Using that criteria, consider this: all 41 racers in F-Zero GX have their own theme song.
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DOOM, SM64 and Demonās Souls are maybe my favourite three games ever if I had to choose. These are the blends of action and exploration that buzz my brain in a special way. Iām just a 3D polygon junkie at heart. Plenty of 2D games in my top 20 or whatever but the spatial reasoning that comes with that extra dimension is what really hooked me on video games and continues to interest me. So Iāll always prefer a say, Jumping Flash! or Gunvalkyrie, to āobjectivelyā better games like idk Street Fighter or Gunstar Heroes (which are great).
I remember being scared of DOOM even after asking my cousin to install it on our computer, playing it when my parents werenāt around and thinking, āWhat if I got sucked into this hell world and could never get out?ā I still recall the dreams I had of running over infinite green hills after watching SM64 on the jumbotron at Best Buy in 1996. And Demonās Soulsā¦I wasnāt playing games for a couple years and it pretty much rekindled my interest in these things, so maybe as influential as the other two.
Iām probably a philistine for this, but after playing the first few hours of Killer 7 last year, I donāt think Iāll be returning to it. Love the camera framing, maybe above all else. Music is cool. The gunplay got old fast. Same for the āfreakyā vibe. Eventually I found it numbing, neither funny or unsettling or thought provoking, justā¦trying. The last thing I remember is being in the āsafe roomā area and looking at the long list of tutorial topics, and then the character select screen and seeing there were stats to level up, and then feeling claustrophobic in the pause menu and ultimately thought, āThis is a cluttered, dull and ugly chore of a thing I donāt wanna deal with right nowā and maybeā¦never. Appreciate it, but donāt wanna play it.
Iām not sure about Dark Souls vs Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. Havenāt played the latter but maybe Iāll vote for it in the name of diversity even though Dark Souls is one of the best things.
Oh and F-Zero GX. I suck at that game! But it rules and it has that character James McCloud andā¦did a human and a fox fuck to create the hero of the Lylat System? Cool thing to put in a game imo.
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Katamari and doom are a great matchup. Finding what connects seemingly dissimilar pairs was more enjoyable than considering which I liked best.
Both are loose and horizontally zippy 3d games, the looseness is what I like most about both, however differently they go about it. They have plenty of gaps and circuitous spaces which go hand in hand with their speed. Katamari is the grab game par excellence, the elegance of scale being the biggest boundary you face opens every challenge like a kid in a candy jail doomsday scenario. However I think the spaces in DooM have the upper hand, thereās something latently wonderful in dynamic floors/ceilings and coordinating teleporters. The map is a multicellular organism from hell, even though the main verb is shoot, itās more important to me that thereās circulation.
DooMās dance can be a shepherds or a plumbers, but it really canāt compare to the solipsistic joy of rolling a dorodango. The katamari has the pitch, roll, and yaw of a Rubikās cube, you can ignore itās perfection and still recognize what a great thing it is. Then youāve got dashing and 180 turns which are so goddamn satisfying.
DooM is a mess, but itās more than the sum of its parts. Katamari is a more respectable game, but not better imo. It was designed as an off ramp and thereās a poignant videogame emptiness at the end of the unlockable eternal zones. DooM is already realized abundance and I donāt look forward to it as something to return to. Idk katamari is something you take into the real world and doom is ALIVE and here to eat you idk um hehe
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I never made it past the first stage in Killer 7 in a few attempts and this was always a big element of it.
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I remember enjoying the first stage enough to continue on, but I also remember it feeling long and trying. The latter parts of the game solidified it as special, even earned its place as my favorite. I havenāt played it all the way through in a long time, so I canāt tell anyone who didnāt like the first two hours to keep trying.
One of the problems is everything itās done has been taken and redone to death.
But for me the positive points are whenever I play it I am inmediately struck with oppressive dread. That nothing happens in the first 30 minutes is excellent and Your first encounter with an enemy is you viciously kill it. It is an empowerment sim actually. I love the voice acting and CG which for me has always read as strange and otherworldly but is very close to just being weird trash.
I have a lot of love for that aesthetic era and hope the puppetry of it enhances the work:
The fog and representation of An America is great down to the crumy mexican restaurant.
I like the implication this is a personal hell, different for every occupant. More games should establish a contradictory world with information that doesnāt match.
It lays the ground work that Shattered Memories takes the full course of your actions have consequences. How you play is important. The problem is this is very well known and spoiled instead of a player reveal. Hopefully other works in the last 20 years have done a better job of twisting the knife based on the players actions and NOT made it a bullet point.
Also Dog Ending.
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I always had the complete opposite reaction to the atmosphere it creates. I hate how near the fog is, it just annoys me and adds nothing valuable to the atmosphere. Itās a videogame where you canāt see or hear anything. Now that could be kind of a cool concept, just the way it does it doesnāt make me scared or feel anything other than annoyance and irritation. Itās too foggy and when itās not foggy itās too dark.
The radio sound is too noisy and whenever it comes on it triggers me into almost screaming āshut up already.ā The enemies are also not scary because you can just dispatch them with two or three hits and a stomp. Maybe this is that empowerment fantasyā¦ Does it really fit the game though? From a gameplay perspective it just trivializes the enemies and takes all the fear Iād otherwise feel out of the game. You have 200 hand gun bullets at any time.
