31 Game Horror Challenge 2024

 It's that time of the year once again to do the 31 game horror challenge!  This year we're doing it in November because my October was busy as all hell but if it was really up to me, it would be spooky month every month but whatever.  Here's the list in the order that I'll be playing them

1. Silent Hill 2 

2. Paranoihell 

3. Resident Evil 3 (PS1) 

4. The Smell of Death -A Tsugunohi Tale- 

5. Bioshock

6. Lucifer Within Us 

7. Fatal Frame

8. Crow Country 

9. F.E.A.R 2 

10. Splatter Master 

11. Moons of Madness

12. Gun Survivor 2: Biohazard Code Veronica 

13. Lost in Vivo

14. Splatterhouse 3 

15. DreadOut

16. Fobia: St Dinfna Hotel 

17. Disaster Report 

18. Tormented Souls

19. Manhunt 

20. Faith

21. Hollow Body

22. 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors

23. Evil Dead: Fistful of Boomstick

24. Murdered Soul Suspect 

25. ...iru?! 

26. Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit 

27. Gregory Horror Show 

28. Shadowgrounds

29. Dementium 2 

30. Michigan: Report From Hell 

31. Deadly Premonition 2 

I've not failed a horror challenge since the very first one I did where I underestimated the length of Days Gone but this year I have a baby to contend with.  Will I get through all of these? or will life be the real survival horror?  Only one way to find out!  www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

I Do Not See The Appeal Of Silent Hill 2: Remake

 

The Silent Hill 2 Remake is one of those games I've been shitting on since it was announced.  Starting with the annoucement that the gaggle of incompetant hacks, Bloober Team, are making it and then with every shoddy trailer to drop since then I've only had increasingly harsh words to say about it.  But then the launch trailer appeared on YouTube and under it was a sea of positive comments of people hype to play it and I'm just completely baffled.

It really does feel like I'm going insane in some ways.  Like, imagine if you were in a resturant and the waiter serves you literal dogshit on a plate.  You respond by saying "this is dogshit! I'm not eating that" but then all your friends and the other people in the resturant are just shovelling the dogshit into their mouths and just GUSHING about how good it is.  That's what watching the trailer and then looking at the comments section feels like.

On a gameplay level, the things shown in the launch trailer look OK, I guess.  Maybe the most acceptable part of the whole deal.  This is only because they are using the same 3rd person over the shoulder style that a ton of games in this genre have been using since 2005, it's a hard thing to fuck up at this point.  That said though, Silent Hill: Homecoming and Silent Hill: Downpour were also using this style of game play and managed to fuck it up so even though it looks fine in the trailer I'm very much expecting it to suck ass when I actually get around to playing it.

But the gameplay is not what I'm really purplexed by, it's everything else.  The subtlety seems to have been completely thrown out of the window in the overall presentation.  The game looks like its pulling all the tricks for "scares" that things like Dead Space uses.  Like there's one bit in the trailer where James turns a corner to a TV with static on it and a monster in front of it.  As he gets closer the TV turns off and the monster just shuffles out of view.  I can almost guarantee that the next move after that is if you turn the camera the monster is gone.  One of the oldest and least effective tricks in the book being used in not just any modern horror game but in a SILENT HILL game of all things.  Even in the, admittedly kind of ass, 2001 E3 trailer for the original game they weren't pulling any bullshit like that.  The games creepiness spoke for itself in the few snippits that they showed off between some cutscene bites.  

But the cutscenes are where the remake seems to scandalize me the most of anything.  The new voice acting and character designs look like absolute trash.  The two big offenders so far are Angela, who's had her weird quirky line delivery removed for ham fisted, obvious bullshit and Eddie, who has, quite frankly, become a parody of himself

The trailer shows off a section of his speech near the end of the game where he says "It doesn't matter if you smart, dumb, ugly, pretty! its all the same once you're dead! and a corpse can't laugh" and the presentation and line delivery of the scene are so HORRIBLY bad and miss the point of the original so hard that I physically winced.  Whoever is voicing Eddie in this remake needs a fat slap or a better director.  Preferably both.  This is just two scenes out of the whole game too so how much actual pain I'm going to feel playing through it is sort of daunting.

