Silent Hill 2

[StarStruckStrumpets]

I was watching the making of Silent Hill 2 yesterday, I got the special edition, and I was so damn suprised at how young the development team were. Not that this is anything to do with Silent Hill's quality, I just thought I'd introduce my statement with a little ice-breaker.

I love the symbolism of Silent Hill, the suggestively horrific scenes really do grab your nerves and slowly cut them with rusty scissors. Most games seem to miss the point, you can't have a game with excellent game-play and no story, unless it's something like Eat Lead, a game which knows what it wants to be.

Silent Hill, at least the ones made by Team Silent, are truly works of art, and there is no mistaking that the story was nothing short of epic if you really kept your attention on it. Yahtzee was right about PoP: Sands of Time too. The love-interest sub-plot wasn't made to feel as if it didn't belong there, the characters were believable, and it just made everything so much funnier when they slowly argued themselves into the love-trap.

Yahtzee was right, if a game had the immersive atmosphere of the Silent Hill games, and the gameplay of...well, a good game, then it WOULD be an instant classic, sadly I can't think of any game that has both. Silent Hill's combat was sucky, but it was sucky for a reason. I felt quite annoyed when Silent Hill: Homecoming's protaganist was ex-military. I don't want a combat master, I want a guy with a wooden plank and a nail!

 

[tehroc]

I'd like to add one...

Thou shall give me control within the first five minutes after starting a new game.

Nothing irritates me more then having to go through 30 minutes of cutscene after starting a new game. I didnt fire up the system to watch movies, I fired it up to play games. Even if it just the tutorial in the first 5 minutes, that's fine, just give me control.

 

[cj_iwakura]

I like his columns just as much as the videos, since they're more about legitimate critiques than comedy. (Not that the latter's bad or anything)

 

[khaimera]

You are correct, you're missing the point.

Thanks for that. Do you troll here often?

Seriously though, what's the point in you posting that, and then not explaining the point that I seem to be missing? Hmmm... I get the feeling this may go on for quite a while.

I sort of agree with you. Why not just make the review longer. Or maybe just put out a video and text review. What if good stuff was left out to use in this piece. Its kind of like DLC not just being put into the original game.

 

[blacklab]

lol, child please.

 

[WaderiAAA]

I totally agree on that no enemies should be considered evil to begin with. Sadly I haven't played any game with proper character development for the bad guy - Though FF IV, Super Paper Mario and Majora's Mask did make the effort to try.

 

[WaderiAAA]

I don't know how to say it properly in old-school language, but there should be this one:

All cut-scenes must be skippable.

I mean, someone doesn't like the cut-scenes. When I played TP, I watched all the cut-scenes, but when playing it again, it was great that I had the opportunity to skip them.

 

[WaderiAAA]

My point is, or more specifically, my question is, why? Why does Extra Puntuation exist? (...) It's just extra work for Yahtzee that simply isn't needed.

Maybe someone from The Escapist can comment on this, but my guess would be that they are paying him to write a column in addition to the ZP videos, and presumably that's because people like Yahtzee and they hope that more Yahtzee means more traffic for the site. So I would think that, yes, it's more work for him, but probably it's paid work. (I have no inside information about this, but he's a professional writer, why wouldn't he be paid for writing more for them?)

According to himself, he actually wants to be constructive in terms of telling people how he thinks games should be designed. Extra punctuation has a lot of the constructiveness that he doesn't take time to include in zero punctuation.

You know, it's not always about money, at least not for everyone.

 

[ckam]

Thou shalt not be on the Wii. That one was fun, but I do agree with the stuff your talking about.

 

[elbowlick]

During the bit about conduits control scheme, I recalled Silent Hill's "3D" style of movement. Am I the only one who repeatedly turned that off as soon as I figured that was an option? I mean, yes I get it's purpose. It makes controls more clumsy and contributess to the weak average main character instead being an action hero, like in Resident Evil, but it's frustrating.

 

[Ericb]

During the bit about conduits control scheme, I recalled Silent Hill's "3D" style of movement. Am I the only one who repeatedly turned that off as soon as I figured that was an option? I mean, yes I get it's purpose. It makes controls more clumsy and contributess to the weak average main character instead being an action hero, like in Resident Evil, but it's frustrating.

This very week I started to replay SH2 on account of Yahtzee's review, but eventually let it go precisely because of the controls.

I tried switching it to the easier 2D style, but honestly it just felt like an after-thought on the designers part.

And although I get the argument that the tank-like controls are to increase the sense of not playing with a space marine instead of a avergae joe just barely surviving and all. But it just doesn't cut.

Since I've already finished it last time I played, giving up on playing it wasn't a hard decision. Because that design approach is a bad one. If you've ever seen or been a person acting on a fight-or-flight response under stressful situations, you'll know that they can move faster then what was previously thought possible.

It's entirely possible to be an average person on a game without crippling their most basic motor skills.

