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im gonna play SOMA and both hate it forever and love it eternally just so i can piss off literally everyone in this thread
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Oct 8, 2018 19:58
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I have to say, the criticism of Homecoming of 'it's not scary if you can kill all the monsters' doesn't really hold water in Silent Hill, the series where the 3' steel pipe is ever the god-king of war and trusty friend of man that banishes all darkness. All the other criticism of everything else about it makes total sense though because it is trash.
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Oct 8, 2018 20:01
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al-azad posted:So I'm curious what's the deal with Homecoming and why is it so reviled? Really, a not insignificant part of it's people who really like to get on about "The baka gaijins ruining muh series!" type stuff. That's not to say the game doesn't have some real problems, it's another SH where previous game bits were just haphazardly slapped in (The 'Bogeyman' is straight up just Pyramid Head) because it's Silent Hill's "style" I guess, it tried to lean on combat a lot more and as ever, Silent Hill's not really a game about that so it felt weird, the story in Homecoming was a lot more blunt and pretty bland. It wasn't great, but it feels like one of those games that often gets a lot worse than it deserves.
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Oct 8, 2018 20:04
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Homecoming is competent but that's all it is. You can tell the developers tried but it's a very superficial reading of the franchise, especially 2 which everything and everyone rips-off. Protagonist with a dark past and a plot twist related to it, spooky psychological monsters based off someone's trauma, spooky evil cult, a "karma" system with a bunch of nonsense 20 second endings, pyramid head and other fan favourites (~~the sexy nurses~~). It's there if you really want more Silent Hill but it's nothing special beyond some decent music tracks by Yamaoka.
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Oct 8, 2018 20:21
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Use the knife!
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Oct 8, 2018 20:25
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See this is why I insist Shattered Memories was good, it at least tried to do something a little different, even if it isn't scary at all.
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Oct 8, 2018 20:53
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Post-SH2 nemesis characters in Silent Hill are basically this:
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Oct 8, 2018 21:28
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Halloween Jack posted:I have a hard time visualizing how you'd do that. It's very easy to use video games to tell a story where you don't know anything about your character's background, or you see things that you're later told are not really there. But how can a game simulate false beliefs instead of simply false sensory perceptions? Well, the idea would be that you, the player/character, doesn't have false beliefs. You're 100% correct in your beliefs/perceptions. But the NPCs in the game, knowing you're autistic or whatever, refuse to help you or even actively hinder you because they think you are just so crazy.  "There's someone scratching on the window." "Nah, I hear aspies are hypersensitive, you're probably just over-reacting to the fluorescent lights. Here, I'll open the window so it stops making that racket." "Someone's after me, you have to help me get out of here! He's got a knife!" "I heard aspies are an elopement risk, I better lock all the doors to keep you safe."
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Oct 8, 2018 22:33
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Homecoming felt like it was someone's Silent Hill fanfic turned into a game
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Oct 8, 2018 22:38
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Sakurazuka posted:Homecoming felt like it was someone's Silent Hill fanfic turned into a game They should have went with my Silent Hill fanfic instead.
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Oct 8, 2018 23:15
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Is yours the one with all the circumcising monsters?
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Oct 8, 2018 23:42
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it's not just that Homecoming was made by Americans, but you can see it, it saturates the walls they leaned into the "old coal mining town" aesthetic from the films, there's a Saw trap, there's a scene where you get strapped to a chair and someone puts a powerdrill in your leg like in Hostel, there's a pyramid head 'cuz he was in the movies too, I think there was inexplicably a Human Centipede boss before Human Centipede actually came out? like, the horror influence is like 95% derived from big budget American horror films from around the time that Homecoming was made. I mean obviously previous Silent Hills reached for American sources like Jacob's Ladder and Dean Koontz' Phantoms, but those are slightly deeper cuts and used more subtly than "uhhh what JUST came out in theaters let's literally put one of those in", and when you're pulling from recent horror and your franchise has produced a movie the serpent ends up eating itself, and you get Silent Hill: The Movie: The Game that's just the broad strokes and vague touches from me, someone with real specific opinions about horror, but the game's also got a lot of missed opportunities, lame storytelling, and puts way too much weight on the cult angle edit: to clarify, I think I would rather replay Homecoming than I would The Room, but it's a tough call. They both have a problem with being full of potential and having some good ideas at their base, but then just totally making GBS threads their pants as soon as they turn the corner Lunatic Sledge fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Oct 9, 2018 |
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Oct 9, 2018 00:04
