Reader Questions no.3

Left these for a while, answering a few.

Via twitter from Daniel Ross: "you write a lot about games would you ever want to make them?"

Honestly? from a technical side? no, been there, tried that. as dull as the devils face. Never want to do that again. Though i would very much want to writer/direct a videogame. but coding? modelling? real technical stuff? never again folks.

From an email from 'darknezzzgoeff': "I visit all these horror sites but my favourites would be yours and christ survival horror quest you should look it up! (im a reader of it) but you have very different ideas and tastes why do you think that is?"

Simple, entertainment, like art is subjective. One mans greatest game is anothers piece of crap. Take obscure 2, i loved it as a homage to 90's horror films, Chris from the site mentioned above really disliked it mostly due to thematic content. Is either right? no but neither is wrong either. In fact to get a good gauge on how a game is you need to read all the opinions, not just all the high ones or all the low ones.
I dont agree with a lot of his opinions just because i have different tastes but i would definitely recommend them for sincere credibility on his opinion. Its one very much worth paying attention to if you like horror games. visit his site on the links list to the right to check it out.

From an email from Alyx Soni: "is left 4 dead survival horror?"

No, i'd say it's survival panic. The goal isn't to scare you with oppressive dread on what might happen but instill adrenaline pumping panic about what you know WILL happen, just not exactly when at all times.
This is aided by the multiplayer aspect, which makes it more engrossing when its not an a.i being ravaged by a hunter but a real life friend whos crowding up party chat with vile obscenities.

From a tweet by 'crazy leon': "Ever gonna mention your top 5 worst horror games."

HURM. Not a bad idea for an article.

That's 4 for now, i'm out. thanks for reading as always gentle internet folken.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories - The Review

Developer: Climax Studios
Publisher: Konami digital entertainment
Platforms: Ninentdo wII, PSP, PS2
Released: December 8th 2009


This is a tough one. really, i mean that.

This is a very hard game to surmise, to attempt to quantify the sum of its parts as some value of its worth as entertainment. To be honest its hard to call this a videogame, let alone a horror one.

Near as i can judge its an interactive experience that, unlike heavy rain, does not try to be that. It is just what its become in the process of telling its story.

Or telling Konami's story, again, i should say.

So yeah, read on but bear in mind, regardless of arbitrary scoring at the end this is a prime example of how i am one guy and as such the scores of meaningless, its just a process to express my feelings about a game upon completion of it having seen all it has to offer you as a genuine opinion of one person who loves horror games to another.


So silent hill shattered memories is a retelling of the original game in what most consider resident evils long standing rival to the survival horror franchise crown. A game that got me into the genre, a game that layered nuance, subtext and context upon the player in a way not truly seen before in videogames as a medium.
To be honest i was pretty damn wary of this. The more time passes the more i am so utterly disappointed by the cheap name drop cash in that is silent hill origins. So news of the same developer handling a re-imagining of the source of it all?
Madness, surely.

Well i was wrong, if silent hill origins is the worst experience in the franchise, including the gba visual novel and arcade lightgun machine game, then shattered memories is one of the best, in some ways usurping its original.

The game plays as an over the shoulder style explorative action adventure come light puzzler. You play Harry mason, driving along in the car with his daughter cheryl, only to crash it. Not in fog this time, or due to the ghost of some spiritual half a girl but to a blizzard the likes of which silent hill has never seen.
See Harry is not passing through silent hill this time. it is his home. trouble is he doesnt remember a lot of things about the town, and other people live in his house...
Of course Cheryl disappears and Harry spends the game looking for her, traversing silent hill proper and also some of its surrounding countryside.
The game is faily linear but the linearity is never the same at defining points. this is all controlled by the games 3 piece play system.

