Silent Hill 4: OoOOoOOooo, I'm petrified.

[Salka]

Man, it's like they took all the good and scary things from the first couple of games, took them out, and then made something as boring and linear as they possibly could. If I run around these circular corridors once more, I will scream. It is no longer scary. I am no longer scared. I am frustrated and I want to cry.

And the enemies. They are laughable. They are fucking laughable. Toadstools with heads??! Slugs?!?? And then your mandatory vaguely human-shaped blood-covered thing. And some dead people that fly around like the witch from our fifth class rendition of The Wizard of Oz, a sheet hoisted onto a rope, swinging across the stage. And when will they stop making us run through bloody hallways with mesh floors? It stopped scaring me two installments ago. Two and a half, actually.

The story is... what? I don't even KNOW. What's going on? My character doesn't seem surprised to be here. Or scared. He seems pretty indifferent to everything, in fact. And after all these terrifying murders and locations and monsters, he meets one of his neighbours and...? They meet, greet, and go their separate ways. A likely story. With survival instincts like that, my friend, you're going to die soon. And all these notes? I know horror story villains have to be relatively evil, but I quote; "The doors to a number of cells no longer open. As a result, the kids inside can no longer go outside. but the less they know about that, the better." I mean, that's so ridiculous it hurts.

Which leads me on to the puzzles. Rotating the entire 2nd and 3rd floors so you can align the bloody beds on all three floors? Yeah, fuckin' right. You wouldn't even get a shitty puzzle like that in an Adventure Game.

The enemies are too easy. None of them pose a real threat, and they RESPAWN. There's just enough of them to be frustrating, and yet they're not difficult enough to get your adrenaline running. I mean, when you're stamping on slugs that are moving at an inch per hour across the floor, it's hardly going to make your heart beat faster. Or when you're standing, beating the crap out of a weedy toadstool that can't even move with a drainage pipe. Remember in the first Silent Hill, when you would be running through the fog and hear the radio crackling? You would know something was there, but you couldn't see it or hear what direction it was coming from? THAT was awesome. Now I'm just stamping on defenceless slugs and picking mushrooms. Pfft.

And don't people ever get tired of being murdered and trapped in alternate dimensions? What must house prices be like in Silent Hill?

Man, they took out the one real good thing about Silent Hill (the fog), and now it's just boring and dumb and frustrating. I hate this game. Why won't this phone stop ringing?!!?? AHHHHHHHHHHH.

I wish my character would hurry up and die so the game will be over.

[Tanukitsune]

Maybe we're just harder to scare? The only scare I got from a game was from the bathroom mirror scene in Doom 3, the rest was much the opposite of scary...

[Salka]

No way. Alone in the Dark was one of the first games I played, if not the very first, that absolutely petrified me in many places. One of the very first things that scared me was when the monster jumped through the window at the start, although you could push the cupboard in the way to stop it from happening. But the monster would still try to bash through anyway. It was scary because it hadn't been done before, and I wasn't used to things trying to leap through windows at me. Something else tried to come up through the hatch in the floor. It was scary.

The first Silent Hill was scary too. All that alternate dimension shtuff... I used to have nightmares where everybody would just disappear, and I'd be alone. Sounds dumb, maybe, but most people are terrified of being alone. Silent Hill not only messed with your fear of being alone and lost (I didn't like being separated from other characters in the game, in case I ended up in the alternate dimension), but it also had that cool radio thing. You knew something was coming, you could hear it on the radio... but what? And you could hear it getting closer, but couldn't see it because of the fog. Awesome.

I don't think we're getting harder to scare. I think they're running out of ways to scare us.

[Angella]

This is dissapointing news, but I'm not surprised. I love the Silent Hill franchise. I remember when I got the first game. It was so cool. I thought it was so much more atristic than Resident Evil and other survival horror games I had played.

Has anyone played the game SIREN? It's a really strange survival horror game where you can jack in to the vision of surrounding friendlies and enemies and you can see what they are seeing. The goal is to anticipate what they will do so you won't have any nasty encounters that could be avoided. I found it to be pretty scary. You can hear the hear the enemies heavy breathing and you can see the weapon in thier hands from a frist person perspective. You can also see little glowing thingies over where you are located so you can determine where they are hiding.

It's hard, but i think it's truly scary. I had to quit playing it though, because the game is totally annoying to anyone who is not playing it. While you "tune" between all the badguys the game makes a very obnoxious radio static noise. So I don't know what it's like through the end, but there ya go...

[Steve Ince]

This is an interesting thread. Could it be that the high level of production values are actually taking something away from the nature of what made scary games successful in the first place? Were we scared because of the rougher nature of the graphics, previously? Does the high resolution, faster frame rates and increased detail mean that the games are becoming too literal and it was better when monsters in the distance were only a couple of pixels?

[Chris]

I think part of it is that monsters in horror games are actually often really stupidly designed, and as they get more and more detailed you realize how lame it actually is to have a snake-headed robot orangutan. So yeah, you probably are right to an extent.

[Steve Ince]

So when monsters were only a handful of pixels or polygons the lameness didn't matter because it didn't come across?

[Chris]

I think it sort of leaves more up to the imagination, so you at least might not be aware of how ridiculous the designs can be. I mean, I have nothing against higher-polygon models, but designers will have to meet the challenge by coming up with stuff that isn't just going to be goofy once you can tell what it is.

