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.

The Silent Hill 2 Remake Gets Worse

 

So without me realizing it some new Silent Hill 2 gameplay footage dropped and while I'm not usually one to watch these kinds of promotional material I just HAD to see what was going on with this absolute trainwreck of a remake.  I knew from the start that SH2R is doomed to be awful in every way but, at least from what I can glean from this trailer, it is way worse than I had ever imagined.  

First thing I have to mention is the graphics, the game LOOKS like complete shit.  Now you could argue that it's early footage or whatever but this game has been in development for a good while already and if this is where we are up to then things look pretty grim.  What's weird is that the visual design of their games is literally the only thing Bloober Team is any good at.  Layers of Fear, for example, is a gigantic piece of steaming garbage but if you go on the store page for it and take a look at some screenshots it looks pretty well put together.  Hell, I imagine a lot of their sales for that game came off the back of tricking people with talented 3D artists to get curious shoppers to buy in.  In particular within that trailer james is fighting some Lying Figures and they look AWFUL.  They sort of look like they've been pulled right from the movie but not the actual 3D model used from that film but an amateurs recreation of that model, horrendous.

Then there's the problem of the combat itself.  It's pretty much stock standard over the shoulder gameplay but there's something about it that looks really bad.  The way it looks gives me weird Homecoming vibes and the abundance of QTE gives me flashhbacks to Silent Hill Origins and that is NOT a good combo at all.  People like to piss and moan about tank controls and shit but that style of gameplay was FINE for a game like this and once you get used to them they don't really feel at that bad at all.  I don't subscribe to the "it makes James feel like he sucks at fighting" thing either, that's fucking stupid bullshit spouted by people who just suck at playing the game since Harry, James and Heather, unlike the highly trained members of S.T.A.R.S can at least have some mobility while aiming.  Not having the camera locked to the right side of James's shoulder though allows the developers to do some things with enviroment design that would probably get missed with a camera so zoomed in.  There's a lot to say for tank over the more modern system but that's another post for another day.

The final thing about the trailer, the thing that stuck out the absolute most out of all the others was some writing on a wall that read "Reap what you sow"

Silent Hill 2 was never this kind of game, never this brand of horror.  It was slow burn, atmospheric, oppressive before lurching into some really scary stuff for a short time and then pulling you back into weird spooky serenity.  Think the part in the hospital, its a great example.  Calm and creepy up till the the bit where Laura locks you in a room with those weird things from the ceiling, then opressive as all fuck and THEN holy shit triangle man is chasing you down a hall and it all ends with James in the hospital defeated, sad and alone while some calm music plays.  I get that this trailer is just supposed to be a short compilation of "the scary bits" but look at Bloobers other games and tell me that you think that they are going to be able to pull off what original Silent Hill 2 was doing.  Of course they fucking aren't, the whole game is going to be always like that all of the time.  Silent Hill 2 via Dead Space and "Reap what you sow" written on a wall in bright text is a perfect signpost as to just how little anyone working on this remake understand what the original was about or trying to do.

Remakes can, in general, suck my ass as in most cases they are a shitty way for some execs to use nostalgia as a method of getting a bigger bonus for the year. But this remake, which is doing that but made by people who clearly lack a lot of talent and probably don't even care about the source material can extra suck my ass through a straw after I have consumed a large amount of spicy food

Fuck SH2R

2022 Horror Challenge Roundup

 

On October 1st 2022 I started a challenge that involved playing though 31 horror games within a month (outlined in this post http://identitygaming.blogspot.com/2022/09/31-game-horror-challenge-2022.html) and on October 30th 2022 I completed that challenge!  It was a stressful month, for sure, but it was an immensely fun challenge and I'm totally planning to do it all again next October.  For now I wanted to just go over a few of the games from the challenge that I thought stood out, so think of this post as a sort of "Halloween spooky game award post" 

Best Game

I did a horror game challenge about 2 years ago and failed it miserably because I'm an idiot that put some IMMENSELY long (and shitty, Days Gone) games and Yuppie Psycho was one of the ones I didn't get to back then, so better late than never I guess.  It's a game that's truly best experienced by knowing as little as possible about it but, let's be honest, is there anything more frightening that office work?  Pepper in a unique setting and some occult-type beats and you have a rather unique experience that is as charming as it is scary. 

