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

2024: The Year of The Dreamcast

 

I haven't published any posts to blog in a hot minute and that needs to change.  Not that I haven't been painfully aware of my lack of games writing but I'm so busy with streaming, YouTube, making my own game(s), work, baby and a ton of other shit that sadly this has fallen completely to the wayside.  No excuses though, let's change that.

I decided two things at the start of the year.  The first being that I would not play more than a single game at a time when it comes to going through my backlog.  For the last couple of years I tend to have a bunch of games on the go, I peaked at one point at 7 concurrent playthroughs of different things and while I don't struggle to remember the goings on of each game for the most part, it does mean that the rate at which I complete stuff becomes immensely slow so this year I want my playthroughs to be a bit more focused.  The second is that I want to focus in on the Dreamcast this year and explore its library a bit more closely.  

Around Christmas last year I was wandering around the retro game stores in Nagoya and while going through the aisles of a Super Potato I started looking at all the Dreamcast games.  The Dreamcast was a system I owned back when it was new, I remember vividly the birthday that I got it with a copy of Powerstone and I played the shit out of that thing, there's a lot of fond memories tied to Sega's final piece of hardware.  But one thing I realized when looking at the selection of titles in Super Potato is that my experience with the system as a child barely scratched the surface of what the system really has to offer.  Sure, I played a ton of Powerstone 1/2, Dynamite Cop, Shenmue, Resident Evil: Code Veronica and other stuff but really I was only scratching the surface.  There are tons of interesting looking titles, a lot of which were locked to Japan and even if I could have got hold of them back then, my younger non-Japanese speaking ass wouldn't have been able to get a lot out of them.

But now its 2024, I live in Japan, fluent in the language and Dreamcast games are easily obtainable, I can go hog-fuckin-wild on this thing and get real intimite with it's library.  There's stuff that I have lined up that I have never heard of like Visual Novel JRPG deSPIRIA or Diablo clone based on an anime Record Of Lodoss War as well as games I always new about but have never had a chance to try like Blue Stinger and Cannon Spike.  A quick google of "obscure games for the Dreamcast" has led me to quite a number of interesting titles that I can't wait to try out.

I did decide to be boring though and kick things off with a game I've already finished once, Grandia 2.  I haven't touched a Grandia game since my high school playthrough of Grandia 2 on the PS2 and since it was sort of a big deal on the DC back when it launched I figured I'd kick off my year with a trip down memory lane.  It's an extremely good game but maybe I should have played a bunch of shorter stuff first to get some completions under my belt instead of jumping right into a meaty JRPG, but oh well, not gonna stop now.

If you are interested in my exploration of the DC and how my individual playthroughs are going then I talk about it in my weekly backlog vlogs so give those a gander if you want to see what weird and obscure shit I come across over the course of the year. 

If there's any stuff you think I should play, leave a comment or tell me in my stream or something.  Between exploring this system and some of the new stuff on the horizon I'm pretty excited for this year in games

Developers Aren't Owed Niceties

 

Right before sitting down at my computer to write this post I read an article online about how the lead developer for Starfield went on a bit of a rant because people who don't know anything about game dev criticize games that they play.  More specifically he said that he didn't like that people will speculate on why things were made a certain way within a game when they have no knowledge of the process and yet talk about it like an authority.  Which is fine, it's no a statement I agree with 100% but I get where he's coming from.  But there was a line in that article where the guy said that he doesn't talk ill of other games out of "respect for his fellow developers" and this, to me, seems incredibly daft.

He's not the only one who has said this kind of thing either, there's been a sort of prevailing attitude in a lot of gaming spaces where it has become taboo to overly criticize developers just because the process of making games is hard.  I first ran across this idea when watching Awesome Games Done Quick where occassionally a speedrunner would accuse a developer of being "lazy" and that's why certain tricks within certain games work but then these comments became frowned upon and you aren't really allowed to say that kind of thing anymore.

Obviously game development is an extremely difficult undertaking.  With it being an amalgamation of a number of art forms as well as technical ability it's fairly obvious that the process of creating a game, either by yourself or in a team, is a stressful thing to do.  But the other thing that you have to consider here is that games also cost money.  Once money is put into the equation, any requirement for me or anyone else to be nice to you over the thing you made goes out the window.  I worked for my money and then I chose, based on the developer telling me their game is good and cool and interesting, to give you money in exchange for the thing that you made.  If then, the thing that you made sucks shit then I get to call you a stupid lying, talentless asshole.  