Still a beautiful and atmospheric game, but the controls are more in keeping of an old design tradition (Alone in The Dark, Resident Evil) than actual enhancement of gameplay (to me, quite the contrary).

I know I'll still give a on on hard difficulty, maybe after I've gone through the original Alone in the Dark trilogy. By then I'll be more tolerant of those controls again.

 

[bakagami]

I agree with the fallout and oblivion thing. I love those games but when I am having a conversation with someone, I feel a little weirded out at times and I never make eye contact, I remember the first person you meet in silent hill 2. I was feeling creeped out by her.

I ran across this great redubbed parody of that scene by a guy named Fungo:
http://www.gametrailers.com/user-movie/dirty-hill-2-episode-1/332646

funny thing is the redub sounds more natural to the scene than the original was

 

[AgentNein]

Ok, maybe I'm missing the point here. I mean, it's not like Yahtzee can't write. In fact, quite the opposite, his way with words leaves me in awe of him at times... But wasn't the whole point behind Zero Punctuation that the review was entirely contained within a video, for my ease and convenience. I love to read, but why the hell should I watch a ZP video, knowing that Yahtzee has had to hold back so he can also write another review, an extension if you will, just because (and here I'll admit I'm assuming... And we all know what that can do at times) The Escapist told him to. It just seems a little pointless to me.

I feel that ZP and EP serve two very separate functions. ZP is designed to give quick snappy reviews of games, showcasing Yahtzee's snarky humor, with funny minimalist animated imagery to help drive his points home.

EP by comparison is a thoughtful digression on some aspect of the reviews. Whether that's explaining himself more fully than the video's snappy pace allows him to, or going off on some sort of tangent (case in point: this weeks commandments). I think in some ways it's his way of saying "hey viewers, I appreciate you folks and I'd like to spend a bit more time so you see my point/s, minus twenty percent of the usual snark".

The pacing of the usual ZP just wouldn't hold up if this was all in one video. So he gives us a supplement of sorts.

 

[RJ Dalton]

You know, I'm going to give Yahtzee the point on the constraints thing (and the rest of the article, since it makes sense to me, but I can actually attest to that one in particular). This reflects bad on me that I'm bringing this up twice in as many posts, but I'm going to say it anyway.
Back when I was writing fanfiction in high school (dark times, dark times), I always limited myself to the cannon. My line of thinking was this: if you're going to write a fanfiction, but change all the characters, put them in a completely different setting and make it exist entirely independently from the established timeline, why not write your own story instead? The first time I wrote a fanfic, I did it because I found an outline I'd scribbled down many years earlier and I thought to myself, "I'll write this and prove that the franchise which I shall leave unnamed at this time can actually be done well." A little arrogant perhaps, but I've never denied being that. In fact, I constantly mock myself for it, but that's beside the point.
The point is, I continued writing fanfiction for a while because I enjoyed the challenge of working with someone else's rules, settings and characters while endeavoring to make it my own. On the whole, I think it was working within those constraints that made them worth mentioning, because, as Yahtzee states, they made me think harder about how to frame the story. I had to put a lot of work into the stories to make them work the way I wanted.
I learned from this experience that the constraints made the story better, so, when I finally allowed myself to let go of writing fanfiction and go back to writing my original stuff, my work was that much better. The firs thing I do before writing a story is I lay out in front of me a list of things that I will not do with the characters, or the plot. Usually, this comes down to demanding of myself not to use common tropes, thus forcing myself to resolve plot problems or character relationships in more unique ways. On the whole, I honestly believe it's the thing to which I owe most of my quality as a writer.

And now, I'm going to take this moment to laugh at myself, because I've written a huge comment on an article that probably nobody's going to read again and thus will influence the lives of absolutely nobody.
Ha ha ha! Silly, RJ, wasting time and energy on pointless rambling nobody's going to read when you should be doing schoolwork. Ha ha ha!
Ah. Now I've made myself feel bad.

 

[Aptspire]

I feel like I must play Silent Hill 2 now

You should at the very least give it a fair chance

I didn't sleep for a couple of days thanks to SH2 because of how utterly terrifying it was. I couldn't get the image of the nurses out of my head and kept seeing them at the foot of my bed D: I was 20 :|

I know... I just had to stop playing for a while, right after I came in the apartment, because I was already creeped out by the outside, where there is lighting, and the lobby's absence of it felt even worse...that was back in 2006 or so (I was 19) but then, I completed the game, and LOVED the implications...I mean, everything after 'that carefully hinted at twist' suddenly came together, in a hauntingly masterful fulfillment of the plot.

 

[samaugsch]

I haven't actually played the game, but I've watching a playthrough of it and I think what I would find freaky is the dead silence that you hear while you're running through the streets alone at night or through the fog (along with what other people have said). I wouldn't be quite as scared if I was in a building or something because it limits where an enemy can try to ambush you. However, out in the open street, a surprise attack can come from any direction. I guess it gives you the feeling that the whole town is watching you, waiting for the perfect moment to strike you down. I could be wrong, but that's one of my best guesses.