That's all you're getting for this one, go play it

Worst Game

Dread X Collection is a collection of short horror games made by various developers that I played off stream and was deeply disappointed by.  Dread X Collection 2 I played on stream and it was probably one of the most miserable experiences I've had with a horror title in a very long time.  The ideas behind the games are bad, the games themselves are bad and there's this sort of air of smugness about the whole thing that makes it pretty unbearable to play.  It's a level of incompetancy that is rarely found anywhere within game development and I feel that most of the people involved should probably fuck off to some other medium.  Most of the games in this collection are barely playing, boring, try-hard messes that despite having an extremely short length feel like they drag on and on just because of how vile they are.

There are 2 exceptions to this though.  One game was called Squirrel Stapler which was really daft but sort of fun to play.  The other was called Sucker for Love which is a sort of joke dating-sim where you have to try and woo an Eldritch God which was pretty funny and also came with some decently creepy concepts and imagery.  However play Sucker for Love with the voices OFF because the voice acting was extremely cringe worthy.  

I own 3 or 4 more Dread X games since I got a bunch of them as a set and after playing these two I have 0 motivation to continue the Action52 of horror games.  

Biggest Surprise

After seeing the AVGN review and being told about it by various people I was expecting something truly awful, something akin to the level of quality of Dread X Collection 2.  However Countdown Vampires is a game that's actually pretty fun to play, at least on stream with a group of people to banter with and revel in its insanity.  It's just a shoddy clone of Resident Evil that has basically no vampires and like, 4 countdowns in it but there's something sort of endering about the whole thing.  The 3D FMV sequences are non-sensical but weirdly well produced and a decent amount of effort went into the pre-rendered backgrounds even if the actual render quality is sort of shoddy.  Also the game is really, REALLY funny between absolute batshit character design and voice acting that makes Resident Evil 1 sound like Shakespear; the whole thing, while not good, was highly entertaining and I'd happily play it again 

Scariest Game

I know that saying Silent Hill 2 is scary is like saying that the sky is blue, just obvious bullshit thus making this pick seem like a complete cop-out but the one "mistake" I made this year was that most of the games I picked almost completely failed on their horror fronts.  F.E.A.R gets a close second for, while not being scary in the slightest, at least TRYING to get an ambience down and Alien Isolation gets props for making me make silly noises when I messed up but I wasn't actually scared by any of the games this year except for maybe this one. Even then its more fear of a concept of my wife getting sick and dying before my eyes than it is of the actual game but it scared me pretty badly in my teenage years so it gets the scariest game spot for being creepy on multiple levels at least. 

Least Scary Game

I didn't know anything about Geist when I put it on the list.  I mean, it's called "Ghost" but in German so I was expecting something at least a little spooky but what I got was a sort of ghost-themed action game/puzzle game?  Not that I'm going to bash it too hard, it was fun to play and the ghost-based puzzles were equal parts interesting and funny but there was a bit too much just shooting dudes with guns in first person for me to really consider it a proper horror game.  Still, I feel like a lot of people haven't tried this one so if you get a chance, give it a go. 

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So that's it for this year!  There will be other horror games peppered into the stream here and there throughout the year, of course, but we wont be going full spooky again until next October.  Keep me informed of any cool horror games you find via Discord or twitch chat and maybe they'll get put on the list! 

 

Why Silent Hill 2 Is So Damn Good

If you've not at least heard of Silent Hill 2 at this point in time you're either VERY new to gaming or have been living under a nuclear blast proofed rock for many many years.  When people say the words "horror game", at lot of people instantly bring to mind either Resident Evil or Silent Hill and if it's the latter they usually are thinking about the second one.  While my personal favorite Silent Hill is 3 because I really like the occult story line in that game, there's absolutely no denying the impact of SH2 on not just it's own series but the horror genre in general.

