67 - Silent Hill 4

[matt]

In this video I talk about the good and the bad in Silent Hill 4: The Room.

[Grabthehoopka]

Silent Hill 4 had SO MANY good ideas but SO MANY terrible ideas with such terrible execution that weighed it down! Being mysteriously locked in your apartment for however many days and then finding a portal to a hellish otherworld through a mysterious tunnel in your bathroom wall might be the creepiest concept for a horror game I've ever heard. Overall, I'm glad I played it, but still. It's sad how good this game could have been.

The main character, Henry, is the most boring, wooden, uninteresting, and apathetic main character in any game, ever. It's understandable to some extent, being bored, exhausted, and depressed from his captivity, and possibly unbelieving of what he sees and experiences, but after a certain point you have to start giving a crap, you know? And furthermore, why do developers think weapon degradation is a good thing? I think I've seen it justified and done well, like, once or twice. Every time else is just terrible.

[matt]

I totally agree. I remember when it came out, my buddy at work bought it and we sat in the conference room for the first section of the game mesmerized by its creepiness. Then when he found out he couldn't kill the enemies, he stopped playing - probably forever. hahah But man, the beginning is super creepy!

I think subways are pretty creepy and are always good for horror. FEAR 2 also had a subway scene,and there is a greenlit game that I backed on Kickstarter U55, that takes place in the subways of Berlin. (It didn't meet its kickstarter goal, but they are fortunately still developing it)

Can you name a time that weapon degradation was good? I can't think of any. I was playing System Shock 2, and I think I was so mad they had it, that I started looking for cheats. Even though I think vulnerable and weak characters are really important to horror games, I think they took it too far. There was a postmortem for Silent Hill 4 in Game developer magazine that I read back in 2005 (http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/GD ... h_2005.pdf) were I think that they admitted unkillable enemies was probably a bad thing. I think I'll go back and read it now.

[matt]

I read the postmortem, and a few interesting points:

It was only 500,000 lines of code compared to Retro/Grade's 750,000. (They had 70 developers to our... 3?)
It seems like Wikipedia is wrong about it not being designed from the start to be a Silent Hill game... Although the Silent Hill references do seem very tacked on...

I feel like their what went wrong section missed a lot of the big mistakes. No mid-level bosses?!?! Placements of icons? No UFO ending? Those are their conclusions?!?!

The most WTF statement is "In the future, we will have to consider the possibilities of network gameplay for the SILENT HILL series, among other improvements." I'm glad they didn't pursue that. I am kind of sad that they switched to Western developers after 4. I would have loved to see what Team Silent came up with next...

[Grabthehoopka]

The most WTF statement is "In the future, we will have to consider the possibilities of network gameplay for the SILENT HILL series, among other improvements." I'm glad they didn't pursue that. I am kind of sad that they switched to Western developers after 4. I would have loved to see what Team Silent came up with next...

Agreed. I haven't kept tabs on the Silent Hill series for a while, but I think I heard that the last game that came out was a cooperative dungeon-crawler style game for the PSP? Ugh.

Can you name a time that weapon degradation was good?

The only thing that springs to mind is Condemned 2, since they improved the combat considerably from the first game. Weapons are scattered around, but more importantly, you can carry 2 weapons with you instead of one, and you can still fight with your fists if you don't have one, so your weapon breaking didn't leave you completely helpless. In the first game, blocking was all about timing, which was hard with the enemies' erratic, unpredictable attack animations, but they changed it so that you could just hold down the block button, but getting hit would degrade the weapon. If you hit the block button at the right time, however, you would parry it instead without doing as much damage to the weapon, so they still incentivized you to time it properly.

I forgot about weapon quality in System Shock 2. I didn't think it was that big of a deal, since repairing them when they broke was free, as long as your repair stat was high enough, and carrying around a spare weapon in the early parts of the game helped contribute to me feeling like a resourceful badass, but I agree, they could have left it out and it certainly wouldn't have hurt the game. It suffers from the unforgiving, old-fashioned "you bought it, now deal with it" school of frustrating (by today's standards) game design. You can level up your maintenance and repair ability, but the game doesn't clearly telegraph which stats are more important, and the resource needed to level up is incredibly scarce in the earlier parts of the game, so, they either expect you to find out through trial-and-error, which would involve getting frustrated and starting a new game, but, whatever, "you bought it, now deal with it", or, preferably, make a lucky guess on your first try. And god help you if you decide to make a psionic-based character on your first playthrough.

