Silent Hill Downpour: Reminiscing about the future (Preview)

In September of 2001 one of the greatest games ever produced was released. Excellent story, interesting characters, brilliant score, multiple endings, and some of the hands down best atmosphere to be put in a video game ever. With the exception of some of the old school tank controls common of that genre, Silent Hill 2 as far as I am concerned set the the standard for what a great survival horror game should be.

On my first play through of this game, it took me around 8 or so hours to get through. At my best, I had every map and puzzle memorized, and could play through the game in just over 2 hours. Played it through enough to get all five endings and still continued to play it afterwards. Hands down one of the best games ever.

So why do I bring up a playstation 2 game that is almost 10 years old? Because for every Silent Hill game to come out since its release, I hear from almost every development team that works on each respective project say: "We are trying to get back to what made Silent hill 2 great." Despite this every adaptation to follow this one has never quite lived up to the expectations of the one before it. 3 had some alright moments in it but it didn't have that same feel of 2. The Room had some interesting concepts but it had some of the worst controls in the franchise. Homecoming improved the combat greatly but that inversely affected the horror level of the game, never causing that sense of fear and panic some of the others had. That's not to say any of them were bad, I thoroughly enjoyed every one of them and played them multiple times. Its just that they don't feel like they've lived up to the standard that's has been set.

The reason I take this little trip down memory lane is because I am staring to hear this same promise again in the form of the upcoming Silent Hill: Downpour set to be released this winter. When I saw the initial release trailer, it looked very rough and unclean. It was clearly nothing more than a concept video to present at a show to and at least get some buzz going for it. Well a year has gone by now and they have got the a more cleaned up trailer that shows a little more of the story and some of the game play elements. 

In this 8th installment of the SH franchise, you play as Murphy Pendelton. A prisoner in transit who escapes as his transport when it crashes and flips off the side of the road. Murphy is stranded in the southern map of Silent Hill, an area that has been yet to be explored in the franchise at this point so while there might be some visits to a familiar location or two, the setting should feel original and different again despite being back in a town we've visited so many times before.

One of the first things I noticed as I was looking at how good the character's looked this time around, is how brightly lit and super saturated all the characters and locations were. To me, this feels like a detriment to the game. That may sound like I am contradicting myself but I'm really not. Here's the thing, while the character models look great, the first three SH games had this fantastic way of increasing the tension from the location alone. The game was either pitch black making you barely able to see past the minimal distance of the flashlight you carried, or in daylight the entire landscape was covered in a thick foreboding mist that reduced your visibility and filled you with this crushing feel of loneliness. While adding some color and life to the setting, it somewhat reduces that empty void feeling, that sense as if you are trapped by the town itself.

Which brings me to my next point of critique. Loneliness is a big factor in raising the tension in these games. Monsters are more scary the less you see of them, and panic sets in deeper when you are fending them off alone. This installment of the game seems to have a pretty big cast of characters in it and I think that by including so many people it gives too many opportunities to break the tension and let the player come down and break from the immersion to sit back and watch a scene. Granted, this is commenting on a trailer that's only about 3 minutes long so this may not be the case, but it is something to think about. The female sidekick in Homecoming did nothing to aid in the playable portions of the game, and when a game like SH gets as cutscene heavy as that one did it really kills any fear it was building.

Looking at how some of the combat played in the trailer, it appears like its going to maintain that over the shoulder 3rd person style of gameplay that it used in Homecoming. It somewhat worked in the last installment but it will need some tweaks to be really effective, (fix the fucking dodge roll this time). Guns again are said to be limited and melee makes a return, but it appears that this time around they are bringing back breakable weapons. This can be good or bad. On one hand, having a weapon break mid fight is a good way to raise the panic and desperation of the situation. On the other hand, this was tried in Silent Hill: Origins and it was clunky, inefficient, and only ended up causing more cheap deaths and reloads that cause frustration instead of raise tension. Melee has never been something that is easily masted in the SH franchise so I don't feel weapons that break were needed. I promise no matter how good you are at SH, when combat goes to melee you are going to take hits.  Having your weapon constantly breaking is just another kick in the junk.