Take my famously well documented distaste for the Outlast games.  I get that making a horror game is hard, you have to code it all together to make sure it's actually playable and then have a bunch of artists, musicians and writers create things that are scary and then all of that has to come together and be marketed and shipped.  That's hard, I get it.  But Outlast also cost me about 20 quid and wasn't very fucking good.  The writing was shit, the music is forgetable, the game isn't scary and the enemies are are not very well coded and behave like shit.  I would go as far to say that the developers are Red Barrels are inept, having completely no idea on what makes a good horror game and instead just slapping together a bunch of imagry that's generally accepted to be "spooky" and calling it a day.  It's lazy, badly made dross and I do not feel even a single pang of guilt for saying that.  You know what else those guys are? fucking liars too.  The original marketing for Outlast made it look like Mirrors Edge Survival Horror Edition and I thought that idea was cool as fuck but then it came out and it's a slow, plodding hiding and sometimes jogging away kind of horror game and it's embarassing that  I was charged money for it.  

If Outlast was made by 2 guys and distributed for free then I wouldn't be so harsh.  I would still give my criticisms of what I didn't like about it but I would assume inexperience over ineptitude or malice. But these were guys who were previously at Ubisoft now telling me to roll up for a brand new horror experience and what I got was a waste of cash.  Outlast IS lazy and poorly made and it costs money so the devs at that company who effectively stole my cash can get fucked. 

Also why not drop the ego?  There's a lot of developers I've interacted with, such as the developers for Crosscode and Benbo Quest who get defensive and insulted when you, even gently, tell them things about their games that kind of sucks.  Criticism is good for artists and creators, it's how you get better.  Back in like, 2014, I wrote a book that I published to Amazon called Noise and I shopped it around a few people I knew for some feedback.  The thing that pissed me off about this whole process is that out of the 10 or so people I gave free copies of the book to for that feedback, only ONE gave me any kind of genuine criticisms of the story.  It fucks me off to no end that everyone just told me it was great when, reading it back now, even I can see glaring flaws with it.  I'm never going to improve as a writer if people don't give me shit when my work is low quality .

I am currently studying and working on a game of my own.  I plan to release it to wherever will take it for a low price, but I'm hoping to maybe get some money for it when it's done.  If you buy it and think that it's a poorly made piece of garbage, I'm fully expecting you to call me out on that.  If you didn't like it and have some constructive things to say, that's even more useful and if you liked it and want to say something nice, that will stroke my ego good and proper, thank you in advance.  But I am not owed niceities and gentle language just because the thing I have decided to try and teach myself is hard.  If you're so fragile that you think that difficult tasks require kid gloves, even when you're taking peoples money as you do that task, then stop.  

If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.  If you can't handle armchair developers calling you a lazy asshole for charging them 20 bucks for your shitty Zelda clone, then stop being a developer.  Just fuck off, the art world is worse with you in it.

Brotato: Fun To Learn, Boring to Master

 

Vampire Survivor clones are generally a genre I stay away from.   Vampire Survivor was a fun little thing to mess around with for a day or two when taking a break from work or whatever but it wasn't exactly some incredible, ground breaking game that changed my life.  It did however, seem to make a metric fuckton of money and therefore has been added to the list of things to copy wholesale by the indie scene and Brotato is a product of that complete lack of creativity from your average indie developer.  The game, however, was gifted to me by a viewer and despite my cynical comments about it, it is pretty good.

The one thing that's interesting about this game, and maybe the whole genre in general is that it's an incredibly fun time for the first handful of runs that you do and then interest dies quickly as you learn what makes the game tick.  When you first fire up Brotato and start a run you are confronted with a ton of shit that you must wrap your head round regarding the characters stats and equipment.  Do you stack HP? Or is it more effective to prioritize dodge and armor?  Is it worth spending your precious level up upgrades on Harvesting and Luck? Or should you be upping your damage instead?  Should you buy that item that ups your speed but tanks your range?  Maybe you should be changing out your weapons for more damage or lifesteal.  It's incredibly fun at first to get your head around this stuff, experiement and work it all out.

