Norman Reedus X Hideo Kojima

So a while ago, Kojima of Metal Gear fame was set to work on a new Silent Hill title with Guillermo Del Toro.  The game was also to feature actor from Walking Dead fame Norman Reedus and thanks to a demo released on PS4 known as P.T. the game was getting quite a lot of attention.  However, Kojima was given the boot from Konami and the project was quickly shut down which was quite good news from my perspective because as a Silent Hill title things were looking a bit grim.

http://identitygaming.blogspot.jp/2015/04/silent-hills-apparently-cancelled-and.html

You can read about why I was happy about the canning of Silent Hill there.  It looked decent enough as its own it was gearing up to be yet another weak entry in the now butchered Silent Hill franchise.  However one thing I did say in that post is that if that team was to get back together in the future to work on the project under a different title, then maybe I'd be a little more interested.

This is what some other websites as well as some of my personal friends have been saying, that the idea of Kojima and Reedus having talks points to the idea that maybe this stuff is happening again and that we should have some reason to be excited.  I mean, this one tween about a reunion with Reedus doesn't really mean anything on its own but even if it does point to that is it really worth getting that excited?

Survival Horror is a dead genre, games like that just aren't made anymore (unless you count the yet unreleased "Back in 1995", look it up) and modern horror games are a fucking shit show.  Horror has been reduced to either bombastic over the shoulder 3rd person games that feel more action than horror or first person stealth games that have a "scary" monster instead of some kind of facility guard.  There are certain quality titles in the genre but none of them even come CLOSE to having the same amount of horror impact as the classic survival horror titles of yesteryear.

IF it turns out this project is back on its feet, hype is the exact feeling we should not have.  No one has any reason to be overly excited about anything because they are making a horror game and that would be excited about watching someone take a shit.  That said, Hideo Kojima is a talented man who makes good games and Reedus is pretty popular for his work on the Walking Dead TV show.  What a re announcement of this title under an original IP is a glimmer of hope.  Maybe, just maybe we can have a horror game that doesn't play like shit and maybe has a semi-decent story behind it too.  Maybe we can have a horror game that ACTUALLY inflicts some scares on the player rather than just the BOO JUMPSCARE shit of today's horror titles.  Maybe Kojima will have the sense to hire some enemy designers who know how to do more than just dudes with cut faces or silly looking piles of meat.

There are a ton of reasons to look at a Kojima developed horror game and think that the genre might have a chance at a comeback.  It's doubtful but we can dream.  Hope not hype.

Silent Hills Apparently Cancelled and I'm Kind of Happy

Apparently it's all over and Silent Hills is a dead project.  A quick google search tells stories about Del Toro saying "It ain't gonna happen" and Norman Reedus confirming the canning of the project over at Konami.  This all comes along side news of Hideo Kojima, the big name behind the project, leaving Konami after the completion of Metal Gear Solid 5.  A lot of people are upset by this news but me, I'm kind of happy.

Now don't get me wrong and start raging, Silent Hills looked OK and had a lot of talent behind it and I'd be overjoyed to get a modern Silent Hill game that doesn't suck complete ass.  Hell, the first 3 Silent Hill games are some of my all time favourites but as a fan of the series I can't help but feel that the axing of this project is probably for the best.

There was a lot wrong with Silent Hills up to this point.  P.T, while very effective as it's own horror thing wasn't very "Silent Hill".  The second trailer that got released for Silent Hills which involved a person running away from monsters in what looked like a school made my heart sink pretty hard.  The whole thing looked something out of a haunted house and it looked like all the subtlety of the previous games had been removed for big set piece monsters chasing you through corridors.  If it was it's own IP then it's the kind of thing I would have been keeping an eye on but as soon as you attach "Silent Hill" to something like that I start to lose interest. 

The problem is though, Konami have come out and said that they will still be developing the Silent Hill series and this upsets me greatly.  Silent Hill is OVER and it's been over since 2003 (or 2004 depending on how you see it).  There is absolutely no need to develop any more fucking Silent Hill games, just let it die.  We are now at a sad point where there are more terrible Silent Hill games than good ones developed by people who don't have a fucking clue about anything.

Silent Hills was a little different because even if Kojima and Del Toro didn't have a fucking clue about the storyline at least it probably would have been a good game.  The problem is that the story is one of the most important aspects of Silent Hill and even if you make a decent game under the name, getting the story wrong just ruins everything.  If news comes out in the next few months that Kojima is carrying on the project with Del Toro under a different name my interest may spark.  "Inspired" by Silent Hill is great but being a part of that series sets you up for so much failure.

People should just let Silent Hill die and focus on bringing forward the next big horror IP.  We have all this awesome technology and graphical power now, I'm sure someone somewhere can make something that's just as chilling as SH1 was when that first came out.  A new IP would mean I'm not looking at it through the SH lens and nitpicking every single aspect of the story, presentation, game play, characters etc.

Lord knows gaming needs a good new horror game but Silent Hills was not it and I can't help but feel the series is better off without it.  Good luck to Kojima after he leaves Konami and I am kind of hoping the project gets restored under a new, original IP and it's just as scary an engaging as Silent Hill used to be. 