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So today we'll be talking about the first of two survival horror Pac-Man-styled games I'll be covering this year. This one is the more interesting of the pair, but sadly that doesn't translate to good gameplay or horror. 1. Little Nightmares 2. OK/NORMAL 3. Unforgiving - A Northern Hymn 4. Rise of Insanity 5. Paratopic 6. Rusty Lake Paradise 7. Cube Escape: Paradox 8. INFERNIUM    “Open-world survival horror Pac-Man” is one hell of a hook, I’ll give them that. I honestly had zero clue what to expect going into something like that, and after an hour of it I see what they’re going for. I also see a boatload of problems with that, problems that feel like they were ignored in the pursuit of making good on their claims. It would be nice if the unique concept, environments, and mechanics were enough to earn this one a pass, but the execution is sorely lacking, in ways that drag the entire game down. The first red flag comes right at the beginning, when you are dropped with absolutely no context onto a pillar of rock high above a rushing, ephemeral river. There are some immersion-breaking tutorial bubbles, globes of light you can absorb, and a path into some tall fortresses that lead you into the rest of the game world. You’ll get plenty of plot, mind you, just not up front and not illuminating in the slightest. Turns out you’re in some kind of purgatory called Infernium that was explored by a prior group, whose base camps and hand-drawn maps you’ll find in your travels. It’s a neat touch that helps bridge the gap between the real world and this very video-gamey world, but I’d be lying if I said the scribbled notes on walls about politics and philosophy didn’t get old in a hurry. Setting aside the weirdly fractious plot, the mechanics are what’s going to dominate your time in Infernium. That Pac-Man appellation comes into play in two ways, with those globes of light and with the ghosts. The light globes can be absorbed to fill sigils on your hand, which are then used to unlock gates. At first you can only fill one sigil so you can only open doors with one mark, but somewhere in the world are more sigils and additional shapes to collect and open new paths with. As for the ghosts, you’ll see them hovering around parts of the world, usually between you and where you want to go. When you get near they’ll give chase, and you’ll either need to outpace them or leap to somewhere (using your slow-rear end teleport, you can’t jump in this game) they can’t follow. None of these mechanics are explained, mind you, and while that’s not an issue with the ghosts it very much is with the dots you’re eating. I didn’t even realize I was charging a sigil on my hand until half an hour in, and I wasted a ton of globes by absorbing them while my sigil was full. There’s no direction towards the necessary upgrades, either, because apparently the developers took the “open” in open-world extremely literally. You can do an absurd amount of wandering and exploring without discovering anything, through dusty tunnels and white-washed chambers and icy snowfields and more. You might even figure out how the checkpoint system works, or the big particle fields, or what the seemingly-random symbols on the maps mean. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate a good mystery, and the unexplained weirdness does make for a solid atmosphere. The environments are a high point of Infernium, with towering staircases leading off into the void, luminous subterranean waterfalls, and slick ice floes stretching on forever. At one point I found a seemingly-inverted castle stretching down from the clouds, reaching right to the surface of the rocky plain I was on with a little door to enter its vast halls within reach. It was a striking moment, one that will stick with me, as will the winding maze of featureless halls and aimless wandering that lead to. As good as the concepts are here, they’re never fully translated into something fun or even scary. The floating bathtowel ghosts are only frightening when positioned to surprise you, and once they’re after you they’re little more than annoyances. There’s too much time spent being lost and confused to make the game entertaining, and not enough direction to keep that from happening. And even as much as I like the environments, they lend to some very boring gameplay. I found a secret path from the area you go to when you die that led to a vast field of ice floes, which made for an impressive vista. But when I went to explore it I was beset by a blinding blizzard, which made it impossible to discern between the ice to walk on and the water that would kill me. My reward for seeking out a secret was even more tedium and confusion, and that really told me all I needed to know about Infernium.
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Oct 9, 2018 00:38
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Lunatic Sledge posted:it's not just that Homecoming was made by Americans, but you can see it, it saturates the walls they also plagiarized character designs from Lost
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Oct 9, 2018 01:01
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Oxxidation posted:they also plagiarized character designs from Lost having not watched Lost I missed this, but that's hilarious and further drives the point home it's like the people behind Homecoming's only exposure to horror was mid-2000s American television/cinema, and also they didn't get what made it scary so they just jacked parts wholesale and stapled it together (gratuitously, with the camera zoomed way in and blood everywhere)
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Oct 9, 2018 01:05
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Lunatic Sledge posted:having not watched Lost I missed this, but that's hilarious and further drives the point home 
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Oct 9, 2018 02:38
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voltcatfish posted:See this is why I insist Shattered Memories was good, it at least tried to do something a little different, even if it isn't scary at all. I would call it more off-putting and melancholy, with all the random flashbacks and stuff you find. Cheryl did not lead a charmed life.
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Oct 9, 2018 04:52
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Night10194 posted:I have to say, the criticism of Homecoming of 'it's not scary if you can kill all the monsters' doesn't really hold water in Silent Hill, the series where the 3' steel pipe is ever the god-king of war and trusty friend of man that banishes all darkness. It's all about how much of a personal danger they can be to you specifically, which is plenty.