The reason that I feel it's so effective at what it does is that no matter what age you are, there is a level of horror to be found in Silent Hill 2 that will freak you out.  I remember when I first played it, I don't remember my exact age but it was around high school time I think.  My parents, every evening after work, would unwind and relax before making dinner and doing housework by chilling on the couch with a glass of wine and a bowl of nuts.  Meanwhile, I'd be on the PC or something gaming away or just generally wasting time.  Most of the time they would be watching TV but there was one occasion where the TV was vacant so I decided to jump on and the game I set on that evening was Silent Hill 2.  It was daylight outside, my family behind me and yet just the opening section of that game freaked me the fuck out.  It didn't need a dark, isolated room and a pair of headphones, it managed to scare me regardless of all that.  The spooky atmosphere and the creepy monsters managed to freak me out in a way that a lot of games didn't back then and even don't now.

Now when I was younger, scary monsters and things like slasher movies had quite an effect on me.  I was a bit easy to scare back then but as I got older that stopped happening.  The idea of a zombie apocalypse stopped being a terrible prospect, monsters jumping out of my closet became a laughable idea and ghosts flopping from my TV lost it's charm.  Admittedly, I'm very hard to please when it comes to horror.  I can enjoy a horror game or horror movie but it's a VERY rare occasion when I'll actually be scared.

But then I replayed Silent Hill 2 in my adult years and was JUST as freaked out now as I was back then.  What makes Silent Hill 2 isn't the fact that it managed to keep scaring me despite the fact I'd seen it before AND it pierced my adult cynicism but the fact it scared me for an entirely different reason.  Silent Hill 2 is about the main characters wife getting sick and dying, the plot twist (spoilers) being that he killed his wife because she was going to die anyway but mainly because he couldn't handle it anymore.  When I was younger this was just a "wow, how horrible" moment and then I went back to being scared of tables with tumors on them but playing it now it was THIS part that shook me to my very core.

I grew up and got married and one of the things that worries me to no end is the idea that one day I'll lose my wife.  When you play Silent Hill 2 and you see what James went through in that game your brain starts asking you questions that you don't have the answer for.  "What would you do if YOUR wife became terminally ill?", "would YOU be able to handle it?" and worst of all "is there a chance YOU might do what he did?!".  Of course you'd hope that you'd assume you'd be a good person and care for the one you love but Silent Hill shows you that very real, very human weakness that maybe you just aren't as strong as you think you are.

It's multi-faceted horror like this that makes Silent Hill as good as it is.  Doesn't matter if you're a teen scared of monsters or an adult scared of loss or even a lack of knowledge about yourself.  It's something I've not seen in a game EVER since Silent Hill 2.  I've seen games try, but never do it this masterfully. 

If you've never played it you ABSOLUTELY must.  Go do it right now

What Happened To Silent Hill?

If you were following the stream schedule you may have noticed that April was supposed to be the month where I was doing Silent Hill 2 "speed" runs.  If you were following the stream then you may have been disappointed because not a lot of Silent Hill 2 actually happened in the end.

Well there was a number of reasons for this.  First, I'm playing on original hardware and my knowledge of doing this is basically zero so setting it up again after months of not doing it turned out to be a lot harder than I expected.  Plus April was a pretty crazy month with Hanami (drinking in a park while looking at Sakura trees), work stress just generally tiring me out and an old friend coming to visit which has been the focus of my last few weekends. 

However these are just excuses and I feel bad about not delivering on a decent amount of SH2 attempts so instead of boring you with details, I'll just make up for it.  May was supposed to be a month of Ys1 however I know not many people know what the game is and a lot of people kind of don't like watching it.  I'm not going to cancel Ys month on the stream but I will be trying to alternate between a Ys run and an SH2 run each evening to make up for the lack of SH2 in April.

The remainder of April will be spent hammering out Final Fantasy 9 because I've been playing that shit for ages and I'm only on Disc 3.  So the next few days will be focused on that and then it'll be back to nightly runs!

Of course, I won't be able to stream every day of the month but I'll try my very best to cram in as much as I possibly can.  If I'm not streaming and you want to know why, Twitter is a good place to find out how I'm wasting my time doing things that are not streaming, so follow there for updates (@Taurinensis)

Thanks for the understanding and continued support!

Silent Hill 2

Silent Hill 2 is a game that I love so damn much that I'm about to start speed running it.  It's part of the much loved Silent Hill series which was at one point a wonderful collection of genuinely terrifying and wonderfully well written survival horror games.  However, like Resident Evil and the survival horror genre in general, Silent Hill has become complete shit being developed by people who have no clue about what it is about and seem to be allergic to good game design. 

