57 - Silent Hill 2

[matt]

In this developer diary, I discuss Silent Hill 2 and the influence it has on Neverending Nightmares.

[loudERIC]

That shirt... perfection.

[matt]

The best part is that it says Buckaroo Bonzai tenth anniversary 1984-1994. I think I bought it at San Diego comic in like... 2004? So they had them printed up 10 years earlier and didn't sell out. hahahaha

[gagaplex]

Couldn't agree more with this; I never played SH2 myself, but I saw an LP of it and even that was quite immersive.
And while I really love the graphical style, the biggest strength so far is the sound design in my view, yes.

[loudERIC]

What's interesting about the visuals of that game is they are a bit dated now, but it holds up better than a lot of games from that same era. Art style is everything for a game.

[Reinik]

Haha, the controls. I remember the first time I played, I kept saying how the controls themselves were scary because I had so much trouble with them.

I agree, the atmosphere is amazing, and it's cool how the enemies are all symbolic [extra layers of meaning wowowow!] and how they're all recognizably different shapes.

[Stefan8000]

and not to forget the songs and melodies. and the ending, when all parts come together. this game was and is so great. i miss it.

[matt]

Yeah the visuals definitely hold up. Even the visuals for Silent Hill 1 still work, which is really amazing. When I played it for the first time (this year), I thought it would be distracting and awful, but I really got into it.

Audio and music is definitely one of Silent Hill's strong suits. As of now, I've played all the Silent Hill games except:
Book of Memories
Downpour
0rigins

I haven't exactly heard good things about those ones though. Are they worth playing?

[Grabthehoopka]

Yeah the visuals definitely hold up. Even the visuals for Silent Hill 1 still work, which is really amazing. When I played it for the first time (this year), I thought it would be distracting and awful, but I really got into it.

Audio and music is definitely one of Silent Hill's strong suits. As of now, I've played all the Silent Hill games except:
Book of Memories
Downpour
0rigins

I haven't exactly heard good things about those ones though. Are they worth playing?

I was talking about that during one of the many skirmishes in the post-Machine for Pigs flame wars in the steam forums. I played Quake fairly recently, and I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but it actually scared me quite a bit. And I think the primary reason why it was so creepy to me was the blocky, low-polygonal, low-res enemy models, and the primitive way they are animated.

When the graphics are crappy like that, you really have to use your imagination to fill in the gaps, since you can't get a 100% clear look at the enemies, even when you're standing over their corpses looking right at them. Since you're actively trying to interpret what you're looking at, you end up conjuring scarier things in your mind than what's actually presented to you, and it's scarier. You're often presented with enemies that are too far away to see clearly, and they just look like blobs of pixels to you, but you still hear the noises they make clearly...

I've never really seen another game like it, but all the enemies are also animated in this choppy, herky-jerk way that almost looks like claymation, and I'm sure the tech behind them actually isn't that different from stop-motion animation. It's actually really cool, it reminds me a lot of the skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts (and one of the enemies is, in fact, a skeleton armed with a sword, naturally). Seeing everything move in that way is off-putting, and puts them squarely in the uncanny valley, since the movements are believable, but nothing actually moves like that in real life.

The graphics between Quake and Silent Hill aren't too different (they were released a year apart), and I think that's why the muddy, indistinct character and environment models hold up so well, because they actually hide details from the player, and that makes it scarier.

[matt]

I believe Quake uses morph targets (individually positioning the vertices) and interpolating them at 10 FPS. We actually do something similar for the animation on Neverending Nightmares, so while it looks hand drawn, it can be smoothly interpolated.

I do agree about using your imagination to fill in the gaps. I think that is one of the things that makes H.P. Lovecraft's fiction so great. He describes how indescribably awful the monsters are.