What games are you currently playing?

[mawk]

hey back on silent hill shattered memories

how effective is the whole OKAY TAKE THIS QUIZ WE WILL MANIFEST YOUR INNER DEMONS IN THE GAME thing? first I heard of it it sounded incredibly hokey and too fundamentally limited to be very effective but I'd like to find out how it works regardless

and my consoles are in another city so

also does it suck any less than homecoming? imo the series is pretty much impossible to recover at this point since the new studio doesn't seem to get the point behind half of the original games' facets (okay first off PLEASE START RELATING THE MONSTERS TO THE PROTAGONIST INSTEAD OF JUST GOING FOR WHAT SEEMS SCARY OKAY) but w/e I'm an optimist

 

[moog]

home coming was HORRIBLE im pretty sure SM was better

 

[mawk]

it really was terrible

I like how Pyramid Head is basically SH's Cloud by now. gratuitous cameos where he isn't needed, an obvious imitation (the Butcher), etc. I get that he was a very popular character but he has no reason to be doing any of this unless James Sunderland is stalking poor Alex for all Homecoming's duration!

I don't even get why he's that popular, really. I mean, okay, his design was sort of cool! but not that cool! it says unfortunate things about gamers that they gravitate towards the one character who has no role in the game except incredible brutality!

(even creepier are the fangirls)

(of course that variety of fangirl is fairly creepy regardless of what fandom they belong to, but this situation has the added factor of just how creepy "I would let X rape me" sounds in any context)

 

[Venetia]

there are fangirls who say they'd let PH rape them :x?

im a big SH fan but uh
idk
yikes

anyway homecoming was made by an american studio. they did everything i worried they'd do: they based a lot of the effects and monsters off the american movie (which imo wasn't a horrible movie but def wasn't totally true to the series and def shouldnt have been ganked for ideas), and they made things more about action!action!action! than exploring and being creeped the fuck out by subtlety. oh yeah and they kept PH in it, despite it being James's special monster, mostly because the movie did it. (in the game PH even had beetles and shit running around it: something only done in the movie)

i dont think the series is unsalvageable but they are going to need to sit down and say "how do we make a better SH2" instead of anything else. because god damn it SH2 was freaking great.

 

[Venetia]

in 1, 2, and to a slightly lesser extent, 3, SH always based the environments and monsters and items and puzzles and lesser chars off metaphors for foreshadowing and symbolism of the main character's foibles and troubles and inner demons. 4 seemed to ignore that completely (ghost's! and also the main character, did he even have any inner-demons? maybe besides lusting after the neighbor chick), but it was still legit creepy because of the apartment first-person element.

5 actually TRIED to touch on it for a few environs and puzzles (the strange meat-chopping room of his dad's and the masks of his mother, pictures from his li'l bro etc) but then ignored it entirely everywhere else. it had creepy potential, to be certain (every parent kills their own kid in some brutal fashion then tries to cover it up? yeah thats def potential) but it was executed in a really sub-par fashion.

the only part of homecoming that was really worth its salt was the very beginning when whats-his-face is being wheeled through the hospital, and the camera lightly touches upon views of the horrors in the other surgical rooms, which were all representations of the childrens' sacrfices. and, perhaps, the death of the mother, just because yiiccckkkk that was a nasty choice to have to make.

 

[mawk]

there are fangirls who say they'd let PH rape them :x?

in droves. I'm surprised you haven't seen any.

the biggest thing that disappointed me about Homecoming was the series of endings you could get. it was the same sort of thing that Origins did; the endings weren't for the purpose of the story as much as they were there for shock. tell me how making certain decisions gets Alex inexplicably teleported and bound to a chair where he gets made into another Pyramid Head (which, like all other SH monsters, are constructs of the protagonist's subconscious and never were human in the first place)? SH2's stuff was more logical, with the obvious exception of the joke endings. your playstyle influenced James' decisions, rather than just random endgame events, and in a more logical way, too.