Just like how Resident Evil 4 turned the series from tense survival horror into big loud not scary action, Silent Hill 2 is the reason that the series went from well thought out demonic cult story to series of twats facing inner demons.  Unlike Resident Evil though, Silent Hill 2 was an interesting take on the story from the original team which was then completely ruined by outside influences while Resident Evil just got turned to shit because Capcom thought the fan base was full of thickos.

The story of Silent Hill 2 involves James Sunderland who travels to Silent Hill after getting a letter from his dead wife.  There he has to travel through the town in an attempt to find her all while being confronted by horrible manifestations of his inner self, a power that the town itself gained after Silent Hill 1 happened.  Not only that but he has to deal with a small handful of other twats with their own inner demons that are getting in the way with their shit when all James wants is to just find his dead wife and be happy again.

Silent Hill 1,3 and 4 on the other hand tell the stories of characters dealing with a demonic cult run by some really evil twats that want to birth their horrible "God" into the world.  The town of Silent Hill is still running rampant with manifestations but they aren't the manifestations of the main character but usually someone else and that to me is just what makes these games a little bit scarier.  You aren't dealing with your fucked up brain, your dealing with another persons fucked up brain and they've all been tied up in demonic cult shit so they're way more fucked up than you could ever be.

But then the series ended with Silent Hill 4 and a bunch of westerners decided to give it a go in order to keep it alive.  The most popular game in the franchise was quite clearly Silent Hill 2 so because these people couldn't be fucked to actually learn the ins and outs of the incredibly well crafted plot, they just played that one entry and used it as a template for EVERY OTHER GAME TO FOLLOW.

So that leaves us where we are now, in a horrible situation where there are now more terrible Silent Hill games than good ones.  Games that miss the point of the original series or just flat out get things wrong for the sake of making twats who misunderstood the first 4 games feel good about themselves.  All of these games have that theme of "person facing their inner demons in Silent Hill" and quite frankly I'm sick of it.  This series was never about that, it was about demonic cults and everything came to a nice dramatic close in Silent Hill 3, there didn't need to be more fucking games.

What people are making now aren't psychological survival horror games but action games about psychology and that's just fucking sad.  Genuine terror has been replaced with laugh out loud retardation, jump scares and people ripping off Saw.  The writing has gone from pure excellence with some of the best continuity in any work of fiction I've ever seen to non nonsensical bullshit where the games themes are slammed across your face like a wrecking ball made of adamantium spikes.

Sadly, it's all Silent Hill 2s fucking fault.  If that game wasn't so fucking good then twats wouldn't have tried to copy it in order to make a quick buck.  It's tragic too because Silent Hill 2 is genuinely a really good game that everyone interested in games, especially the ones looking for good examples of "games as art" should play.  Luckily, no matter how hard twats who aren't Team Silent try, they can never ruin the quality of the original games so just do what I do, stick your fingers in your ears, bury your head in a rusty room and pretend like the new ones don't exist.

My Top 3 Genres

I've been having a pretty shitty week so I'm just going to take a minute to gush about some genres that I really like because maybe posting something overly positive on here will help cheer me up a bit.  I'm sure I'll have something to rage about soon but for now I'm just going to gush.

1. Rhythm Games

One of the best things about living in Japan is the fact I'm surrounded on almost all sides in an arcade by the latest rhythm games.  I fucking love these things and I got my start playing them when I was pretty young and my local bowling alley in the UK got a DDR Euromix machine in.  These games were challenging, fun had sick music and back when I first got hooked the ability to draw a crowd. 

I lost interest a little bit during the peak of things like Guitar Hero and Rock Band because I didn't really like those games and getting hold of the ones I did like such as IIDX required importing shit from Japan and getting special controllers but once I moved here my interest came back HARD.  Admittedly I'm a sucker for shitty J-Pop sometimes and these games feature the catchiest shit J-Pop you've ever heard,  it's like a fucking dream.

The selection for these games out here is also insane, with new games popping up all the damn time and classic ones constantly getting updates.  Personal favorites include Jubeat, Sound Voltex, Chunithm and DDR but I'm always willing to try one of the weirder looking ones like MaiMai if I have some extra during my trip to the game center.