Now the obvious thing to say here would be "if you hate it so much, just don't play it".  But that doesn't fly because Silent Hill 2 means a lot to me and if I'm going to be in a position to talk at length about how much this remake sucks shit, I have to play it through AT LEAST a couple times.  Plus there's always the astronomically low chance that I'm wrong about all this and it turns out to be great.  I think I have more of a chance of surviving a plane crash and then winning the lottery right after but the chance is a smidge higher than 0%, at least.

But here's my theory on why SH2R is seeing so much positivity.  Most people played, or more likely watched, Silent Hill 2 and didn't really get it.  The looked at some video essays or articles about the game after the fact and parroted that bullshit to seem smart online but they were essentially just pretenders wanting to be in on the popular thing.  Then Bloober comes along and gives you a version of the game that is louder, dumber, less intelligent and easier to digest but has JUST ENOUGH of the original in there to still looks smart with your peers online for enjoying the "art game".  If that's not it then I weep for the standards and tastes of general gaming audiences.  

I knew the bar was low, but this is on a whole new level of trash.  I, of course, will be playing it at some time soon after release and will be coming back to either validate this post or maybe do a complete 180, lets see how it goes.

Blue Stinger: The Good Kind of Jank

 

Blue Stinger was a launch title for the Dreamcast that I pretty much ignored when it came out.  At the time I was much more into arcady type games so I opted for Power Stone as the game I got with the system.  After that I stuck to the arcade and fighting games on the system so my library of titles consisted mainly of things like Soul Calibur, Dynamite Cop, House of the Dead and other games in that sort of style.  I did go on to enjoy things like Code Veronica and Evolution but Blue Stinger was one of those games that stayed out of my collection for the entire consoles lifespan. I'm sort of glad it did actually because this game is all sorts of fucked.  I think a younger me would have scoffed at its weird, jokey cutscenes and got easily frustrated at its gameplay but at older me can appriciate it for the wonderfully weird bit of pre-2000s jank it is.

The game follows Elliot on his adventures through Dinosaur Island.  He's chilling on his boat with a friend while he builds an anime girl-in-a-bottle (no, don't think about it) when a meteor crashes down and causes a monster outbreak.  Elliot is soon accompanied by a guy called Dogs are are assisted by a chick called Janine and the three of them must work together to stop the outbreak by shooting a lot of things in the face.  Oh, also the anime girl-in-a-bottle turns into some weird ghost thing, don't think about it too hard.

On the surface, Blue Stinger might seem like any other survival horror game and I spent my first couple of hours with the game playing it as such but I quickly found out that you will be absolutely miserable if you're trying to go through things that way.  There's no real survival or horror elements to Blue Stinger, its a much faster affair where enemies drop cash and guns/ammo can be bought from vending machines so no need to conserve, just blow everything to high hell.  The horror on the other hand falls completely flat but I'm not entirely convinced that's what they were going for.  The imagry is trying to be horrific with ihabitants of Dinosaur Island having their bodies taken over and mutated but the whole thing has the vibe of a low budget action B movie with a horror theme.  For example there's one point where you have to fight a jeep that's been turned into a giant crab monster and when you kill it you are rewarded with a minigun for Dogs that allows you to just absolutely mow shit down.

Once you realize to not play it like you would play something like Resident Evil though the fun factor jumps up a fair bit.  There's also a number of setpieces throughout the game that are, admitedly, quite stupid but will have you grinning like an absolute idiot as Eliot and Dogs bumble their way through them.  An example of a good one is that there's one point where Eliot has to cross a chasm to get to another part of the island but instead of going around or finding away across, he climbs up a big tower with a gas tank on the top of it and blows it up as he jumps off to have the blast just throw him across.  It's dumb to the point of it being awesome and I wouldn't have it any other way.

There are some frustrating parts of the game though.  The two most notable of these are a section near the start where you must navigate a freezer but the freezer is a big ass maze that's slowly killing you AND there's enemies inside it AND if you fuck up the puzzle it becomes a giant heater that STILL kills you as you go through it and the solution to the puzzle or even what elements need to be interacted with aren't particularly clear.  There's also a bit where Elliot gets a bit sick and its not hard but they decided that a lot of wall climbing needed to be done in that part and the climbing is slow as all fuck and it reverses your controls when you're doing it which makes navigating the area take a bout 8 times longer than it usually would.

