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mutantIke posted:Bad news. Alan Wake is in Fortnite. Are you sure about that?  I think that is Tim Allen from the start of The Santa Clause
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Oct 10, 2023 21:49
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| # ? May 15, 2024 01:29 |
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Alan Wack
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Oct 10, 2023 21:51
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Call him Sam Lake House because that's what he probably bought with Tim Sweeney's fat paychecks.
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Oct 10, 2023 21:52
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Sakurazuka posted:Is the first one any good? Feels like something I've seen in every single PSN 'Indie Sale' I absolutely loved it, but it kinda checked some particular boxes of mine (exploring abandoned houses, as well as being a 'walking sim with some very light resource management'). It's absolutely worth $5 or so to check out, although do be way of what platform you play it on. I played it on PS4 with no issues, but a goon upthread mentioned that they got a game-ending glitch.
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Oct 10, 2023 21:56
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CuddleCryptid posted:Are you sure about that?
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Oct 10, 2023 23:47
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i ain't playing anything named Broom
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Oct 10, 2023 23:49
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more like Alan Fake
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Oct 11, 2023 00:36
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Started playing Faith This is some good stuff
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Oct 11, 2023 01:15
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mutantIke posted:Bad news. Alan Wake is in Fortnite. I want to see Alan Wake hit the griddy and do orange justice.
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Oct 11, 2023 02:02
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Whirling posted:Alright horror games friends, what jank rear end ps2 horror game should I play for October? Beat Silent Hill 2 and 3, and now I am hungry for more It's not PS2 but if you haven't played Illbleed, it is an absolute joy. Lil Swamp Booger Baby posted:Also The Cat Lady was fire, I can't remember if it was recommended to me here or in the Adventure game thread but it was a good rec. I remembered hearing about this from some horror youtuber awhile back, found it in the depths of my brother's steam library, and gave it a play. That was pretty good!
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Oct 11, 2023 06:52
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bowmore posted:Hello Mr. Wick Even funnier considering how Alan Wake 2 seems like it's borrowing some concepts from Matrix Resurrections
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Oct 11, 2023 06:58
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Night10194 posted:Horror is also very subjective and it's possible that whatever the game was doing just hit hard for that person.
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Oct 11, 2023 09:17
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I feel like the oceanview depends on when you experienced it. I first played bloodlines years after release and the whole thing was comical
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Oct 11, 2023 11:13
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It was always comical.
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Oct 11, 2023 11:18
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I played it for the first time about three years ago now and I found it decently scary. A lot of it has to do with the game mechanics and idea of the story, of course. Like, I'm a badass vampire, right. Pretty popular escapist fantasy. But one of the first things you'll do in the story is very humbling. Your badass vampire powers don't mean poo poo here. You can't fight a ghost, you just have to be led by the nose and run through a hallway of your greatest fear/weakness, fire. I like it a lot for taking a power fantasy and making you feel totally helpless. That's the scary part for me as much as the actual "spooky" events in the hotel.
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Oct 11, 2023 11:34
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I ran a combat build and was mostly just annoyed that I couldn't fight whatever the ghost was.
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Oct 11, 2023 15:23
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Some liars in this thread Smdh
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Oct 11, 2023 17:50
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I can understand someone not really finding the hotel that scary, I never found it particularly scary either, it's more of a haunted house kind of thing. It's a neat atmosphere but it's hard to really feel apprehensive about moving forward. I'm pretty sure the raptor in the museum gets everybody though.
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Oct 11, 2023 19:37
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Hotel was cool once. It kills my subsequent playthroughs.
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Oct 11, 2023 19:49
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The Hotel was really scary to me the first two times and now I just run through it and it's not very scary anymore. It's still one of the few things in a game that actually scared me but it had a lot more effect in the early 2000s than now. The raptor gets me literally every single time, though.
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Oct 11, 2023 20:00
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mutantIke posted:Even funnier considering how Alan Wake 2 seems like it's borrowing some concepts from Matrix Resurrections
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Oct 12, 2023 09:22
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(Former?) goon supergreatfriend famous for his LP of Deadly Premonition just completed his SH Homecoming streams, and holy gently caress western SH games are baffling. Origins had no reason to exist, and while I'd argue that Homecoming has a skeleton (a pretty ugly one with a few bones missing) of something resembling a coherent and alright story, it's insane that no one understood how amazing the dungeons in the original trilogy were. Like, they used every possible trick to gently caress with you and created many weird and interesting situations which led to some being unforgettable. Western SH games just crapped out some hallways with enemies, and while I'm not the one to blame devs before publishers, the sort of tricks SH 1-3 pulled aren't hard to pull off and wouldn't cost much! It's just timing and breaking expectations! Of course the cherry on top is that SGF went through the game choosing the dialogue options that he picked when he played the game way back then, justifying his desisions along the way, and if you know about Homecoming you probably know why: for a new player there's a 12% chance to just stumble into a UFO ending that's not even any fun. I just feel like I need to write this somewhere because holy poo poo what. Like, the first hour or so if we don't count combat-heavy dungeon, with coming home that's been Silent Hill-ified is kinda cool and creepy, but then you get that?!
