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I kinda disagree that it's better than Homecoming and Downpour. Homecoming was creatively bankrupt but it was at least a competently, if blandly executed creatively bankrupt game. Downpour had genuinely interesting ideas hampered by a poor execution and bad monster design, but at least there was enough of a hook to keep going. The Short Message is just wandering around hallways reading badly written journals while the protagonist never shuts up, and once in a blue moon a scary flower monster chases you through a maze full of rust and blood as the game beats you over the head with the themes of "bullying is bad" while depicting teenage bullying in a cartoonish light. It's better than Ascension but I mean... even the godawful second Silent Hill movie is better than Ascension.
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Feb 3, 2024 21:10
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Selenephos posted:I kinda disagree that it's better than Homecoming and Downpour. Homecoming was creatively bankrupt but it was at least a competently, if blandly executed creatively bankrupt game. Downpour had genuinely interesting ideas hampered by a poor execution and bad monster design, but at least there was enough of a hook to keep going. The Short Message is just wandering around hallways reading badly written journals while the protagonist never shuts up, and once in a blue moon a scary flower monster chases you through a maze full of rust and blood as the game beats you over the head with the themes of "bullying is bad" while depicting teenage bullying in a cartoonish light. I think you're probably correct in your rankings, with the caveat that Homecoming was not competently executed on a technical level; it had severe bugs throughout (the bobvids LP is a great resource on these). Downpour was the more polished of the two, despite its issues.
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Feb 3, 2024 21:35
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Improbable Lobster posted:Is it though? It's like arguing which type of dog poo poo is the least lovely obviously the type that turns white when it dries out in the sun
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Feb 3, 2024 21:42
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Diabetic posted:They try to mimic the mimicry already done and ape off the movie. No Dignity posted:This is what happens when you put franchises over creators. Silent Ahill was good because Team Silent (and also Kojima I guess) were good, not because fog and rusty grates are the best Yeah, the fact that it had the Silent Hill name attached to it isn't necessarily the worst thing about it, it's the fact that it gets shackled with the visual shorthand of new Silent Hill (and in some amount, PT, during the family trauma portion of the game) and doesn't get to fully explore the visual parts of it that were actually pretty good. Like, this is a leaked piece of concept art from before The Short Message's release, which I really love:  and it translates fine into the game. The sticky notes are acting as a visual stand-in for intrusive thoughts, which works! I think they would've worked much better if they were eased into the environment instead of suddenly plastered all over, though. They're also pretty corny. It would've been better to establish the sticky notes themselves, with different messages/thoughts/etc. than jumping straight into this:  Especially because the sticky notes are just immediately overlapping with the graffiti. The graffiti in the game is interesting because of its variety of voices and styles, so you're immediately tuned into the fact that 1. There's a lot of negativity being captured in the very bones of this building, and 2. It's not something that's come from one person, but many people over the years. That's even a good and immediate set-up which keeps true to Silent Hill's history of cryptic graffiti messages in the town! That's good poo poo! We also have the contrast of the more permanent graffiti written by many people vs. the identical (and easily disposable) sticky notes which are personal to Anita, but they just... have the same stuff written on them. Later on in the chase scenes, the sticky notes get replaced by photos of eyeballs (meh) and then photos of Anita, Amelie, and Maya, which works really well! The game also very quickly ditches any semblance of daylight shining in during the moments of horror, which is a shame. C.B.'s chase scenes happen in narrow corridors lit by stray lamps, with the photos/notes peeling off the walls and floating on the breeze. Whenever one of them came up I thought about how cool it'd be to have it happen in the hallway from the concept art instead, with the plain white sticky notes being painted pink by harsh sunlight shining in through bold red sheer curtains. I'm still hoping/praying for a horror game that finally says "Alright, for our obvious-horror-movie-inspiration, we've decided to go with Annihilation" and puts a large portion of it in broad daylight with that kind of unnatural body horror (i am really hopeful for Silent Hill ƒ ) C.B. is also really cool in motion because everything else in the game is animated at the same framerate, but C.B. is animated at a much lower FPS (I think it's called being animated on 3s? meant to make it look almost like stop-motion) so the visual distinction is unnerving. I