~Man who just dropped car keys into mouth of volcano "going in"
aaaa so tired lately
Flipping through that Ocelot/Solidus site and running the fics through google translator is kind of interesting. A few of them had 14 year old Solidus running around while Ocelot leered at him creepily which was a little uh, since it was insistent that Solidus looked like a totally legal young man AND YET was also 14, so it's like what kink are you going for here fic this is kind of weird
Likewise, it ended up adding even more weird layers of transference than usual by having youngSolidus saying that Ocelot was HIS Big Boss, or something like that it's hard to tell, and MAN BIG BOSSES EVERYWHERE YOU CAN'T ESCAPE THEM
There was one where Solidus wore a kimono for halloween, hahahaha, and another one that mentioned he liked sushi, and how it must have been a genetic thing that all snakes just loved raw food. Which is kind of adorable. Then there was a super depressing one for MGS4 where Solidus was conscious and aware throughout the whole thing but unable to move or communicate with anyone (which is scary enough on its own), and Ocelot was all :< about it when he was himself and not Liquid, and it was kind of trippy and weird to follow at points (i think ocelot kept touching his head, i'm not sure), but near the end Solidus figured out a way to communicate via morse code (NANOMACHINES and no really i think that was the explanation) and he asked Ocelot who he was to him, Big Boss or Solidus and got all emo about it and was like I'M JUST A COPY GOD I'M NO ONE WHY AM I ASKING I'M JUST HIS BIG BOSS ;_-
and ocelot was all "you're solidus, you're my solidus" which was sad enough right there
then solidus was all THANK YOU, I FEEL HAPPY. we should die, together PLEASE KILL ME, PLEASE KILL YOUR SOLIDUS
and they said goodbye and ocelot killed him and it was like JESUS
I DIDN'T THINK MGS4 COULD BE MORE DEPRESSING BUT WOW
YOU SOMEHOW DID IT
There was also another one where Solidus was carrying chocolate around but it melted and thus was BETWEEN SOLID AND LIQUID DUN DUN DUUUUN and then Ocelot licked it off his fingers and I'm sure it was supposed to be sexy or romantic but I ended up picturing something like this
which was bad enough but then I put it together with the sound from this and i just lost it entirely
there were some other interesting images and now i can't remember them, darn it. i think there was one with teenie solidus reading again on a lawn somewhere and ocelot leaning over him so his hair went over his face all HI WHATCHA READING :D which was a cute image, haha. Also one where all the Snakes were living together and Snake tracked in mud everywhere and Solidus was like MY CLEAN FLOOR MY GOD YOU PEOPLE >:( and then liquid showed up and they went joyriding in some kind of hotrod or motorcycle, i forget.
ANYWAY I started Silent Hill Shattered Memories, which is... interesting. I'm around the equivalent of the bridge to the other district in the original SH1, before Alchemilla, then I decided to take a break.
Basically, it doesn't really feel like a SH game so far. I can't put my finger on exactly why this is just yet. I don't know if its the atmosphere or the areas or what, but there's something that just doesn't... click, exactly.
It's possible that it's the lack of a threat from any type of monster for certain periods, and the thing is that I actually do appreciate not having to deal with a zwak in every room or god forbid the frigging monsters in homecoming, which were just obnoxious, but at the same time it sort of changes the feel of things, if that makes sense. There's a difference between a potential threat, even if its a nothing threat like a zwak, and no threat, which is basically what seems to be the case in Shattered Memories when you're not doing the running bits. I do appreciate having time to look at everything at my leisure and not have to worry about bladespiders coming and owning me, but at the same time... I dunno, it makes for a less oppressive atmosphere, less tense. It's not the same feel, exactly.
Anyway, the running bits so far are obnoxious. This is possibly because I have no sense of direction and thus get lost easily. The fact you're tearing through most rooms as fast as possible probably doesn't help, as well as the fact you can't check your map. That is killing me, guys. You HAVE a map, of course, its on Harry's phone. But you can't run and look at it, as far as I can tell, and you rarely have any time to pull it out and study your path while monsters are trying to eat you. There's no lit path telling you where to go, and so I tend to head for whatever door is open, which sometimes leads me in a circle, then bam, monsters gang up on me and I go down.
Also annoying is having to shake the monsters off, which involves tossing your remote around and is very frustrating when Harry won't respond or just gives halfhearted efforts or when you have a ton around you and you throw one off to have another jump on, and arrrrgh. ARRRRRRRRRRRRGH.
I probably wouldn't be as frustrated by this stuff if I DIDN'T GET LOST SO EASILY but I hate having to run and run and run in circles or get stuck in a dead end and do the same sequence over and over again. Even the addition of a typical SH map button for triangle would solve the problem. I could just check that every few steps to make sure I was going the right way. As it is it's just very obnoxious.