The first pyramid head fight sucks and takes all the respect you would have for that enemy away immediately. Heās not a threat, even though he looks like he should be. Thatās symptomatic for the whole game.
The sound design is something thatās often considered brilliant about SH2 and I think itās annoying and repetitive, especially in combat. Itās grating to my ears.
The whole atmosphere is built on noise. Visual noise like the fog and film grain, and then the static noise of the radio. For me thatās just annoying and that says a lot because I love noise in almost every other game and in the music I listen toā¦ It just doesnāt work for me in SH2. Itās been that way back in the day and itās like that now.
I try really hard not to judge the game unfairly from a modern perspective when it influenced so much of what came after. And I can agree with you that the environments are cool and that the concept of this personal hell is coolā¦ The rest of it just doesnāt do it for me and the whole experience of playing SH2 is very, very close to kusoge for me. I mean, itās clearly not, it was made by people who knew what they were doing and there are little flourishes that are high qualityā¦ Like the music is obviously amazing and little gameplay things like if you pick up a map after you tried a few doors in the area youāll already have those marked as locked or open on the map retroactively - thought has gone into a lot of the systems, for sure.
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i still havenāt sorted through my feelings on sh2 completely after playing it a few months ago so iām enjoying all these takes to reflect on. i will say that the balance of empowerment and enfeeblement (not quite the right word but iām sleepy and lazy) offered to the player is an interesting dance. i could beat enemies to a pulp with various blunt objects but despite my power over their bodies in immediacy, them haunting the unknown + unseen areas of the world (which are basically all of them, so shrouded by fog and darkness) gave them an even greater power over my mind. the game started with me roaming the streets and encountering creeps relatively at my leisure, but then increasingly forced me to confront them at their chosen pace (via ādungeonā design), not mine.
the trick with horror is the unknown seems to always be scarier than the known; the constant tension of what could be lurking in darkness. when encountering an enemy, i felt more relieved than startled ā here was a ācheckpointā in the midst of uncertainty, a place where i could be sure of my surroundings. the scariest part in the game for me was in the prison, walking through cell blocks with main character looking offscreen at some demon chanting that i couldnāt see or reach. i doubt anything was even modeled in there. that moment sticks with me more than any other about the game.
since this is a competition: sh2 definitely beats f-zero for me as i canāt stand the feeling of floaty hovery racers. give me a spintires game set in the f-zero universe and then weāll talk.
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It feels to me like SH2 could have been a really good walking sim. It seems like youād agree with that, kind of? Because of what you mentioned about the enemies and the unknown in the darkness. I could imagine the game working just as well as a combatless experience, where you just run away sometimes and at other times get scared because of the radio and things you canāt see or that canāt get to you. There are many instances in the game with the latter. Enemies behind grates or bars and the like.
Of course walking sims came to prominence much later and I donāt think many have been done on consoles or found much success thereā¦ I wonder if PT was supposed to have combat or not? I donāt know anything about it besides what was in the demo, never looked into it
This talk about Silent Hill 2 being the worst rather than the best is interesting. Iāve always held it in the top spot, though I could be convinced that the original game is the best one. Really, thereās a lot to like about all four (and Shattered Memories).
SH2 and Shattered Memories are the two in the series that donāt try to be scary as much as meaningful. Whether they succeed or not for all players, the attempt is admirable. And SH2 is unique in addressing themes you just donāt see in video games such as terminal illness, widowhood, and child abuse. I still find its symbolism very clever, and I like that the player is not likely to pick up on some of the most significant symbolism until late in the game.
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I have said my piece regarding SH2 in one of the earlier threads so iāll just that here:
Similar feelings to BBP but I still find the game compelling.
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I think if I played Silent Hill 2 before Silent Hill 1 Iād have enjoyed it more, but playing through them on back to back Halloween seasons the first half of SH 2 felt like such a retread that it really failed to hold my interest that closely. I also tried not to use the gun until the second half of said game due to worry over ammo shortages endemic to survival horror games of the era which lead the the first half being a slog and the second a bit of a breeze.
I donāt think SH 2 works nearly as well as an experience if it doesnāt hold your complete attention, it feels a bit like āyouāre all in or all outā wager.
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i also like the matchup in that they both arguably have their strongest roots in pac-man. also both make me want to refer to their stages as āboardsā
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Thereās gotta be a linkās awakening rom hack (in Japanese) that takes out all the annoying tutorial stuff right?
Iām really glad we had this Silent Hill 2 conversation. At first I thought I might have come off as too dismissive of it for it to become a constructive discussion. Yāall pulled through though. I certainly learned about some fresh perspectives on it after all these years and thatās always cool.
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There is. I should patch my roms for when my child plays it in 15 years.
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voting is now open for the week!
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You can apparently vote more than one in each. I didnāt but i noticed it was possible.
thanks for flagging thisā¦ the forum software for setting up polls changed since last time, i selected a min and max selection of 1 but i guess that didnāt work? does anyone know how to fix it lol
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Katamari Vs Doom is the one that hurts the most, but the answer is clear. Only one of those kept me sane in small weekly doses through grad school, and you sure as shit canāt unwind while circle strafing.
Silent Hill 2 Vs F-Zero GX gave me the most pause, but I grew up next to the rustiest fence ever and cannot relate to space anime people at all.
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