Posts Tagged ‘Silent Hill: Shattered Memories’

Yes, its late, and we missed February completely, but with most of the regular cast having birthdays last month we can be forgiven right? Well maybe not, but we are back again now with added titillating missile silos. I say ‘we’ are back, but really it is me with a brand new cohort in the form of Scoot, a font of gaming knowledge and a welcome partner in podcasting crime.

So here is the twenty-fourth DoFuss Show, and if you can bear with a couple of small technical issues on Scoot’s end you will be treated to an hour an forty minutes of gaming news and discussion. Focusing our attention on online competitive play and games retail for the most part, we also dip in to some Nintendo conference talk and other news.

I suppose we are reaching a point where I may have to concede that a ‘regular’ schedule might never be possible, but I promise to keep trying and may hopefully even manage to get a three-man show going one day. Until I hope you keep listening to, and enjoying, our sporadic content.

 

 The DoFuss Show – Dedicated to Claire and Miki [101:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Different sites have different mandates on the subject of at what point a review should be written. I used to believe that a reviewer should experience a game in its entirely before they could reasonably pass judgment. It is a view that has slowly eroded recently, leaving me unsure as to my own principles and questioning at what point I am qualified to write a review.

Initially my concept of finishing a game before reviewing was solid, every game on my own site has always been completed before anything was written. But playing Ultimate Band for review on Game People threw all of this in to question. Playing the Disney rhythm game I could be found repeatedly pumping my Wii remote above my crotch with no penalty for my constant, rhythmic ‘strumming’ which didn’t even come close to emulating the onscreen beat. I finished around half the songs offered with a variety of instruments, and concluded that it was fair to say I had seen enough.

The game that changed me.

It was peculiar how divided the decision made me. Maybe I was doing readers an injustice by not experiencing everything the game had to offer. But I knew that the template for the action wasn’t going to chance, and nor was my opinion. I set to writing the review feeling that I had been fair to both my readers and the developers.

I constructed a new internal guideline for my reviews. Based on the time I play and the genre/size of the game I ensure that on sites that do not require I finish a game that I at least give each it a fair amount of my time. I was happy with my new code until recently when the question was again reawakened by the narrative heavy Mass Effect 2 and Silent Hill: Shattered Memoires.

Narrative dependent titles have an implicit expectation that you will experience a story in its entirety. Similar to a movie it would be unfair to review it before it reached its conclusion. If I were to watch the first hour of The Sixth Sense and then review it my opinion would be very different to someone who watched it all. But it is impossible to dissociate a game’s narrative from its interactive elements. Again if The Sixth Sense required all of its audience have their toenails torn off while watching, then I would be justified in saying it doesn’t matter what the pay off is, it can’t be worth it and subsequently leaving after only five minutes.

Almost entirely incredible.

Looking at Silent Hill and Mass Effect 2 both game’s finales sit in contrast to my opinion of the rest of the experience. Mass Effect 2 was for me an incredibly involving forty-hour experience; every moment (bar the mining) was a joy, until my final confrontation. Any ending of a story or game with an expansive and involving plot will always struggle to meet the high expectations established throughout the rest of the experience, and thus they are almost uniformly anticlimactic. In Mass Effect’s case end sequence in its entirety is an emotional sequence of events, but the last tiny fraction was a let down. I couldn’t even say it tarnished the rest of the game, but it did hit something of a bum note when it should have reached its crescendo.

Silent Hill takes the opposite approach. Incorporating two game styles, creepy atmospheric adventure and running in terror my opinion throughout Silent Hill oscillated between amazement at what the developers were trying to achieve, and dismay at the infuriating action sections. Discussion of the emotions that the game’s infuriating controls induce and how intentional they were aside, every moment spent fleeing your enemies during these sections were soul crushingly bad, yet instantly forgive when you get to the end and begin to realize what it was building to.

A strong ending can make up for a lot.

Now I am stuck in a quandary. Mass Effect 2’s slight disappointment did not alter my feelings about the experience. Maybe it is due to the length of the title, or perhaps simple that the mechanics were solid enough to have overlooked weaker narrative elements. Silent Hill’s ending however totally altered my opinion. Lasting only six or eight hours perhaps I was inclined to be more forgiving of the hour or so spent in the games broken action segments; looking back I am even starting to appreciate the real sense of apprehension the scenes created in me. But what it boils down to is that I could have reviewed Mass Effect 2 after ten hours and bar a throw away comment about the ending my conclusion would have been unchanged. Where as if I hadn’t finished Silent Hill my feelings would have been inclined towards the negative, rather than the overwhelmingly positive view I now possess.

So it is back to the drawing board with my guidelines. Currently I am leaning towards the idea that when left to my own discretion I play a game until I just can’t bring myself to play any more, assuming of course that I at least have ensured a solid grasp of the concepts. I arrived at this formula because personally I would not feel ‘cheated’ if any writer supplied their opinion in this manner, providing they clearly indicated what their exposure to the game entailed. It seems many disagree with this methodology however feeling entitled to reviews that encapsulate the complete experience.

I can understand arguing for completion, but it seems that with both the industry and distribution of information changing as rapidly as it is, changes in coverage’s content should adapt also. With game media moving almost exclusively to websites, speed of coverage and personality of the review are becoming increasingly valuable. Following someone with the same tastes, or drawing from hundreds of voices, allows us to choose what suits us personally. As players have more games to play and less time available a review that tells me that one persons experience was so bad it made the player put down the controller and never return is invaluable providing the writer frames what their opinion is based on sufficiently.

I know it is late, with all of the Tokyo Game Show write-ups, reviews and articles that I had to get posted things have been hectic. But it is here now and stuffed to bursting point with previews, discussion and interviews from the show!

To give you that nice cozy and familiar feeling we kick off with just me and Darren for our usual banter but then Darren is out and we switch over to Daniel Feit, another writer and resident of Japan who also attended TGS. Dan and I get down in to it for almost two hours talking about the games of on show and our experiences there. Just be happy we at least break it up for with an interview with The Behemoth (kicking off around the 1h 49m mark), creators of Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers and the upcoming Game 3.

Have a listen and please leave feedback in the comments or on iTunes. Also remember to keep an eye on DoFuss over the next three weeks for some extra audio/visual stuff in the next few weeks as Darren hits Japan.

For my TGS coverage check…
here for Playdevil.
here for Go Gaming Giant!
and be sure to visit DoFuss for my final show wrap-up post later this week.

For Dan’s coverage and all his other articles look here…
to see Game Life.
to see Feitclub, Dan’s home page.

 

 The DoFuss Show – TGS Special. [136:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Expect something more substantial soon about my experience as a whole in the next few days, but incase you were wondering where all my TGS previews are you can find them at Play Devil and Go Gaming Giant.

Hope you enjoy.