Horror Month Roundup

 

Well, horror month is "over" and for the first time in years I failed to finish all 31 games on the list.  Technically, at time of writing I still have one day left but the next game in the list is Murdered: Soul Suspect and there's no way in fuck hell I'm finishing that in one day.

So why did it fail? The first and probably most obvious reason is the fact that I'm a dad now.  Being a dad reduces my stream hours a fair bit even at the weekends so while in previous years I would maybe go from like, 6am to midnight, this year I'd have to do 9am to 6pm and then 6pm to 11pm.  That's a whole bunch of hours, even an entire games worth of hours in some cases to get shit done.  Now while it would be easy to scapegoat my 1 year old if I'm being honest I don't think I could have pulled it off this year anyway because I'm an idiot.  In previous years I have put short indie horror games in the list to account for the fact that Monday-Friday I have to do my 9-6 job but this year I put far too many big boys on there.  Resident Evil 3, Fatal Frame, Bioshock, Fear 2, Manhunt, Disaster Report, what the fuck was I thinking.  Then I also got sort of blindsided by games that I thought would be a bit shorter that ended up taking way more time like Tormented Souls, FOBIA and Hollowbody.  My impression going in was that they were short and they were short in the sort of "6-10" hour definition and not the "1-2 indie experience" that I was thinking.  My fault for not doing the research in enough detail.

But enough about my failure.  More importantly, how were the fucking games?   Well good, mostly.  Stuff like Fatal Frame and Bioshock were in there because I already knew they were good and I wanted an excuse to replay them.  I was actually surprised at how much I enjoyed Resident Evil 3 actually.  Usually when I have played that game in the past its because I've been marathoning 1-3 back to back and by the time I hit 3 I'm burnt out.  Playing it fresh gave me a new perspective on it and while it's still sort of frustrating and feels like an expansion rather than a proper sequel, I liked it a lot more than I usually do.

Then there were the first plays like Disaster Report which I really enjoyed although I have played later games in the series and enjoyed those so I sort of knew I'd like that one.  Crow Country was also a great old school survival horror throwback with a cool visual style.  Tormented Souls I liked less but still thought was pretty solid.  I really enjoyed the fact that someone was doing the modern day "rendered" backgrounds thing because I love pre-rendered backgrounds of old and I wish more people would make really crisp, detailed shit on modern tech.  That technique is seen as "dated" though and isn't used so much so big props to Tormented for doing a take on it.  Of course, I cannot mention the great games from the horror games I finished without mentioning Faith.  Absolute belter of a game despite the fact that it looks like an Atari2600 game.  Interesting plot, actual effective horror, some decent replayability that I'm excited to go back to offline, absolutely a contender for best game of the marathon. 

Finally there were the stinkers.  Moons of Madness was a pathetic and boring foray into Lovecraft.  Hollowbody was a complete snoozefest which is crazy considering how much it was copying the homework of much better games.  Finally there was FOBIA which I won't go into detail on here because that might be one of the contenders for worst games I have ever played in my life and therefore I need to save all my bile for the blog post its going to get soon.

Just because horror month is over, doesn't meat that I'm just giving up on that playlist though.  It's being incorporated into the regular schedule and played to completion.  My weekends will also continue to be long horror streams until it's done so tune in over at Twitch or Youtube to check it out.  The one good thing about failing the marathon is that the last game on the list is Deadly Premonition 2 and while before I was planning to b-line it to the end to make pace, now that I've failed I can kick back and engage with more of it's content, which I think is a much better way to do my first playthrough.  

Good times were had, more to come

www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

Silent Hill 3's Weird Bad Ending

 

Silent Hill 3 is my favorite entry in the series.  Unlike the vast majority of the fanbase that seems to hold 2 as the best one, I actually like the occult stuff from 1, 3 and 4 and I think the third entry in the series has some of the best scares of the entire franchise.  But they are all (all being 4 and before, anything after 4 can fuck off) good, really that just comes down to personal preference but despite having played SH3 a ton and it being in my top spot since my teens I have never gotten it's weird bad ending.

I didn't even know it was a thing.  Silent Hill as a series is known for its multiple endings thing but 3 didn't really have that. 1 had the Good/Bad + or not plus thing, 2 had endings based on actions you took in the game, 4 has a bunch of endings based on how you treat the escort and how good of an exorcist you are but 3, I thought, only had 2.  It's a definitive story about the aftermath of the first game, there's not really a lot of wiggle room for an ending.  Heather has the unawaked demon god inside her, some shit happens and then she kills it, done and dusted.  Of course, there's the UFO ending which basically every game has to have as a tradition but then there's the "Possessed" ending.  I only found out about it when I was drinking with my friend and he mentioned it in an off-hand comment and it took me completely by surprise.

