The Horror Games "Play or die"

Baron Of Hell wrote:
beanman101283 wrote:

I stopped playing Amnesia because it was so stressful If I go back I don't know if I should start from the beginning or just try to continue from where I left off.

I played for 30 minutes. I don't know what to make of it. The way you open and close doors is stressful in itself. Started to panic when I tried to close the door to the closet I was hiding in. I'm not sure if you can even hide in closets. The monster making all the noise never showed up.

Are you SURE the monster never showed up?! Maybe you should stay in there for a bit longer....

..Or, I guess you can take your chances. Maybe.

CptDomano wrote:
Baron Of Hell wrote:
beanman101283 wrote:

I stopped playing Amnesia because it was so stressful If I go back I don't know if I should start from the beginning or just try to continue from where I left off.

I played for 30 minutes. I don't know what to make of it. The way you open and close doors is stressful in itself. Started to panic when I tried to close the door to the closet I was hiding in. I'm not sure if you can even hide in closets. The monster making all the noise never showed up.

Are you SURE the monster never showed up?! Maybe you should stay in there for a bit longer....

..Or, I guess you can take your chances. Maybe.

But don't monsters usually hide in closets too? :O

I'll give Amnesia a spin, see if it's as pants-wettingly scary as everyone makes it out to be.

Silent Hill 2 (XBox), Fatal Frame II (PS2), or Clock Tower 3 (PS2) will fall this month. I'd say CT3 is the least likely, as I gave it a long try almost 10 years ago and it just didn't grab me that much.

If for some reason those don't happen, I might turn to Resident Evil 1 (remake) or Eternal Darkness on the Gamecube. ET is hella-long though. I nearly finished a first (of 3) run-through years ago before getting stuck and never really resuming.

Oh crap, I totally forgot about Eternal Darkness. I really should finish that one day.

Actually, thinking about it, I have a shockingly huge number of horror games on my real and virtual shelves.

Chaz wrote:
Blind_Evil wrote:

I've always wanted to play the Fatal Frame games, but don't feel like buying a PS2 or dealing with the awful Xbox emulation on the 360.

Was the emulation for these really so terrible? I've got the Xbox versions of the first two, but haven't tried them on the 360. It'd have to be pretty terrible for me to go to the trouble of hunting down an original Xbox.

I don't know, I don't have them. I Just know the games I actually have tried have been frustrating in one way or another.

ZaneRockfist wrote:
Blind_Evil wrote:

I've always wanted to play the Fatal Frame games, but don't feel like buying a PS2 or dealing with the awful Xbox emulation on the 360.

You could try emulating on the PC.

I'm not into playing stuff on PC, and even if I was I suspect my laptop wouldn't do well with emulating anything stronger than an N64.

WipEout wrote:

But... But... I just finished washing my shorts after playing Slender (of which there's a new one coming soon )!!

SCP-087 goes less towards pant-fouling terror and more towards aneurysm-inducing tension. No excuses! Except possibly high blood pressure.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I'll give Amnesia a spin, see if it's as pants-wettingly scary as everyone makes it out to be.

Just make sure you do it properly: dark room, headphones, set aside a decent block of time (a good hour or two) and try to let yourself be immersed in it. Like any horror, it can easily be undermined by the wrong environment or over-analysing it.

(admittedly this is coming from someone who started off doing it properly and finished up playing it on sunny weekend afternoons)

Blind_Evil wrote:

I've always wanted to play the Fatal Frame games, but don't feel like buying a PS2 or dealing with the awful Xbox emulation on the 360.

Also, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (Wii, PS2, PSP) beats the hell out of both SH games on the list there.

I'm in the same boat. There are a lot of J-horror games I'd love to play but they will have to wait until I've sorted a play station and that will have to wait until various other things come into play.

As far as emulation goes I can't even play my copy of psychonauts because of some sort of pal incompatibility.

How long is Amnesia?

I love the Fatal Frame games.. and I agree they are a bugger to get a hold of.

El-Producto wrote:

How long is Amnesia?

I love the Fatal Frame games.. and I agree they are a bugger to get a hold of.

5-6 hours, if the Steam timer thingy can be trusted.

Started Silent Hill 2 last night. Emulation on the 360 seemed fine so far. Only got about a half hour in due to circumstances conspiring, but far enough to get my first weapon. I decided to set combat to easy and puzzles to normal. Thinking about bumping puzzle difficulty to hard, but I'm not sure if that'll just make them hopelessly obtuse.

Put in some time with Costume Quest. Really fun game with a few bad points. No save anywhere which all games should have. No remapping of controls which all games should have. Dialogue is all text and some of it doesn't pause for slow readers. Other than that the game is pretty cool.

El-Producto wrote:

How long is Amnesia?

I love the Fatal Frame games.. and I agree they are a bugger to get a hold of.

I would wager about 10 or so hours.

Chaz wrote:

Started Silent Hill 2 last night. Emulation on the 360 seemed fine so far. Only got about a half hour in due to circumstances conspiring, but far enough to get my first weapon. I decided to set combat to easy and puzzles to normal. Thinking about bumping puzzle difficulty to hard, but I'm not sure if that'll just make them hopelessly obtuse.