The first type of play is i lonely exploration of the 'real world'. A mundane snowy town thats got most inhabitants in the warmth behind closed doors. There are no monsters, no nightmares round the bend. Just a man looking for his missing daughter. A very real nightmare for every parent that requires no fictional entities to make it all the more dreadful.
This portion plays like an amusement park ride. See the sights of silent hill. An easter egg filled walk through the town where you learn as much or as little about the game as you want. There is no reason to not stop and spend as much time as you want in every area exploring every nook and cranny and drinking it all in.
The second type of play is the psychological evaluations. In first person perspective you the player are interviewed by dr. kaufman- now less a creepy peddler of drugs than a doppleganger for mass effects illusive man- who wants to help you with your apparent mental problems.
To do this you undertake certain tests as the game progresses. either you solve a riddle, or colour a drawing or just answer some yes/no questions about yourself. The opening titles recommend being as truthful as possible and i did and it was an interesting process because your choices and therefore your mental outlook shape the game around you.
Maybe you come to a small shopping arcade and there are a number of stores, but only one leads to the next area. Maybe guy A plays it and its the record store, but girl B plays it and its the electronics store. This all depends on the player and the unconscious choices they make.
There is no stark fable style good or evil choices. its all subjective. There are things like if you tend to linger the camera on the breasts of mannequins or female characters and the players lecherous nature will alter the game to suit there psyche. The enemies hips will bell out and there faces will become more feminine, cybil will dress in a much less....professional way. Whereas if you prefer art or posters then maybe the enemies look more like sculptures and dahlia seems more punk-ey than junky.
The third portion is the other world. Every time Harry nears a crucial point in the plot the world literally ices over in deep glaciers of nightmarish, angry jagged exploding ice like glass from hell. This world is full of the rawshocks. An obvious play on the psychological term rorschach tests that also change depending on the player. all starting as some raw fleshed skinned humanoid nightmare thats only goal is chase Harry through these mazes of ice and darkness and grapple him to the ground for a nasty end. Which is an ironic metaphor in a remake of a game where the spirit of the horror has gone from oppressive isolation to crushing loneliness- and this game is very much about loneliness on a few levels. You can hide from them for a time, use flrase and fire to keep them back and move obstacles to slow them down but these adrenaline fuelled periods of terror in between the calm have a single focus 'RUN'. you cannot fight them, you cannot win, all you can do is run from the problem and find a safer place to continue you journey to cheryl. a journey that will be different for most of you.

Basically its all based on you with no stark right or wrong. Because whilst there are 'good' and 'bad' endings the story is always the same.

And it is most certainly a sad one.

This is a completely different silent hill story. its still got the same named characters and places, and Harry still needs to find his daughter, but the whos, whys and wheres are a very different silent hill. Dahlia is not only a young woman but she is Harrys wife, there is no cult, no white drug, no out and out supernatural evil.
Like the games development the story is a much more personal affair. You are not saving the world in some way, or fighting a dark god or some other detracting out of left field enemy but from beginning to end this is a story of a father and his daughter and there separation. This simplicity and sole focus doesn't not detract from shattered memories, in fact i can say it only strengthens it. The game pulls you in in a completely different way per person, two friends will play it and feel completely differently about the plot twists and characters by the end than the other.

Personally i found the game surprisingly engaging on an emotional level. I went in expecting weird shit and lame attempts to scare, but honestly between tense marathons from rawshocks, and the creepy exploring the story i got was much more touching than i expected. My ending in particular got a rise out of me few movies or games have in a decade.
However like i emphasised this may differ completely for you. Based on you and how you played you may be left hating the characters and the story.

But can anyone hate the experience?

I don't believe so.


Gameplay was its a very different silent hill. nunchuk controllers movement and the wiimote is everything from harrys arm holding the torch in third person to a key in a lock or a channel tuner on a trv to a hand you move to solve puzzles like shaking tins to hear if theres a key in one you can upturn to get it out.
No longer is there a radio but a smart phone that you use to take pictures, save, load the menu and even take calls that involve you holding the wiimote to your ear to hear out of its speaker a eerie message left by some emotional ghost or a call from another townsfolk out in the blizzard.