Overall though, good fuckin' game.  The only other game that I think the company did after this is Illbleed and if you've played that as well as Blue Stinger you might come to the conclusion that the development team consists entirely of insane people.  It's sort of hard to recommend to people but if you don't mind some late 90s jank and you need a good chuckle from a retro game then Blue Stinger has you covered

Reevaluate Your Opinions

 

I can't help but feel that in recent years that the general gaming public has a bit of a problem when it comes to the way they treat games.  The way it seems to me is that a game comes along that ends up being the main character for a while, think titles like Red Dead, Elden Ring, Horizon Forbidden West, New God of War etc, then these games are played once by most people and then shelved while the user goes on whatever social media platform and joins the collective marketing driven gush is going on at the time.  After a period of time the collective gush dies down and everyone moves to the next thing, the game is largely forgotten in public discussion and the game is never played again by a majority of the people who bought copies of it. 

Writing about how this is a shitty way to be in this blog, now that I think about it, is probably a case of preaching to the choir because I know for a fact that the vast majority of people who engage with my little corner of the internet aren't like that but I think it's worth stating that it is a shitty way to be.  It's a shitty way to be at the peak of the games popularity because most games have higher difficulties and extras that are skipped by a majority of the userbase and its a shitty way to be after the fact because I'm of the opinion that reevaluating your old tastes to help better understand and appriciate the stuff you consume currently is good practice so allow me to regail you with 2 times that this happened to me.

The first case was only a few days ago from the publish date of this post with Doom 2016.  It took me a long time to get around to it since I went through a portion of my life using only trash laptops and I wasn't about to play a game like Doom on a console.  When I did play it I had a fun time with it but I remember feeling that the game was overly long and felt like an absolute slog to play by the end.  I enjoyed my time with it but the additional modes for score and time seemed like absolute overkill for a game that could barely handle its own length in the campaign.  This time around, however, I had a lot more fun with it.  I don't know if its because I'm just better at games or because of my even better hardware or because I was streaming it but the experience was significantly more enjoyable the second time around.  Upon finishing it I even had a go of the arcade mode to see what was up and found it to be a cool addition to the games content package.  If I'm being really honest with myself I think my opinion of  the game "barely being able to handle its own length" stems from the fact that the system I played it on originally was constantly crashing and blue-screening during the playthrough.  I was replaying sections a lot because of these hardware issues that were not fault of the game and yet it sullied my opinion of it.  I'm glad I went back to it because now its a title that has become a candidate for a possible future speedrun. 

The second and much more violent example of an opinion change is with The Evil Within.  I picked it up and played it around the time that it launched and holy fuckin hell did I absolutely HATE it at first.  I thought the horror elements were lame and trying overly hard to "scare" the player with just huge piles of gore.  But more than that I hated the game itself.  The first few chapters set me up to believe I was going to be playing a stealth game only for the majority of encounters to be some kind of ambush situation.  The constant lack of ammo and healing had me frustrated rather than on edge and when the game threw a boss at me I was either bored or frustrated.  The upgrade system was cumbersome and stupid and I felt that at base, every enemy was far too tanky and combat was not fun to engage in at all. But then I watched a friend of mine play it on Twitch and suddenly I felt the need to give it another try and my opinion did a complete 180.  Maybe its because I knew what challenges were ahead on the second try, maybe its because I was in a completely different head-space than the previous playthrough but either way I had a MUCH better time with it.  I still think the horror is kind of lame but maybe its because horror today is so oversaturated with untalented developers making complete shite that The Evil Within seems like a breath of fresh air.  But I also just enjoyed the game a lot more.  I understood from the outset this time that ammo is scarce and I played much smarter that I had a better time with it although the upgrade system is still stupid and using gel to upgrade pockets and sprint time is extremely annoying.  But overall I like The Evil Within now, its a cool game and I want to try and beat it on Akumu one day.