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Oct 9, 2018 07:20
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I want a game based on David Lynch’s works. Deadly Premonition has been done for twin peaks and it was actually not too bad. What I’m saying is we need Deadly Premonition 2.
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Oct 9, 2018 09:12
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If they could make a Deadly Premonition 2 but also make it less... Janky? I'd be down for it. I enjoyed it but I remember getting to a point where I just had no idea what the gently caress to do after some hospital thing, i think?
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Oct 9, 2018 09:23
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homecoming is one of the most dismally broken messes of a game I have ever had the misfortune to play and I'm not even sure how it gets described as "competent". It's the Sonic 06 of its franchise in pretty much all ways that is an apt comparison, a broken glitchy mess that isn't finished, locks up or crashes all the time and has surprisingly aight music. Otherwise, it is just complete trash. I would sooner recommend just about any other game in the entire series over it. Origins and Downpour are respectively both pretty dull but at least Origins never crashed on me. Can't say the same about Downpour, mind you.
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Oct 9, 2018 09:26
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Downpour was nice because you could ignore combat altogether, but the save system was really stupid.
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Oct 9, 2018 09:42
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As much as Homecoming cribbed off the film and as terrible as it got when it turned into SAW/Hostel at the end, at least the enemies/locales weren't half as insipid as Downpour's. As little sense as the Pendulum split-heads made* at least they weren't just people wrapped in barbed wire or... a slightly bigger person wrapped in barbed wire. And I'll defend to my dying breath the decent level in Homecoming. Compare that to... what was with that level in Downpour where it was a giant cube room with stairs leading to nowhere in it? Like, I kinda dig the idea it was going for in theory. But it looked so out of place and sterile? And then there were the chase sequences which was scrabbling to evoke the Pyramid chase scene. But even Team Silent themselves couldn't pull it off in 3. So that was lame. *Though saying that I can't remember enough of the story to know if they DID make sense. Also Downpour has spooky ghost cars that drive around town. Which is real daft. Ferrous posted:I think I said this before but supergreatfriend has a dry humour style which I enjoy a lot but does have an effect on the spook factor if you're looking to be spooked. I went with SGF. Already had the spooks so just need someone to go over the weird mechanics of the game and point out how the plot all sticks together for me while I unwind from work. Great stuff. Wish he'd do 2 and Blood Curse as well. Drunken Baker fucked around with this message at 10:42 on Oct 9, 2018 |
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Oct 9, 2018 10:40
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quote:I went with SGF. Already had the spooks so just need someone to go over the weird mechanics of the game and point out how the plot all sticks together for me while I unwind from work. Great stuff. Wish he'd do 2 and Blood Curse as well.
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Oct 9, 2018 11:47
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Siren is a game I'm enjoying watching but I wouldn't be able to play myself. Between the spookiness of it and the batshit insane mission objectives it is not my jam.
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Oct 9, 2018 11:49
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Watching video of Homecoming, I don't know the protagonist's background but the dude can kip up like Jackie Chan it's quite ridiculous.
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Oct 9, 2018 12:10
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Len posted:Siren is a game I'm enjoying watching but I wouldn't be able to play myself. Between the spookiness of it and the batshit insane mission objectives it is not my jam. Its how I recommend it to my friends too. I did play it but only about 2 or so hours; before the objectives became really hard and convulted. I went through one more mission using a walkthrough but then I realized that if I was just going to walk through my way through the rest of the game, I might just as well watch someone play it. Already got the experience and spooks with the first levels.
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Oct 9, 2018 12:32
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The supergreatfriend Siren LP peaks early when he tries to demonstrate how deadly and mean the game is, and then the RNG goes bananas and he accidentally speed runs the level.
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Oct 9, 2018 15:41
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Is the conjuring house based on the movies or what it has three stars on steam
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Oct 9, 2018 15:42
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SkeletonHero posted:The supergreatfriend Siren LP peaks early when he tries to demonstrate how deadly and mean the game is, and then the RNG goes bananas and he accidentally speed runs the level. Hahaha. I thought he was doing a "bit" there for sure.
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Oct 9, 2018 15:44
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SkeletonHero posted:The supergreatfriend Siren LP peaks early when he tries to demonstrate how deadly and mean the game is, and then the RNG goes bananas and he accidentally speed runs the level. "Now you're gonna see how this sniper... uh, WELL THIS IS THE END OF THE LEVEL."
