2nd March 2015, 4:59 PM
Sacred Jellybean Wrote:Not gonna lie, I searched for "Silent Hill" to see if you'd given your opinion on that. Awesome! Even though that game isn't to your liking, I still think it's a big touchstone in gaming. Silent Hill 1 is the first one I played and still my favorite of the series.Big touchstone? Why? It seems like just another survival horror game...
On that note, read the Dino Crisis one for more of what I think of survival horror (the second one, not the old version in the first post), and also the two Fear Effect games' ones (again, the redo version of the first game); those games aren't survival horror, but they have some similarities (camera, controls). I don't particularly like any of those games either, for sure.
Quote:I think you're right that RE paved the way for this. The controls are necessary because of the style of gameplay: you enter arenas that have different camera vantage points. Silent Hill especially uses this in its opening scenes, where you're running through a dark alley. Since you're not a horror aficionado, I can see how this didn't do anything for you. I think the game does a fantastic job of terrorizing the player, though.Huh? You're just walking though an alley, wrestling with the bad controls and awful camera angles (these things are not so much scary as annoying). That last area with the bodies and stuff was a bit creepy, but not so much the rest of it. I guess I just don't understand horror stuff most of the time. (I didn't find much in Eternal Darkness scary either, I loved it for other reasons; it was creepy sometimes though sure, mostly because of the Lovecrafian hopelessness.)
Quote:But in any case, these controls are necessary, because you would get whiplash trying to keep up with a traditional analog stick. From a practical sense, you have to consistently keep one thumb down to be able to continue running straight, as demons chase you through dark hallways and foggy alleys.RE2 for N64 has a better analog control option, you know. It actually works fairly well.
Quote:One thing SH did better than RE was, instead of having pre-rendered backgrounds everywhere, there were many areas where you could run in all eight directions and look at things.I agree on this point.
Quote:IMO, the pixelated graphics actually sort of enhance the game. They make it feel vague (which adds to the mystique) but undeniably sinister. Sort of like finding a VHS tape somewhere, having no idea of its origins, but looking at it and seeing something terrifying. It's like Lovecraft said, "The most compelling emotion is fear, and the greatest fear is that of the unknown". I never really made the Lovecraftian connection to the game until now (I know, doi, underground cult that wishes to summon a demi-god into reality, me big dummy, and isn't there a street named after Lovecraft?).Eternal Darkness is a Lovecraft-style world done right. Otherwise... pixelated graphics rarely make games look better. I'd much rather have N64 blurred textures with added effects (perspective correction, etc.) than ugly PS1 pixelization, polygon seams, etc.
Quote:This is a central plank in survival horror. The game forces you to flee enemies, which means you must be on your guard. Seeing your bullet and health counts drop is part of what adds to the terror. I played through the school recently (I began another playthrough this past fall, had to keep with the halloween spirit!). I found it easier to avoid them in places where I reliably could (like corridors) and don't bother clearing them out until you've explored everything.I quit Dino Crisis this time because I realized that in the hour I had been running around (I loaded my old save, saved about an hour in) I'd found exactly zero bullets. I'd found plenty of health I'd left lying around, but no ammo. Either I was missing it or there wasn't much yet, but there are dinosaurs here and there. So what do I do, just try to run around a dinosaur blocking the hallway? That's called "take damage and maybe die" and it's really annoying. Sorry, no, I have only bad things to say about th stupid, stupid idea of limiting ammo, I hate it!
The advantage is two-fold: a better knowledge of the area, and more opportunities to find/stow health and ammo.
As for Silent Hill, those stupid birds don't give up on chasing you, but I don't have the ammo to kill them all. Basically I take hits, and eventually die. Nothing can be done about this other than use up the ammo and presumably have not enough later. I think this is awful game design, honestly.
I do understand the concept here, though. For instance, in Resident Evil Survivor, the bad RE lightgun-style game for PS1 that doesn't support a gun in the US (I cover it in this thread), it was kind of tense when I was on my last continue in this game that doesn't let you save your progress, with low health and no more health packs... and then I died after a while, and didn't want to have to start the whole game over. But sure, it was tense. Lots of RPGs limit you by having limited mana and healing items and such too. I don't love that design though... you know, "out of health/mana, go back to town now), it's kind of annoying. It can sometimes work, I guess. But the ammo thing in survival horror games is worse, because there's no way around it, you can't just go back and buy more bullets.
Thinking about it, it's probably this kind of criticism that led shooters, for instance, to abandon health pickups in favor of regenerating health. Regenerating health allows you to create each encounter assuming the player is at an even bar health-wise, which is nice. It also doesn't punish worse players like health pickups (or limited ammo in a survival horror game) does -- the good player isn't going to be as affected by the limited health or ammo, but the bad player sure will be. Is that entirely fair? One of my first experiences with regenerating health (& mana) was Guild Wars 1, and I thought it was a pretty good idea that removed the frustration of limited healing items and let the designers create all encounters evenly. I have less experience with it in shooters, but "hide behind wall during fight to heal" seems kind of dumb, as a game mechanic. At least in GW, you had to wait long enough before healing would start that it almost always would only happen between fights, not during one.
On the other hand I love classic games, having to challenge yourself with a game with limited health pickups can be fun for sure! Doom is a great game. I just don't feel that way about ammo in survival horror. Just trying to ignore the enemies is NOT fun, it's frustrating, particularly when they're trying to attack me! I can't avoid all their attacks, and having to leave enemies lying around is very unsatisfying. And as I said (in the summaries) I don't think too much of survival horror games as adventure games either, so they don't make up for it that way.
Quote:Ya, it's all about the timing. I've played the game for years and even I still have trouble with this. The demon babies have varying walking speeds so it's tricky to get them down right. I favor holding down X to deliver a slow but firm blow to knock them back. Those dead babies are still horrifying, oof. You'd think the effect would wear off all these years.What's the point of even having melee combat options when it controls so badly it's pretty much unusable?
Quote:This is very interesting to me too. I've only been in New England to visit Providence, RI and Vermont, neither of which would be what this game is trying to capture. Even so, I figured that the designers nailed that small town look. If there aren't any places like that in Maine I could see them perhaps in Baltimore. I figured they'd at least get the architecture and small shops right. It felt very touristy but spooky. The amount of details are impressive, Kojima and the Silent Team are a true gift to gaming.Oh, expecting it to not look like Maine isn't a new thing; I remember Weltall saying sometime that one of the SH games has a subway, or something, in the town? Of course, the only subway in New England is the one in Boston. On that note, Silent Hill is a "small town", but how small is it really? "Small" by Tokyo standards (20+ million people) or "small" by northern New England standards (Maine's largest city is ~68,000 people)? I think it's quite clear that this game isn't made like the Grand Theft Auto games are, they don't do site research. They do use English signs, "mph" on speed limit signs, American mailboxes, and such, though, so there is that.
In the game, you start out in this area with oddly wide streets, those crazy-oversized crosswalks, and sizable grass areas between the street and the buildings. They aren't wide enough to be full front yards, though, but are too much for your average town street... it's a weird look, made weirder I'm sure by the ridiculously bad draw distance. You can see what, three feet in front of you a lot of the time?