I’ve never run a horror game, so I can’t really author much genuine advice of value on the topic of scaring players. But it’s still a subject of great interest to me. With that in mind I offer the following:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “GM Advice: Scaring Players”
A reader sent me a link to this. In that thread, an EA rep explains to users that if they get banned from the forums, their game account will be banned as well. Which will lock them out of all of their games which require activation. The key post, from one of the moderators:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Online Activation: The Noose Tightens”
We resume our nonsensical journey with Travis Grady, a trucker turned ADHD firefighting paramedic ghostbuster. Part one is back that way. When we last left our hero special-needs truckdriver, he’d rescued a girl from certain death by helping her to escape to a different certain death. Then he passed out.
Besides, this is fun. More fun than playing the game, anyway.
Travis awakens and it’s daytime. He’s on a bench in Silent Hill. He remembers the girl and decides to go to the hospital and see if he can annoy her some more. (He wants to know if she’s all right.)
No she’s not all right you bumbling, dim-witted, lamebrain. She was doomed before you scooped her up and loped outside with her. She was cooked. The best hospital in the world would be hard-pressed to coax a day or two out of her. You drool-soaked, cross-eyed, dunce.
Having failed to present the player with a compelling protagonist or mystery, the game sends you off to the hospital. Now, the hospital is an iconic place in Silent Hill. Everyone remembers their first trip to the hospital. It’s arguably the signature area of the series. It was a major part of almost all the other titles in the series, as well as the movie. But it’s something you build up to. It’s the headlining band, not the opening act. This game just has no patience. It hasn’t even bought me a drink yet and already it’s trying to get my pants off. And I’m really sorry for that metaphor.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Silent Hill Origins Part 2: Hello Nurse!”
The latest comic deals with the ongoing siege of the English language perpetrated by the armies of MMOs and txtspeaking.
As a supplement to today’s comic, I present this:
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The player took the time to correct his earlier typo, by… making sure he typed out the mangled word as intended. He was only a couple of characters short of “you’re”, which I assume is the word he was groping for.
Why must young people do this to our language? Can’t they just smoke pot and have drunken, unprotected sex like previous generations?
Oh, they do that too? Ah well.
Warning: This review contains images that are both disturbing and stupid. Mostly the latter. Either way, viewer discretion is advised.
This is not a scary game compared to the previous offerings under the Silent Hill name. I could end the review there and we could all go back to talking about City of Heroes, but then you might be left wondering why it isn’t scary.
I’ve already had a lot to say on what makes games frightening. One thing I’d add to that is that the player really needs to connect with the main character before you can hope to start scaring them. The player needs to empathize with their avatar, or else the whole game is just a tedious system of resource management and dodgy combat controls. The first few minutes of the game are crucial for building that connection and coaxing the player into immersing themselves in the gameworld even though it’s dangerous and unpleasant. Let’s see how well Silent Hill: Origins pulls this off. (He said, a paragraph after he’d already tipped his hand.)
The game starts off by dropping us into the shoes of Travis Grady, a trucker who is just passing through Silent Hill. Travis has an expositional conversation with another trucker over the CB. Suddenly a robed woman lurches into the road. Travis slams on the brakes. He gets out of his truck, but she’s gone. Then he sees an apparition in his side-view mirror, which looks like a little girl. Then a little girl (seemingly a different one) wanders by in front of his truck and runs off into the fog.
And Travis, for no reason available to the player, takes off after her.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Silent Hill Origins Part 1: Trucker’s Delight”
As a follow-up to my earlier post: I replaced the Windows font-drawing code with my own. A bubble which took a third of a second to rebuild will now update so fast that I can’t measure it with the millisecond clock. (It takes “zero” milliseconds.)
I suppose if I really wanted to measure it I could build some gargantuan page-eating bubble, or make ten of them at a time and then divide but… whatever. Problem solved.
Just wanted to share the moment.
Now if only I could get the program to write jokes for me…
This week I’m going to be talking about survival horror and scary videogames. I’m probably going to be citing Yahtzee‘s reviews a lot during this series. He and I are very different gamers with different tastes and backgrounds and ages, but despite all this our opinions on the Silent Hill series are very nearly identical. I could probably just link him with a, “what he said” and save myself the aggravation of trying to re-word my own opinions in an attempt to avoid plagiarizing him, but that would be the coward’s way out. And this isn’t the week for that sort of thinking.
Both of us rate Silent Hill 2 very highly. (My SH2 review is still one of the longest posts on this site.) I’m not a Yank-hating Brit and / or Aussie like Yahtzee, but I emphatically agree with him about how badly the series has been mucked up in the hands of bungling idiot American designers. They have gone completely James Cameron on the games, making them faster, louder, shallower, better looking, and (most importantly) about a thousand times less frightening. You could argue that perhaps it’s not that survival horror sucks these days, but that the genre has ceased to exist. Cameron turned the thrilling sci-fi horror movies Alien and Terminator into over-amped sci-fi action movies Aliens and Terminator 2, and I think that’s what’s happened to survival horror. The new Resident Evil and Silent Hill titles aren’t bad games on their own, but they’re a non-sequitur in terms of mood and pacing when compared to their predecessors.
I wasn’t able to play Silent Hill Homecoming in time for this series. (Thank you so much for that, City of Heroes, you crack-laced, productivity-murdering monster.) But I will be looking back on Silent Hill 2 & 3, as well as Silent Hill Origins, and doing that armchair game design thing which everyone is so inexplicably willing to tolerate.
I’ll also be commenting a bit on Homecoming, even though I haven’t played it. I’m sure this will enrage a few fanboys and cause them to “lose respect for me”, which is what fanboys do when you tell them the sky is blue without going outside to check first.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
T w e n t y S i d e d