First of all, you can't even get it on a New Game, you have to be in New Game + or else it won't play even if you do the other requirements.  Once you've done that, you have to get your Hotline Hill on and kill over 100 enemies while also letting them smack you around because you yourself have to take over 1000 points of damage.  Forgive the woman in the confessional near the end of the game and then kill the final boss and boom, bad ending.  I won't spoil what it is exactly here, you can either go look it up on YouTube or go do it yourself.

So it's no surprise I never knew about it really.  Silent Hill 3, despite it's quality, is not the kind of game I tend to play more than once at a time.  The game is so exhausting (in a good way) that after I'm done I'll put it down for a handful of months and then come back for another playthrough when I get the itch.  It's like crawling under a nice blanket....made of flesh and it's bleeding, but it's comforting nontheless.  Usually when I come back to this playthrough I don't do NG+ from a completed file, I usually just do a flat new game on normal/normal.  I've done the UFO ending long ago but that's one of the only times I've engaged with the plus stuff but I'm mainly here for the narrative and not to shoot anime beams at flesh beasts.

It was a nice thing to discover though, gave me an excuss to do two more playthroughs of one of my favorite games on the PS2 and I suggest you give it a go too.  If I'm being honest it's not REALLY worth the effort to get but if this post can get even one person to replay SH3 again then that's good enough for me.  Go play it

Pathetic Imitations

 I've put some real stinkers on this years horror marathon playlist and one of them that really stood out for having a particular odor was FOBIAL: St Dinfna Hotel.  I'm not going to spend this blog post going into the details of just specifically how terrible it was, that's another post for another time, but not only was it a bad game, it was also a pathetic imitation of something much better.

We live in an age where remakes and remasters seem to be all the rage, constantly barraged with updated versions of shit from games past and when those aren't being shoved into our faces by developers and publishers there are constant talks of what "deserves" a remake (whatever that means) and what "needs" a remake.  Pathetic discourse for pathetic people who have buried deep into their comfort zones and built nuclear bunkers so that they don't have to suffer the torment of playing something new or from an unfamiliar IP.

But one thing we don't seem to pay much attention to is the imitators, the weird malformed cousin of the remaster.  Not part of a well established thing but copying the well established thing closely enough that the people will still clap their hands together like seals and fork out the money for it.  It happens a lot in the indie sphere with a great many games cribbing from things like Zelda, Metroid or even just copying whatever big indie game came out in the last six months.  If I had a dollar for every Vampire Survivor clone that exists then I'd probably have enough money to pay off the rest of my mortgage.  Again, a post for another time but I do feel the indie scene does have a bit of a creativity problem going on.  

Not that this ALWAYS results in terrible bullshit.  Touhou: Artificial Dream in Arcadia springs to mind with it being just a straight up, slightly weebier, clone of Shin Megami Tensei 1+2 but clearly done by someone with a lot of love and passion for the older MegaTen games so the imitation feels sincere.  Not a quick way to make a fast dollar off two established franchises with a fan game but someone who clearly likes Touhou a fair bit making a game in a style that we don't get anymore just because they like it so much.  Go check that game out, it's pretty fukken neato.  

I suppose you would call it a tribute, rather than an imitation

But then there's FOBIA: St Dinfna Hotel, a pathetic attempt to make money off the fact that Resident Evil 7 exists by a studio of inept, creatively bankrupt morons.  Everything about that game from the graphics to the UI to the gameplay feels like a cheap knockoff of what RE7 was doing.  The very epitome of the "we have Resident Evil 7" at home meme that you see so often around the internet.  Unlike the Touhou game, it seems to have been made by not only cynical idiots out to make a quick buck from the back of another IP, but also a group of people who have ONLY played RE7 and literally nothing else. I will, for now, refrain from going into massive detail but FOBIA is the exact kind of game to cause veins to pop in heads with just how hollow it is and it's just one of many offenders that have popped up thanks to platforms like Steam and Itch.

Another, slightly less (but only slightly) offensive example is one I'm currently playing at time of writing called Hollowbody.  A game that at first glance looks like it might be doing its own thing and then quickly devolves into a particularly shallow Silent Hill clone that isn't so much bad as it is just painfully boring.  Usually I say that boring games are worse than bad games because at least anger is an emotion and art should be there to illicit emotions but there's something especially grating about a developer that copies another games format so closely only to still make the interactive equivalent of wallpaper paste.  A group of people who played Silent Hill 2 exactly once, followed it up with a single viewing of 28 Weeks Later and then churned out a low effort game because those two things made money, so surely that will too.  It's pathetic to see developers engaging in this trash behaviour and its even more pathetic to see consumers giving it the thumbs up in a steam review.