love stuff that gives you an expectation of what "normal" looks like and then swings for the uncanny valley and switches it out for a completely different and at-odds visual style for the monsters. The obvious answer to this is Madoka Magicka but the early-childhood example I remember was Courage the Cowardly Dog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H8BRrU48Oo That's pretty much the extent of the mixed-praise I can give it, everything else wrt its themes of bullying/child abuse/self-harm/suicide/murder aren't conveyed to the player as much as they are screamed through a bullhorn at every opportunity (especially the graffiti messages that are being screamed out by the abusive mom), and all of the notes that you read between chase-setpieces/cutscenes are filled with by-far the worst writing in the game. Instead of being the breadcrumbs and/or the story rewards for exploring the environments, they're groanworthy pick-ups that you end up grabbing along the way. The gameplay loop ends up being "interesting visual/environmental design" -> "groanworthy text logs" -> "personal and/or collective trauma for us to gawk at" -> chase scene -> repeat loop, with each successive loop getting worse writing, more frustrating chase scenes, and replacing the interesting visual/environmental designs with the same loving Silent Hill shorthand that Konami used in the first SH movie and refuses to ever give up bawk fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Feb 3, 2024 |
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Feb 3, 2024 21:48
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Downpour is fiiiiine It's derivative as gently caress still, but I finished it
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Feb 3, 2024 21:57
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Downpour is a tier above homecoming and origins. No real cult poo poo. Focus on personal trauma. Maybe they explain a little too much but they’re trying. Which is better than you could say for Ascension and the jam man.
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Feb 3, 2024 22:30
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Your Uncle Dracula posted:Downpour is a tier above homecoming and origins. No real cult poo poo. Focus on personal trauma. Maybe they explain a little too much but they’re trying. Which is better than you could say for Ascension and the jam man. Yeah I felt Downpour was the least bad of all the post PS2 stuff. Almost all of that stuff misunderstands the assignment bigly. It’s not without its own missteps, but eh. It’s “alright”.
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Feb 3, 2024 22:53
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I'd agree if it didn't have the worst combat in the series and actually expect you to engage in it sometimes.
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Feb 3, 2024 23:16
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Konami should give the Silent Hill license to Red Candle.Sakurazuka posted:I'd agree if it didn't have the worst combat in the series and actually expect you to engage in it sometimes. I'd say of major entries, Homecoming's still worse.
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Feb 3, 2024 23:31
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I genuinely think that if Downpour was released on more powerful hardware that could actually run it at a stable framerate, had a bigger budget and more experienced developers (Vatra barely made anything to their name beforehand and much of the development problems stemmed from their inexperience mixed with almost zero support from Konami) and had Masahiro Ito or someone similar work on the creature designs, it'd be considered a good game overall. It'd still have issues with the combat but I mean... so did the Team Silent games, frankly. Homecoming meanwhile is just very by the numbers. Even if it was hyper polished it wouldn't be regarded all that well. It's... a playable horror game, that's about all you can say about it.
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Feb 3, 2024 23:55
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Obligatory link to Bob's fantastic LP of Homecoming, which is basically a paragon of the form. https://lparchive.org/Silent-Hill-Homecoming/ Note you will need an extension to re-enable annotations to experience this LP in its full functional glory; this one works for Chrome. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/annotations-restored-for/daabpdmgkghdbfljmeahnplkcldbeefg
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Feb 4, 2024 00:27
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I quite liked Shattered Memories even though it's terrible. It diagnosed me as an alcoholic who can't gently caress, which was very funny when I was playing it as a 17 year old who didn't drink but now, well.
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Feb 4, 2024 01:15
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I forgot about Shatmemz, I did get a kick out of that one. It was at least trying to do something original instead of aping all the popular elements of past games. The psychiatrist stuff is funny as hell but I do like that the game will change poo poo based on “you zoomed in on this booby calendar” or some such. It was a novel idea. I think having it separated into either chase sequences or absolutely no threats at all probably harmed it.