Horror Game Advertising Sucks

If there's one thing that's pissed me off for quite a while now it's the way horror games are advertised to the public.  They have zero subtlety and everything is made far too obvious from the trailers. 

Let's take a look at an old piece of promotional material for the original Silent Hill

and let's compare this to

See the difference?  Silent Hill has a pretty decent trailer with it posing a question and then showing you a few scenes from the game to give you an idea of it's cast an atmosphere.  The majority of the games content is left a mystery and the little bits of horror that they do show you.

Silent Hills on the other hand has a pretty bad trailer that's all about the special effects and wowing you with next gen graphics rather than making anything remotely scary.  Apart from the fact that it's all pre-rendered, which pisses me off on it's own, the whole thing is more like carnival horror house rather than cutting edge psychological horror game.  No real build up or any mystery, just a big twitchy spazbeast chasing the character down and then some weird shit with a door and a dark stairway.  Don't even bother mentioning the man throwing up centipedes or whatever because that shit was laughably dumb.

Going from that trailer into Silent Hill is like going on a horror adventure filled with mystery while the Hills trailer is like a big advert for Kojima's Spook House.  However, a bad pre-rendered trailer, while annoying isn't the end of the world and it won't sour my opinion of a game before I even get a chance to play it.  It's those stupid fucking reaction videos that do that for me.

This kind of promo material is the fucking worst.  It's like someone saying "HEY GUYS! HERE'S HOW YOUR SUPPOSED TO FEEL WHILE PLAYING OUR SUPER SCARY GAME!".  These kinds of videos falsely put forward the idea of a game being scary, so that when other people play it they already have that idea in their heads.  The game isn't scary, they've been fooled into thinking it's scary beforehand by idiots screaming in front of a camera.  Outlast is actually a really good example because it's one of the least frightening "horror" games I've ever played yet there are people who think it is scary because they've had that idea forced into their head by stupid bits of promotional material like this.

Horror games are supposed to be about mystery and atmosphere and I think whoever the people are in charge of making trailers and promo material for horror games really need to get a clue and learn how to make a good trailer again.

My Thoughts on Tokyo Game Show 2014

This post is a little overdue since I had to travel across half the country, start a new job and because of the national holiday I was quite drunk and my time for making blog posts was a little low.  However things have sort of normalised now and I can finally talk about TGS.

Just before I get into it, I wanted to have a lot more pictures but I stupidly left my camera in my buddies apartment, so when I get it back I'll upload all the TGS stuff as a gallery post.  Also I'm not going to talk about the games so much as I'm going to describe my experience with the event, I'll do the games on an individual basis later.

I've never really been to any big organized gaming events like this before so TGS was pretty crazy.  It's hosted in a big hall in Tokyo called Makuhari Messe and despite being fucking massive the crowds are so big that it's hard to navigate ones way round all the booths.  Games are also not the only thing on display here with there being another massive cosplay section going on somewhere a short distance from the main floors but still part of the show.  I got some really cool pictures of a few of the people so look forward to seeing that shit when I get my camera back.

If I was to try and sum up my TGS experience in one word it would be "unprepared".  I sorely underestimated the crowds and as a result it was almost impossible to get a hands on with anything.  There was an indie booth where I managed to play a couple of really interesting games but all the big titles like Bloodborne were not only rammed out but I think you needed advance tickets or something.

I was actually really looking forward to seeing all the stuff for The Evil Within but when we arrived at the booth the wait was over an hour long so we just said "fuck it" and moved on.  There were also a number of things happening with developers going on stage and talking about their games but because of my lack of preparation we missed most of them.  We did get to see the demo Resident Evil Revelations 2 being played and we caught the Silent Hills stuff about half way through but that shit was so hard to hear we just gave up on it in the end.

Despite that, TGS was fucking amazing and I'm probably going to go again next year but next time I'll ready myself appropriately so I don't have to make shitty nothing posts like this in the future.  Like I said, my thoughts on individual titles will come later because if I did that here it would take me all evening to type out so watch this space and the pictures should be uploaded around Saturday.

The Positives of PT

If you have me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter you might have noticed that I've been raging about PT (Playable Teaser) for the last few days.  Rightly fucking so too because while PT wasn't terrible it just wasn't Silent Hill.  As a stand alone horror game it was fairly effective but since they slapped Silent Hill on the title then it has to be held to a certain standard which I think right now it doesn't meet.

But maybe I should lower the rage gauge for a few moments and have a bit more of an optimistic outlook on this.  First of all, despite all of the failings of PT it's so much better than basically any Silent Hill game shat out by Konami and the Tomm Hulett retard squad in recent years.  I'd be pretty pissed off if I was Tomm because he spent so many years making failed SH game after failed SH game and now Kojima rolls up and makes a DEMO that everyone is saying is the next best thing.  At the very least PT exposed just how much of a talentless shithead Tomm was.  Good riddance.

Now I raged a little bit about Kojima and how he doesn't get Silent Hill or whatever but if you just back up a moment, it's fucking Kojima!  This man is one of the industry greats who's created some of the best games fucking EVER.  If you just ignore "Silent Hills" for a minute and realise that Kojima is behind this damn thing, at least we are guaranteed something that plays well and looks really good.  Even doing just that will be a damn sight better than everything else we've had up to now.