Honestly i wasn't expecting these motion controls to work but they are intuitive and engaging- and capable of more than i would have thought on the wii, especially the torch in a game that for its platform looks absolutely fantastic.
The biggest complaint is the visual cues on how to shake the wiimote and nunchuck to shake off rawshocks during the otherworld phases are often wrong or the movement detection doesnt work well. but truthfully its pretty easy to get through without getting caught once and a handy check point system means even if you do its not an hour of gametime lost or anything.
The biggest portion of the games controls or harry interacting with the normal world and most use the wiimote and the a and trigger and somehow climax made so many things feel intuitive and natural with this claw grip motion.
The camera and torch acting as the same hand as the point of view works seamlessly in this snowy town and the option to zoom in and focus makes it much less constrictive than it would appear to be in the limit range of movement given to a sensor bar compared to a never ending thumbstick held in one direction.
An excellent example of the zoom being in the elementary schools principles office where harry must decipher his password by exploring every nook and cranny of his office to find every clue to get in to find what he needs.
In fact most of the puzzles are well thought out. none are truly hair ripplingly tough but all are neat. another involves altering the positions of statues so there shadows spell out a word. something done in real time with a very impressive lighting engine for this not so hardware heavy console.

The voice acting is not its strongest point but its not resident evil level cheese at all. harry is played as a normal guy. and i mean a truly normal guy, not the hollywood 'normal' guy that other games like alan wake or heavy rain failed to capture. He truly comes off as a poor man caught in a terrible situation. and each member of the backup cast no matter how small there part all put in the effort.

Soundtrack wise its Akira Yamoakas last silent hill soundtrack and he goes out with a bang, like the voice acting id say it pales to silent hill 2s raw emotional nature of it but it still knocks it out of the park. in particular another series of collaborations with mary elizabeht mglynn are haunting and beautiful.
Also it was nice on a personal note to see the change from foggy or rusty nightmare to a more natural, but out and out psychologically devastating world meant we see akira abandon his usual heavy industrial interludes for a more melancholic sound that only serves to emphasise this game is less about making the player feel scared at the oppressive, almost hateful nature of the world around them. But sad, lonely and altogether isolated. not only from the townsfolk in the blizzard but form the protagonist himself.


All in all it is an experience that is hard to evaluate. which is why i will probably deem this my worst review to date but honestly this is a game you need to play. it is the best silent hill game since 2 and you will give a shit about these characters and not just wait to see who gets killed off if and when the next dramatic push forward occurs.

Is it a masterpiece? not at all. the very nature of its split play style means you get wise to it and know "no ice, im safe no worries" or "ice, dont worry, this will have a set end point i just need to reach". This is why i feel it fails utterly as a horror game, because it gets less scary as the game goes on.

However this fault does not dull that fact that this is a pretty damn unique experience in the way that makes silent hill great. does a silent hill game have great combat? no. fluid controls? not really. Tough characters you can get behind? never.
It does have memorable characters, a superb soundtrack, a spooky world you will adore to explore every facet of and an ending that leaves you numb as the credits role.

You know how i classify this kind of game?

It's Silent HIll. simple as that.


SCORE [9/10]

SCARE FACTOR [4/10]

just a tidbit.

So whilst busy with a lot of boring junk i did manage to poi'chus' playstation move and heavy rain move edition for the playstation 3.

After spending quite a while with it i will say that it is lighter and much more comfortable than the wiimote, the battery lasts longer and it is much more responsive than the wii mote. Though i can complain that the camera doesn't track it as consistently as the wii sensor bar and the buttons are still poorly arranged.

I think a motion controller with a hand held interface should not be a long remote, it should be something ergonomic and hand fitting- hell i'll conjure the powergloves vile name for this.
In games that have you open locks, sword fighting or aiming and shooting a pistol you want to grip it in the curvature of your hand, not have something you hold at an odd end of middle point like move or the wiimote.