The monsters themselves are odd looking for me - zwakish looking things with no faces, and ones with odd geometric heads that have been cut into segments. i dunno what the other versions look like. My way through the game won't be like someone elses with the whole questionnaire thing and all that.
Speaking of which, the lack of a real SH feel actually contributed to me thinking of the game as something entirely divorced from Silent Hill in general, which means that I didn't even start comparing it the first game until I got to the bridge. The basic major points are still hit mostly in the same order, but they've been slightly changed.
Cybil (who is dressed sensibly in my version) meets you after Harry freaks out at someone else's house, as opposed to the alleyway.
Your quest to find the keys at the beginning becomes aimless wandering through a forest.
Midwich Elementary becomes Midwich High School.
Balkan Church becomes Balkan Night Club.
And in both you still have to lower the bridge before you can cross.
My basic theory right now is that the Harry you're playing in this thing isn't actually Harry, but some guy having a psychotic episode for some reason or another and is just "pretending" to be Harry. Things don't add up, of course, and Harry seems a bit amnesiac and odd. The questionaires might change things, but most of the time its hard to tell how. The most obvious one was coloring in a picture of a house - when you find the house in reality, its colored the same color you colored it. So my house was yellow and orange, and the people inside wearing red and green. That sort of thing.
My newDahlia (who I don't think is Dahlia Gillespie) doesn't match that screencap I posted before - she's wearing a full shirt and gloves, and has a sort of resemblance to Cheryl that makes me somewhat uncomfortable. I hope that's just me, anyway. Not only that, but newDahlia (who looks 16ish or so still) is supposedly banging newHarry, although he has no memory of that. This put harryndahlia in a somewhat odd light. they might say something about that consequently
But she's not my Dahlia, as far as I can tell. I EXPECT TO SEE DAHLIA LATER, THE REAL CRAZY OLD LADY DAHLIA, AND NOT NEW TEENIE DAHLIA.
Harry with his iphone, and the highschool girl saying that Cheryl was in the class ahead of her and graduated already, makes me think again that its some guy having a weird episode and pretending to be Harry for some reason or another, and Harry and Heather have already moved to Portland or something.
The odd snippets of things you find in the town don't seem attached to anything and are fairly cheesy, and don't really help increase the atmosphere for me since they seem so disjointed and unattached to things I care about. Sort of like the bunches of people in the apartments in SH4 that I couldn't keep straight and didn't really care about. I answered the quizzes saying I didn't cheat on my partners and wasn't a slut in high school and that sort of thing, so the things I found tended to be girls getting pressured into sex and stuff along those lines, which probably isn't a coincidence. If that's the case, that would actually be a somewhat effective read on the game's part - I definitely am not comfortable at all with rape (although then again who is), and if it got that impression from my answers, then more power to it. Who knows though.
So far it's not very frightening, although most SH games don't frighten me anymore (homecoming sure didn't) and just creep me out every now and then. And the lack of an SH feel and the annoying running sequences are kind of meh. But it's not bad, exactly. The flashlight works really well this way, very easy to get used to and makes it much easier to look around, and so far its competently put together and everything. It's just sort of... I dunno, it's hard to say. Not mediocre exactly but... different. I might have more opinions after Alchemilla and meeting some of the older characters, like Dahlia or Kaufmann (if Kaufmann isn't the guy giving you the quizzes, and if he is he's certainly improved his bedside manner) or Lisa or whatever.
Graphics are a bit weak, but Homecomings were too and it doesn't bother me much. Music's fairly unobtrusive, which is... alright? idk.
The girl you meet at the school totally gave me flashbacks to Cynthia from SH4. Poor Cynthia.
Shattered Memories is supposed to be a reimagining of SH1, but it's so distant at times that I forget that its supposed to even be that instead of its own game. Which I guess could be a good thing? Hmm. It might be more obvious later I guess.
AHA I REALIZED ONE OF THE DIFFERENCES
THERE ARE NO STUPID INSANE PUZZLES IN THIS YET
NO BIZARRE RIDDLES OR POEMS OR BOOKS OR LOCKS OR FETCH QUESTS OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT
and believe it or not i miss that sort of thing
MORE LATER, I GUESS.
