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.
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
In my last post I made a big rant about how twitch had fucked up with their latest changes to VODs and recorded audio. I'm not going back on that, what they have done is complete bullshit and it fucks a lot of people over, including me.
Now I made a big song and dance about moving over to Hitbox.tv and after experimenting a bit with Hitbox I can say that it's actually a pretty good service. The best part about Hitbox is that I can remove the delay from my stream so I can chat with my viewers in real time, which is nice.
However, let's face it, as of right now Twitch is still the best streaming service and considering I'm doing this stream for charity I want to reach as many people as I can because the more people who enjoy my stuff means more potential donations to the Alzheimer's Society. So I won't be completely moving over to Hitbox, but I do intend to use it from time to time. Think of it as as a backup stream for when Twitch is down or dropping frames or something. Imagine Twitch as a Channel 1 and Hitbox as a Channel 2.
So with that in mind, go and give me a follow on Hitbox (www.hitbox.tv/taurinensis) and maybe you'll catch me or maybe even one of my buddies streaming under the Identity Gaming flag.
Also, next week in Japan it's Obon!
Just to fill you all in, Obon is a time in Japan where people remember their dead relatives. What this really translates to is everyone going back to their home towns, hanging out with their living family and visiting the graves of their dead ones.
It also means I have a week off work.
This is the first genuine bit of downtime I've had in a long, LONG time so my goal for the week is to get as many of the met donation incentives done as I can. It also means that I'm going to have plenty of time to stream so hopefully we can finally finish Final Fantasy 5 and move on to the really good ones. You'll also probably see a new speed run of Ys coming out soon once I stop being shit at it and manage to get past the first few bosses.
So keep an eye out next week and get those donations ready!
Seriously, what the fuck. Streaming should be so fucking simple, you just play a game live and people get to come and enjoy the experience with you, why did you have to go and fuck it all up?!
I don't know when these changes happened exactly, but that's not really the point. The point is that these changes did happen and Twitch has become all google-fied (read: total bullshit) and I wouldn't be surprised if the changes made to the twitch service would make people consider moving to other streaming platforms which aren't so focused on fucking you over.
The first change I came across this morning was the change to the Video on Demand thing. How I understand it is that past broadcasts are going to be saved for 14 days and then deleted. This part is kind of fair, I guess, since there must be just insane amounts of completely unviewed video just clogging up space. They then go on to say that if you don't want your shit to be deleted you can save them in a highlight, which I guess is also fair since highlights receive a lot more views than just the raw stream footage.
OH BUT WAIT! THE HIGHLIGHTS CAN ONLY BE TWO HOURS LONG!
What the fuck is this crap, really?! Why only two hours?! This doesn't really affect me (right now) since most of the highlights that I make are an hour or less with the longest being the Silent Hill speed runs. But there are PLENTY of members of the speed running community and other communities being fucked over by this limit. Just to give you an idea, one of the biggest streamers on the goddamn site (Cosmo) runs The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and that's a 4 and a half hour run. That means, that if he wanted to save his run to twitch, he'd have to do it in 3 fucking parts and that's just a pain in the ass.
Even worse for runners who play games like Final Fantasy where the runs can be up to 6 hours or so. Making highlights for those runs now involves so much busywork that I can't help but feel sorry for them.
But that's not the only thing, oh no, there have been changes to their policy on audio now. They use some kind of automated software that detects third party content and then mutes that part of the video. This is complete bullshit because 1) I'm pretty sure that stuff falls under fair use or some crap and 2) IT DOESN'T FUCKING WORK
Nearly HALF THE FUCKING VIDEO has been silenced when it mostly contains ambient noises, Harry's footsteps and my talking. I'm pretty sure Konami don't own the rights on my fucking voice. My guess is that it got muted because at the very start part of the Silent Hill theme was playing but even if that was the case, why did TWENTY SIX FUCKING MINUTES of video get muted for that shit?! Why not the whole video? It's not like the audio is much different in the second half of the game.
What's even worse is that I can prove this bullshit doesn't work with this
Here is a video of an older time I got a while ago. Notice how NONE OF IT IS FUCKING MUTED but IT'S THE SAME FUCKING GAME! So much for your fucking audio policy because you suck at enforcing it.
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So between fucking over speed runners and people who play long game and fucking over everyone else with this audio bullshit, I wouldn't be surprised if people start moving to a new service. Unless things are solved I imagine twitches days could be numbered.
Sometimes I get into discussions with my friends or on forums and things like that about how older games are better than modern ones. I'm one of those people who is inclined to agree with that idea because personally I find a lot of modern games to be a bit of a joke. That doesn't mean I think modern gaming is bad but I just find the older experiences a lot more enjoyable.
At first I thought it was just a case of personal taste or hell, maybe it was really nostalgia goggles but on my long boring train rides I decided to think about it a bit more critically and old games are really just better.
So here's what I'm going to do to illustrate my point. I'm going to take the first 3 genres that pop into my head and explain why old games in the genre are better than the newer ones.