Dont get me wrong, in terms of controller design the move is a step up from the wii's controller, but they could have continued the curve motif and make it curve slightly to fit a hand more ergonomically, and add the start and select next to each other and not on equidistant on either side of the tubular surface of the thing.

Of course im sure they wanted to get around the 'why would i purchase a family member a black button covered dildo?' but honestly at least it doesnt vibrate...


Honestly its worth the cash, particularly when you consider the line up which is why im posting this here.

2011 is looking to be the year for the ps3 in terms of what most games enthusiasts want. the wii's kinda slowing to a crawl, microsoft is really focussing on kinect, a novel interface but not a list of titles i know most folks whove played games for more than 15 years now don't really care about as the focus point to there console experience, but the ps3 is releasing a lot of new games, a lot of big name sequels included and many of them are being made move compatible as a bonus.

The big seller for me is dead space 2, which i still cannot find any concrete evidence that the full game is move compatible or just the hd port of the wii railshooter dead space extraction. However i have heard it mentioned here and there, honestly the idea of standing in a dark room fighting of necromorphs with a motion controller is scary, exciting and potentially embarassing in equal measure. Judging from the out and out resi 4 control style mimicry im hoping it is, since resi 4 on the wii was a hoot and im tempted to get resident evil 5 on the ps3 for move, even with boulder punch wagglan.

There are also rumours that siren blood curse is getting a patch to make it move compatible and its not just these 3 horror games on the list.

all in all if you are a horror games fan and dig immersion or new ways to play- especially if you tried shattered memories or fatal frame 4 on the wii the next 2 years are going to be quite exciting for horror motion gaming. So if you have £45 laying around and own a ps3 grab a move, yes it is a wii knockoff, but its the price of one game to play games in an entirely new way and while that may be odd if you werent around for the mass peripheral whoring of the NES days thats well worth it lemme tell you.

"So why don't people like Alan Wake?"

Before i put up my review for Alan Wake i thought this was note worthy to write about.

I had been following Alan Wake for about 6 or 7 year maybe and as such had a lot of prior knowledge about it before it's release. However many of my friends had barely heard of it before it came out earlier this year, and many of them had been put off by the lukewarm reviews.
Knowing these type of videogames were my forte' and i usually end up being the go to guy when they have a question like "what does X mean in silent hill?" or "how do i do blank in resident evil?" they all approached me with the same question: "What's the deal with Alan Wake's reviews?"
See anyone can tell paid reviews are... i don't want to say crooked, just skewed. for example Halo Reach is getting 10/10 scores, but still has plenty of criticisms in the reviews. That doesn't make sense. giving something an absolute perfect score. saying it cannot be any better and then listing off its faults? its why i dislike numerical grading. Grading is subjective and articles should impress an opinion of the experience, nothing more- but thats a debate for another time. Point being, people are giving an impression of the experience. A game could be excelling in all its points from a technical standpoint and yet still the review is always the written expression of the reviewers experience.
Which in the case of Alan Wake will often be marred by a pre-associated stigma in my opinion.

To be blunt, even with little knowledge of the games development, Alan Wake is an extreme case of 'what might have been'.

Let's go back to the beginning shall we?, It's the early 2000's and Remedy entertainment, creators of the critically acclaimed Max Payne series announce they are working on a 'dark survival horror game' according to a small blurb in the Official xbox 360 magazine. This naturally piqued my interest, i believe my ravings at the time involved "its my favorite genre made by the developers of my favorite shooter!" or something along those lines.
Keeping my ear to the ground i searched out what little tidbits of information i could find. This would be a long wait however as it would be nearly 7 years before i got my hands on the finished product (In which time i started attending and successfully graduated from college AND university), the product i eventually got was not what i had been so eagerly awaiting however.

