October Together Retro: Golden Age of Survival Horror

[Nemoide]

...because I've always felt strongly about playing through Enemy Zero first, for whatever reason. They both seem to be relatively short games, though. I played a bit of Enemy Zero tonight actually. It is creepy af, tho. Totally died trying to get to the elevator. Not really sure exactly how I get a gun.

Good luck with beating Enemy Zero! I found that game to be CRAZY HARD.
I always thought that it was a cool game but never succeeded in killing the invisible monsters, even after going through the training mode multiple times. I figure that for future attempts I'll use headphones or good stereo speakers, which has been enough to keep me from playing it for a long time.

[Ack]

Dude, Pierrot, my copy of D2 is bugged. I'd love for you to play through it and hear your thoughts.

That's definitely the goal. I'd probably rather just skip right to D2, but I haven't played it to this point, because I've always felt strongly about playing through Enemy Zero first, for whatever reason. They both seem to be relatively short games, though. I played a bit of Enemy Zero tonight actually. It is creepy af, tho. Totally died trying to get to the elevator. Not really sure exactly how I get a gun.

What's bugged in your copy of D2, by the way? Looks like it's not a cheap one to get a hold of now. That's a bummer.

The game freezes immediately after a video. It might not be a total loss experience, but the video plays after a boss fight, so to get to that point to test, I have to go through a fight that takes a while, and it's just frustrating to do it all. Hence why I have never beaten D2. Maybe I'll try it on a different Dreamcast someday and have it magically work, but for now I've moved on to other media.

[Xeogred]

I just wrapped up Silent Hill 3, played on Action Hard and Puzzles Hard but the riddles were so ridiculous, I just looked everything up this time haha. I had a bunch of unlockable weapons and extras since I've beaten it twice before, so you can do NG+ish stuff, like I had a lightsaber, different costumes, an unlimited machine gun and flame thrower, etc.

Technically SH3 is a real marvel, Akira Yamaoka has basically perfected his craft by this point with the sound design and music. With headphones I noticed the sound is even a huge step up from SH2, which was already amazing as well. The intensity was amplied by living in an apartment, I seriously had to turn and look around my place at points to double check things. Visually and artistically, this is still one of the coolest looking games out there to me and a real power house on the PS2. Finally, we see the Hellraser-esque Otherworld of SH1 fully realized and it's incredible. Then there's the monster designs, by far some of the best up to this point with grotesque creations that still hold up to this day. Combat wise SH3 is the best in the franchise, you have way more weapons and tools at your disposal and everything just feels great. The first half also has amazing level design dipping more into the surreal which I really love, like dangling mall escalators that lead to... a giant hole of pure blackness, to which you can also fall into with the unsafe ledges in this one with pits everywhere. I love that addition too.

All the positives aside, it's time for some of my recurring SH3 nitpicks that are being enforced going back through it a few times. Whereas SH2 only gets better and wrecks me harder with each revisit, SH3's final stretch just makes me roll my eyes a bit and I burn out after the incredible carnival boss fight. My first time through, the weird cult and evil-God-in-the-womb shenanigans were cool, imaginative, and somewhat interesting... but I find it decreasingly so when I focus more on that context of the town, events, and characters. I prefer the more surreal subtle approach leaving a bit more up to ones imagination, like in SH2 or SH4. I also really don't care for many of the characters in this one, Heather is a damn cool female protagonist and the detective guy is awesome, but beyond that I don't care much about anyone else or their goals. I'm also always still disappointed by how weirdly short this game is, there's only one screen of the town itself and then there's the hospital, both portions directly ripped from SH2 so re-using a lot of assets to make it seem even more lazy in ways. Though, SH3 does some awesome twists with the hospital. I don't mind the meta humor as I think some of it and the easy accidental deaths are intentional given Heather's story, but that might be more proof that Team Silent were ready to move onto new ideas (to which reading around more this week, I guess the SH3 and SH4 teams were completely split! SH4 had more of SH2's lead talent, so that might explain why the story is far stronger) So, SH3's has some amazing peaks and weird lows. Really polished and fun game otherwise, I'd still put it above the lesser RE's in my book and all the half baked Western Silent Hill's after SH4.

[Markies]

I beat Koudelka on Sunday.

Here is my review about it.

http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopi ... 2#p1138282

Rough around the edges, but I really good game overall.

[Nemoide]

I played more Fatal Frame II today. This game still gives me the jibbles, so my progress is slow. I don't know if I'll be finishing the game by the end of the month. But I put in another hour and am into chapter 4! If I get to chapter 5 by the end of the week, I'll be satisfied.