So go back and replay some of those things from your past.  Same goes for books and movies too, always worth seeing if stuff holds up for today you the same way it did for old you.  Maybe you'll discover something cool that rubbed you up the wrong way before or maybe you'll realize that younger you was an idiot that like trash.  Either way its a fun thing to do so go try it

Doom64 is absolutely horrible

 

I play a lot of games in a lot of genres and as a result of that I also play a lot of complete and utter shite.  Every so often, though, a game comes along thats so rancid in its design and content that it lodges itself in my brain and I can't stop thinking about it for a long time.  It's like seeing a horrible road accident where the images of people being sliced in half by pieces of car metal stick in your minds eye for weeks after the event.  It happened with Outlast 2, it happened with Holy Diver and now it's happening again with Doom64.

Doom64 was released, unsurprisingly, on the Nintendo 64 in 1997 and unlike previous console ports of Doom where it was just Doom 1 or 2 being brough to console, this was a whole new thing.  A unique Doom game for a brand new system, fucking wow, but in terms of the larger conversation of Doom and Boomer Shooters in general, 64 is a bit of a black sheep in the series and the genre.

On it's surface its a pretty competently made Doom game.  It's basically just more of what we got with Doom 1 and 2 with some redesigned monsters and a new gun to play with, what could possibly go wrong? Well fucking everything really.  

The first and most minor problem is the controls.  The N64 controller is already a gigantic piece of garbage made for octopus people (and even they don't like it that much, they told me) and playing an FPS on it feels like pulling teeth.  Running with the stick and walking with D-Pad is irritating but but the absolute worst thing about the controls is weapon switching.  The number of times I fucking died because I got ambushed by a large number of pinkies or imps and either couldn't pull the appropriate gun out fast enough OR accidentally switching to the rocket launcher and blowing my own face off made me want to rip and tear my own throat out.  There's a reason these games were originally made for PC where you could switch guns with a number key.  It's because using the right gun for the right situation is key to gameplay and having that shit hindered by having the guns just be in a list makes for a fucking awful time.  

Then there's the level design just being generally fucking awful.  When I was playing Doom 1 and 2 on stream I'd often complain pretty vocally about how I dislike the majority of levels designed by Sandy Petersen but I feel like I owe him an apology now because the Doom64 levels make even his most diabolical outings look like a walk in the park.  Sudden pits, crushers out of nowhere, pitch black rooms full of enemies, PLATFORMING are all common features in Doom64 maps that are likely to drive you insane.  One of the worst examples of this is a level early on where you are expected to sprint across a number of platforms that change height as you touch them.  I didn't know that's what was going on at first so I had 3 or 4 attempts where I just fell into the black pit of pinkies and ate shit.  The point of the section was so poorly conveyed that I had to look up a fucking YouTube walkthrough just to be able to tell what was even going on.  That's just one example too, go watch the VoDs on my YouTube channel of the playthrough I did recently for many, many hours of similar and equally frustrating bullshit. 

Then there's the thing that really stuck in my brain which is the games penchant for teleport ambushes.  In original Doom, ambush rooms were a common-ish thing.  You would walk into a room where there would be a gun or a key and when you grabbed it the walls would open.  The concept is introduced in E1M3 (I think) where picking up a blue key opens a wall to a few shotgunners and then you know its a thing you're supposed to look out for.  You can walk into a room and maybe predict if the walls are going on open, for a new player its a guessing game that keeps proceedings intense, keeps you on your toes.  Doom64 said fuck that though and just teleports enemies into a level, usually in positions that will completely fuck you with no warning.  The second to last level in the game is a great example of this where killing a Mancubus (at least I think that's the trigger) will spawn in an ARMY of imps, directly in your face.  If you know its coming you can move out of the area as your rocket travels through the air and avoid too much damage but for a new player it's just a shitty rookie trap.  Kill the enemy, OH WHOOPS NOW YOU'RE TRAPPED, dead and restart the level.  Imagine if you were playing something like Dungeons and Dragons and then when you kill a monster the dungeon master suddenly goes "oh by the way, there's 100 goblins in the room with you now".  You'd call him a piece of shit, break his teeth and never invite him to DnD sessions again.  That's what teleporting ambush spawns makes me want to do in Doom64.

