{"id":24009,"date":"2014-08-21T14:20:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-21T19:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24009"},"modified":"2014-08-21T14:20:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-21T19:20:00","slug":"p-t-part-2-theyre-calling-to-me-from-hello","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24009","title":{"rendered":"P.T. Part 2 &#8211; They&#8217;re Calling to Me From Hello"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/5anF-SsqABo\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=5anF-SsqABo'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>I think this demo \/ trailer \/ teaser thing ran out of ideas after about half an hour. At this point it&#8217;s just being obtuse. Like, if Chris wasn&#8217;t reading from the guide, how would we possibly know what we&#8217;re supposed to be doing? We have no character, no goal, no context, and no direction. That&#8217;s fine in this case, since it&#8217;s not supposed to be a game. I&#8217;m not asking for cutscenes or anything. But it does need to let you know what your goal is or when the demo is over. I can&#8217;t imagine I would have ever found that pencil-point hole on purpose. I would have stumbled around, growing more restless and annoyed, wondering if the demo was over or not. Instead of ending on the high note, I would have been pissed off at the dumb game that wasted a half hour of my time. <\/p>\n<p>Also, let&#8217;s think about these controls. We have one button: Zoom in. We don&#8217;t need to select weapons, aim, shoot, reload, open inventory, toggle flashlight, interact with objects, crouch, jump, or sprint. We have over a dozen available inputs, including the convenient and familiar face buttons. But no, we&#8217;re going to bind our primary means of interaction to holding down the right stick. I&#8217;ve had to do that before in games, and I know it&#8217;s incredibly uncomfortable. That&#8217;s a pretty egregious sin from an interface standpoint, but then making the little cutscene reset when you stop pressing down on the stick is where it goes from uncomfortable to infuriating. <\/p>\n<p>THIS is the Kojima influence I was worried about. I&#8217;m sure the thinking is, &#8220;Hey! It&#8217;s uncomfortable to depress the stick, just like the character would be uncomfortable looking through the hole. And it&#8217;s tense, because you&#8217;re always worried your finger might slip and you&#8217;ll have to watch it again. And you don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re supposed to be doing, which makes it mysterious like Silent Hill.&#8221; That&#8217;s pretty standard Kojima thinking: Make something incredibly obnoxious and then use a complete confusion of in-game and out-of-game logic to justify it. I know this is his shtick, and I know I&#8217;m risking the wrath of his fans by even bringing it up, but this sort of thing drives me nuts. I don&#8217;t begrudge Kojima his particular style and I&#8217;ll admit it&#8217;s made the Metal Gear series a powerhouse with an army of enthusiastic fans, but this is <strong>not<\/strong> what I&#8217;m looking for in a Silent Hill game<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t want to be thinking about the controller at all. If I have an emotional connection with my avatar then I&#8217;m perfectly capable of empathizing with them without needing to contrive a bunch of immersion-breaking gimmicks. These two feelings are mutually exclusive&#8230;<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>I am trapped in a psychotic hellscape, and the only way to escape is to go deeper in by looking through this pinhole and facing whatever nightmares this world has to show me.<\/li>\n<li>Ow. My finger is uncomfortable and if I adjust my grip I might slip and waste a bunch of my time watching this again.\n<\/ol>\n<p>&#8230;.and the first one is a thousand times more potent than the second. Moreover, Silent Hill is pretty much the only series that&#8217;s even willing to attempt that sort of thing. All the other AAA spook games have turned into shooting galleries and quicktime button-mashers. <\/p>\n<p>Having said all that&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Meh. I gripe, but it&#8217;s not actually a big deal. This is a demo for an idea that might become a game someday, and the final product might not look or play anything like what we&#8217;ve seen. There&#8217;s no point in getting worked up about any of this<span class='snote' title='1'>He said, once it was too late.<\/span>. We wouldn&#8217;t have bothered with it, except we wanted something low-stakes to test our recording setup. <\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll finish up the demo (sort of) in the next episode. Next week we&#8217;ll go back to Marlow Briggs. After that, we&#8217;ll launch the new season. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) I think this demo \/ trailer \/ teaser thing ran out of ideas after about half an hour. At this point it&#8217;s just being obtuse. Like, if Chris wasn&#8217;t reading from the guide, how would we possibly know what we&#8217;re supposed to be doing? We have no character, no goal, no context, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[53],"class_list":["post-24009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-silent-hill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}