They also don't tell you to immediately go into options and turn the music volume down to zero so you don't have to deal with the terrible, dated, blaring techno music ruining the game's atmosphere.

Edit: That said, the Siren series, including the more recent Blood Curse, which is sort of an Americanized remake of the first one, were all conceived and directed by Keiichiro Tomoya, the creator of the Silent Hill series and director of the first one, who I guess had a falling out with Konami and left to join Sony Computer Entertainment Japan. Team Silent went on without him, and he founded Team Siren and made the Siren series, and then, curiously, Gravity Rush.

Anyways, the first Silent Hill game has always been my favorite, and I would say that it's pretty different from the direction the series started going down. So basically, Siren is like an alternate-universe Silent Hill series. I would recommend looking into it. From what I've heard, Blood Curse is much more forgiving than the first game was.

[matt]

Yeah, Book of Memories is bizarre. Basically, the Silent Hill games post 4 are as follows:
0rigins - a prequel for PS2 and PSP. I haven't played it because it seemed like basically a rehash
Homecoming - Xbox 360 and PS3. I played it and felt like it was pretty underwhelming.
Shattered Memories - Wii, PS2, and PSP. This one was interesting. It had some good ideas with some really annoying flaws. I'll probably make a video about it.
Downpour - Xbox 360 and PS3. I haven't played it, but it got pretty bad reviews.
Book of Memories - Vita. I have no idea what they were thinking with this one. WayForward talked a bit about its genesis

I'll probably break down and play 0rigins and Downpour at some point, but I doubt I will enjoy them too much. I just love Silent Hill so much that I have Silent Hill cravings. hahah

In Condemned, I played on easy. I couldn't figure out blocking, but fortunately, on easy, I didn't need to. Hahahah! It makes me sad that Monolith stopped developing horror games and is doing weird licensed shit for WB (their new owners)

System Shock 2 is borderline impenetrable these days. Your initial stats are determined by what you study in the very beginning before you have any context for what you are studying. haha

I have definitely been tempted to play Blood Curse, but Chris Pruett said that it isn't nearly as good as the original. He loved the brutal difficulty, so that might be why...

[Grabthehoopka]

I actually loved Shattered Memories a lot, and I think it's a step in the right direction in terms of where the series needs to go. It wasn't very scary, sure, but the linchpin that the Silent Hill series has revolved around has always been unsettling, visceral scariness layered on top of a deeply emotional and personal story, and in my opinion, Shattered Memories is the most emotionally charged, and equally emotionally draining entry in the series since the second one. Despite knowing that I was safe in the exploration segments, I couldn't help but shake this sad, lonely, and despairing feeling that the game just oozed out of every pore. Whenever I stopped playing, the game would stick on me like a cold, wet blanket, and I had to do something to cheer myself up. I can't say that Homecoming affected me quite the same way.

Also, I thought the whole gimmick with character and story details changing depending on your actions, while a little flawed in execution, was woven rather brilliantly into the story.

So, I think that the series has a-ways to go before they make another amazing entry in the series, but I believe that Shattered Memories was a step in the right direction. Also, it should be noted that I played the PS2 version of the game. Despite missing out on all the cool gimmicks, like your phone calls coming through the speaker on the wiimote, I've heard that the controls for the Wii version, particularly for the QTEs, can be nonresponsive and terrible. I regret nothing.

[ranger_lennier]

Can you name a time that weapon degradation was good? I can't think of any.

Assuming there are no genre limitations to the question, I'd say the Fire Emblem series. Every weapon has a limited number of uses before it breaks, and the only way to get new ones is buying them in shops (with limited gold), having them dropped by a few defeated enemies, or finding an occasional treasure chest. So you have to strike a balance between using your best weapons and putting your characters at risk trying to get by with cheap, crappy ones.

[matt]

Hmm... I can see where it might be compelling in a strategy game. I don't have the patience for strategy games myself though.

Usually horror game have more of an action influence, and it's usually frustrating when you are fighting to survive, and your weapon craps out on you.

That is interesting! Thanks for letting me know.

[Grabthehoopka]

Usually horror game have more of an action influence, and it's usually frustrating when you are fighting to survive, and your weapon craps out on you.

Silent Hill: Downpour apparently has a crowbar as one of the many weapons you can use, and it too breaks. I guess they didn't do their research, otherwise they'd know that crowbars are manufactured for the sole purpose of being impossible to break.