The final and most irritating thing in Doom64 though is the final level.  It's a simple stage, a small room with a bunch of guns in it and then an arena.  At one end of the arena are 3 portals that spawn in an absolutely unreasonable amount of demons.  Once you kill them the final boss appears in the middle and starts barraging you with what I can only describe as a Mushihime-sama style bullet hell pattern.  Here's the kicker though, if you were thorough enough in the previous levels to find the secret maps then you may have also found 3 Hell Keys.  The hell keys upgrade one of your guns AND allow you to close the portals early, meaning the number of pre-boss demons you have to fight is significantly more reasonable.  The game makes no mention of this at any point and I don't care if its written in the manual because who the fuck ever kept manuals for N64 games? No one I knew that's for damn sure.  I have seen footage of people beating this stage from a pistol start without the keys because my initial reaction was that it seemed impossible without them but in order to pull it off you actually have to be some kind of Doom God.

Here's the thing though.  The game fucking sucks.  I don't WANT to explore the levels because the levels are ass and full of bullshit, I just want to get through them as fast as possible so I can stop fucking playing Doom64 and move onto a better game like Action52 or Video Cart-8: Magic Numbers for the Fairchild Channel F.  Getting good at something or taking the time to explore something is only worth doing when the game is good and Doom64 is certainly not that.  Therefore, I fucking cheated to see the ending.  Usually I'm extremely anti using codes and stuff to get through a game but when the thought of playing it any longer was actually ruining my mood and the prospect of streaming it further was ruining my entire DAY before going live, I don't give a shit.  Maybe if there was any indication of the existance of those keys, even in the form of a cryptic comment or something, I would have grinned and beared it because then its my fault, but to be blindsided by a sudden key requirement on the final level that would require me to go play the majority of the game over again?  Get fucked.

Doom64 got re-released for PC where you can use mouse and keyboard and they brightened the game a little bit so its not so unplayably dark at all times but even then I can't imagine it being any better.  Maybe my point about the controls being ass would be fixed but the rest of the broken, rancid design of Doom64 still remains.

Fuck this game, send it to hell along with the people who made it

Remnant: From The Ashes

Remnant: From The Ashes is a game from 2019 that I have just finished in 2024 thanks to the Epic Games Store giving it to me for free.  I remember when it came out and it had a bit of a buzz around it for being essentially "Dark Souls with Guns" but while also having a solid multiplayer com.  Well I didn't try the multiplayer component and let me tell you, Remnant: From The Ashes is the worse than bad, it's fucking boring.

The game is set in some kind of post apocolypse where you are tasked with getting to some island that's protected by a big storm in order to stop The Root, tree people that seem to enjoy human murder.  What follows is, a shameless Dark Souls clone with the twist being that the game focuses on ranged combat which, at first, starts out somewhat interesting.  For the first few areas of the game there's some degree of intensity to the gameplay.  The enemies are dangerous and resources are scarce so exploring the environments for healing items and ammo boxes so that you can free up your currency for upgrades is fun.  But then, after a boss or two, things start to go downhill extremely quickly.

As you kill enemies and gain experience you gain "trait points" which you can put into a variety of skills in your menu.  The most obvious thing to do is max out HP and stamina because having more numbers to get hit and dodge with in a game where damage values are so high is pretty valuable.  Once you do this, however, and max those values a lot of things in the game become trivial and when the challenge starts to die in a game like this, it's the beginning of the end.

What then makes things even worse is that after the initial area of levels set on Earth, you are transported to different, alien worlds on your quest to stop the Root and it's when you get to these areas that a lot of shit in Remnant is re-used.  In the desert area known as Rhom I think I went through the same dilapidated set of corridors about 6 times.  Not as backtracking during exploration, I mean that on the foward path, en route to new areas, the same indoor environment had been copy pasted that many times but just with the enemies shifted around slightly.  It was in this world, the second of 4, that I basically vowed to stop exploring anything because having to endure the same area over and over again was just mind numbing.  

Not that the vow I made meant anything in the end because not only is area re-use up the wazoo but after the first area things get extremely linear.  Like, Final Fantasy 13 levels of linear.  By the end of the game I was rushing through every zone just so I could get to the final boss as fast as possible and I STILL managed to find a ton of rings and trinkets that I basically had no use for because there are two very good rings and then a bunch of trash which will just take up space in your inventory.  

