish) and Origins (which I gave up on after it broke twice, I was playing the console port) Silent Hill was a good series, at some point, and when I start to tell people it is a good series I often forget the sheer number of arcade/handheld/remake/slot games that got dumped out with Pyramid Head slapped to the front of them edit: which I guess is kind of appropriate with horror, as a whole. Hellraiser had one, arguably two good entries before it went totally off the rails, tonally fell apart and the cenobytes became generic evil dudes what commit the evil Lunatic Sledge fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Sep 25, 2018 |
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Sep 25, 2018 21:32
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I really liked Shattered Memories. It was one of the rare games though I played on the Wii and I think it would have lost a lot if ported to other systems. You needed to be able to wave your remote around as a flashlight and get creepy calls on the speaker.
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Sep 26, 2018 04:07
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Cardiovorax posted:It's never outright stated, but Silent Hill 2 all but had it as its tagline that "all you find in Silent Hill is what you bring there yourself." It's pretty much its big theme and, if nothing else, explains why the little unarmed girl really doesn't run into much of any serious trouble while strolling through the place. She's the only one who has no personal demons to chase her. The problem is from game 1, and in every game since (including 2), that tagline is bullshit. All you find in Silent Hill is what you bring there yourself......and everything everyone else brings there. Focusing myopically on the protagonist's Hidden Secret as the game core is really crippling for other aspects of the design.
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Sep 26, 2018 05:32
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Yeah, Silent Hill in the first game had dick all to do with Harry. It was all of Alessa's various nightmares springing to life. Then 2 does the thing where the town is unleashing a mishmash of James/Angela/Eddie's hangups, 3 is...ambiguous (you'd think everything is revolving around Heather's subconscious, but then Vincent implies Claudia is doing it). And 4 goes back to 1's idea where you're wandering someone else's nightmare. DeathChicken fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Sep 26, 2018 |
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Sep 26, 2018 06:20
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I think that's why the first Silent Hill has always been my favorite, because Harry is just some guy caught up in something unspeakable. It's not his psyche manifesting things, he's not part of some dumb prophecy (there is a dumb prophecy but he's tangential to it), he's just a random dude who wants to do the right thing by his daughter and nearly gets destroyed for it. That's classic cosmic horror, normal people encountering grand, unexplainable things that are existential threats just by their scale. I get that Silent Hill 2 is a landmark horror title but I just don't find the whole Jacob's Ladder thing as compelling as an alien, out-of-place thing that torments by merely existing. I would like 4 more if it wasn't so laser-focused on Walter and his home-brewed prophecy, and was also more fun to actually play. And Siren is even more extreme in that regard, in some ways it does the cosmic horror nightmare better than SH1 but can be absolutely agonizing to get through at times.
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Sep 26, 2018 06:44
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Discendo Vox posted:The problem is from game 1, and in every game since (including 2), that tagline is bullshit. All you find in Silent Hill is what you bring there yourself......and everything everyone else brings there. Focusing myopically on the protagonist's Hidden Secret as the game core is really crippling for other aspects of the design. I mean, let's not kid ourselves, the cult storyline is stupid. I mean, it's genuinely dumb and it makes no sense at all. The evil goopmonsters are hostile to everyone, including their own cult, and there is no sane reason why anyone would even worship Twitchy McPointyhat at all, never mind entire generations of people in both this town and apparently the neighbouring ones. It's very visibly a symptom of "functional 90s writing," as you might call it: a villain responsible for everything was needed, an evil cult fit the bill. Making sense was a distant second concern. It's why I can agree with "a good game in a mediocre series" from a writing perspective, because for all that Umbrella Corporation is more visibly over-the-top and ridiculous, making monsters to sell them for cash monies actually makes more sense as a setting antagonist with a comprehensible motivation. SH's cult is just a plain mess. Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Sep 26, 2018 |
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Sep 26, 2018 07:03
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Cyberdud posted:I'm getting off topic a bit here but all this talk about "Her Story" made me remember a game I saw recently. It's also an extended metaphor for Trans spaces on the late 90s-early 00s internet.