2. RPGs

Pretty much the genre that cemented my interest in gaming back in the Sega Saturn days I fucking love a good RPG.  I tend to not give a shit about all these differentiations like jRPG and wRPG that we make now a days because back when I was playing these things we just called 'em RPGs.  Didn't matter if it was Baldur's Gate or Final Fantasy, that shit was just an RPG.

I like these games for 2 main reasons.  One is the story because if an RPG has a really good plot behind it then it can be almost impossible to put down.  Granted, that a lot of the time finding an RPG with an actual well written story can be kind of hard but when you do it's pretty incredible.  However an RPG for me, especially a jRPG can be just as enjoyable if it has a cool combat system and lots of stuff going on in order to progress your characters.  I love the process of min/maxing characters in order to overcome a secret super boss or whatever, it just feels good to have to know a game that intimately in order to succeed. 

Some of my favorites for this one include Panzer Dragoon Saga, Shadow Hearts and more recently The Banner Saga.  It's a shame that the genre is so overcrowded now with all this moe shit in Japan but they are still pretty fun from a game play stand point.

3. The Horror Game

 

I'm a big fan of horror anything really, but horror games especially are my favorite way to experience the genre.  It's hard to make some general comments about what makes the genre as a whole so great because that kind of varies from series and series and game to game.  The reason why Silent Hill is so damn good is different to the reason why Project Zero is so good. 

Granted, the genre does have a lot of shit in it like that weird The Ring game on Dreamcast and that X Files game on PS2 that I currently forget the name of but the good horror games really are fucking awesome.  There's nothing quite like playing Silent Hill 2 for the first time or the rush of encountering your first ghost with the camera in Project Zero.

While the AAA horror game has kind of died it's luckily being kept alive by a good number of indie developers.  Things like the first Amnesia game, Penumbra, Into the Gloom and Lone Survivor show that there still are a number of game developers out there who know how to produce a good scare every so often and while it's niche as fuck the fan base for the horror genre is pretty dedicated. 

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So there you have it folks, my top 3 genres.  It's cool if you don't give a fuck but writing some positive stuff about some games that I love really helped cheer me up so I'll be back to my usual rage pretty soon. 

New Prizes!

 OK I have some some SICK new prizes available for you to donate for provide by my good buddy.  Both prizes are hand painted pictures of awesome video game shit.  The first is the painting you see in the heading image.  In case anyone isn't familiar with what they are they are looking at, it's the Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2.

This painting is awesome so there's a minimum donation of £5 but I feel that's a small price to pay for the quality of this piece of art.

The next prize is this cool Final Fantasy 7 picture

As cool as it is, it's not quite Pyramid Head levels of awesome and the artist agrees that it's not quite on the same level so this one has no minimum donation..

So, all the prizes and how to be eligible to win them are displayed on the blogs prizes page!

http://www.identitygaming.blogspot.jp/p/prize-raffles.html

Just donate to the Alzheimer's Society with the comment "prize 1" for the Pyramid Head and "Prize 2" for the Final Fantasy 7 painting!

Here's the link for the donations if you need it, but it's always on the right hand side

https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/identitygaming2

Good luck!

"Games Are Art"? Piss Off!

There seems to be this big ongoing debate between gamers that games are art or whatever and before I explain my reasoning behind wanting this debate to just fuck off forever, let me at least acknowledge that they have a point.

Gaming as a medium is quite artistic, you can't really debate that.  You have 4 different mediums coming together in the form of writing, music, artwork and then interactivity on top of all that.  Slamming all that together to make a game is no easy task so to say games aren't artistic at all would be a bit silly.

But should games be considered art?  Well fucking no because art is fucking terrible.  I'm aware that made me sound like some kind of uncultured swine but hear me out.

One thing you may have thought when you first opened this page is "why did he put a blue (it looks purple thanks to blogger, whatever) rectangle at the top of this post?"  Well that's no ordinary blue rectangle, that's fucking ART!  I'm not even joking, that this is a piece by a bloke called Yves Klein and is titled "Blue". 

I took a page from his book and made my very own piece of artwork

I call this one Red, I'll be sure to get it hung the Tate Modern Art Gallery soon, I'll be expecting millions in my back account within the next few months.