The earliest premise i can recall- and forgive any possible inaccuracies, as i've said its been a long time since i first heard about the original version of Alan Wake,- was a 'dark survival horror-thriller' about a writer named Alan wake, a insomniac who's wife had left him and with it he lost his muse and his writing ability. She had recently disappeared at the start of the original story, Alan alone headed to the washington state costal town of Bright Falls for some much needed R&R. He beings writing a book filled with and fueled by his nightmares. However Alan soon finds out that when the sun goes down the idyllic town changes, his nightmares come to life and a group of men in yellow raincoats are hunting him down. 'They come for him at night, and light is his only ally'. The tone was different, This wasn't a gritty episodic thriller, the music was different the world seemed different to the finished product. Even Alan himself was different. Hell the very type of game was different.



What we were shown was a free roam sandbox game unlike anything that had came before it and in all honesty still has yet to appear at all. By day alan explored the countryside, the towns and farms and locale's of bright falls in search of clues as to what was going on. By night the world turned against him and Alan needed sleep. Using Coffee thermos' scattered around the world to stay 'A.Wake' (ba-dum-pish) he could find a safe haven, somewhere either secure or a place he could rig with traps to ward off the light sensitive 'dark townspeople' that were hunting him down when the sun fell. One early example being using a tripwire and a floodlight to light up a narrow hallway if the door to it was broken down.
Whilst this may seem vaguely reminiscent of the likes of dead rising, albeit on a much larger scale, back then this was a completely new thing. As the game progressed we saw new stuff being demo'ed to show how far this amazing game was coming along. There was nothing but good praise for it "it represents everything exciting about the future of video games" "most eye catching game of e3" "i literally could find no better looking game" ect, ect.
The last big thing was this tech demo for intel's at the time most impressive core for gaming rigs which at the time was jaw dropping.



Then? nothing. The game fell completely off the radar. spending a few years considered as vaporware that would remain only a legend that never saw the light of day. Which in a way wasn't too far from the truth. Most people forgot about the game and those that didn't only looked at it fondly as something that 'would have been cool' and just dismiss it for the next big game that was soon to come out. Almost to the point where Alan Wake was considered this generations Duke Nukem forever ,which at the time of writing i can't help but grin to myself about that.
Then finally three years ago Kotaku announces that Remedy has confirmed the project to still be in production but it has been "reworked" and the team are 'taking a break' to revitalize themselves for the "new" Alan Wake, leaving many wondering just what happened to the old one they spent the last four years working on.

Then there were rumors of a windows vista exclusivity which in fact would later turn out to be completely unfounded. Not only that but the game was not coming to pc at all, and was in fact an xbox 360 exclusive game now.
Which, needless to say, annoyed many and the next announcement annoyed as many, if not more and left many confused. The game we would be getting was not what we had been waiting for. We would now be getting a story heavy, strictly directed episodic game. Basically the final version you have probably all played by now.
The official line was that sandbox just didn't work to direct a heavy story which isn't strictly accurate for anyone who has played the likes of Grand Theft Auto 4 or red dead redemption- a game that was in development for 5 years and released on the same day as Alan Wake- and that the game was rebuilt from the ground up as a "dvd boxset of a tv series" in terms of structure style instead. Something tried a while back by Alone in the Dark and wasn't particularly well liked for the choice then.

Of course there were rumors as to why this stark change was made. Some said money, Many blamed Microsoft. The most common was the crisis of the time forcing many studios to close, Rare being the poster-child example at the time, and that making the game was simply proving too complex and expensive and so to save the project they reworked it into a smaller game the console could handle. With lead by the hand directed pathways between set pieces, isolated by steep drops or high fences, to keep the player on track through small cross sections cut out of the ghost of the former, much grander world.

-and therein lies the problem.