What makes the game completely unbearable though is how, after a certain boss in the second world, the game becomes COMPLETELY braindead.  One of the bosses grants you a beam rifle weapon that is so significantly better than every other weapon that you get your hands on that regular enemies won't even have a chance to get near you, let alone hit you with anything.  It also makes bosses a completely joke because you just aim and hold down fire which allows you to dedicate 100% of your brainpower to dodging the incredibly easy to avoid and heavily broadcasted attacks that they do.  By the end of the game, between trait points making everything a joke, overpowered weapons and boss design that felt like the devs just gave up, you're playing Remnant in a sort of mindless haze that fails to engage or entertain in any way at all.

There is a heavily emphasized multiplayer component that I didn't touch because who the fuck is playing Remnant: From the Ashes in 2024, really? but I can't image that having an extra person in my game would make things any more fun.  It would just be a second drone to mindlessly beam down all the enemies with and, if anything, would make procedings even easier.

So in closing, I fucking hate Remnant.  I always say that bad games have value because at least in getting mad about them or finding them funny in some way you are getting something out of it.  But Remnant is boring.  A game that you will play, finish, feel nothing while playing it and then never think about it again after the credits roll and that is way, WAY worse.  A truly miserable game made by truly soulless people to ride an action RPG wave they didn't understand.  Sad and embarassing

The Worst Battle Theme Of All Time

 

Metaphor ReFantazio is an upcoming game with a stupid title from the boys over at ATLUS that I'm actually quite exicted for.  It looks like a neo-persona game, right down to the main chracter and Mitsuru-elf but its set in some weird fantasy kingdom full of monsters that look like abstract paintings come to life.  I'm avoiding most of the news and updates regarding it, as I do with most games, so that when I do get my hands on it I'm not tainted by hype or marketing but one thing crossed my path from this game that's so batshit that I can't help but want to talk about it.

A video popped up in a Megami Tensei group I lurk in that featured the games battle theme.  I'll embed it here so that you can hear it for yourself. 

At the start it sounds fine, just a sort of generic orchestra dollar store tier Nier wannabe music but then the male vocals kick and it sweet mother of baby Demifiend what the FUCK is that actual shit?  It sounds ridiculous.  Maybe if it was some kind of real world language being used then I might not think it so laughable but it just sounds like some guy doing opera gibberish.  It's distracting and sounds fucking awful, I have no idea how I am going to be able to take any of the combat seriously if this starts playing every time I get into a fight.

But when I look at the comments for this track, people seem to be praising it but I have an idea as to why I'm having such an adverse reaction to it.  Back when I was a child there was a panel show on British television called Shooting Stars.  The hosts of the show, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer would sometimes do a "club singing" round, where Vic would sing a very distorted and silly version of a song and the contestants had to guess what it was.  Example below

And this is the problem, when those vocals kick in for that battle theme all I can see in my minds eye is Vic Reeves fucking club singing.  Hell, given the pace and the flow of the song it almost sounds as if it's Vic Reeves club singing the rap from Persona 3's Mass Destruction.  So maybe if you're British and of a certain age then the Metaphor battle theme will tickle a very silly bit of your brain and if you aren't then maybe it sounds just fine.  That's my theory as to why I and a few of my friends have had such an adverse reaction to it.

To give credit where it's due though, its certainly a memorable song.  Nobuo Uematsu came out recently saying something along the lines of modern game OSTs being a bit boring and I agree with that statement.  There's tons of games with great soundtracks all the way up to the PS3 but I don't think there's many current or last-gen games that you could name where I could just instantly start humming or singing a tunes from their soundtracks, it's all become sort of orchestral mush.  Even games that have good soundtracks like Final Fantasy 7 have them ruined by this grand orchestra bullshit as seen in the likes of Remake and Rebirth.  When I think of JENOVA, my brain defaults to that glorious, high energy PS1 version and not that absolute white-noise trash found in Rebirth.  So despite me calling it the worst battle theme of all time, it at least stands out.  It's so silly that I sometimes find myself in the kitchen singing it as I cut meat and vegetables for dinner, it has wormed its way into my brain and will not leave.

Either way, maybe in the context of the game it won't sound as silly and I'm not about to let Vic Reeves of all people ruin my enjoyment of an upcoming release.  Let's be honest, anyway, you know and I know that I'm gonna be singing along to this shit when I inevitably stream it anyway.  Bring on October, I can't wait.