But then you do work it out.  What I've found works for me is getting some luck and harvesting early on, then armor, dodge and HP and then focusing on my damage output and doing that has basically guaranteed me a win with every character so far.  I've also found that the Engineering stat along with buy shittons of turrets is an absolutely busted way to play that makes the gameplay trivial even on it's highest setting called Danger 5.  I am, at time of writing, about half way through the large cast of characters and I'm at the point where I'm sort of glazing over as I play.  I'm not thinking anymore and just going through the motions each time.

This doesn't happen with other games though.  Brotato reminds me quite a lot visually of The Binding of Isaac and mastering that games gameplay and RNG didn't result in a boring experience.  I stopped playing Isaac because I had done pretty much everything in it that there was to do and I wasn't on the verge of falling asleep with each run that I did because the better you got and the more you understood about it, the harder it got and more intense challenges were thrown at you.  Brotato doesn't have that kind of scaling and once you learn how to do 20 waves then it's extremely simple to win every time after that.  Maybe you'll lose a run here and there if you don't get good items for the little egg man that you play as but outside of getting buttfucked by randomness the game is extremely easy.  

However, what I'm not saying with any of this is that Brotato is a bad game.  The game has been incredibly useful for me as a new father because it's a perfect game to play when holding a sleeping baby.  I can play it pretty much exclusively with one hand and I can leave it running between ways if I have to run away to do baby stuff.  I'm not going to lose my flow or forget what I'm doing, it's perfect for sqeezing in a quick session in a busy schedule.  I wish it had more music and there was more to the areas than just a square that fills with enemies, maybe some extra levels with obstacles or maybe mazes to have to deal with and navigate would have been a fun addition but for what it is, a shameless Vampire Survivors clone, it's pretty solid.

If you like these kind of games and you need a new one to fiddle with then Brotato is absolutely worth picking up but otherwise your money might be better spent on something a little more involved.

The Dumbest Thing I Ever Did

 

If you play games long enough your bound to have done something stupid at some point.  Some kind of dire mis-play in an online game or some stupid decision in a single player one, it happens to the best of us.  One of my favorite Braindead Gamer Moments can be found on Game Center CX where Shinya Arino, the host, is playing Bonks Adventure.  He enters a bonus stage, jumps off the ledge to the first platform and immediately overshoots it and eats shit, ending the stage and getting nothing for his trouble, hilarious.

That's just a silly mistake though, my personal dumbest gaming moment I feel is far worse because it was influenced by an advert and entirely self inflicted.  The picture at the top of this post is an advert for Playstation 1 memory cards.  Just in case some zoomer stumbles on this post, the PS1 didn't have an internal memory so if you didn't have a card, you couldn't save your game.  You may notice that at the bottom of the image it says "Try beating Final Fantasy VII without it!".  This of course is because FF7 is a big ass game and the idea of beating it in one go without a card is unthinkable to most.  I however, was quite young and instead of being sold the idea of going out and buying a memory card I instead took it as a challenge.  "Fuck you, reverse side of the manual, I'll fukken show you", I thought. So for years I would play Final Fantasy 7 without ever saving.  I would sit and play and then at the end of a session I would turn off the PS1 and then start from the beginning every time I came back.  What made this even dumber was that I owned 2 fuckin memory cards for my PS1.  It wasn't like I didn't have a card and couldn't just give up the idea of finishing in one go, I was just to stupid to realize how long a 3 disc game was and too stubborn to ever give up and so it took me an embarassingly long time to beat Final Fantasy 7 for the first time.

What made this worse was that this mindset extended into other games.  Another title that took me an embarassingly long time to finish was Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  Even though that DID have internal memory I was so pressed by the challenge at the bottom of that FF7 advert that every time I came back to OoT I would delete my file and start over.  I think the furthest I ever got for a long, LONG time was the end of the Forest Temple.

If my memory serves then the tipping point for me breaking this habit was when Final Fantasy 9 came out.  I think that was around the time I wised up and though "yeah you right, I can't beat it without one" and started saving like a normal human being.  I spent an embarassingly long amount of time not beating many games because I refused to save because I wanted to show a marketing team whos boss.