What we see is good, great even (but wait for my review for that), however this is always damped by the ever constant looming, weighty shadow of what might have been this sense that no matter how good the product we receive is it still remains only a hurried cobbling together of parts from a far grander work to save a project from failure and that remedy had no problem releasing a neutered bare basics pale imitation of the original, eagerly demanded game was proposed to be.
Now this does not mean the game we have is bad. at all. It does mean however that if the reviewer has been following the products creation for its entirety there opinion can be very harshly skewed by said feelings of being handed a half hearted, uninspired product only put out to recompense the developers on there losses.

At the end of the day though it is just as likely as any negative possibility that one day the developers just went "you know what, this isn't working out as what we want" and took it back to the drawing board. Which is absolutely okay and there is nothing wrong with such a decision. The most famous of which being the complete redesign of resident evil 2 long into its development cycle- and the series' 4th installment too now that i think about it.

Yet no matter how great resident evil 2 was, we always want to see the "resident evil 1.5" that might have been (which is actually possible- more on that at another time), the scrapped version could be absolutely terrible, full of ideas that seem great but utterly fail. However the fact that there is a version we will never play has an air of mystery and revealing of the 'man behind the curtain' to it in equal measure.
We feel something is kept from us that may be just as good, if not better, than what we paid our hard earned money for. At the same time it just shows the developers are more than a logo on the case. They are human. They can make mistakes, bad design choices and can also have the good fortune to perceive these problems and take more time out of there own lives to improve on it till they feel it is ready for you, the audience. Still this ability to fail can inspire a lack of confidence and make us more, if not overly, critical of faults in the final product and judge it on "what could have been" instead of the faults and merits of the stand alone shipped retail product which is all a review should ever do. Honestly i think there are very few reviews for it that don't have a little bit of that sentiment to the final opinions on the critiques of the game and i have had to think really hard before finishing my review if i am letting my prior knowledge alter my opinion. At the end of the day i managed to write a review for Alan Wake, the game remedy worked damn hard for you on for a long, long time and write about the game, without wondering about the game we could have gotten.

For at the end of the day this is what Remedy had the pride to put there name on and ship with confidence that it represents the best they could do with the project. Sure things could have been better if things had been done a different way, if it stayed on the pc as well. At the end of the day this is what we received and can only judge it as such. Still i'm sure for many reviewers this has proved hard to do and i don't blame them. I don't think it means you should dismiss the reviews, i just hope i made some sense with this lengthy diatribe and you see what i mean or at least made some sense out of this wall of text in which i have tried to express my opinion some of the overly, an seemingly unneeded, harsh criticisms you have seen and emailed me about.

-and most of all, as usual, thanks for taking the time to read and i hope you found it interesting as always.

I caved.

So...yeah. That's a new XBOX 360. What can i say, i never really play my PS3 much and my Wii hasnt gotten any play since mario galaxy came out so i went with what i unfortunately own most of my games on.

Let's just see how long this one will last huh?

Goodnight sweet prince.

HURM.



I get back into playing some horror games. whats come out that i havent posted about? resident evil 5, left 4 dead 2, silent hill homecoming ect. ect. What do i own them all on? the xbox.

I turn it on and 40 seconds later it red rings. superb. Not my first, just my first microsoft won't repair for less than £100.

*sigh* i don't know why i keep putting up with this....

Something neat for PS3 owners in the uk

So i took one of my bi-yearly trips into playstation home to have a nosey and wouldn't you know it but they've added-in summer for some reason, the haunted house hospital,'the ward of despair' from siren blood curse that was released on halloween in '09.

I don't know why we have it now, maybe its been hidden in the mess of files home was till the last interface update but its there, its free and im about to give it a shot. Two sec's.

.....Okay, tried it. Its a little janky, but its got a few genuine jump scares. you and 5 other people are meant to work together to escape.
You really dont work together, you basically set off alarms and stuff to get keys and stuff to escape the hospital from siren. Its a little creepy and i jumped once. it even attempts to use resident evil set camera angles.
Don't get me wrong its not that great but ive seen worse in retail games and this was just a neat freebie so give it a try!