First Person Shooters
This is a no brainer since if there's any genre that is guilty of being dumbed down for mass consumption its this one. Take old games like Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, Hexen and many many others. These games were popular not only because of their ultra violence, but because of their big sprawly labyrinthine levels full of secrets and generally speaking you needed some degree of brain power and strategy to win at these games on higher difficulty levels.
Contrast that with now, where all the exploration and skill that this genre was famous for has been completely stripped out for an experience that people who don't want to spend time learning a title (read: idiots) can handle. Regenerating health was the first big culprit, then came limited weapon inventories ruining strategy and limiting your play style. Also every level in a modern shooter is basically a corridor and all you do is hide behind cover and pop heads.
That's right, modern FPS is nothing but the fair ground duck shooting attraction but with a military theme and attached to a roller coaster track. Finally, don't give me none of that shit about Multiplayer either. If you think Call of Duty or Halo stack up to something like Unreal Tournament or Quake then you need a slap.
RPGs
RPGs barely fucking exist nowadays and that's a damn shame. Just to qualify, when I say RPGs I mean both the J and W type, so don't worry I'm not discriminating between countries. Western made RPGs used to be such deep and rich experiences. Things such as Ultima, Baldurs Gate and old school Fallout were such joys to play with so much goddamn content in them that it would probably take a few playthroughs just to notice all the little details about the world you were in. Japanese RPGs were a little more simplistic but the variety of what was on offer in that genre back in the day was absolutely staggering. Most western games tended to focus on Tolkien-esque swords and sorcery settings while JRPGs tended to have more outlandish settings and characters.
Contrast that with now, where every Western made RPG just feels like a cheap knockoff of something that came WAY before it. Most RPGs today have these terrible fucking "morality systems" and stupid branching dialogue trees with only 2 or 3 options on them and the extra tidbits about a worlds lore aren't even half as developed as they are in older games. Just look at how Elder Scrolls started and look at it now and you'll see exactly what I mean.
Japan on the other hand seems to have forgotten how to produce anything that isn't shallow, moe, otaku pandering bullshit with every game box on a store shelf having some wide eyed anime girl on it doing something cute and the game play is much shallower.
The Point and Click Adventure
Do I even need to explain this one to you? Just look at stuff like Monkey Island, Sanitarium, Myst, Grim Fandango and god knows what else. Then look at what passes off for an "adventure" game nowadays. Gone Home, The Stanley Parable, Serina just to name 3. A genre once known for it's insane mind bending puzzles and great stories now reduced to walking simulators with barely any game play produced by people who can't make a game worth a shit and can't write for shit either.
Let's just be happy that GoG exists to preserve all the great point and clickers so that people can still experience them and all this modern badly written bullshit can hopefully be forgotten about
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Now I know I've been ranting and it sounds like I hate modern gaming with a passion but that couldn't be further from the truth. Modern gaming is still great and there are still new titles that come out and I have plenty of fun with. It's just that gaming has gotten noticeably stupider and I think it's a damn shame.
Also I know I've been talking about "modern gaming" in general terms but there are exceptions to all the above and in all other genres. Some developers are still trying to capture the magic of the old school shooter with things like Painkiller and The Rise of the Triads remake to varying levels of success. I've been hearing great things about Divinity: Original Sin and Japan is still producing RPGs of the old quality such as "俺の屍を越えてゆけ２" which looks fucking radical The point and clicker is still being moderately screwed but an HD remake of Grim Fandango is coming out so I guess it's not all bad, just a shame that the newest thing I can think of in the genre worth a damn is Anna on PC So to all you devs trying to make intelligent games for the modern age, keep on going. Finally to all you devs making safe, mass appeal bullshit, try pushing out the boat a little more will ya? You can still make buckets of money with a smart game, I'm sure it'll be OK.
The World Cosplay Summit is an event that happens every year right on my doorstep. A short 10 minute walk from my apartment this weekend led into a huge crowd of people all dressed up as their favorite anime and video game characters for this yearly celebration of nerdyness.
Now I'm not into anime AT ALL with the last thing I watched being Akagi, a show about Mahjong, at university so most of the things that people were dressed as went right over my head but that didn't stop it from being super impressive either way. However there were plenty of video game characters I was plenty familiar with so I guess there's a little something for everyone.
I would say that even if you aren't into games, anime or cosplay it's still an event worth going to. Some of the things that people pull off are so outlandish that it's the kind of thing that has to be seen first hand to believe. It also coincides with the Osu Festival (temple pictured above) so you can wander away from the cosplayers and experience something a bit more traditional and it makes a great weekend.
Unfortunately, I was busy this weekend and didn't get to spend a lot of time there but below I'll share a few snaps I got on my camera with you. Enjoy!
A really awesome Wander from SotC
Sephiroth
A sexy Mario being bombarded by nerds with big cameras
These were all the gaming ones I got, I'll put the anime related ones on twitter or something.
