75 - Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

[matt]

In this diary, I discuss the interesting design choices of Shattered Memories, and what I feel they did right and wrong.

[gagaplex]

Only saw a Let's Play of it, but really enjoyed it. Made me wanna try my own route.
I didn't mind/I liked the lack of combat/enemies, although I disliked the monotony of the enemies. Don't get me wrong, the way they slowly change into a "fitting" monster is awesome (and I had to look up the various possible extremes out of curiosity; also, how characters within the game differ, too), but for every individual playthrough it's only ever the one type of enemy that's "appropriate"? And running really was too samey from the looks of it.
As for the ending, from what I heard the various endings do differ quite a lot, although I suppose the one particular twist was easy to see coming, yes. Do all the endings share that twist, though? I can't remember.

[Grabthehoopka]

I only played the PS2 version, so I didn't get the full experience of using the wiimote as a phone, but I tend to hate motion controls, so I think it balanced out. But one thing that I've never heard anyone bring up before was that, in the PS2 version and presumably the PSP version as well, they implemented button-mashing QTEs better than any game I've ever played.

I hate quick time events, and I especially hate how often developers use them to make us mash a button in order to do something really mundane like open a door or something, but during the chase sequences, when Harry is traversing an obstacle, like climbing over a wall or crawling under an opening, you can mash on the X button to make him go faster. Since the mannequin fetus monsters can outrun you quite handily, this is something you want to do quite often. This act taps into the compulsive human desire to push buttons repeatedly in a futile attempt to make the elevator or walk signal go faster, which translates perfectly into video games, as you'll know if you've ever seen anyone lean into a turn when playing a racing game or mash on the "next" button in those games with really slow, unskippable text crawl. It's usually just as futile in-game, but the fact that they included it as a mechanic makes it incredibly satisfying to do.

If you want to get really, really deep and psychoanalyze the shit out of this, you can turn to the two-factor theory of emotion that Chris' Survival Horror Quest likes to bring up every now and again. We can say that we're smart, logical, and reasonable people, but the fact of the matter is, we've all done this at one point or another, whether we want to admit it or not, and the act of doing this subconsciously brings up memories of doing the same action before. There can be any number of reasons why we can't be patient enough to just push the button once, but regardless of the situation, there is always some element of stress to it, whether it's the external source of an encroaching time limit, or the internal source of being frustrated at waiting. By doing it repeatedly enough, theoretically, your brain could generate the same stress it associates pushing a button repeatedly with, and generate panic where there is none. Yes, I did genuinely feel distress during the chase sequences, and I couldn't tell you if any of that was manufactured whole cloth by my brain because of pushing buttons quickly, but it probably didn't help.

[matt]

I do like to psychoanalyze everything so I quite enjoyed that! Unfortunately, I got waggling, instead of button mashing. While I also hate motion controls, I figured it would be worth playing on the Wii because it was designed around that hardware. For the most part, I was pleasantly surprised with how the flashlight worked with the Wii-mote, but I suspect the chase sequences were definitely made worse by gestures.

I do like mashing buttons!