Ironically, in my adult years I have taken up speedrunning and there are now many games I can finish in one sitting.  Hell, even big  RPGs like Panzer Dragoon Saga on the Sega Saturn I am now capable of finishing in a single sitting but that doesn't change the fact that child me refusing to use saves was probably the dumbest gaming releated thing I have ever done

Black Summer: How not to do a Zombie show

 

Since becoming a father I have spent a great deal of time doing laps of my living room while rocking the baby for naps and the like.  During that time, since I can't play games quite as much as I'd like, I've been catching up with my watch list on Netflix and Amazon and I've seen some good shit.  Better Call Saul, Peaky Blinders (except season 6 that shit was anus), Everything Everywhere All At Once, Juni Ito: Maniac, all in all it's been a pretty good time.  But then I decided to fire up a zombie series called Black Summer and holy moly, this isn't just the worst thing I've watched while on baby duty, it's maybe one of the worst things I've seen just in general.

First broadcast via Netflix in 2019 and apparently some kind of spinoff of some other crap sounding show called Z Nation, Black Summer follows a bunch of characters as they try to survive their way through a zombie apocolypse in order to get to some kind of sports stadium where apparently it's safe.  I'm currently half way through the first season of the show and it's pissing me off to such a degree that I can't help but come here to complain about it.

The premise is you're average zombie survival affair.  Survivors and zombies and assholes for your standard issue "are you humans the real monsters after all?!" nonsense that comes with most zombie media but that's fine, I was pretty much expecting it to be that way going in.  What I wasn't expecting is for the writing of the show to be THIS fucking horrendous on all fronts.  You could legitimately use this show in a course for aspiring film students on what not to do when making a horror show.

Each episode consists of your standard zombie fare where characters go to a place, get fucked somehow and then try to survive but the problem with Black Summer is that the characters seem to be sometimes just willfully fucking themselves or just opting to be immensely fucking stupid at all times.  For example there's one part where they end up in a school which has been overrun by murderous teenagers.  That setup in itself is kind of stupid but there is a scene where a standoff happens, one guy has a gun train on a group of kids, they have a gun pointed back at them and a hostage.  The hostage in question is deaf so there's a bit of an exchange and they agree to let him go in exchange for their gun.  The leader of the teens passes his gun to a small boy and says "shoot him if he moves" while they make the change but the hostage in question is deaf, so he starts to walk where the small boy just blasts him in the back, killing him.  At this point the boys start to flee and they just let them fucking go.  The characters were going on in the previous episode about how they needed weapons and these kids clearly have weapons and just killed your friend and instead of gunning them down and taking their shit they just let them go.  This is then proceeded by the dumbest zombie chase of all time where characters just opt to leave doors wide open for the rage zombie to chase them through and make the shittest attempts I have ever seen in this type of media to block his path.  These are fast rage zombies by the way and their ability to tank bullets seems to be based on how  "tense" the scene needs to be rather than having any sort of consistent rules. 

Speaking of inconsistent rules, in the same episode there is another character who is running away from a zombie, again in the dumbest way imaginable who has a very clearly fucked up right hand.  It's covered in blood and after escaping the zombie he tries to start a car and has to clumsily reach over to the ignition with his left hand because his right is unusable.  These scene ends with him finding a mostly untouched supermarket after escaping the zombie where it then shows a title card and then he's walking around the store completely fucking healed.  I would have been willing to accept that he found some medical supplies either in a back room or in the asiles of the store and patched himself up off camera but there's no bandage or any evidence of that kind of thing at all.  It's like the entire sequence of him getting injured was written way after the fact OR, and given how stupid the show is I'm assuming this to be the case, they fucking forgot.  The lack of attention to any kind of detail or consistency just makes the entire production feel lazy. 

What's worse is that zombie features are such a well trodden road that the rules are basically written for you and barely any effort has to be put in for this kind of thing.  Hell, even games like Resident Evil were getting this shit right in 1996.  In RE1 the characters split up because they don't know what they are getting into and they are trained soldiers, in RE2 they get split up by unfortunate circumstance and in Black Summer they split up as if that idiot gas from Cabin in the Woods is just part of the air in that region of America.  When you're show can be compared to original Resident Evil and RE comes out on top as being the more intelligently put together piece of media, you have a BIG problem.

