Choose Or Die? I choose die

 We all know that video game movies are generally pretty bad.  There may be the odd exception here and there but generally speaking a movie based on a game is almost guaranteed trash.  What's worse than video game movies, however, are movies about video games.  The most famous example of this is probably Ready Player One.  An unfathomably shit movie about a bunch of morons looking for some thing inside a VR Metaverse that will give them a bunch of money and allow them to escape their shit lives or something.  It's an extremely poorly written plot surrounded on all sides by trite video game references and a bunch of money men trying to seem relatable by pointing out that they looked up a thing about Adventure on Atari 2600 one time.  But then Choose or Die got made and it makes Ready Player One look like a fucking masterpiece.

There's a short story published by Steven King in 1983 called Word Processor of the Gods.  To cut a short story even shorter, some dude has a word processor that has the magical property of making whatever he types into it turn into reality.  The guy in the story basically deletes his shitty kid and shitty wife and makes a more well mannered kid his and a woman that's a bit nicer to him into his wife and then the word processor runs out of magic juice and breaks down forever.  I think that's what happens anyway, it's been a hot minute since I read it.

The reason I bring up Word Processor of the Gods is because Choose or Die basically rips off that idea wholesale but instead of it being a magic bit of 80s tech, it's an old video game that bends reality. The film follows some woman finds a game called "Curs>r" in her friends failing retro shop and on the back of the box there's a promise of a cash prize for anyone who can beat the game.  They call the number and find that it's still in service (with the audio recording being delivered Robert Englund of all fucking people) and so the woman takes the game home and tries to beat it to get the money and pull herself out of the shit, broke life she finds herself in.

"Curs>r" is a text adventure, kind of like Zork or any of those ancient purely text based adventures that you controlled by typing in shit like ">walk north" into a command prompt only this game creates its situations based on where the user is and then asks them to make some kind of horrible choice under the threat of death if they fail to choose in time.  For example when the woman first gets hold of it shes playing it in a bar and the game is like "you are in a tavern, should the waitress take a break?".  So she types yes and by "take a break" it meant that it forces the waitress to start picking up random glasses off the shelf and smashing them off the floor.  Then when asked if she should clean up by the game, the woman picks yes and Curs>r forces said waitress to pick up the shards of glass and eat them.  This is probably the only effective moment of the entire movie because I have to admit, watching a woman being forced to chew glass by a reality bending text adventure did make me wince.  

After that moment it's entirely downhill.  Instead of ramping up the stakes of the choices the game starts doing all sorts of weird shit like making the main character control a rat that's trying to eat her mother and somehow teleporting the characters to alternate fog dimensions to tease her about past traumas.  The core premise of the film isn't even that bad but the execution of the movie after the initial couple of scenes is just completely fumbled.

There's one really funny scene where the game traps a character in what I can only describe as "the lag dimension" and kills him by making him puke a never ending stream of casette film.  Base Film is soft and fairly brittle but somehow it kills him because this movie things that the inside of old casettes are made of barbed wire.  

The whole production feels like it was made by someone who has never actually engaged with anything outside of wikipedia synopsis. Like the writers know roughly what a video game is, have seen tech from the 80s in Instagram reels and maybe have a vague idea of the existance of horror movies and with this vague surface level understanding of these things attempted to make a film.  

Choose or Die is a boring movie trying to pander to middle aged men who will eat up any old bullshit if it has things from their childhood in it.  It's sad, embarassing and if you were going to make me choose between watching this film again or putting a bullet in my head, I will log out of my Netflix account and you can watch me die.

 

Silent Hill 2 Remake Isn't Very Good

 

I finally did it, I finally slogged through the Silent Hill 2 Remake and saw the ending.  I got Leave if anyone is curious.  I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on the game but overall I'm pretty negative on it.  There's a couple of things here and there that were done decently but overall it's an annoying and boring version of the original with a bunch of the sublety removed and a final act that seems to just not understand how good storytelling works at all.

