Silent Hill: Downpour

[Still Not George]

Silent Hill fans may be interested in this indie game "Lone Survivor".

Lo-fi pixellated visuals are the current indie version of Gears of Halo Duty #37. Getting REALLY tired of them.

(Judging by previous form, I fully expect everyone in the indie world to immediately disagree with me about this and call me names, then inevitably follow suit and declare low-fi artwork passe in about 12 months. It's a hard life being the Cassandra of Games.)

[Rev]

And on this one we're in complete agreement.  Yume Nikki's great and all, but the tools available to bedroom developers mean that it's more of an effort to draw sprites than it is to fire up Blender and do something 'modern'.  I'm all for great stories, simply told, but when we had our Amigas and our SNESes we were dreaming of games that were beyond what was then possible, we weren't thinking about replicating Spectrum games with accurate colour clash.  We looked to the future.

[madhair60]

I've never played Lone Survivor, personally.  Couldn't give a toss what a game looks like as long as it's fun.  I agree to a point that pixels are overdone - seeing Fez's look fills me with quite possibly all of the universe's collective "meh".  It looks exactly like Cave Story.

I like 2D graphics but I do prefer stylised in the manner of, say, Bastion, Binding of Isaac or Iji over games that look deliberately "retro" and pixelated.

ASCII is fine though, right? ;)

This thread really needs splitting off.

[Still Not George]

I've never played Lone Survivor, personally.  Couldn't give a toss what a game looks like as long as it's fun.  I agree to a point that pixels are overdone - seeing Fez's look fills me with quite possibly all of the universe's collective "meh".  It looks exactly like Cave Story.

I like 2D graphics but I do prefer stylised in the manner of, say, Bastion, Binding of Isaac or Iji over games that look deliberately "retro" and pixelated.

A Valley Without Wind made me want to vomit. Why they thought taking GIS results and putting them through a 16 bit filter was a good idea I have no conception. It doesn't help that the game is a heap of ass.

ASCII is fine though, right? ;)

Well, yes. Because it isn't actually a graphical style at all. It's kind of the "atheism" of the graphics world.

CAN OPEN... WORMS EVERYWHERE

[madhair60]

Then visual novels like Fate/Stay Night are agnosticism.  Ironically that makes Broken Sword Christian fundamentalism.

[Still Not George]

I'm going to spend the rest of my lunchbreak playing AI War and crying into my Irn Bru.

[mcbpete]

Silent Hill fans may be interested in this indie game "Lone Survivor".

Did Lone Survivor come about as a result of the Silent Hill II demake Soundless Mountain ? - http://db.tigsource.com/games/soundless-mountain-ii

[madhair60]

Same bloke, I think.

[mcbpete]

Aye so it is - probably could've easily googled that one myself !

[Mister Six]

Creative risks make the game/film harder to market, no? The point being that I really don't think it was as groundbreaking as you do. Harry may have been an average bloke in the story, but he still runs about the town, killing monsters and collecting items. The puzzles never gave me any great problems, and I'm no genius to say the least. I'm pretty sure that if you lent it to someone and said that it's like Resident Evil, they wouldn't come back later and call you a stinking liar.

It's 'like' Resident Evil but far more opaque and weird, and with none of the easy B-movie gumph that made Resi so acceptable. Resi's about a crack team of heroes investigating a 'haunted' mansion; Silent Hill's about a single dad who's lost his daughter. Resi's baddies are zombies and genetic mutants made by mad scientists; Silent Hill's are weird extensions of the various characters' personalities and psychoses. Resi's populated by stock action-hero characters: the noble hero, the dastardly turncoat, the reluctant Judas who turns back to the side of good; Silent Hill's characters are broken people with a shared but oblique past. Resi's story is easily comprehended; Silent Hill's still hasn't been confirmed by the creators, and inspired 18,000 words of analysis with no rock-solid conclusions.

Silent Hill is like Resident Evil in the same way that Blue Velvet is like The Goonies. If they wanted a safe bet, Silent Hill would have been home to a science lab and full of genetic mutants. They didn't and it wasn't.

[Mister Six]

Nope. Konami gave them a specific brief, and the game is clearly very similar to Resident Evil, as Claude just said above.

They gave them a brief, but Team Silent basically fucked off and made their own thing. If Konami had been keeping tabs on it, there's no way it would have wound up like it did.

Fiddly controls, relatively fast pacing inbetween the puzzle sections, converted allies, and the storyline is a standard "rescue/escape" structure.

The first three points are so broad and vague as to be irrelevant. It's like saying Rayman is the same as Flashback because they're both French and have a fella jumping around on platforms. The storyline one... well, first you're confusing 'motivation' for 'stoyline' and second... it's really not standard at all. As mentioned above, it's extremely vague in several parts and open to interpretation, and most importantly there's no 'happy' ending where Harry actually manages to save the daughter he spent the last eight years raising. The best he can hope for is a kind of reset, and the chance to raise her all over again, minus Silent Hill's influence.

That's far more obviously the case with Silent Hill 2, a game with ridiculously slow pacing, ground-breaking characterisation, a main character with little to no likeability, constant ambiguity, no real "good ending"... Konami took a massive risk by letting Team Silent do what the hell they wanted for SH2.

It's not an either/or situation. They can both be groundbreaking in their own ways - though I'd argue that aside from the characterisation and pacing elements, SH1 did all of that.

BTW, sorry if I seemed to be getting on your case a lot before. Not a vendetta! I just disagree with you a lot in this thread...

[Rev]

Resi's story is easily comprehended; Silent Hill's still hasn't been confirmed by the creators, and inspired 18,000 words of analysis with no rock-solid conclusions.

Do I have to be the one to break it to you?  I love it dearly, but Silent Hill doesn't have a story.  It has a premise and a few concepts to bung in, but not a story.  It's about the journey, not the destination, and it's vague because the confusion you experience through the bulk of the game is the point of it all.  I'm sure the designers would rather have had the thing crash your console three-quarters of the way through than wrap it up at all, but they had to wrap it up, which is why it becomes so silly at the end.  Damn straight they'll never 'confirm' the story.

Blue Velvet to the Goonies?  Nah, the European Pilot of Twin Peaks to The Thing, maybe.

[Mister Six]

That just proves my point even more, doesn't it?

[Thursday]

Exactly, you can't project all this imagined interpretation onto something that isn't there. Even if you want to dismiss this all as bullshit, why aren't there other games that have provoked this kind of over analysis from people? Why are people inspired and able to come up with thousands of words of interpretation onto something that has no thought behind it?