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Oct 12, 2023 22:13
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I've been watching the youtube uploads of that playthrough (SGF's LPs of Deadly Premonition and Illbleed are still some of my favorites) and yeah I played homecoming on release and forgot just how bad the game is. A huge problem with the western silent hills is their obsession with combat, something that the silent hill 2 remake seems to be continuing on with. Silent Hill combat was never good, it was at best serviceable; but it was never a major part of the game. It encouraged you to largely run past enemies if you could because combat wasn't particularly fun or rewarding, and it made the bosses stand out more because they were weird things you had to fight your way through for the most part. Origins, Homecoming and Downpour all put way more emphasis on the combat and often made it a lot harder to simply run past enemies, or made enemies way more aggressive; and combat in the latter two especially was way, way, more involved with dodging and quick time events. It slowed the games down a lot because now if you wanted to get through an area, every few seconds you had to stop to have a lovely dark souls fight with like three monsters while the open city areas respawned dudes every five feet. So you don't even get the spooky atmosphere juxtaposed with the uncomfortable, claustrophobic, otherworld anymore because the games are just always loud all of the time now and the monsters are always screaming and running around and you have to have sick combat fights. Also just because it really needs to be said, the western games basing themselves more on the movies than the previous games was a stupid decision and makes them just that little bit more worse, because the movies were bad. But also lmao at learning that the devs for homecoming had a scrapped script where Joshua and Alessa have a dragon ball z fight.
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Oct 13, 2023 04:20
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Yeah Silent Hill is a classic example of the problem I mentioned earlier of people looking at horror games with bad combat, going "what if we made the combat better", and having it completely ruin the tone and pacing of the game. RE4 pulled it off a lot more successfully but the thing about that game is that it dramatically reshaped what the series was and built itself around that shift, rather than trying to slot "better combat controls" into the pre-existing model and hoping it would work out. Although I feel like the fundamental issue with the western Silent Hills was less gameplay oriented and more the lack of new ideas (which my understanding is wasn't really the dev's fault; it was Konami that kept insisting on poo poo like putting Pyramid Head in the game). A big pet peeve of mine is how much SH2 gets treated as "the only game in the series that matters" and that well, specifically, is what they keep going back to. I don't dislike SH2 at all, all the praise is very well deserved, but what made it special was how it was a completely different thing than SH1, and then SH3 was completely different from SH2 and the same with 4. Origins/Homecoming/Downpour were all just variations on the theme of "Evil town that tortures people psychologically because of something in their past" when that was really only SH2's thing.
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Oct 13, 2023 05:25
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Shattered Memories tried something different and i'll always respect it for that but idk I also just like exploring creepy locales so I am def biased
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Oct 13, 2023 05:40
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Meowywitch posted:Shattered Memories tried something different and i'll always respect it for that I didn't like the whole "run from the enemies" gameplay. Honestly, though, I'd probably love a silent hill style game with minimal combat or actual monster presence at all, with mostly like oppressive environment and atmosphere. Basically just turn it into an adventure game like Stasis: Bone Totem which I enjoyed a lot.
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Oct 13, 2023 05:43
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the worst thing about the shattered memories chase sequences is that the only interesting environmental design in the entire game is in the areas youre not meant to stick around and look at
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Oct 13, 2023 06:18
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I appreciate SM and Downpour for trying to do something with the setting. The ice and water stuff was at least more novel than the other two. 0 rows returned posted:the worst thing about the shattered memories chase sequences is that the only interesting environmental design in the entire game is in the areas youre not meant to stick around and look at Baffling decision. I wanted to explore poo poo like that, not marathon through it.
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Oct 13, 2023 06:23
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shattered memories was a great fit for the wii with its flashlight controls and being able to hold the remote up to your ear during the creepy cell phone calls. it was a totally cromulent spinoff of silent hill that didn't try to be a dollar bin knockoff of sh2. the psychological test gimmick was neat even if it didn't impact the plot in that significant a way. it at least made for interesting repeat playthroughs. i'd even say the game's better than downpour
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Oct 13, 2023 08:17
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The later SH games aren't scary because the audio design sucks. I mean, just think about it, it's near impossible to make completely lifelike graphics even now, but we've been able to make audio that sounds literally like the real thing ever since the advent of DVD storage let games utilize significantly less compressed audio. If you've got even semi-decent speakers or headphones the reproduction will be really lifelike. A game can't make you think a gross hunchback nurse is actually next to you, but it can very, very easily make it SOUND like she is. The instant I got a surround sound setup my previous stance of "videogames don't scare me" went out the window lol, hearing every little creak of the house in RE7 had me making GBS threads my pants over basically nothing other than a tiny audio file. It's amazing how much good sound design can imbue what is obviously a videogame with a sense of reality. It's the bridge that connects the unreality of a game on a screen with our reality. I think it's far easier to make a game frightening with good audio design versus good visual design. People used to get scared playing Doom because they heard monsters growling in another room, audio really is one of the biggest sellers when it comes to unnerving atmosphere. David Lynch is out there making lamps terrifying by putting crazy rear end audio over them.