The last thing I want to touch on is the music. Akira Yamaoka has been the composer for the SH franchise for most of the major releases, and he has been brilliant at the job. The SH franchise contains some of the best scoring in video games to date, (the first video in this blog is a fantastic sampling of this). So for what reason is he not being included in the project? In addition to that, if you've kept up with the franchise you probably are familiar with the music of Mary Elizabeth McGlynn. She has been the vocalist to appear on the soundtracks and in the SH franchise since SH3, and while met with mixed reviews, she too has provided a number of memorable tunes to this great franchise. She had originally announced in June of 2010 that she was not going to be a part of this project, but a year later it had been confirmed that she would be doing music for the game. The problem is she is not doing the theme as she usually has. This time around the theme to Downpour will be written and performed by Korn. Yes, I said that. Korn. This would make me excited maybe back in 96 or 97. But now? I do not see how they can add ANYTHING that will fit this franchise and make it better. I'm willing to give them a chance but they have a very narrow margin to impress me. This to me has been the most disappointing news.

Take this preview for what it is, its just me commenting on what I know from the game as of now. I still have it pre-orded, I will still probably play it from start to finish, and i will still probably love the hell out of the game. But if the SH development teams are going to keep making these games, they need to adhere to this little nugget of advice: Stop promising us Silent Hill 2. It might never be that good again.

I still have no idea what he's doing in this scene. 

Yakuza 4 (ps3): Welcome to my Corner of the web.

So this is my first entry here into the world of blogging. So right off the bat i'll let you know exactly what to expect here. I am not a professional writer, reviewer, or critic. I'm just a guy who likes to play games and has some opinions about them, and will probably make spelling and gramatical errors along the way. You can read magazine reviews all you want but you are more likey to take the advice of a friend who played the game, Right? So thats what I'm here to do. I'm not rating things on a massive scale or giving scores in areas of focus. Just going to tell you what I liked, didn't, or if I'll recommend it or shred it a new one, savvy? Good. Then without further adieu.....

YAKUZA 4 (ps3)

So for my first review I would like to cover a game that I personally really liked. When the game first came into the gamestop I worked at, I really thought nothing of it. But they kept airing a commerical for it on the tv we run so for the sake of trying it I took it home. Now, as you can clearly tell this is the 4th installment of the series and if you aren't caught up in your Yakuza backstory, believe me, the game will let you know about it.

It suffers right out the gate by forcing a good 15 to 20 minute install. I understand this is supposed to help you with loading times and such but seriously, can no developer create a way that this install takes place while you play the first level? Nobody wants to buy a brand new game, race home to play to be forced to wait another 20 minutes...

Sorry, I'm getting off topic. Upon starting the game you take control of the first of four characters you play as, Shun Akiyama. From the onset you gather that he is an eccentric money lender of sorts and after a bit of a quick cutscene your secretary forces you out to collect on a debt. It holds your hand on a pretty linear path to start with a tutorial battle along the way, which we'll get to in a moment. After this brief period you follow an aquiantance of your character and then are flung into a rather lengthly cutscene discussing multiple different chracters and clans and who's in charge of who and what clan is at war with this clan and who's has command and yadda yadda blah blah blah. Much like reading Battle Royale unless you are fairly familiar with japanese names this first cutscene will probably make you feel very lost, as I was. In all honesty it was a bit of a put off, but the after that scene and after a bit more walking and miniboss fight you hit the event that starts the ball rolling. From there I focused on the characters I knew and things got a bit easier to follow. There were definitely a number of scenes where I had no idea what was being discussed but the game does do a pretty good job of recapping and remeniscing about it to bring you up to speed. Actually, in the main menu before you start the game, you can view of series of cutscenes from the previous Yakuza games to bring you up to speed. I've yet to watch them all but it is a nice little feature if you are like me and are starting off with the 4th of the series.

