BryanM wrote:Silent Hill f was announced a few months ago, apparently. The When They Cry guy as the writer doesn't seem like quite the right vibe, especially after seeing "Unlike previous games in the series, it is not being set in the titular town, but in 1960s rural Japan."
For some reason I think I heard all about this, but then promptly forgot all about it.
Eh well, probably won't be the worst game to hold the name.
Oh, I remember hearing that and going "hm." Higurashi (as weeb friends called it back in the late 00s) never sounded all that interesting to me.
Actually it sounded
PRETTY FUCKEN WEEB TBQH (■`w´■) But! If it means a new SH developed in its home territory, I won't complain. 3; I've no illusions of it guaranteeing a better result than the last two decades of cut-price outsourcings to Great Value Screensaver Co of West Buttfuck (and their equally august competitors, Terry's Cut-Price Webpages of North RumpyPumpyshire). It might be utter shite! But it at least promises a bit of that old East/West dissonance.
Or does it. Set in 60s Japan, huh. Are you trying to sell more books, Higurashi bro? >_>
I heard Toyama was looking at a new horror project, a few years back. I'm far past the point of actively following these things, though. If it falls through =
pain 3; If something good happens =
well isn't this nice lmao :3
BareKnuckleRoo wrote:BIL wrote:[I like to think Hard Action (and XTRA Riddle) is the canonical game, so it's especially funny knowing that if the player
does hightail it, it's an instant trip back to the title screen.
Yeah, Pyramid Head does NOT fuck around in Hard Action and will straight-up kill Maria unless you're actively shooting him (or poking with the pipe?) to damage him and slow him down. But then if Maria gets in between you and him when you're aiming... X_x
It's almost as brutal as the boat ride is? 10 star ranking that sucks cuz of the controls. :V
I'm not sure if it's ten star-worthy (might be a bit slow, or mess with the shot/fought ranks), but I was able to get the Hard Action Brookhaven escape down to a reliable process, having heard ahead of time how unforgiving it is (was worried about it harshing my revisit mellow
).
First, reload the handgun before you enter the corridor, full clip ready to go. Once you're into the setpiece - the long shot that sees PH emerge from around the corner, to his bloodcurdling ring entrance BGM - double back and get right up in his face, so Maria can't Clint Eastwood her way into your line of fire. Contact-dump the clip straight into his fuckin face, counting down so you don't get caught in the reload animation. PH will be stunlocked during the shots, which sound rad plinking off his face, and left temporarily without his terrifying Hard Action hyper-trudge. Haul ass away after the last shot, don't reload.
It's been a few years, so I forget the path's layout, but you're now good to move to the next corner - maybe even two corners at a time. At any rate, get far enough ahead that Maria follows you out of PH's striking range (my dog is the same way! want him to come in the house? jackass will sit there panting at you all day if you don't go in first!). Get in front of her again, reload while you wait for PH to come around, get pointblank and hammer him again, etc. Nails a difficulty spike in an otherwise chillaxing Terror Horror affair reet down.
I never knew WTF I was doing in the Lake Toluca Solo Classic, but at least you can't drown.
Ahh, fuck, what a killer stygian scene. Right down to the
"PERSONS PROCURING OR CONCEALING ESCAPE OF PRISONERS" warning on the... whatever the fuck is behind James at that moment. I remember the sublime
"Wait. What?" bathos of escaping the Abyss like it was yesterday.
I am so glad someone else played Homecoming in detail before critiquing it.
I really did want to like it. The environments and bosses and whatnot are interesting enough, and the melee combat's decent enough (even if 99% of the time you'll be using the knife as it's really damn good) but the NPC interactions just don't feel believable, and a lot of the themes feel like they're trying to tell the player "hey remember SH2, it's just like that! you're an amnesiac and the town's punishing all the bad folks~" but it's just not executed as well. I do like that they tried to focus more on the occult aspect of the town as SH 1, 3 and 4 did though (the occult aspects from the first game are mostly ignored in SH2 aside from the NG+ Rebirth ending).