First of all, I want to address the gameplay because that part of the game is at least OK.  Silent Hill 2 Remake plays basically the same as every other 3rd person over the shoulder horror game that you've ever played.  Resident Evil 4, 5, 6, remakes, The Evil Within, Silent Hill Downpour, Dead Space, all that shit.  It plays just like those and therefore there isn't really much to say, if you have played any modern horror game since 2005, you've played a game just like Silent Hill 2 Remake.  What is kind of cool about the gameplay of Silent Hill 2 Remake is the exploration and the remixed areas that James has to explore on his quest to find his dead wife.  When I bought the game for 60 quid I was worried that I was going to blast through the game in a couple hours because I'm pretty familiar with the original and can blast through it in an hour or two.  The areas of 2R have been expanded quite a bit though with new puzzles to solve or expansions on old ones.  For example the coin puzzle in Ashfield Apartments has been carried over from the original game only this time the coins have two sides that you have to contend with and solving the puzzle comes in the form of a 3 part poem with different coin arrangements for each part.  There are certain sections of the game where the expansions to these areas feel like padding such as in the prison, labryinth and one absolutely unforgivable puzzle segment in the hotel but overall the changes to the areas and exploration are decent.  Not better, not worse, just different and for a game that I'm extremely familiar with, I welcome the effort.

Another positive thing I want to touch on are the changes to the boss fights.  The bosses in original Silent Hill 2 are kind of wank.  For a town that's trying to punish James with monsters from his own pscyhe, it's not trying very fucking hard.  In the remake though, from a gameplay standpoint, I like the bossfights.  The change I liked the most is the Eddie fight in the meat locker.  In the original the AI would run at you, get stuck in a loop punching a piece of meat and then die in a couple of hits.  In the remake he's running all over the arena, shooting at you, trying to confuse you by fogging the place up.  At one point the hanging meat starts moving around and so if you're trying to gun him down then that's another thing you have to be managing while you shoot at him and avoid his revolver.  It's cool shit.  The fight with the double pyramid heads at the end of the game is also significantly more intense and while it's not difficult in any regard thanks to James having Dark Souls-eqsue i-frames when dodging, the sheer spectacle of fighting these two hulking fuckers with spears is very cool.

There is some stuff that's absolute dogwank though.  The game learned one trick very early on that was to hide its sentient pairs of legs around corners and have them ambush you and instead of just letting that be a one time or a couple-time thing, it's spamming that nonsense for the ENTIRE GAME.  Even when nightmares start intersecting with each other and James is supposed to be seeing Angela's monsters in the hotel, the remake decides to not do that and instead just fill the hotel with MORE FUCKING LEGS.  Legs and Pukey Boiz, that's all you fuckin' get for like 15 hours.  Maybe a nurse if the game is feeling generous but you fight them in the exact same way you fight the legs so what's the fucking point?

But that's all gameplay stuff.  Admittedly, the game part of the video game is alrite, solid, even if it does run like shit and crashed on me once in the hotel.  But the game isn't the real reason we're here is it? or at least it shouldn't be.  The story is what counts in Silent Hill 2, an absolutely masterfully written supernatural tragedy and how did Bloober handle it?  Well they fucked it up in nearly every single cutscene.  It was so bad that I started to dread getting to the end of segments because I knew something was going to piss me off royally as soon as the characters started flapping their gums.

There's too much to go through in a simple blog post, maybe I'll do a video on it one day, but the general gist of why it all annoys me so much is the complete removal of subtlety from the story.  Everything that was hinted at or implied through imagry or line delivery is gone and instead replaced with obvious statements made by Hollywood-ass sounding voice actors.  Angela doesn't sound weird and stilted like she's supposed to, Eddie is overly pathetic, the letter read at the end of the game from Mary sounds like a weird dollar store version of the original.  Granted, for most of the game it's only mildly annoying, stuff that me and my friend were saying "yeah it's OK but they fumbled it a little bit, I guess".  But then you watch the video tape in the hotel and everything, narratively speaking, goes to complete shit to the point where I wanted to take a plane to the Bloober offices and just punch every "writer" they have it that place right in the fucking jaw.  The game was made for them, all they had to do was copy it and yet they made all these weird changes to the sequence that aren't just different and a bit crap, but actively ruin the effect that the original was trying to produce.  