The game for the most part plays like a cross of sandbox action game and JRPG. Once the world opens up, you are pretty much free to explore the city of Kamurocho as you please and explore all the mini games it has to offer pretty much right from the start. But unlike most American sandbox games such as like GTA, Saints Row, or Infamous, the game doesn't really provide any vehicles to get around fast in. There are a handful of cabs that you can use to jump to different portions of the map but if you aren't near one then you are walking and that can take time. The other odd aspect of the game comes into the combat. Unlike in say Grand Theft where the moment you hit the streets you can start beating the crap out of anyone you come across that is not the case in this game. Occasionally as you walk some one will charge you and spout some ridiculous reason for why they are angry at you, and you'll get a blurry filter as the game announces who you are fighting a la the random encounter system common in JRPGs. And when I when I say ridiculous, I am not kidding. One of my personal favorites is: "Hey you! Man, you look so familiar.. Don't you just hate it when you can't remember someone? I'll just have to take it out on your face!!!" If that's passers by react in japan then I think my vacation there can wait...

Homeboy seems totally justified to me. 

The meat of the game comes in the combat. The controls aren't particularly innovative but they are simple enough as it uses a fairly standard light attack, heavy attack, dodge, block, throw system. But the combos are plentiful and fairly easy to pick up. It does sometimes spawn a large number of baddies in a small area but its pretty rare to get overrun. But I would say the strongest thing working for the combat is that it is flat our visceral  I've said this to friend and I honest to god mean this that some of the finishers in this game are harder to watch than God of War. When you see limbs getting shredded off in games like God of War and Dead Space it has like no weight to it because it happens so much and so often that the constant sprays of blood can get downright comical. Yakuza can get rough to watch sometimes as you can watch their jaw dislocate and see a few bloody teeth fly from their mouth. As gruesome as it is, it never stops being fun and I crack a smile every time I swing a punk by his shirt collar spine first into a street lamp. Below you can see some of Akiyama's special moves, just to give you an idea of some of the innovative violence they've crammed in here.

In addition to the main story and the hours of ass kicking you'll do, I eluded that there are mini games to play and there are a lot of them. Many of them aren't listed on the map obviously but if there is no shortage of things to do from casino games, golf, bowling, fishing, cage fighting, pool, darts, restaurants, hostess clubs, and pachinko just to name a few. You can easily get yourself distracted for hours playing all the various different side attractions in the game which gives it an impressive depth and nice little getaway from the main story. A good example to show you is my completed game results:

Those bottom two lines tell the story right there. I played the game for almost 60 Hours and all I had to show for it after beating it was just over 20% percent of the content unlocked. 

The only real "complaint" per say comes into one of the characters side missions where you have to do a few jobs for the hostess club that Akiyama runs. Essentially a hostess club is a lot like a brothel for first dates. You come in, meet a cute chick, buy her drinks, listen to her talk about herself, and then if you're lucky get a hug at the door. For a few missions (or the achievement if you wanna put yourself through it) you have to take a girl and dress her up and do her makeup and hair and nails depending on what the clientele of the club wants to see. For a game were I can curb check a guy with a bowling ball, this bizarre pretty pretty princess dress up game seems very out of place. If they forced me to play it more than the three times in order to complete the story, I might not have continued to play it. But if in the event you have to get all the trophies in the game or actually like it, the video below is incredibly helpful for you. Get your achievement and get out, its just creepy to play it. 

So to wrap this up as its gotten a bit longer winded than I wanted to, lets bring it to the bottom line. After a bit of a rocky and confusing start, the game and story become very solid as I played through and learned about the characters and their back stories and meshes together a good number of inter connecting story lines and I felt it was pretty deep and engaging. The game contains a strong cast of likable characters that are genuinely easy to get behind. The combat while not as free to engage as I would have liked provided only a small nuisance and fights made the game very difficult for me to put down as you can tell by the image above. The massive number of mini games give the game an excellent variety so even if you get tired of beating ass, you can find something else to keep you playing the game. Overall I would highly recommend this title so if you happen to see a copy on the shelf, give it a shot because its pretty scarce.