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Oct 9, 2018 15:53
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looks more like Michael Ironside to me
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Oct 9, 2018 16:00
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Basticle posted:looks more like Michael Ironside to me I'm seeing thin Marlon Brando over here. The developer of today's game was nice enough to give me both this and its sequel, and the quality makes me eager to see what he did with the follow-up. 1. Little Nightmares 2. OK/NORMAL 3. Unforgiving - A Northern Hymn 4. Rise of Insanity 5. Paratopic 6. Rusty Lake Paradise 7. Cube Escape: Paradox 8. INFERNIUM 9. Dead Secret    The key to a good mystery is to give the audience all the clues they need to solve it themselves. Most mystery-oriented games don’t bother with this, honestly, usually opting to mete out the secrets as part of the main plot. A few take the opposite tack though, and base the gameplay around ultimately having the player solve the mystery themselves. Dead Secret is one such title, stranding you in an ominous homestead full of clues and asking you to pick a murderer out of a motley lineup. If you can work your way through the volumes of reading to piece it all together, and avoid death at the hands of a masked menace, then you’ll likely find this one of the better creepy mysteries out there. Reclusive professor Harris Bullard has turned up dead in his remote country home, and no one knows quite what to make of it. As a small-town reporter, you see solving the murder as your ticket out of your dead-end beat and head out to the house solo. Bullard had four close acquaintances who all bore their own motives and peculiarities, and the many notes and clippings left around the house will eventually lead you to the killer. But Bullard’s research was of the esoteric type, and it’s possible he unleashed something that led to his doom. You’ll have to contend with more than just the corporeal secrets here, including a killer who may not have killed their fill just yet. I’m a big fan of Dead Secret’s story, and not just because you have to name the killer by the end of the game. Bullard’s house is a unique setting, even in the modern landscape of haunted Unity horror houses. The place was in the middle of being packed up when Bullard bit it, so some rooms like his study and bedroom are mostly untouched while the living room and kitchen are veritable mazes of boxes and disarranged furniture. It gives the house a more grounded, lived-in feel and lends credence to your finding of dozens of notes scattered all over the place. The story does indeed dip into the supernatural as well, but just enough to entice and leaves plenty of space for curious minds to come to their own conclusions. There are scares to be had as well, and while they lean heavy on jumpscares they’re mostly well-paced and earned. The game being first-person lends significantly more weight to these moments, and they’re smartly situated to startle even in broad daylight. You’ll find yourself in danger from time to time, forced to hide or escape from the killer before they do what they do best. These sequences can be a little frustrating as they only have one right answer that isn’t immediately obvious, but you don’t lose anything aside from tension from fouling them up. As you progress further into the game the atmosphere grows noticeably more ominous as what feelings of security you cling to slip away. What weaknesses Dead Secret does suffer from are mostly found in the mechanics. It’s a first-person game but rather than let you wander the house freely, you’re stuck in an on-rails sort of point-and-click version of it. That means everything is done by nodes, including movement and interaction, and sometimes you have to be standing at a specific node to do something otherwise obvious like turn on a light or pick up a note. There’s an absurd number of notes to find if you want the full story, too. I know I said earlier that the transitional state of the house made it more reasonable to expect such things, but the volume can only be explained by someone filling a diary and then tearing the pages out, spreading them like confetti. I won’t be too much of a pedant about this though. The fact is that Dead Secret pulls together a compelling and creepy mystery in a way that’s only lightly flawed. The graphics won’t win it any awards but they do the work of setting the scene and the lighting is quite effective at raising concerns. There’s not much sound design to comment on either but there doesn’t need to be, as silence is an excellent filler for the remote homestead. It’s just a solid product from start to finish, one fine for horror, adventure, or mystery fans of any stripe.
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Oct 9, 2018 16:35
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"Bald scowly guy" is kind of clichéd and overdone for villains either way, though, on about the same level as white-haired prettyboys.
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Oct 9, 2018 18:30
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I played dead secret in VR so it scared me to an absurd degree. (Is everyone's punctuation in SA appearing as cursed text or is it just me)
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Oct 9, 2018 18:59
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Meallan posted:I played dead secret in VR so it scared me to an absurd degree. I'm seeing it too. Do I have to send a videotape to someone or something?
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Oct 9, 2018 19:04
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Meallan posted:I played dead secret in VR so it scared me to an absurd degree.
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Oct 9, 2018 19:04
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Meallan posted:I played dead secret in VR so it scared me to an absurd degree. No same here too. I can't tell if it's like the mobile app glitch ing or SA being playful with the Halloween theme?
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Oct 9, 2018 19:05
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Section Z posted:I'm seeing the � replacing some punctuation too, but I can type type you're without it going crazy. So who knows what's going on. We're haunted!
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Oct 9, 2018 19:22
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For the Resident Evil HD release for the PC, does anyone know if they actually had to remake all the textures in high definition, or were able to to just re-use the art assets from the Gamecube version because they were already at that quality internally? No real reason for asking, I'm just curious.
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Oct 9, 2018 21:48
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