Being inspired by another person or studios work can lead to some really great things.  Some Lost in Vivos, some Okami's, some fuckin Undertale type shit but making those kind of games requires not only love for the thing you're imitating, but love for the medium itself.  The two games I talked about here are just recent examples of a problem that has existed since the dawn of games, but I'm begging just a few more indie devs to maybe try at least a little harder.  Play a little more widely, go experience some things that aren't games, draw from many things to make something cool instead of just copying the flavor of the month to try and line your pockets.  Steam is already full of shit, stop adding to it

The Game Awards Are Dumb Bullshit

 

It's that time of the year again! The time where everyone gets together to discuss what the best games of the year were.  The time where we celebrate all the cool titles we have played throughout 2024.  The time where shallow hype merchants peddle their crap opinions at you in the hope to generate some dollar for their high profile buddies in the industry.

Maybe I'm cynical but The Game Awards are something I've always had a certain degree of disdain for but I think even this year the lineup of nominees for the hype machine are sort of grim.  For those that can't be bothered to go look what they are I'll list them here.

-Astrobot 

-Bolatro

-Black Myth: Wukong

-Shadow of the Erdtree

-Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth 

-Metaphor: Refantazio 

This is just the GOTY category but I find that no one gives a fuck about the other awards.  All discussion revolves almost entirely around these titles so who gives a fuck about anything else?  That aside though, this lineup is just fucking depressing.  Astrobot is a shite mascot platformer that failed to push PS5s, Bolatro is the token indie entry in a thinly veiled attempt to make it look like the awards aren't just a AAA circle jerk, Black Myth Wukong is just "another souls-like", Erdtree is a fucking DLC for a game from 2022, FF7 is a padded remake that butchers key scenes from the original and Metaphor is about the only thing on the list that skirts the line of being an "original" game, despite at it's core just being fantasy Persona,.

This lineup has even had the effect of turning me into a tin foil hat conspiricy crackpot.  DLCs have won awards in the past in minor categories but this is the first time that one has been in the running for actual GOTY.  My dumb theory is that some money-men have greased the palms of award show organizers for Erdtree to be entered and for it to win so that FromSoft can make extra dollar of a "Elden Ring: GOTY Edition" that includes Erdree.

But if you ignore the specifics of this years show in particular, The Game Awards are just a pile of dumb bullshit as a concept.  90% of the votes for winners are peformed by a jury consisting of people from various games media outlets and I wan't you to think very carefully about that.  Think of the kind of absolute dumbfuck that works for any big gaming website or publication.  An entire enthuisast press made up of easily manipulated morons that barely have the motor function required to operate a control pad or keyboard pumping out the most stock standard gaming opinions day after day so that they can maintain funding for their site and access to developers and publishers.  These idiots are the ones who get to say what the best games of the year are.  I'd be willing to bet money that the games these people have played over the course of the year can be counted with just your fingers.

But even if it was a completely public vote, a vote where dedicated communties of niche weirdos could push for whatever game they love to get some recognition, it wouldn't matter because deciding a game of the year in the current year is just daft by design.  Not one person, nor group of people has had the time to even scratch the surface of things that were released this year.  I'm not saying that in order to make an informed decision on what a potential game of the year is you have to play EVERYTHING that year, but I guarantee that the judges for this show, along with most people (myself included) have barely scratched the surface on things that came out in 2024.  

There is a channel I quite like on YouTube challed YourMovieSucks who does these "best of" videos.  One example of this is his best films of 2015 video which was released in 2018.  He gave the year of 2015 some breathing room while watching as many films as he could from that year both big and small, and then made a list based on that much broader viewing.  I feel like that's what The Game Awards should be doing.  Fuck GOTY 2024, we should be crowning GOTY 2018 around this game thus giving judges and general audiences a bit more time to experience what 2024 had to offer outside of the big budget, heavily marketed titles. 

At the end of the day, none of it really matters, it's all just twats shouting their opinions from the rooftops.  I base my personal GOTY selections on stuff I played that year rather than stuff that was released that year, none of this affects me on a personal level really.  But these are award shows are somewhat important to developers and publishers and their outcome will have an effect on the industry at large in some way and if you ask me, it's making things considerably worse year on year.