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Feb 4, 2024 01:54
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:I quite liked Shattered Memories even though it's terrible. It diagnosed me as an alcoholic who can't gently caress, which was very funny when I was playing it as a 17 year old who didn't drink but now, well. I played in grad school with a group of behavior analysis and psychology students, taking turns with the wiimote. Was it the way the game was intended to be played? No. Was it a scary experience? No. Did we have the time of our lives? Oh hell yes.
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Feb 4, 2024 01:54
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In fairness if I was in scary frozen silent hill, you know I’m gonna be looking at titties and brewskis to cope.
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Feb 4, 2024 01:57
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I loved Shattered Memories. I just loved the concept of exploring a snowy, dead town and finding all sorts of creepy notes and audio files and stuff that tell so many of their own stories, of people you never even end up meeting. Lots of visual storytelling too. But then you're interrupted by the only danger in the game via the canned chase sequences with monsters you cant fight back against at all. So in that sense I guess I wouldn't say ShatMemz is a true horror game, it's more like a moody atmospheric exploring simulator that occasionally becomes Amnesia The Dark Descent? (though apparently ShatMemz is a year older than Amnesia) Meowywitch fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Feb 4, 2024 |
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Feb 4, 2024 03:00
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Shattered Memories had a really touching ending 
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Feb 4, 2024 03:07
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Shattered Memories: It's like a Tiger in space.
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Feb 4, 2024 03:08
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Your Uncle Dracula posted:Downpour is a tier above homecoming and origins. No real cult poo poo. Focus on personal trauma. Maybe they explain a little too much but they’re trying. Which is better than you could say for Ascension and the jam man. I would absolutely rather have the cult than what Short Message and Ascension are trying to do. At least SH3 proved you can use it well as a prop in a larger story with an allegory. When the allegory is all there is you get poo poo like this.
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Feb 4, 2024 07:45
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It's a free game so I'm just playing it but lol the solution to the locker combination lock puzzle is to look around the room to see numbers drawn on the walls...
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Feb 4, 2024 08:31
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The Saddest Rhino posted:It's a free game so I'm just playing it but lol the solution to the locker combination lock puzzle is to look around the room to see numbers drawn on the walls... thankfully, once you've solved this masterful gambit, you are free from the scourge known as "puzzles" for the rest of the game it was really weird to pick up Poppy Playtime 3, a game that's been widely ragged on for being another cash-in on the "what if children's media was EVIL" train, and have mechanically interesting puzzle design/chase sequences after seeing more people do the maze today. bawk fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Feb 4, 2024 |
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Feb 4, 2024 08:41
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Lmao they wrote lore to explain the fog in silent hill E: zooming in to a pizza and I got screamed at
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Feb 4, 2024 08:42
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day 1 pc mod is going to be replacing all the screaming mom lines with dragula lyrics but keep the kids reactions the exact same. f
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Feb 4, 2024 08:50
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Ok I'm at the end and my partner just went "yay she didn't commit suicide! Hurray!" lmao I thought the setpieces were good and the monster at the low frame rate was interesting (to a point) but as a free, I guess proof of concept maybe, it's not too bad! The story is super heavy handed and nowhere as interesting as it seemed to think though. Feels like I'm watching kids role-playing sad kids using therapy language at each other and then adding some family abuse (that seems very PT lite) and slap dashing something resembling a narrative together. Gameplay is just a walking simulator (no dig) with some shattered memories chase sequences once in a while with a pathing I don't fully understand and one (lol) single "puzzle". It's biggest failure is not being tense or scary at all imo. Personally I was hoping the twist was that she was Maya the actual graffiti artist so I was like "wait it's this straightforward? Lol" and what the hell was that whole thing about a Japanese lady who brought economic success to the town then got called a witch for some racist reason? E: Looking back this was the exact thing that leaked that I posted a while back itt https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3648165&pagenumber=687&perpage=40#post523425905 The Saddest Rhino fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Feb 4, 2024 |
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Feb 4, 2024 09:10
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I'm very curious what happened with Short Message's development where they felt they had to stealth release it as a free title, instead of doing literally anything else. It seems telling that we know it was in the works as early as 2022, but it was never announced or mentioned alongside "F" and everything else.
