February 2011 Archives

I remember playing Silent Hill – the first one – in my junior year of high school. I played it in the dark, as one does. To the left of where my TV sat in my basement at the time, was the door to my dad’s office (or as I called it, the room of many Playboys). While I was playing, the door creaked open. There wasn’t anything there, of course – the bolt just lost its grip on the strike plate.

I could’ve been the first 17 year old to have a heart attack, the way I reacted. The game had pulled me into its world so thoroughly that a small thing like that was enough to just about kill me.

I’ve never found Dead Space to reach those heights even once. A few jump scares, sure, but nothing looming, nothing that could ever give me a nightmare. So what’s the difference? Why does Silent Hill still scare me

The big, easy answer is the location. Silent Hill is a smallish town with twenty-some-thousand people. Harry, James, and Heather all move through the homes, apartments, stores, and buildings of the town, and everywhere there are things to remind you that you’re in an American town. A burger joint, a mechanic’s garage, a parked car here and there. When the fog rolls in, any small town looks like Silent Hill.

The USG Ishimura and the Sprawl, on the other hand, are literally otherworldly. The Ishimura is one of my favorite game settings, no question. Like the recent Batman movies, everything feels like it has weight (even the zero-g sequences!). Even though it’s not a real place, it feels like it could be. If we ever figure out the secret to Faster-Than-Light travel, how long will it be before we have massive ships like the Ishimura tooling around the galaxy? For all that weight though, the game never lets you forget for a second that you’re in deep space. Regular zero-g sequences, rooms open to the vacuum of space, and constant references to the planet below keep that idea at the front of the player’s mind. Dead Space 2 goes even further with big, epic windows filled with gorgeous vistas of Saturn and space.

It’s the same thing with movies like Aliens. I adore the first two Alien movies, but I’m never going to have a nightmare about a Xenomorph, because Xenomorphs are on other planets and in space ships. Event Horizon scared the crap out of me when I was 15 though, I wonder if that still holds true, especially since a lot of the visual inspiration for Dead Space seems to come from that film, in my opinion.

But it’s not just the location, either. The armor plays a big role. While Isaac Clarke isn’t a security officer, he’s properly equipped for working in the sorts of environments he does. He’s clad from head to toe in iron ribbing and the coolest goddamn helmet since the Ninja in Metal Gear Solid. When he stomps, heads explode. When he fires, limbs go flying. That doesn’t mean it’s not stressful, but Isaac Clarke is a badass, while Silent Hill’s protagonists are always regular people with questionable aim (not to mention sanity) and enough luck to find a handgun before Pyramid Head shows up.

The monsters, of course, play a central role in both. In terms of sheer terror, the necromorphs may beat out Silent Hill’s monsters. They’re faster, meaner, and they will tear you apart. The Silent Hill monsters, with a few exceptions, more or less shamble. Turning off your light and running past them is often the preferred method of dealing with them. Speaking strictly to the danger they present, Silent Hill’s monsters just aren’t as threatening.

That said, there’s something about them that makes them frightening in a much deeper way. Like the necromorphs, Silent Hill’s creatures very much resemble humans. While the necromorphs are humans turned into walking biological weapons, Silent Hill’s residents are deeply disturbing images with a more than passing resemblance to things like bondage and sex. As if a creature made of legs wasn’t creepy and sexual enough, one scene in Silent Hill 2 depicts what appears to be the infamous Pyramid Head raping or otherwise having sex with one of the mannequin monsters. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is an entire game about a girl with some very creepy daddy issues as well, though that game did a lot of other stuff that killed the scare factor.

If I hadn’t spent so much time in Silent Hill, maybe Dead Space would scare me. It doesn’t keep Dead Space from being one of the coolest, most intense experiences in gaming, but it’ll never keep me up at night either.

WARNING: This article will have spoilers for Dead Space and Dead Space 2.

The idea that Dead Space protagonist Isaac Clarke would be talking in Dead Space 2 never really bothered me. The team did such a stellar job with the first Dead Space title that I knew they’d be able to handle some character development. They proved me right, giving Isaac a voice and personality that fit naturally.

After playing through both games multiple times, though, I can’t decide which way I like better.