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Sep 26, 2018 07:07
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Cardiovorax posted:I mean, kinda yes and kinda no. When you look at the Silent Hill 2 artbook, nearly every creature is described or taglines with some variation on "this here thingie represents James frustrated libido/rage against the world/potty training" or something that nature. Yeah, the other two bring their own monsters with them, but the only time you actually see them is when you run into the woman's "Abstract Daddy" that represents how he molested her. The rest of the time, it's almost solipsistic in how completely it focuses on James and his personal concerns. That's nonsense. Several elements of other characters' emotional states are explicitly influencing the environment. Cardiovorax posted:It would certainly be bullshit to say that about the other games, but for Silent Hill 2 alone? It's really tight writing and right on the money. People call the Silent Hill series psychological horror, but Silent Hill 2 is the only one that actually is. It's why, even here, people either like it the most or the least: it's actually very different from the rest of the series. That's nonsense. The entire series explores psychological themes, and is psychological horror. One of the biggest hangups of the later series is that subsequent teams got hung up on a shallow, simplistic accounting of what Silent Hill is that resulted from a simplified interpretation of the contents of Silent Hill 2. That's why the series has been trapped retreading 2's plot points and structure. Cardiovorax posted:I mean, let's not kid ourselves, the cult storyline is stupid. I mean, it's genuinely dumb and it makes no sense at all. The evil goopmonsters are hostile to everyone, including their own cult, and there is no sane reason why anyone would even worship Twitchy McPointyhat at all, never mind entire generations of people in both this town and apparently the neighbouring ones. It's very visibly a symptom of "functional 90s writing," as you might call it: a villain responsible for everything was needed, an evil cult fit the bill. Making sense was a distant second concern. The cult storyline is fine, you're missing a big part of their role in the games. The cult does not actually understand what they are meddling with. The cult isn't really responsible for what's going on, because they're also enthralled by the effects of Silent Hill. That's a huge part of the point of how the cult is depicted in every game (except Origins). The subversion, the gap between their beliefs, their expectations, their experiences and what the town delivers is what makes the cult work narratively- that the mythical items and totemic plot devices they have are mostly garbage, that their God is actually a monster of their own creation. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Sep 26, 2018 |
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Sep 26, 2018 07:16
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I'm not and never will be a fan of the idea that Silent Hill is a place where some Godly force punishes sinners until they repent and become good people as if Silent Hill is literally a purgatory on Earth. It's the most common interpretation of Silent Hill 2, that James is being punished because he's a bad person and it bugs the ever loving poo poo out of me that people have that interpretation as it shows a basic lack of understanding on how mental illness works or what people with mental health issues actually go through. Regardless on if James and Eddie were bad people or not, Angela sure wasn't a bad person even though she ended up killing her father, but she still suffered. The town in Silent Hill 2 is simply reflecting what the own characters feel about themselves, not judging them. Pyramid Head isn't a figure of judgement because James is a bad person who needs punished, he's a figure of judgement because of the immense guilt James has over everything, from killing Mary to having dark emotions over Mary's that he feels resentment to both Mary and himself for having. He loves Mary. He also hates Mary and these conflicting emotions aren't mutually exclusive. He's stuck in a bottomless pit with no light to guide him, he's completely lost in his own delusions and depression and guilt. Pyramid Head isn't punishing him for being a sinner, he's punishing James because James wants to be punished and feels it is what he deserves. Likewise with Eddie, it's not the town punishing Eddie for killing a dog and shooting someone in the leg, it's Eddie punishing himself because he's all too aware of his own body weight and feels worthless, depressed and angry because of it and instead of directing that energy to lose weight and being around better, less toxic people he's instead externalizing his own self-hatred onto others, lashing out and hurting others and getting lost in the power trip. The town punishing Angela would be sickening as an idea, what she did was entirely justifiable. But she feels as though her father and brother raping her for most of her life and the feelings of guilt and shame that brought was her own fault, that she deserves it because they wouldn't do that to her if she were more "normal". A horrible injustice was committed against her and not only did nobody outside her family bother to help her, Angela is blaming herself for it happening to begin with. It's those feelings which are being manifest in Silent Hill and are tormenting her. If I'm completely wrong and Silent Hill really is about a weird purgatory where people repent for their sins and the Cult are correct in their beliefs then Silent Hill is a much less interesting series to me. The problem with the western made games is that the developers thought of Silent Hill as a purgatory where people are punished until they repent. They never actually explored the inner psychology of the characters and how they really felt and the only game which came close was Shattered Memories; but Shattered Memories was a confused mess which wanted to have Cheryl as the actual player stand in which led to contradictory and confusing mixed signals the game had to process. Your own story really shouldn't have been Cheryl's story and I kind of feel Shattered Memories would have been much better if they ditched that dumb psychology warning when starting the game and removed player interactivity from the therapy sessions.
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Sep 26, 2018 08:25
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Discendo Vox posted:The cult storyline is fine, you're missing a big part of their role in the games. The cult does not actually understand what they are meddling with. I guess I really care as little about your opinion on this as you seem to care for mine, so let's just agree to disagree.
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Sep 26, 2018 08:56
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I like the justification even if they are just pasted onto generic monsters after the fact. I don't see what makes it different than when a sequel adding lore to a game world that started pretty generic.
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Sep 26, 2018 09:05
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