It's the exact issue I had with that stupid fucking movie called A Quiet Place.  Where all the "tension" of the show is generated by characters being stupid rather than any kind of clever scenario writing.  Despite pissing me off greatly I'm going to finish both seasons and if it magically gets better I'll come back and write a big apology to it but I imagine that it's only going to get worse from here.  It got cancelled after 2 seasons anyway so the chance of it getting any better is 0%

I Hate What Silent Hill Has Become

 

Silent Hill Ascension released recently to pretty unfavorable reviews which bodes extremely badly for the current batch of upcoming Silent Hill games because if you can't even get the extremly easily impressed gaming press on side, then the fuckups must be pretty colossal .

When I say I hate what Silent Hill has become though I'm not talking about the games themselves.  Silent Hills 1-4 are still extremely good horror classics but anything after that hot trash.  Silent Hill Origins probably being the most forgivable since even though it's a steaming pile of wank you can at least tell its heart was in the right place but once you get past that game it's all downhill from there.  The series hit peak shittiness with Book of Memories that probably still hasn't been outdone even with the recent ascension but the series, even in the current day is still in freefall in terms of quality.  

The new batch doesn't seem any better either.  Ascension is already being shit on, there's some other one called Townfall and I'm not even sure what that is, there's Silent Hill F which seems to be having an identity crisis and looks more like Fatal Frame than anything else and then finally there's that fucking stupid piece of shit remake of Silent Hill 2 being made with the inept and creatively bankrupt folks over at Bloober Team.  I could write an essay on why Silent Hill 2 being developed by Bloober is terrible on its own but thankfully I don't have to because YouTube user Bobsvids did a great job of outlining why they are so terrible, so I'll just let him tell you why that project has absolutely no hope whatsoever 

 

But like I said, I'm not talking about the games themselves, per se but what Silent Hill has become conceptually.  In Silent Hill 1 you aren't going through a spooky town being hunted by manifestations of your own guilt in order to punish you for something, you're going through a town beset by a cult and the nightmare is coming from another person, not really for the sake of punishment but because she is being used to birth a demon which you end up actually fighting if you get one of the games good endings.  Silent Hill 3 continued this plot with the influence of an unborn demon God causing the nightmare to manifest outside of Silent Hill but again, not for the sake of punishment.  Heather Mason is not being punished for anything by the nightmare.  Silent Hill 2 was an offshoot of this occult story as a sort of aftermath tale where the events of the first game have sort of caused the nightmare effect to spread to anyone who enters.  James gets plagued by manifestations of his own guilt but he's the only bloke in the original set  of games cast to go through that experience (side characters not included of course, shut the fuck up)

But after Silent Hill 4, due to the popularity of Silent Hill 2 over 1 and 3, Silent Hill is now ONLY a place where you go to "fight your innner demons" or get punished for some kind of misdeed you performed in the past.  The worst example of this is in Downpour where thanks to a bunch of talentless hacks trying to write a story that's "open to interpretation" you end up with a game where, in the best ending, the main character is being punished by manifestations of his guilt for something he didn't even fucking do.

The problem is that Silent Hill was originally interesting because it was a gripping story about a cult, a demon god and a families struggle against that cult.  2 was an interesting exploration of the effects of that cult on the town as well as a cool story about 1 guy inparticular and 4 expanded the scope of that a bit more.  But in the current day, Silent Hill is now just this weird therepist town you go to when you've done something wrong so twitchy monsters covered in raw bacon can spook you into not feeling so bad about it. So sure, the modern games have fucked Silent Hill on a mechanical level sure, but over time and thanks to the efforts of a bunch of very low skill people who aren't the original Team Silent the CONCEPT of the entire series is completly fucked and ensures that anything that gets pumped out from this point onwards is doomed to be awful garbage that entirely misses the point of what made the first set of games interesting in the first place

At this point I would probably say something like "If you're going to do Silent Hill again, bring back the cult and drop this pseudo-therapy shit" but what really needs to be done is the series needs to be killed.  Stop making them, let it die and find another group of talented people to make a new horror new series with new ideas.

Fuck Silent Hill