I understand that Bloober is a team of not very talented people and the fact that SH2R is as acceptable as it turned out is an christmas fucking miracle but what they did to the ending segment of the hotel is nothing short of art vandalism and I'm already sort of swerving into spoiler town enough with this post so again, another post for another day or maybe even a 14 hour video about why it sucks if I ever find the time to produce such a thing. 

Overall, Silent Hill 2 Remake is a medicore experience that teeters very close the being just flat out bad more often than not.  A few good decisions here and there but, quite frankly, it would be better if this game had never been made.

Hollowbody

 Spoiler alert, I'm going to say some rather unkind things about this game.  However, apparently, it's a game made by a single guy so before I take a big shit on it I want to at least acknowledge that the fact that this game exists at all is worthy of at least some praise.  I'm slowly trying to get into making games myself and even just learning how to make a knock-off ZX Spectrum lookin' ass game is proving to be quite the undertaking so despite Hollowbody's myriad problems, the effort to put it out is worthy of a pat on the head.

Anyway, nice things over, this game fucking sucks shit.

Hollowbody is a classic style survival horror game about a chick going into an abandoned British city in order to look for some other chick.  At time of writing it's been a little over a month since I finished Hollowbody and the plot is so forgetable that it's pretty much all I can remember of its story.  It's poorly presented and completely uninteresting and while I do remember the ending I don't want to go that far into spoiler territory for this post but it's unsatisfying and not worth it.

So if we ignore the plot, what are we left with? A sub-standard Silent Hill 2 clone with muddy graphics and shit level design.  Really it's copying the broad strokes of big titles from the entire genre but I single out Silent Hill 2 specifically because the first major area you go to is an apartment building that basically amounts to a dollar store version of the Ashfield apartments.  Each area you go to is also rife with some of the most boring and easy puzzles I have ever seen in a game of this type where any challenge that arises comes from poor signposting of key elements rather than devious challenge from the developer.  One example of this is when you need to light a trashcan fire to set off a fire alarm but the trash can asset is strewn all over the building that you're in and the existence of the fire alarm isn't obvious because it's a glowing red cube that clips into a wall.  When it's not being annoyingly obtuse in that regard the puzzles are just flat out obnoxious.  A stand out example of this type of puzzle was where you're tasked with trudging around a large graveyard examining sparsely layed out tombstones for a code.  I took one look at the puzzle, one look at the size of the area and immdiately went to the internet for the solution because Hollowbody is not worthy of me trudging through empty environments for clues.

But puzzles aren't the only thing this game has, there's also (sort of) combat.  Almost no strategy needed and no need to worry about the "survival" aspect of this survival horror game because most of the enemies you encounter can be smacked to death with a big stick and will basically put up zero effort to try and kill you thanks to the stunlocking effect of said stick.  By the time the game does start throwing some bigger baddies at you, you're so ammoed up with no risk of ever running out that you can mindlessly just blast anything blocking your way (which the enemies rarely ever do anyway, just run around em') and proceed to the end of the game unharmed and unbothered.

There is also a disgusting lack of polish that plagues the game at every turn.  Character models look weird with animations that are distractingly bad.  Voice acting is stilted in the inept way rather than the SH2 creepy way and I encountered a handful of bugs when playing.  My personal favorite of these bugs was a "puzzle" where you have to run around a sewer collecting still beating hearts to put on this fucking machine.  When you examine the machine, the character is like "there are creepy hands reaching out for something" or some shit but my game looked like this 

Insane indeed.  Here's a pic I clipped from some dudes lets play so you can see what its supposed to look like 

Hollowbody being apparently developed by one guy makes me want to be charitable towards it, if true, that's cool as fuck.  But on the flip side, you charged me 15 quid for a sub standard, derivitive and forgettable product that looks like jank and runs like shit.  So sorry not sorry, Hollowbody can fuck off forever.  One for the acid pit, don't buy it