It's pretty clear to see that Kojima does care about the project too.  If there's one thing Kojima is good at it's emotion and detail which is EXACTLY what Silent Hill needs to be effective.  Kojima is also very much aware of his own weaknesses which is probably why he's teamed up with del Toro who's an extremely talented guy and will be easily able to cook up something pretty effective at the very least.

I've also heard a rumor that Kojima is trying to get members of Team Silent on board or at the very least asking them for advice.  If this is true and the original Team Silent are involved or at least helping Kojima with the project then maybe there is a little bit of room for some excitement.

I desperately want all my rage and anger to be horribly misplaced.  I WANT Kojima to give me a big fat slap in the face, the middle finger and show me just how awesome he can make a Silent Hill game.  PT and all the dicksucking on twitter that went with it had me extremely concerned and upset but I'm going to ignore the idiots and put some faith in the talent behind the project. 

I guess I'm very nervously boarding the hype train.

Silent Hills Anti Hype

I'm not going to lie, after Book of Memories I was kind of hoping we'd never see another Silent Hill game and the series wouldn't have to be ruined by any more brutally bad games.  Alas, that is not the case as Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro have stepped up to the plate to bring us yet another game but guess what.....it looks fucking awful.

I can understand why people WOULD be hyped for this game because on paper the idea sounds awesome.  One of the best game developers in the industry teaming up with a highly talented movie director to bring us a new horror game for the next generation; sounds awesome right?

Well no, first of all there's the problem of the trailer.

Nothing happens in this fucking trailer.  A man who looks like Murphy Pendleton's fucking brother walks down the street, spots a speck of blood and a flickering street lamp and then it's a bunch of fucking logos about the Fox engine and all that stuff.

Now there is another video that I can't be arsed to find but if you type "Silent Hills Playable Teaser" it will come up.  In those videos it shows people walking around a house in first person before being jumped by a dirty woman and the demo ending.

It's like they took the first person apartment sections from Silent Hill 4, which everybody fucking hated and used THAT to showcase their big, scary horror game.  The other problem is that the demo ends with a fucking jump scare which is never what Silent Hill was ever about and to top it all off you get jumped by a fucking person.  People aren't fucking scary because you know what they are.  Sure, a person with a chainsaw or something is threatening but it's not scary.  You can shoot a person in the face and unless it's a zombie (and please god don't bring zombies into Silent Hill) they should fall to the ground.

Look at all the enemies in Silent Hill 2 or 3.  Just these vague shapes that kind of twitch around and they are scary because you know they are going to fuck you up but you aren't quite sure how.  They are scary because they are intimidating and vague but a woman jumping out of a closet and killing you with her bad breath is NOT fucking scary.

Also why the fuck is it called "Silent Hills".  Anyone who has played the games once or twice can tell you that the whole multiple dimension thing is wrong or is it just a case of Kojima being addicted to pluralizing everything like with "Ground Zeroes"

The point is though, we didn't NEED another fucking Silent Hill.  Team Silent said way back after Silent Hill 4 that the series was done, just let it fucking die already.  It's already a steaming pile of shit and betrayal so even if Kojima did produce something decent at the end of the day all he's doing is coating a turd in gold. 


EDIT: It came to my attention via Facebook that some of my information given in this post was wrong and I'm sad to admit that it was.  The playable teaser does not end with a jump scare, oh no, it's just EVEN MORE BULLSHIT THAN I FIRST IMAGINED.

So here's what happens; you walk around a creepy house, see some creepy shit and get jumped by a dirty woman along with some other things.  Then in the ending there's a phone call with some guy on the other side talking about how he's "back with his new toys" or some shit and then it leads into the footage from the initial trailer.

Guess what....BULLSHIT!  I have one HUGE glaring problem with the content in this trailer.  Silent Hill is an ABANDONED TOWN.  It was abandoned because of the influence the of the cult and their drug running and all sorts of other shit you can read in the FUCKING FIRST GAME IT'S NOT HARD.  So from that we can safely assume that the house featured in the trailer is NOT located in Silent Hill.

You could argue that the character has been brought here by someone judging from how it started but who and why would anyone do that?  Also the demo talks about a father gunning down his family  with a shotgun and the foreshadowing is about as subtle as a steel pipe to the head so now I'm assuming it's going to be about a "man battling his demons" which means THE GAME IS BULLSHIT.

Anyway, the reason I make a big deal about the location of the house is because SILENT HILL CAN'T/DOESN'T AT ANY POINT EVER TELEPORT PEOPLE PEOPLE.  So if the house isn't in Silent Hill and he walks through his front door into Silent Hill that means he was teleported there so COMPLETE AND UTTER BULLSHIT.

May I suggest to anyone looking to comment via blogger or Facebook to PLAY THE FUCKING GAMES.  The P.T is bullshit and so is anyone defending this nonsense.  Silent Hill Downpour had a similar initial promotional video and look how THAT game turned out

I rest my damned case.