...Akira Yamaoka has basically perfected his craft by this point with the sound design and music.

Fun fact about that guy, he also made a number of songs for Konami's Bemani games! Some of them are kind of silly. Others are... kind of scary in a different way from Silent Hill. Some are actually on the normal-ish/cool side of the musical spectrum.

[nullPointer]

I've finally gotten caught up to the point in my Games Beaten backlog that I posted some retrospective thoughts on Silent Hill 2. It needs to be said that my objectivity goes right out the window where it comes to this game. It's pretty easily one of my favorite games of all time. There are very few games that operate on the same sort of narrative level as Silent Hill 2 (IMO, etc. etc.)

AT any rate, over the weekend I started playing the other game that was on my list of 'must plays' for the month, Resident Evil 2. I have never played this game y'all. And if I'm putting all the cards on the table, the only other game I've played in the entire franchise is Resident Evil (1) Dual Shock Edition. In light of my time with Silent Hill 2 (which I've played several times before), I guess I've inadvertently declared this as the 'Month of the Survival Horror Sequel"!

Any hoo, this game is (unsurprisingly) pretty great! I always had the feeling that whereas Resident Evil was Night of the Living Dead (all the bio-tech stuff not withstanding), Resident Evil 2 was more akin to Dawn of the Dead, one of my all-time favorite horror movies. And thus far I've not been disappointed in the slightest!

Coming directly on the heels of SH2, I had forgotten how much more Resident Evil focuses on careful management of inventory. I'm continually running low on handgun ammo, and it adds a real source of anxiety to the game! Another aspect I'd forgotten is the degree to which you're reliant on smart management of item storage, although I feel like this is much more emphasized here than it was in the first game. I tend to keep on-person inventory at a minimum (so I can maximize item pickups) – often just my handgun + ammo – and as a result I feel like I'm constantly having to backtrack to item storage locations to retrieve keys and other key items! That part is kind of … meh, but all told not a terribly big deal (It would super-suck if enemies re-spawned in the meantime, but as it is it's just a slight waste of time).

At any rate, RE2 seems to be a great expansion of the story and concepts introduced in the first game, although from a narrative standpoint I worry that they may have painted themselves into a corner in terms of elevation of stakes. They went directly from spooky 'haunted house' setting, with a small grade outbreak to full city-wide (and beyond?) outbreak without much middle ground. I'm not sure where you go from there without going full post-apocalyptic. To be fair though, the 'Living Dead' series of movies found itself with this same predicament.

But for the time being (and I suspect for the duration) I'm really enjoying RE2! At the current time I'm escorting Ada Wong through the sewers. I've not yet played as Claire, though I suspect that must happen at some point. Are the scenarios in this one fully separate as they were for Chris and Jill in RE1?

[pierrot]

Good luck with beating Enemy Zero! I found that game to be CRAZY HARD.
I always thought that it was a cool game but never succeeded in killing the invisible monsters, even after going through the training mode multiple times. I figure that for future attempts I'll use headphones or good stereo speakers, which has been enough to keep me from playing it for a long time.

So, I kind of knew going in that the guns would be a bit of a problem, but I'm actually finding that the voice recorder (for saving) is much worse. I think I can abuse some save bug with my power memory cartridge in order to not use up the battery on it, but we'll see how far I get on this one battery. The game feels like it might be kind of short. I made it up the elevator, and into George's research area, after winding through the ducts, but I got kind of impatient, and trapped by stuff in the ducts, when I went back in. The gun isn't too bad, really. The enemies screech, and if you pull out the gun to start charging it, right when you hear that, then release once the beeps are coupled with the bull horn, then it seems to be guaranteed to kill them. It is quite the ambitious game for 1996. I really wish the FMV exploration portions weren't so ungodly sluggish, though.

Maybe I'll try it on a different Dreamcast someday and have it magically work[...].

That would be cool. I'm getting a bit more excited to play D2 now. I'm debating whether or not I just want to use a guide with Enemy Zero to get through it a bit more quickly.

I played more Fatal Frame II today. This game still gives me the jibbles, so my progress is slow. I don't know if I'll be finishing the game by the end of the month. But I put in another hour and am into chapter 4! If I get to chapter 5 by the end of the week, I'll be satisfied.

Are you still enjoying it? I remember not being entirely ready to jump back into the game right away, for similar reasons. That game is intense, but I feel like I started to get a bit more desensitized to it after a while. Until the last couple chapters, anyway.

