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Comments
Rayman Legends has been delayed to next year. On one hand, it's good to know that they're taking the time to make it as awesome as Rayman Origins was, and possibly make the game better for single player. On the other hand, there goes one reason to buy a Wii U at launch.
This is a big part of why I think AC III looks good, along with the Kill King Washington DLC.
That trailer seems to be a refreshing change from the game's "Kill ALL the redcoats!" marketing campaign. It at least confirms that it won't be completely black and white in terms of the conflict at hand.
The WoW thing sounds like someone forgot to comment out a debug ability when Pandaria got released. XD
No, the point is to force you to use whatever you can scrounge up and get attached to them.
People nearly always find three or four decent Pokemon to use in a Nuzlocke run.
No, the point of Nuzlocking is to make the game absurdly unfun.
Except not, 'coz I'm still having a lot of fun with it.
Yeah, Connor fighting for the people instead of the revolutionaries and the aforementioned DLC are making me feel better about some bluecoats getting sliced up as well.
Just got two of the nine endings in the original SNES Clock Tower for my binge on survival horror for October.
It's no Silent Hill or Fatal Frame but it's a pretty solid click-and-point horror game for the era.
Also, I finally figured out how to work my PSX emulator so I can finally play the original Silent Hill.
Playing it on a keyboard though... oi.
Nova: Yeah, but part of that attachment is that you often have to use the bad Pokemon
Then you get sad when your Zubat dies and you swear vengeance, or when half of your team is wiped out by one fucking Tyrouge and you promise to bathe in their fucking blood and FUCK I HATE TYROUGE >.<
Not... really?
I mean, even in just Heart Gold, it's easy as hell to train a Togekiss, a Typhlosion, a Gyarados, and a Dragonite, and sweep everything with those. Hell, even if you don't catch a Gyarados early, Typhlosion and Togekiss can easily carry you through to the Lake of Rage.
In every game, you're basically guaranteed to get several Pokemon that are tougher than most. It's not being forced to use weak Pokemon that's the issue- it's being forced to use a limited amount of Pokemon, and those Pokemon being knocked out meaning you can never use them again, that's the challenge. It forces you into a very defensive playstyle that discourages risks.
Basically, the challenge in a Nuzlocke is to force you to hurl your DS through a wall when a gym leader gets a crit on you, because there goes the Gyarados you just spent three hours training up to Level 40, or whatever.
Even the toughest Pokemon in a Nuzlocke can die, so long as you're not grinding to infinity. Note: The Darmanitan I spent so much time arguing about here died to the Elite Four, and Reshiram only survived fighting Zekrom on three health- if IV's were arranged just a little differently, I could have lost Reshiram on my very first fight with him.
I know that feel.
I wasn't actually hugely impressed. I mean, it was good, just not great. Though I suppose it's SH2 that's generally presented as the gold standard, so I guess I need to give it a shot sometime.
Silent Hill is a good game. It's just that the first one is rough around the edges both aesthetically and from a writing perspective. But I think it has a pretty good presentation in terms of using the elements it actually has the right way.
Silent Hill 2 is definetly better, but I think Silent Hill 3 is the best of the three. Then again, I'm biased because lol Heather.
Oh, definitely agreed there.
Yeah, Silent Hill 2 is generally the gold standard and I tend to agree with people who say it's the best game ever made. It's not a game that's immediately scary, but it weighs on you, through oppressive loneliness and isolation. It's something that no other medium can accomplish as Kristophe Gans discovered to his misogynistic disappointment.
Also, I'm partially playing SH1 for the memes. I chuckled a little when I heard "just turned seven last month, short, black hair".
But yeah, I think it's kind of hard to play SH3 and not fall in love with Heather.
So, Dishonored is out and I'm hearing that it's as good as the hype. Probably going to wait for the Steam holiday sale, but I'm looking forward to it.
About Silent Hill: why does the town keep calling people to it? Like, what does/do the entity controlling the place or the cultists on the town's astral plane or the various eldritch intelligences who call the place home or whoever the fuck get out of laying out someone's mind as a trap for them? Is it how they eat? Are they sort of bizarrely benevolent? Is it like with Hinamizawa, where residents and visitors to the town can become consumed by a local disease that brings on murderous schizophrenic episodes, and the mystic trappings are just a front for fucked up research?