Fuck you Geoff

31 Game Horror Challenge 2024

 It's that time of the year once again to do the 31 game horror challenge!  This year we're doing it in November because my October was busy as all hell but if it was really up to me, it would be spooky month every month but whatever.  Here's the list in the order that I'll be playing them

1. Silent Hill 2 

2. Paranoihell 

3. Resident Evil 3 (PS1) 

4. The Smell of Death -A Tsugunohi Tale- 

5. Bioshock

6. Lucifer Within Us 

7. Fatal Frame

8. Crow Country 

9. F.E.A.R 2 

10. Splatter Master 

11. Moons of Madness

12. Gun Survivor 2: Biohazard Code Veronica 

13. Lost in Vivo

14. Bloodshots

15. DreadOut

16. Fobia: St Dinfna Hotel 

17. Disaster Report 

18. Tormented Souls

19. Manhunt 

20. Faith

21. Hollow Body

22. 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors

23. Evil Dead: Fistful of Boomstick

24. Murdered Soul Suspect 

25. ...iru?! 

26. Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit 

27. Gregory Horror Show 

28. Shadowgrounds

29. Dementium 2 

30. Michigan: Report From Hell 

31. Deadly Premonition 2 

I've not failed a horror challenge since the very first one I did where I underestimated the length of Days Gone but this year I have a baby to contend with.  Will I get through all of these? or will life be the real survival horror?  Only one way to find out!  www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

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.

Blue Stinger: The Good Kind of Jank

 

Blue Stinger was a launch title for the Dreamcast that I pretty much ignored when it came out.  At the time I was much more into arcady type games so I opted for Power Stone as the game I got with the system.  After that I stuck to the arcade and fighting games on the system so my library of titles consisted mainly of things like Soul Calibur, Dynamite Cop, House of the Dead and other games in that sort of style.  I did go on to enjoy things like Code Veronica and Evolution but Blue Stinger was one of those games that stayed out of my collection for the entire consoles lifespan. I'm sort of glad it did actually because this game is all sorts of fucked.  I think a younger me would have scoffed at its weird, jokey cutscenes and got easily frustrated at its gameplay but at older me can appriciate it for the wonderfully weird bit of pre-2000s jank it is.

The game follows Elliot on his adventures through Dinosaur Island.  He's chilling on his boat with a friend while he builds an anime girl-in-a-bottle (no, don't think about it) when a meteor crashes down and causes a monster outbreak.  Elliot is soon accompanied by a guy called Dogs are are assisted by a chick called Janine and the three of them must work together to stop the outbreak by shooting a lot of things in the face.  Oh, also the anime girl-in-a-bottle turns into some weird ghost thing, don't think about it too hard.

On the surface, Blue Stinger might seem like any other survival horror game and I spent my first couple of hours with the game playing it as such but I quickly found out that you will be absolutely miserable if you're trying to go through things that way.  There's no real survival or horror elements to Blue Stinger, its a much faster affair where enemies drop cash and guns/ammo can be bought from vending machines so no need to conserve, just blow everything to high hell.  The horror on the other hand falls completely flat but I'm not entirely convinced that's what they were going for.  The imagry is trying to be horrific with ihabitants of Dinosaur Island having their bodies taken over and mutated but the whole thing has the vibe of a low budget action B movie with a horror theme.  For example there's one point where you have to fight a jeep that's been turned into a giant crab monster and when you kill it you are rewarded with a minigun for Dogs that allows you to just absolutely mow shit down.

Once you realize to not play it like you would play something like Resident Evil though the fun factor jumps up a fair bit.  There's also a number of setpieces throughout the game that are, admitedly, quite stupid but will have you grinning like an absolute idiot as Eliot and Dogs bumble their way through them.  An example of a good one is that there's one point where Eliot has to cross a chasm to get to another part of the island but instead of going around or finding away across, he climbs up a big tower with a gas tank on the top of it and blows it up as he jumps off to have the blast just throw him across.  It's dumb to the point of it being awesome and I wouldn't have it any other way.

There are some frustrating parts of the game though.  The two most notable of these are a section near the start where you must navigate a freezer but the freezer is a big ass maze that's slowly killing you AND there's enemies inside it AND if you fuck up the puzzle it becomes a giant heater that STILL kills you as you go through it and the solution to the puzzle or even what elements need to be interacted with aren't particularly clear.  There's also a bit where Elliot gets a bit sick and its not hard but they decided that a lot of wall climbing needed to be done in that part and the climbing is slow as all fuck and it reverses your controls when you're doing it which makes navigating the area take a bout 8 times longer than it usually would.

Overall though, good fuckin' game.  The only other game that I think the company did after this is Illbleed and if you've played that as well as Blue Stinger you might come to the conclusion that the development team consists entirely of insane people.  It's sort of hard to recommend to people but if you don't mind some late 90s jank and you need a good chuckle from a retro game then Blue Stinger has you covered