71 - Deadly Premonition

[matt]

Does anyone else like Deadly Premonition? I sure do!

[Grabthehoopka]

Deadly Premonition is like the game equivalent of an Ed Wood movie. At a glance, it's all just terrible. It looks like a dreamcast/early PS2 game, the voice acting isn't very good, it seems like there's only about half a dozen music tracks that they shuffle through and the audio levels are always mixed really badly in the cutscenes, the controls are awful, the game just feels clunky and weird, it isn't scary, and a lot of things in the game don't make any sense, but...it's really hard to hate. It's not that it was rushed out the door, cause I've heard that this game was originally going to come out on the Xbox and got pushed back. No, just the opposite. You get the sense that the developers just love making games, and were so passionate about making this one that at no point did they realize the game they were making was kind of...terrible. But, that love and passion shines through in just about every aspect of it. It gives you the instinctual urge to hang it up on the fridge for everyone to see!

Funnily enough, I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard that originally, Swery wanted the game to be more like Twin Peaks: The Experience, and it would have been a much more Shenmue-styled adventure game with no combat or anything, just investigation and police work. The publisher, Marvelous Entertainment, heard the pitch, took a glance at the game, immediately foresaw it failing, and pressured them into changing the game to fit into a more conventional, established, and "sellable" genre. So, they shoehorned in the action parts so that they could justify classifying it as a "survival horror" game. I think the game always had those paranormal "otherworld" segments, but that's why the "horror" parts of the game aren't scary, difficult, or very well designed, because the action-oriented gameplay was added in to meet a minimum requirement, and ultimately meant to be glossed over, except for the one important piece of information Agent Francis York Morgan But Everyone Calls Him York discovers at the end of each one.

[matt]

It certainly could be. It definitely seems like the action/horror elements don't quite fit with the rest of the feel of the game. I think I read the postmortem of the game, and it sounded like the main idea was to create a world that feels real with characters with their own motivation and schedules, which definitely is what shined through despite all the rough edges.

I did love the poses of the nightmarish creatures and when they shove their hand down York's throat.

[ranger_lennier]

That game got some wildly discordant reviews. As in 100 from Destructoid and 20 from IGN.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360 ... remonition

Maybe I need to play it just to figure out what all the fuss is about.

[Grabthehoopka]

Maybe I need to play it just to figure out what all the fuss is about.

Everyone should play it at one point or another. It's too weird to live, too rare to die.

[matt]

I think you owe it to yourself to try it. You may hate it, but if you can indeed stomach all the terribleness, it's an amazing game.

[Stefan8000]

oh, i have to play this. looks good. but i think, the steamversion is not the best in the world.

[matt]

The Xbox and PS3 versions are not great either. There are terrible TERRIBLE technical flaws in all the versions. haha I suspect the Steam version is the best because you can play it on a beefy PC and maybe get a decent framerate. The console versions ran poorly.

[Grabthehoopka]

The Xbox and PS3 versions are not great either. There are terrible TERRIBLE technical flaws in all the versions. haha I suspect the Steam version is the best because you can play it on a beefy PC and maybe get a decent framerate. The console versions ran poorly.

No, the PC versions are terrible too, but the benefit is that the modding community will fix all that in no time.

[matt]

Well, I'm sure it was terrible in many similar ways to the console version, but I was speaking specifically in regard to the framerate. Maybe it you have a Geforce Titan you can get 30 FPS. On consoles, you are just screwed. haha! I did hear the modding community is making it much better, which is awesome.