By the way, if you happen to buzz by the Pages of Now and Forever you might see some familiar art. Christmas is coming up so fast aaaa and i still have three more to finish aaaagh
inspired by the tf2 christmas cards as one may guess
here, have some other little things i haven't had time to color yet
HAPPIER TIMES
poor demo and his broken heart. I HOPE THEY MAKE UP AGAIN AT THE END OF THE WEEK GUYS IT MAKES ME SAD THAT THEY'RE FIGHTING
also i am hugely intrigued by this crafting system they're setting up hmmmmmmm
also i need to look up references for demo at some point i keep forgetting what he wears
FAILIEST SOLDIER EVER
for the sake of fairness
feeling dizzy wooooooooo
Flipping through that Ocelot/Solidus site and running the fics through google translator is kind of interesting. A few of them had 14 year old Solidus running around while Ocelot leered at him creepily which was a little uh, since it was insistent that Solidus looked like a totally legal young man AND YET was also 14, so it's like what kink are you going for here fic this is kind of weird
Likewise, it ended up adding even more weird layers of transference than usual by having youngSolidus saying that Ocelot was HIS Big Boss, or something like that it's hard to tell, and MAN BIG BOSSES EVERYWHERE YOU CAN'T ESCAPE THEM
There was one where Solidus wore a kimono for halloween, hahahaha, and another one that mentioned he liked sushi, and how it must have been a genetic thing that all snakes just loved raw food. Which is kind of adorable. Then there was a super depressing one for MGS4 where Solidus was conscious and aware throughout the whole thing but unable to move or communicate with anyone (which is scary enough on its own), and Ocelot was all :< about it when he was himself and not Liquid, and it was kind of trippy and weird to follow at points (i think ocelot kept touching his head, i'm not sure), but near the end Solidus figured out a way to communicate via morse code (NANOMACHINES and no really i think that was the explanation) and he asked Ocelot who he was to him, Big Boss or Solidus and got all emo about it and was like I'M JUST A COPY GOD I'M NO ONE WHY AM I ASKING I'M JUST HIS BIG BOSS ;_-
and ocelot was all "you're solidus, you're my solidus" which was sad enough right there
then solidus was all THANK YOU, I FEEL HAPPY. we should die, together PLEASE KILL ME, PLEASE KILL YOUR SOLIDUS
and they said goodbye and ocelot killed him and it was like JESUS
I DIDN'T THINK MGS4 COULD BE MORE DEPRESSING BUT WOW
YOU SOMEHOW DID IT
There was also another one where Solidus was carrying chocolate around but it melted and thus was BETWEEN SOLID AND LIQUID DUN DUN DUUUUN and then Ocelot licked it off his fingers and I'm sure it was supposed to be sexy or romantic but I ended up picturing something like this
which was bad enough but then I put it together with the sound from this and i just lost it entirely
there were some other interesting images and now i can't remember them, darn it. i think there was one with teenie solidus reading again on a lawn somewhere and ocelot leaning over him so his hair went over his face all HI WHATCHA READING :D which was a cute image, haha. Also one where all the Snakes were living together and Snake tracked in mud everywhere and Solidus was like MY CLEAN FLOOR MY GOD YOU PEOPLE >:( and then liquid showed up and they went joyriding in some kind of hotrod or motorcycle, i forget.
ANYWAY I started Silent Hill Shattered Memories, which is... interesting. I'm around the equivalent of the bridge to the other district in the original SH1, before Alchemilla, then I decided to take a break.
Basically, it doesn't really feel like a SH game so far. I can't put my finger on exactly why this is just yet. I don't know if its the atmosphere or the areas or what, but there's something that just doesn't... click, exactly.
It's possible that it's the lack of a threat from any type of monster for certain periods, and the thing is that I actually do appreciate not having to deal with a zwak in every room or god forbid the frigging monsters in homecoming, which were just obnoxious, but at the same time it sort of changes the feel of things, if that makes sense. There's a difference between a potential threat, even if its a nothing threat like a zwak, and no threat, which is basically what seems to be the case in Shattered Memories when you're not doing the running bits. I do appreciate having time to look at everything at my leisure and not have to worry about bladespiders coming and owning me, but at the same time... I dunno, it makes for a less oppressive atmosphere, less tense. It's not the same feel, exactly.
Anyway, the running bits so far are obnoxious. This is possibly because I have no sense of direction and thus get lost easily. The fact you're tearing through most rooms as fast as possible probably doesn't help, as well as the fact you can't check your map. That is killing me, guys. You HAVE a map, of course, its on Harry's phone. But you can't run and look at it, as far as I can tell, and you rarely have any time to pull it out and study your path while monsters are trying to eat you. There's no lit path telling you where to go, and so I tend to head for whatever door is open, which sometimes leads me in a circle, then bam, monsters gang up on me and I go down.
Also annoying is having to shake the monsters off, which involves tossing your remote around and is very frustrating when Harry won't respond or just gives halfhearted efforts or when you have a ton around you and you throw one off to have another jump on, and arrrrgh. ARRRRRRRRRRRRGH.
I probably wouldn't be as frustrated by this stuff if I DIDN'T GET LOST SO EASILY but I hate having to run and run and run in circles or get stuck in a dead end and do the same sequence over and over again. Even the addition of a typical SH map button for triangle would solve the problem. I could just check that every few steps to make sure I was going the right way. As it is it's just very obnoxious.