Spoiler

if you abuse Maria and keep looking at Mary's letter, James gets more and more obsessive and at the end goes off to try and bring her back to life via ~*~spooky magic~*~. if you keep looking at the knife (which is loaded with suicidal symbolism) and fight Maria, James commits suicide to be with Mary. it's sort of beautifully done, how James himself is the wildcard for the endings; it really drives home that while the town is trying to kill him in more immediate fashion, he's the worst for himself.

one, three, and four didn't allow you to influence the protagonists decisions after the end; the consequences and actions that led to them were more obvious (i.e. if you let your apartment get all haunted it's gonna be sort of uninhabitable even after you kill the bad guy), but it wasn't this ridiculous MAKE THESE THREE YES OR NO DECISIONS IN A CERTAIN PATTERN AND REALITY WILL CHANGE SIGNIFICANTLY shit

 

[Venetia]

yeah i totally agree. also in sh2 the other characters, though they were somewhat extensions of james himself, had their own massive problems (i.e. 'daddy stop raping me!!!!!' and 'oh god i'm such a loser omnomnomnom'). and that fucking little girl who had no problems and saw the world for real instead of the poop nuggets everyone else saw. that really added a huge layer of depth.

lastly: the sh2 ufo ending was amazing

Spoiler: sh2 ufo ending

james, weary from a long ordeal, finds a cartoonesque ufo in the woods. inside he finds a little shiba-inu dog, working the controls with his paws. james dramatically falls to his knees and cries "it was you all along!!!" and fade to black. where we are met with the ending theme song entirely done in barks.

heh heh i almost cried from laughing the 1st time i saw it

 

[Jason]

fuck enix

dude you realize enix was waaaaay more successful than square and pretty much took over them? the only reason the name is the same is to keep fans from not raging

also check out QUINTET if you still dont like enix; those were probably the best games on the snes, and some TRIACE ones tooooo

Yeah, obviously I know that Enix were more successful, but you can't get me to change my opinion lol, the only DQ game that I've liked is VIII (I've played 'em all up-to-date), I've never heard of Quintet anyways, and I'll say there's a few good TriAce games.

But still, I prefer the original Squaresoft to after Enix took over, it's as if their games have gone down the drain... and by that I mean the ones they actually develop, not what they publish, I mean, seriously, one of the first things they made as Square Enix... Final Fantasy X-2, which if you ask me was a fucking digrace to a masterpiece of a game (In my opinion atleast).

But meh, we all have our opinions, lol.

 

[mawk]

actually there's another ufo ending!

Spoiler

it's basically shot in the style of an ass-old silent movie; still frames, grainy quality, poor music and sound effects. a troop of UFOs approaches James, and who should emerge but Harry Mason? they exchange their respective lines ("have you seen a little girl/my wife?") before one of the aliens accompanying Harry zaps James with a ray gun and drags him back inside. the UFOs then depart.

 

[mawk]

also jbrist ff7, ff8, and ffX were terrible and they kept the same core people after the takeover/merger so I'm not sure how you can really argue that they've gone downhill

esp. considering 12 was not bad!

 

[Jason]

See, that's another opinion, like I said, we've all got our own opinions, you can't MAKE me agree with you that they're better now that Enix have taken over, cause I think the exact opposite, although VII and VIII are still the worst two lol.

 

[mawk]

thing is I've at least offered better reasoning for mine :x

you originally backed it up on the basis of the game releases but now that you've turned around and admitted shit was not so cash even before the takeover you have less to stand on

 

[Jason]

I don't get the "shit was no so cash" part o.O

 

[mawk]

that stuff was not very good

 

[Jason]

Oh I see...

...

... But I'm still not changing my opinion, lol.

 

[Venetia]

actually there's another ufo ending!

Spoiler

it's basically shot in the style of an ass-old silent movie; still frames, grainy quality, poor music and sound effects. a troop of UFOs approaches James, and who should emerge but Harry Mason? they exchange their respective lines ("have you seen a little girl/my wife?") before one of the aliens accompanying Harry zaps James with a ray gun and drags him back inside. the UFOs then depart.

8O!

j-just when i thought i knew everything there was to know about sh2 .................

 

[Mega Flare]

Final Fantasy 8! been wanting to replay it but my 2nd disc stop working. Now that its on the psn i can play it again :D

 

[mawk]

why

 

[Mega Flare]

cause i like final fantasy 8 you fag

 

[mawk]

why

it has almost no redeeming features