Fun fact about that guy, he also made a number of songs for Konami's Bemani games! Some of them are kind of silly. Others are... kind of scary in a different way from Silent Hill. Some are actually on the normal-ish/cool side of the musical spectrum.

Damn, Nemoide. Why you always gotta make me search all the DDR tracks I used to love, and make me wish I could still play Look to the Sky, and Healing Vision! I ended up looking around at Omega G4s this time!

[Ack]

Hey null, enjoy Resident Evil 2! It is my favorite in the series by far. I typically recommend carrying your handgun, ammo, and a heavy weapon of some kind. You've met the tougher nasties, like the licker, so you know why you should. Think of safe rooms as hubs for you to head to and take a breather while you heal up, rearm, and get whatever item you need for puzzles.

Also, Leon and Claire's stories do intertwine, depending on who you picked to start with. There is an A and a B story; whoever you started with does the A story, and then you follow with the B for the other character. There are changes to each depending on who you picked. I always preferred Leon doing A and Claire doing B, but that's just me

[Xeogred]

Hey null, enjoy Resident Evil 2! It is my favorite in the series by far. I typically recommend carrying your handgun, ammo, and a heavy weapon of some kind.

If I'm reading Ack right here, this is exactly how I do it too!
Pistol
Pistol Ammo
Shotgun/Etc fully loaded, reload at chests
= 3 slots.

Later on in the back half of these games I might switch out the pistol ammo for whatever stronger weapon and ammo I have. When YOU become the monster!

[pierrot]

I'm kind of glad I know binary. It really made the elevator in Summer Tower, and Ronny's door code really simple. Also happy that phasors are pretty much my thing; Made the power room puzzle in Summer Tower pretty easy to deal with, too. The puzzles in this game are really not very challenging for me, but I have all kinds of problems with figuring out the sequence of flags the game wants me to hit once interacting with the other crew members comes into play. Generally, there's a pretty logical sequence of tasks in a lot of sections of the gameplay, which can still be done somewhat out of order, but once an NPC gets involved at all, the gameplay bogs down with a set of barriers that won't allow progress without doing things in a very specific order. In a lot of cases, I haven't really had the patience to deal with figuring out what that order was, and resorted to looking it up. Every time I did, I became more upset with the game for it. It seems like it's meant to artificially lengthen the gameplay, but they've already seemingly done that with the excruciatingly plodding movement in FMV sequences, and the limited save/load "feature." They've just thrown in one or two too many instances of annoying impediments to the gameplay in a couple different areas. The other obvious one being combat, where they've made the enemies invisible, don't give the player a mini map, and made the gun a chore to use: Shot must be charged before it can be fired; Holding the shot button too long will just release the charge without firing; Limited number of shots (one to five-ish, depending on gun) before ammo has to be recharged at a charging station. Any two of them would have probably been fine, but all three is just too much.

It just feels like Eno and company went overboard on some seemingly contemptuous design decisions, without really considering how it would affect the feel of the game. In most cases, the efforts to extend gameplay weren't really that necessary. It would still probably be a pretty short game, but at least just figuring out how to progress the first time would actually take up a solid amount of time.

I'm on the third disc of Enemy Zero now, and it's basically a FPS survival horror game at this point. I have a crappy gun, with maybe five shots, and no way to recharge it. I went through about 4 floors of this maze the third disc starts out on, before I got kind of stuck going back and forth between two floors, and ended up just running into one of the enemies because I didn't really care that much anymore. I may end up having to start back from the beginning of the game, because of the limited number of saves/loads. Basically, there's this item (the voice recorder) that has a limited battery, which is given an initial value of 64. Every save reduces the battery by four 'points,' and every load reduces it by two. I'm at 38 right now, I think, but I'm sort of anticipating that not holding up. Even if I had to restart, it would probably only take me about 40 minutes to get back to the third disc, because that's how little there really is to do in the first two discs. Most of the initial play time is just in trying to figure out what the hell the game wants you to do, when it gives so little direction. There were actually only three enemies in the first two discs that I felt like I actually had to kill, and one of them I might have been able to actually avoid. One of the other two stands still, so the only way that it can kill you is if you ignore all the warning noises, and run into it. After killing that one, the game makes you shoot this barrier in front of a door, though, and the gun the game gives you at this point can only fire one shot before it has to be recharged, so at a bare minimum, you have to make a trip to a room with nothing other than a charge station twice.

The story's not really even worth mentioning at this point. If you're familiar with Aliens, and Blade Runner, you know what's up here.