The monsters themselves are odd looking for me - zwakish looking things with no faces, and ones with odd geometric heads that have been cut into segments. i dunno what the other versions look like. My way through the game won't be like someone elses with the whole questionnaire thing and all that.
Speaking of which, the lack of a real SH feel actually contributed to me thinking of the game as something entirely divorced from Silent Hill in general, which means that I didn't even start comparing it the first game until I got to the bridge. The basic major points are still hit mostly in the same order, but they've been slightly changed.
Cybil (who is dressed sensibly in my version) meets you after Harry freaks out at someone else's house, as opposed to the alleyway.
Your quest to find the keys at the beginning becomes aimless wandering through a forest.
Midwich Elementary becomes Midwich High School.
Balkan Church becomes Balkan Night Club.
And in both you still have to lower the bridge before you can cross.
My basic theory right now is that the Harry you're playing in this thing isn't actually Harry, but some guy having a psychotic episode for some reason or another and is just "pretending" to be Harry. Things don't add up, of course, and Harry seems a bit amnesiac and odd. The questionaires might change things, but most of the time its hard to tell how. The most obvious one was coloring in a picture of a house - when you find the house in reality, its colored the same color you colored it. So my house was yellow and orange, and the people inside wearing red and green. That sort of thing.
My newDahlia (who I don't think is Dahlia Gillespie) doesn't match that screencap I posted before - she's wearing a full shirt and gloves, and has a sort of resemblance to Cheryl that makes me somewhat uncomfortable. I hope that's just me, anyway. Not only that, but newDahlia (who looks 16ish or so still) is supposedly banging newHarry, although he has no memory of that. This put harryndahlia in a somewhat odd light. they might say something about that consequently
But she's not my Dahlia, as far as I can tell. I EXPECT TO SEE DAHLIA LATER, THE REAL CRAZY OLD LADY DAHLIA, AND NOT NEW TEENIE DAHLIA.
Harry with his iphone, and the highschool girl saying that Cheryl was in the class ahead of her and graduated already, makes me think again that its some guy having a weird episode and pretending to be Harry for some reason or another, and Harry and Heather have already moved to Portland or something.
The odd snippets of things you find in the town don't seem attached to anything and are fairly cheesy, and don't really help increase the atmosphere for me since they seem so disjointed and unattached to things I care about. Sort of like the bunches of people in the apartments in SH4 that I couldn't keep straight and didn't really care about. I answered the quizzes saying I didn't cheat on my partners and wasn't a slut in high school and that sort of thing, so the things I found tended to be girls getting pressured into sex and stuff along those lines, which probably isn't a coincidence. If that's the case, that would actually be a somewhat effective read on the game's part - I definitely am not comfortable at all with rape (although then again who is), and if it got that impression from my answers, then more power to it. Who knows though.
So far it's not very frightening, although most SH games don't frighten me anymore (homecoming sure didn't) and just creep me out every now and then. And the lack of an SH feel and the annoying running sequences are kind of meh. But it's not bad, exactly. The flashlight works really well this way, very easy to get used to and makes it much easier to look around, and so far its competently put together and everything. It's just sort of... I dunno, it's hard to say. Not mediocre exactly but... different. I might have more opinions after Alchemilla and meeting some of the older characters, like Dahlia or Kaufmann (if Kaufmann isn't the guy giving you the quizzes, and if he is he's certainly improved his bedside manner) or Lisa or whatever.
Graphics are a bit weak, but Homecomings were too and it doesn't bother me much. Music's fairly unobtrusive, which is... alright? idk.
The girl you meet at the school totally gave me flashbacks to Cynthia from SH4. Poor Cynthia.
Shattered Memories is supposed to be a reimagining of SH1, but it's so distant at times that I forget that its supposed to even be that instead of its own game. Which I guess could be a good thing? Hmm. It might be more obvious later I guess.
AHA I REALIZED ONE OF THE DIFFERENCES
THERE ARE NO STUPID INSANE PUZZLES IN THIS YET
NO BIZARRE RIDDLES OR POEMS OR BOOKS OR LOCKS OR FETCH QUESTS OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT
and believe it or not i miss that sort of thing
MORE LATER, I GUESS.
By the way, if you happen to buzz by the Pages of Now and Forever you might see some familiar art. Christmas is coming up so fast aaaa and i still have three more to finish aaaagh
inspired by the tf2 christmas cards as one may guess
here, have some other little things i haven't had time to color yet
HAPPIER TIMES
poor demo and his broken heart. I HOPE THEY MAKE UP AGAIN AT THE END OF THE WEEK GUYS IT MAKES ME SAD THAT THEY'RE FIGHTING
also i am hugely intrigued by this crafting system they're setting up hmmmmmmm
also i need to look up references for demo at some point i keep forgetting what he wears
FAILIEST SOLDIER EVER
for the sake of fairness
feeling dizzy wooooooooo