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Feb 4, 2024 10:18
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King of Bleh posted:I'm very curious what happened with Short Message's development where they felt they had to stealth release it as a free title, instead of doing literally anything else. It seems telling that we know it was in the works as early as 2022, but it was never announced or mentioned alongside "F" and everything else. Makes total sense if they are trying to recapture the P.T. experience or trying to build up trust for the other in production games.
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Feb 4, 2024 10:43
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So I feel like I might have misread this plot thread about the visiting brother but was it based around sexual abuse, or that the brother had done stuff to Amelie? Or maybe that was explained after the final chase sequence that I gave up on (really could have done with at least one checkpoint in there or something) but the way the diaries were reading about how the brother stared at her and made her feel uncomfortable, but I don't recall them mentioning why.
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Feb 6, 2024 06:40
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bawk posted:I love stuff that gives you an expectation of what "normal" looks like and then swings for the uncanny valley and switches it out for a completely different and at-odds visual style for the monsters. The obvious answer to this is Madoka Magicka but the early-childhood example I remember was Courage the Cowardly Dog Yes! The Hydra scene in the Disney Hercules movie terrified the poo poo out of me as a kid for that exact reason: the Hydra is this weird 3D/CGI monster compared to the rest of the 2D movie.
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Feb 7, 2024 06:34
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Kuon, Parasite Eve or Clock Tower?
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Feb 7, 2024 06:35
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The Saddest Rhino posted:E: Looking back this was the exact thing that leaked that I posted a while back itt A shame that the final product didn't live up to the leaks. I wonder if the free release was because a producer looked in the door and realized they had a toxic waste barrel on their hands.
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Feb 7, 2024 06:52
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Woah that's neat. I love it when leaks are true
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Feb 7, 2024 07:05
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Discendo Vox posted:A shame that the final product didn't live up to the leaks. I wonder if the free release was because a producer looked in the door and realized they had a toxic waste barrel on their hands. If that was the case they just would have not released it. Also there was one producer (again the credits have like eight people) who was also the director. Gaius Marius posted:Kuon, Parasite Eve or Clock Tower? The answer is probably Parasite Eve but which Clock Tower are we talking about?
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Feb 7, 2024 08:50
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Gaius Marius posted:Kuon, Parasite Eve or Clock Tower? I mean those are three very different kinds of spooky games
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Feb 7, 2024 10:45
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Blockhouse posted:If that was the case they just would have not released it. The Original SNES release. Always meant to get around to checking it out same with PE. Kuon I just recently discovered and kind of just want to jump into it. Just seeing what people think since I'm quickly running out of RE games to play.
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Feb 7, 2024 11:04
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Okay for a second I thought we were talking about the PS1 game/Ghost Head which is definitely something that should be experienced but ideally by watching someone else play it
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Feb 7, 2024 11:21
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idontpost69 posted:the best pt type game of them all is funnily enough a mario 64 romhack. What’s it called?
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Feb 7, 2024 12:29
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Blockhouse posted:Okay for a second I thought we were talking about the PS1 game/Ghost Head which is definitely something that should be experienced but ideally by watching someone else play it I watched the Game Center CX episode featuring Ghost Head, and even with a TV production crew doing their best to map out the plot points, it was still bonkers.
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Feb 7, 2024 12:57
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Gaius Marius posted:The Original SNES release. Always meant to get around to checking it out same with PE. Kuon I just recently discovered and kind of just want to jump into it. Just seeing what people think since I'm quickly running out of RE games to play. Should play Clock Tower. It's relatively short, relatively easy, and takes a great amount of influence from Giallo films, producing a number of memorable scenes as a result. Edit: That starting scene when the lights going out was genuinely chilling, even when playing it on an emulator.
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Feb 7, 2024 14:56
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Pretty sure I'm the biggest, if not the only, Kuon fan on these forums.  Clock Tower is probably the best of those three, though.Lube Enthusiast posted:What’s it called?  I would also like to know.
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Feb 7, 2024 23:51
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Read After Burning posted:
I assume it's SM64.Z64
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Feb 8, 2024 00:01
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