The voiceless narrative of Dead Space gave way to some really cool twists that can change the way the player views the main character. We never hear his opinion and our perception filters through his. If he doesn’t know something or doesn’t want to know something, we don’t know it either.

The biggest manifestation of this stems from the short video transmission that opens the game: Isaac watching a video message from his girlfriend Nicole that sends him halfway across the galaxy to find and rescue her. Once Isaac finds out Nicole is dead, the truth comes out – there was a bit more to that video than Isaac had previously acknowledged, and Isaac watched his girlfriend die in that transmission, going across the galaxy all the same.

Had Isaac chosen not to believe that to hold out hope she was alive? Or was his sanity in question from the beginning? I think that question adds a lot to Isaac’s character by making his perception less than trustworthy.

And then there’s that last moment of the game when Isaac is escaping from Aegis 7. He looks over to the passenger seat and necromorph Nicole lunges in a last effort to scare the pants of the player.

So we pick up a few years later and reunite with Isaac, who has apparently spent the last few years in a straight jacket. After a few unfortunate meetings and a harrowing escape, Isaac has his plasma cutter back in hand and a proper engineer RIG.

This time though, Isaac isn’t quite so silent. He’s not exactly going to talk anyone’s ears off, but it’s clear he’s grown a bit since the first game. Troubled not just by Nicole’s death, Isaac is also under constant assault of hallucinations produced by his contact with the Marker. The two intertwine and play off each other, prodding and pushing Isaac along.

The result of all these elements seems to take the player a couple steps back from Isaac. Instead of watching things as he watches them and thinking about what we’re seeing as he does, we watch him respond and react to the people and monsters he encounters.

Similarly, anytime Isaac’s hallucinating, it’s pretty clear it’s happening, with a few exceptions. The screen flashes and twitches like static with a yellow tint and something obviously hallucinated happens, often Nicole appearing on a computer screen to taunt or confuse Isaac. In the first Dead Space, there was a moment where Isaac had to protect Nicole from across a room, and there was never any indication that that wasn’t exactly what he was doing.

While I like where Visceral took Isaac in this game, I feel like the direction made it hard to focus on his wavering sanity.

The worst thing you can say about a game you’ve just finished is nothing. At least, that’s how it is for me. With my limited time, I generally don’t play too many truly bad games. I have a good general buzz sense, and can avoid games that I know I won’t like. However, I play plenty of strictly mediocre games. I played Transformers this summer. More recently I tried out Vanquish.

My first experience with Vanquish was watching a demo of it at E3 last summer. It was fast, stylish, and super slick. I finally got around to playing it in January after encouragement from my friend Keri. We both loved Bayonetta and Vanquish looked like a shoe-in, but I left Vanquish feeling a bit… empty. It wasn’t a bad game by any means. The animation is fabulous, the action matched my first impressions. It’s really hard to not look cool playing that game.

But playing it doesn’t feel cool. It just feels robotic (ironic, I know). There’s no weight to the guns; they’re not fun to take into battle. And for an action game, there sure is a lot of waiting. Vanquish takes a page from Gears of War with its strong emphasis on cover mechanics, but it seems like the nuance of the system didn’t make the translation. In games like Gears of War, you’re largely in control of when you move and when you don’t. A daring run, a quick cover swap, or a well-placed grenade can give you the opening you need to push the line forward. In Vanquish, though, it feels like the mechanics are designed to slow you down. See, the main character is wearing this crazy-awesome suit that has rocket skis for zooming around the battlefield and synaptic acceleration to slow everything down around you.

That should make this a fast-paced game, right? Except just about every action outside of firing a weapon makes the suit overheat. Dashing, punching, getting hit and slowing down time all cause the suit to overheat, leaving the player nearly helpless. And then the waiting begins.

Bayonetta worked because the tight combat system and battle arenas worked together to keep a certain flow going; The only downtime was for a bit of a breather between fights. Vanquish, on the other hand, establishes this sort of uncomfortable staccato rhythm that feels a bit like stumbling every time you start to run. When it works, it works really well, but it never establishes that flow that Bayonetta had. If it wasn’t supposed to flow, then maybe the emphasis on speed and acrobatics was misplaced.

These problems didn’t ruin the game by any means, but they ended up leaving me feeling a bit cold about the game. There’s nothing I hate more about a game than having nothing to say about it.