Also, like many series, horror series tend to end up using the same bag of tricks. In some genres this is not as important as long as you just keep refining gameplay that's already solid, but if developers just keep trying to scare you the same way you'll become desentisized to it in a way that you don't really from similar gameplay. I mean, look at Resident Evil. That series was getting incredibly stale, and with RE4 they've really injected a whole new spirit into the thing, keeping the same fundamental RE sense of suspense but from a different perspective, different type of enemies, etc., allowing the designers a whole new breadth of gimmicks.

[Salka]

Also, like many series, horror series tend to end up using the same bag of tricks

Yeah, that's my biggest issue. It was scary the first couple of times a monster leapt through a window. It was scary the first time I ran around a blood-covered building full of monsters. It was even kinda scary the second time.

As for the level of detail of monsters... I don't think worse graphics made it scarier. Uglier, yeah. Chris is right about monsters looking dumb. I guess developers are striving to be original and creative, and instead of working on innovative ways to scare us and mess with our minds, they're working on making monsters new and different looking. Which sucks because, whether it's a zombie or a clown jumping through the window, it's still not going to impress me.

That said, I'm absolutely petrified of clowns.

[Salka]

Oh man! I just found a monster that burps when you hit it!!! Oh my god and wheelchair monsters!!! I'm not talking about disabled zombies or whatever. I'm talking about wheelchairs that fly down the corridors and hit you!!! Wheelchairs with a mind of their- Oh, these burping monsters are hilarious!!!

Boy, I know what this game is missing. It's missing other people. One of the scariest things we deal with on a day to day basis is other people. Are... are other people? No, yeah, IS other people. These games all have the same formula; be scared for yourself, you're alone. They never try to make you scared for other characters, or maybe make the other characters the things you are afraid o-

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, A BIG HEAD WITH EYES.

As I was saying, I'm not scared about being alone in this building full of flying wheelchairs and burping monsters. I'm sort of bored.

[DanJW]

Yufster, are you drunk?

[Salka]

No, I... it's all in the game. I'm not joking about the burping monsters.

Why don't YOU try running around the same corridor, beating a floating girl with a pipe until her head explodes, which it never will, and trying to stop a dumb chick with a handbag from getting murdered by TOADSTOOLS, and then see how much sense YOU make?

[Pappa]

What about the music/soundtrack then? Is it as awesome as SH2's? I mean, there's gotta be something good about this game.

[Tanukitsune]

At first I tought SH4 was not worth playing but...

Flying wheelchairs and burping monsters? I'm SO there!

Now THIS is REALLY scary! (I wouldn't click on the link if I were you)

Is it gone yet?

[Wormsie]

I dunno.

[Redwall]

Yufster, are you drunk?

Is this really all that different from anything else Yufster has written?

[Intrepid Homoludens]

I dunno.

Fucker.

[Mr Manager]

Anybody who complains about SH4's storyline should be hit with a blunt object repeatedly. Sort of like this...

... just, uh, the other way around.

[Intrepid Homoludens]

Hell, I don't need any excuse to hit Yufster with a blunt object.

[picks up Kingz and clobbers Yuf over the head with him]

[Salka]

I'd very much like to complain about the storyline in Silent Hill 4, but it doesn't seem to have one to complain about.

[lailoken]

the last game that scared the shit out of me...

and the only at that.... was alien vs predator 2

that was just amazing... i mean i only played the

demo... but man, that was just awesome!!!

also it really captured the essence of the second

movie with the radio and the screams... great atmosphere

but i also think that you have to let a game

scare you. i have a hard time getting scared

of anything while the sun is out and i can

kids playing on the street behind my house...

apart from bunnies... bunnies are just fucking scary

[peccaui]

If you just encountered the burping nurses and wheelchairs, you're going to be so pissed off in about another hour of gameplay.

Although, there were some things I really liked about The Room. Mostly the room itself:

BETTER CHECK ON YOUR NEIGHBOR SOON

I also really liked the episodic pacing of the game. Well, liked isn't the right word. 'Noticed and nodded my head' is probably putting it correctly. Structurally, it's kinda interesting.

But yeah, I agree with ya. By 2/3rds of the way through I was only playing it so it'd never have to enter my console ever again. Even the soundtrack, which has some good tracks, are completely out-of-place in the game. "Yes, let's put a lyric-heavy song over a dialogue-heavy cut-scene! It's BRILLIANT!!" It's really a shame, I loved SH2 and SH3's um ... 'mirror' room really freaked me out (and SH2's beginning with the fog is fantastic).

Has anyone played the game SIREN?

I purchased it, pretty much solely because of Keiichiro Toyama's involvement and well ... personally, I found it to be more of a clumsy stealth game than a horror game. As it turns out, sitting around memorizing patterns isn't my cup of tea.

[Salka]

Alright, if anybody

ever gets around to

reading this, could

you please let me know

why some people type

in tight little paragraphs

like this? Is it because

you don't trust the

editor to automatically

create a new line for

you instead of just running

off the page? Nothing

could possibly irritate

me more. You don't

understand. It's like

somebody has stabbed

a dagger in my eyes.

Please don't type like this.

The only part of that last

paragraph I understood

was about the bunnies.

EDIT: And I didn't even

really understand it, I just

caught the word 'bunnies'.

[lailoken]

well... FUCK YOU!

nono, just kiddin... i wouldn't really...

oh yes, that in all likelihood was all in good humor

[Salka]

Seriously though, why do you type in paragraphs? I've just noticed some people seem to do it. Are you using a phone to access the web or something?