Sarcasm aside, art is a load of toss surrounded by complete tossers.  I'm aware not all art is like this, there are some very skilled people out there doing very skilled work, but they are buried under the droves of tossers making crap and somehow getting large amounts of recognition for it.

So no, games shouldn't be considered art because art is a load of fucking bollocks.  I saw a video of a woman at some kind of art event rubbing shit all over herself in front of a large group of tossers and she was APPLAUDED FOR IT!  Games do not belong in the same category as this so called fucking "art".  If I ever find that video again I'll update this post.

The games that people want to call art, like Ico, Silent Hill 2, Dark Souls and all that stuff aren't trying to be art, they are trying to be games.  However, they use their given medium extremely well and as a result produce something that could be seen as artistic, I get that.

But do you want to know what happens when you TRY to make art within the medium of video games?

Yeah, this pile of stupid bullshit happens.  Badly written stupid bullshit made to pander to a certain section of brain dead pricks who think they are being either "progressive" or "deep". 

What's funny about Gone Home is that 100% of the people I've encountered who said Gone Home was a good game are tossers......so maybe it does have a place in the world of art.

Make GAMES, not ART!  When you make a GOOD fucking game, the artistry that went into making that game will shine through.   If you try to make art instead of games, you end up with shit like Gone Home and Dinner Date........so yeah, Art can go fuck itself.

Game Devs Should Stop Making Movies

This was a post I was supposed to make ages ago, but I guess I got distracted by various other bullshit.  Anyway, before we begin, watch this video.

This video basically sums up everything wrong with big name game development.  All your stuff like this, Uncharted, The Last of Us and many others, while not being bad games by any stretch (although Ryse looks shite) are spending far too much time trying to be movies and not enough time trying to be games.

There's a bit in that video where the guys talking about how the development team are trying to increase the story and characterisation compared to movies.  This, my friends, is fucking WRONG.  Games are not movies and trying to better stories by making them more movie-esque does not solve the problem.

You see, game story is at it's absolute best when the game play compliments the story, and I'll give you two examples.

Silent Hill 2 is the sort of game that puts the story before it's gameplay, but it still succeeds as a game because the game play of Silent Hill 2 compliments that story.  The controls, the combat, the fog along with everything else compliment the story of James Sunderland looking for his dead wife.  Those emotions of fear that you feel as you wander through the town aren't felt because the game is forcing it down you with huge set pieces, it's because you are immersed in the game itself and the overall game feel is impacting how you feel.  What I mean by this is that you're not scared of Pyramid Head because James is like "OH MY GOD LOOK AT THE BIG SCARY MONSTER!!", you're scared by it because it's this big lumbering strangely shaped thing carrying a big knife that is A) Visually intimidating and B) Comes with the prospect of you having to reload a save.

Compare that with Silent Hill downpours mine cart sequence where it's a load of big flasy lights and effects on rails basically screaming at you "BE SCARED NOW! GO ON! DO IT!"

The other example I've got for you is Shadow of the Colossus

Shadow of the Colossus is the other example of a successful video game with a good story because in this games case, the story IS the game play.  You are basically plonked into a world that tells you that if you wanna revive the girl, go kill a load of giants.  You then experience the story visually as you kill each boss, explore the lands and watch the main character get increasingly beat up as he progresses and not once does it feel like you're playing a movie. All the emotions you feel as part of SotC's storyline are felt because they are happening directly to you.  Fear, victory, sadness, excitement are all felt as part of this game because they are what YOU feel as you confront an enemy and figure out and effective way to get to his weak spot.  The excitement you feel for that final boss and ending is something that YOU feel because you have come to the end of a long and arduous task that YOU have completed, not because a cut scene hypes the fight for you.

Ryse and a lot of AAA games on the other hand just lead you by the nose, the emotions are felt by the characters in the story and not by the player at all.  The player in games like Uncharted aren't being engaged by game play or game feel, they are just there for the ride, just to watch, like a movie!

Nothing inherently wrong about these kind of games but I feel like developers aren't using the medium to its fullest potential and are settling for a lazy way out by just trying to imitate the movie industry rather than pushing the bar and trying to deliver on deeper interactivity that compliments their story lines.

Ryse is doing it completely wrong by not only trying to be a movie, but basically removing game play by filling itself with QTE and massive set pieces that you have no real control of.