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Oct 13, 2023 08:18
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The western games having more combat wasn't really the problem, they just kept trying to 'fix' SH combat and somehow make it even worse than the first 3 games. Excluding 4 because that also managed to make combat worse than a PS1 title.
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Oct 13, 2023 08:20
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Sakurazuka posted:The western games having more combat wasn't really the problem, they just kept trying to 'fix' SH combat and somehow make it even worse than the first 3 games. Excluding 4 because that also managed to make combat worse than a PS1 title. I think a big problem is also that tank controls sort of obliquely slow down the pacing of a game, if you make the combat fast and responsive, it sort of naturally does the opposite, and if something feels too fast pacing-wise, you're going to completely ruin any attempt at building up dread. Not really the mechanics themselves, but rather the combat system not really selling what's supposed to be slower paced, psychological horror. You can 100% find a way to do that without making the combat a nightmare to control. RE7 did just fine by using a basic first person framework and just adjusting motion/weapon behavior. Very easy to immediately, intuitively learn to control the game, but the particulars of it add the necessary friction.
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Oct 13, 2023 08:32
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This is a hot take but SH combat would be greatly improved if melee was either removed completely or it was just expendable self defence items like in RE games. Trying to design meaningful melee combat around James the ordinary average man seems futile when you could just solve the issue with ammo and item management instead.
WaltherFeng fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Oct 13, 2023 |
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Oct 13, 2023 08:41
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WaltherFeng posted:This is a hot take but SH combat would be greatly improved if melee was either removed completely or it was just expendable self defence items like in RE games. Trying to design meaningful melee combat around James the ordinary average man seems futile when you could just solve the issue with ammo and item management instead. Yeah its easy asf to just beat most enemies in SH2 into the dirt with melee lol
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Oct 13, 2023 08:54
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Well the first game too. Hammer
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Oct 13, 2023 08:54
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I think combat has an important place in Silent HIll but the core issue is that post SH2 nobody really had any idea of what it was doing with combat as a thing. Silent Hill 1 had combat but even discounting the clunkiness of the PS1 design it tried to play into the idea of combat as part of setting the atmosphere. Being swarmed by terrifying knife children, having to stare into the maw of a beast to kill it, having to potentially murder Cybil with your own hands, and of course the infamous fact that the final boss was designed to make you panic as your ammo dwindled (while never actually leaving you helpless.) It is a different game without the combat because the combat was built into the tension. SH2 went even further with that and made James being a violent person play into the overall atmosphere, tying it into the endings and even making combat itself part of the symbolism of the story. It's a trick that works best if you don't know it is there though which is why it becomes harder to repeat the trick because everyone is looking for it after the first time, though it still has its value afterwards. The melee aspect is important there because James viscerally beating the poo poo out of things is important to the atmosphere, all the way to him getting the giant knife. SH3 is where it starts to fall apart. It has its moments ("they look like monsters to you?") but it doesn't feel as naturally integrated into the setting. Heather fighting monsters ends up feeling more like something that is expected in Silent Hill instead of being a part of the cohesive design. The Room kind of tries stuff with the ghosts but it ends up feeling awkward and everything past The Room has literally no ideas for what combat means except What Silent Hill 2 did.
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Oct 13, 2023 08:58
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There is something conceptually funny about beating the crystallized concepts of your guilt with a plank of wood.
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Oct 13, 2023 08:59
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Also definitely do not include any sort of weapon durability or crafting because that's just equally terrible. Just give James expendable kitchen knives or something if he gets grabbed. RE1make solved this poo poo 2002.
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Oct 13, 2023 09:02
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Your Uncle Dracula posted:There is something conceptually funny about beating the crystallized concepts of your guilt with a plank of wood. Oh, absolutely, but I think that is something the earlier SHs were well aware of. It's one of those things that works well if you allow yourself to be lost in the atmosphere but if you don't then it becomes kind of absurd, which is part of why the rewards for gamifying it are joke endings and weapons. "We recognize that you're leaving the atmosphere behind in favor of speedrunning and optimization so now a dog is responsible for everything and Heather is a magical girl."
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Oct 13, 2023 09:03
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| # ? May 15, 2024 01:29 |
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One of the wildest things to me about SH is how the very first dungeon of the first game already played with the radio mechanic. That feels like a thing devs would come up with in the sequel. I really hope F is good because I doubt any other new SH will be, and while I'm not the biggest fan of Higurashi, I've played the first two games and they're legit very creepy despite having really bad artstyle. It feels silly to say, but the first part gave me more chills than most AAA horror games and it has a scary schoolgirl, for gently caress's sake. There's a particular moment where you start to suspect something's REALLY wrong and call a cop, I believe, only to discover that after she left your room she was just standing near your door for a while, listening, that actually got to me!
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Oct 13, 2023 10:52
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