In 1, 3, and Homecoming, it's pretty clear that things are manipulated by the cult to get their promised children there.
As for the others, well things lose their mystery once they're explained so there's no proper explanation. My theory isn't so much that Silent Hill is therapy town so much as it's using the psychology of the person to torture them, or rather giving them the tools to torture themselves.
For what reason? Who the hell knows? It's a dark god of ancient unimaginable power.
Like I said, mysteries lose their appeal once their explained and giving whatever force is behind the town a reason makes it more human and thus less frightening.
How is anyone supposed to write licensed fanfic like movies or novellas without a canonical reason for the town, its god or its people to do what it/they does?
Creativity?
I don't see why a reason is needed. There's plenty of stuff to go on to make compelling stories, such as the cult, the monsters, exploring personal tragedies.
That said, most have the tie-in Silent Hill stuff has sucked, though that's more due to a a lack of understanding of how the series works. The comics straight up throw all established canon out the window.
Overexplaining horror has ruined a lot of franchises. That sentence implies that Silent Hill hasn't been sunk yet, but it's got a hack-and-slash RPG spinoff coming out and that should pretty much say it all. In horror, it's important to keep the audience ignorant to a significant degree, giving them only enough information to pose new questions.
A reason doesn't have to be revealed to the player or anything, I'm just saying a reason or reasons are necessary amongst the creator and the writing staff so they can tell other people who have to write shit, otherwise there's no basis for any rules that get established for how the mindfucks work; they all end up being purely Doylist instead of having an organic Watsonian logic tying them together. It's like how The Mountain That Doesn't Write told the writers of the tv series Game of Thrones the ending to the series so they can finish it even if he dies before completing the book series, only even more important, because it relates to the premise, without which there would be no canon.
Spoiler: It was all midichlorians.
/series
Well, that's kind of the thing -- setting canon isn't important in horror, because it only has to make emotional sense rather than narrative sense. The idea is less to convey and more to force its audience to feel fear and anxiety. Things to do with the normal world, normal characters and the work's themes need consistency, but everything else is a blank slate.
In fact, the idea of paranormal canon has been damaging to Silent Hill in the past. Silent Hill 2 is about James' warped sexuality, so many of the monsters in that game reflect that, like the zombie nurses and Pyramid Head. But both those monsters have been reused for the sake of giving fans what they want to see rather than what Silent Hill is actually about. So the "technical" canon has overwritten the "thematic" canon.
This kind of fanservice is a consistent downfall of horror franchises. My favourite horror thing, ever, is Giger's Alien. But that's pretty much entirely a lost cause now, because continuous movies, comic books, games and crossovers have all felt the need to explain and expand on things to the point where the Alien is an understood entity. Before the Alien's fall into canon silliness, it could have been anything; it could have evolved from hostile conditions, been a designed bioweapon, or even have been paranormal. But now that set ideas about it have been established, everything is predictable and boring and not scary at all.
So it's like, there are no rules, so establishing a basis for them doesn't matter, as the franchise works better without rules?
Pretty much, as long as you want to scare people.
I thought that was a given, thus why I specified the franchise. Other things, like most of the works of Brandon Sanderson, work much better with a very consistent set of rules and such.
Well, some other things also work better by preying on an audience's ignorance as well. Some fantasy settings do really well with concrete magic systems, for instance, but others are much better off letting the magic flow freely and without rules. The same could be said of technology in some science fiction settings. It's more than horror that benefits from this, it's just that no genre apart from horror relies on it so heavily.
>otherwise there's no basis for any rules that get established for how the mindfucks work
Um, the whole point of a mindfuck is that it doesn't have a set of consistent rules, and warps your sense of reality.
Silent Hill does have a basis of vague rules for how it works that act as a guideline, namely psycholical trauma made manifest. Like Alex has said, providing explanations and consistency has actually hurt the canon.
To borrow from Lovecraft, the oldest fear is the fear of the unknown. Making something known removes that fear.
One thing I think the Freddy movies did as a stroke of genius albeit accidentally is how no writer could agree on what his origin was. Was he a ghost that refused to stay dead? A dream god inhabiting an evil man's body? The bastard child a thousand maniacs? I like the idea of Freddy having a multiple choice past, even if the movies themselves handled them poorly.