I like to think of SH1 and SH2 as improbably perfect companion pieces; "Worlds of someone's nightmarish delusions come to life" (quoth Harry), seen from the third and first-person, respectively. "Improbable," as director Keiichiro Toyama left KCET after SH1. But given Hiroyuki Owaku (enemy & event programmer), Takayoshi Sato (CG), Masahiro Ito (art lead), and even lovable shitbird Yamaoka (audio, Rob Halford cosplay) were all intimately involved in developing SH1, before going on to head up SH2, I don't think it's much of a leap.
With SH2 establishing a much older, larger enigma, I think you could compellingly portray SH1's cult cycle as not uniquely supernatural; just another tale of human folly, unnervingly reified. With one stark exception, SH1 tells nothing of the town itself not related to Alessa. The drug trade, the unexplained deaths of local authorities, the ritual burning... taken alone, this could be read as
Carrie meets
Prince of Darkness, on the scale of
The Mist. Abused psychic girl plunges hometown into the abyss, trying to contain its evil deity she's doomed to birth.
That exception is White Claudia, precursor of tourist favourite PTV, which unifies Alessa, Walter, and even James. Those hefty tomes Jimmy finds, and even the dread Darkness Bong, are useless without a strong hit of White Chrism. Jimmy even finds the Crimson Tome in the Lakeview's reading room, mirroring the chapel library where Heather (packing her own endgame-critical WC gear) finds
On Syncretic Religions; storehouses of white settler knowledge.
SH1 wrote:[White Claudia]
Ancient records show it was used for religious ceremonies.
The hallucinogenic effect was key.
What I like about this model is, SH1/3/4's human element - the fanaticism, the megalomania, the atrocities in service of, along with Alessa, Heather, and Walter's plights - is untouched. That stuff is real as all hell. It's merely a neat reconciling of Heather's musing to Douglas, "I guess it wasn't much of a 'God' if it could be killed by a human being." Harry did indeed kill the thing Dahlia revered (and her daughter dreaded, attempting to murder-suicide Heather rather than risk its escape) as "God." He shot it repeatedly in the face while avoiding its flamey flames that PWNed Dahlia, and it fell over and dieded. I think it was just another monster - a particularly odious and resilient one, as real-life Gods so often are - birthed from the great Whatever that caused the area's previous occupants to steer clear.
(the old "Injun burial ground! Bwaaa!" thing is a lot cooler taken as a non-denominational
"This place makes weird and dangerous shit happen, kids! Stay the fuck out, before you bring Meat With Teeth - or even Hooker Who Looks Like Mom, how will I explain that shit - down on us all! Ohshi, it's whitey with guns and blankets. Hey waitaminute, whitey! Don't build your prison camp there! Ahh fuck" imo)
It also grounds a necessarily videogamey aspect - God getting blown away like Enemy Crime Boss - into the only marginally less farcical domain of human endeavour. Jimmy's Pyramid Heads cannot be Smith & Wessoned away like Dahlia's God. They will, however, obediently go away, if Jimmy's pesky Eros can surpass the looming Thanatos that summoned them; SH2 being a struggle of human will not against another, but itself.
I generally don't subscribe to this extent, myself. I always thought "God" was dogma incarnate, but I take Alessa and Walter's paranormal abilities as flatly "real," in-universe. But given how consistent the backstory of "abused children dosed with peyote in the pursuit of Miss Cleo powers" is, and how seamlessly it jives with SH2, it's something I increasingly like to entertain. Maybe Alessa could "kill people with her mind" not out of some unique power; just the resonating of Whatever with the universally-recognisable longings of an abused child.
Clawing At The Veil.mp3(^w´ )
This is what I wish Homecoming had capitalised on; cult as family. A strong writer could conjure moving horror/drama for days out of that concept. They just didn't have the raw minerals, apparently. I'm sure cash wasn't abundant, either. Plus, they were wasting time with a B plot of far less innate oomph, and a C plot that blows back over the whole production, most foully, like a dog farting in front of the television. 3;
Actually, fuck, speaking of White Claudia and other psychotropics, there's the lesser-feted companion piece to
Fukuro aka Pyramid Head's Sex Tape,
[url=hhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_WuZGtYbXo]Kinoko[/url] ("Mushroom"). Hm. And
"Overdose Delusion," which I'm linking here because it's fukken
RAWK. Reminds me of why everyone loves Yamaoka.