Bottom line, make GAMES! not movies.

Bullshit #9: The Silent Hill HD Collection

Today we have something SO extremely bullshit, that it's caused free game Friday to be cancelled, so if you were expecting a free game this week, go tell Konami about it!

Now I've talked about some shit on this blog, but this takes the 2012 award for most bullshit thing to happen all year.  Now before we get into it, the bullshit about this game comes on 3 levels.  The first level of bullshit is the "this sucks now but it may be sorted one day" bullshit.  The second level is the "I can't believe you fucking did that" bullshit.  The most bullshit level of bullshit is the "I want to stab you in the brain with an icepick" level of bullshit, so let's address each one, one at a time.

So bullshit level 1 (a.k.a. Sucks now but it may be sorted level), is the number of technical bugs that are involved in this game.  The game glitches, freezes, slows down and stuff bugs out all over the place.  The sound doesn't work properly, when you fire guns, the sound just glitches all over the place and the the shell casings play twice or even 8 or 9 times in quick succession.  Even worse than that is  the fog, oh god is it FUCKING AWFUL.

There is a picture that was shown to Masahiro Ito (the art guy) before the game came out, and it still looked like that after release, you can see the goddamn floating bit of rope because they were using fog to make up for any limitations like that.  A google search or a youtube search can get you all the other weird fog glitches, and the fucking fog was one of the most important parts of the games look and feel, if you can't get that right WHY IN THE FUCK would you even bother to release.  That's not even all the problems as well, I've not even mentioned the mixed up eye texture (google that one to have your mind blown on just how bad this remake job was)

But you know what? These problems are all technical and can be sorted with patches.  In fact, there was a patch that helped with a few of these problems, but I think there are still a shitton of issues.  So even if you set aside the game not working properly, lets move on to the deeper layers of bullshit.

So level 2 (a.k.a. I can't believe you fucking did that) is the changes to the voice acting and general design of the game.

The changes to the design of the town are pretty bad.  One thing that really helped the atmosphere of the game was just how dirty everything looked, even when you weren't in a nightmare, but for some reason, probably for the purpose of making it all "HD" and shit, it just looks boring and uninteresting.  But apart from the art being changed, the voices were changed and THIS is the biggest offender.  It's not that the voice acting is bad on its own, they gave solid performances, but when you put those performances into a Silent Hill game, they are fucking muffgabage.  Team Silent carefully picked its team of actors to give the characters a certain feel, and the new performances just shat all over that.  Finally, the way they up scaled the scenes is fucking stupid.  They put these weird borders on everything, most notably the scene in the hotel where you watch the tape of Jame's wife, where they put this really stupid fucking TV border round the whole thing and it crops out half the fucking video.  Whoever decided that is a wanker and I want to beat him with a bag of frozen bread until he gets a concussion.

The final level of bullshit (a.k.a Stab you in the brain with an icepick) comes entirely from this man.

This is Tomm Hulett, he works for Konami as what I think is the guy in charge of Silent Hill nowadays, and is the grand master of missing the point.  I don't like this man, he is a stain on the gaming industry and his bravado is offensive to basically anyone who has to listen to it.  He claims that nobody loves Silent Hill as much as he does, and has said other things like the gameplay in the old games being shit, or the voice acting being bad etc.

Basically, his very existence in Konami is a giant middle finger to the original Team Silent.  This man remade Silent Hill 2 and 3, not because he wanted to bring these great games to a new age, but because he thought he could "improve" them and get rich and famous off the back of someone else's  work.  The funny thing is, the "improvements" this scumbag made to these games has just enraged fans and to be quite honest, the fact he felt like he needed to make improvements at all is really offensive to the original Japanese team and the only real way for him to apologise for this "remake" is to get on his knees and cut his own stomach open.

Fuck this remake
Fuck Tomm Hulett (Book of Origins looks shit too by the way)
and fuck everything that western developers like him have done to this series

God. Damnit.

Note
I'm linking to a really good channel on youtube called TwinPerfect.  These 3 guys did a series on Silent Hill called The Real Silent Hill Experience, and I recommend that you watch it, if you're a fan or even just to learn about what you're missing out on.
http://www.youtube.com/user/TwinPerfectChannel