I think those are good settings. Exactly what I played SH2 and 3 through on. It annoys me that the more recent SH games don't have an easy setting for combat.

ZaneRockfist wrote:
El-Producto wrote:

How long is Amnesia?

I love the Fatal Frame games.. and I agree they are a bugger to get a hold of.

I would wager about 10 or so hours.

I think it just feels that long when you're curled up in a ball of fear.

Maybe I should take this opportunity to have another go at Silent Hill 3 which I've had for ages, yet only dipped my toe in.

The game didn't get much love but I found "Jericho" to be a very underrated game. I rather enjoyed it.

(I'm aware in a lot of instances emulation isn't cool. I feel this is one case where there is no way to purchase this in a way that benefits the original developer or publisher, so I do not feel bad emulating this. I apologize if this is a taboo.)

The original Clock Tower is great, but it really does take a lot of patience. You just have to tell yourself "DON'T hit that speed up button" on your emulator because you can miss some really great moments.

Also look up a guide, not for a walk through, but on basic controls. There's definitely a "struggle" button that the game does not inform you about on it's own.

Fun story - the first time I played Clock Tower was right after the translation patch came out. I had never heard of it and checked it out on a whim. I skipped the intro and jumped straight into the game so while I was walking around dark rooms, I only assumed it was some sort of adventure game.

Of course anyone who's played this game for more than 10 minutes knows the game makes it very clear as to what's going on and in that moment of clarity I yelled NOPE and Alt-f4'd out of there.

I've gone back and completed it, but yeah. Was not ready for that.

Chaz wrote:

Started Silent Hill 2 last night. Emulation on the 360 seemed fine so far.

If you have access to an original Xbox or the game on another platform, I strongly recommend that you switch to that and stop playing on the 360. There's a major, game-breaking bug with the emulation on the 360 that doesn't completely kick in until about 60%-70% of the way through.

The short version is that the game's textures begin to disappear. You might even be able to see it already as you're running around town: look at the fences and storefronts, there should be little white squares and rectangles that don't quite make sense, like someone stuck a blank sticker on a wall. Each white rectangle is a dropped texture, and eventually whole walls, floors, enemies, and items will be solid white.

It's a neat effect, and I actually at first thought it was intentional, but you eventually won't be able to see wall textures with clues for puzzles written on them, doors will be largely indistinguishable from the walls around them, and enemies will blend into the background and be almost impossible to see. Beyond that, it just ruins the atmosphere.

I also ran into problems with corrupted save files, but I'm not sure if that was an issue with the emulation or my unit's hard drive.

(There's another, less game-breaking bug having to do with the flashlight shining through the protagonist's body, but that can actually be quite helpful for seeing enemies behind you.)

That missing textures thing kind of sounds like a really interesting gameplay mechanic.

You have to solve the game before the world literally washes away to nothing! It even fits the horror motif.

That stinks. Is it 100% that the bug will happen? I don't still have an original Xbox, and have no real intention of getting one again. I suppose I could always go out and get a copy of it for the PS2, which I do still have.

See, this is what I hate about the current state of video games: there's generally not a great way to effectively re-visit classics. The new trend of remastering old games is fantastic when done well, but sometimes you wind up with crap like the Silent Hill HD collection. Now that that port was completely screwed up, it's highly unlikely that somebody's going to come along and do it properly. The only options to replay Silent Hill 2 are to either live with shoddy porting/emulation, or buy obsolete hardware to play it on.

I'm really hoping the emulation on the first two Fatal Frame games is better.

The HD collection port got a big patch a few months back that supposedly cleaned up a lot of the issues, but I haven't looked into it.

And yeah, so far as I know the texture loss bug is guaranteed. I haven't talked to anyone who played it that way who didn't run into it eventually, although it was worse for some than for others.

The emulation on the 360 is a joke almost across the board. I know there are some games that don't have problems (Halo, Splinter Cell, others) but everything I tried was garbage. That's why I prefer the Nintendo approach of integrated hardware emulation or nothing at all.

Ugg, looks like I'm swinging by a Gamestop to try and get a used PS2 copy.

I'm staying far, far away from the HD ports. Everything I've heard about them has been incredibly negative, and they were apparently built on top of non-final code, so a lot of the problems may not be fixable. There's no way I'm giving Konami money for something like that.

The Shadow of the Colossus port was excellent.

Sure was, as were the God of War and several others that were re-done for PS3. The problem is when they're done badly, like the Silent Hill ports.

Some comments I've found about the SH2 emulation issue suggest that the save file corruption comes into play when you start using more than 15 save slots, and that the texture issue can be fixed by either/both not playing for extended periods and quitting to the dashboard. If either of those workarounds actually work, that might not be so bad. I usually cycle through three save slots and rarely play more than an hour or two anyway.

Fortunately, I'm not hearing about any major issues with the emulation on either of the two Fatal Frame games, so if SH2 craps out on me, I've got something to fall back on.

Hmm. I only had one save and didn't play for longer than an hour at a stretch. Your milage might vary, of course. I'm not known for my good luck with technology.

I guess I'm putting the PS2 version on my list of games to check for if I find myself in a Gamestop.

If you've enjoyed Amnesia but have not played Penumbra: Overture and Penumbra: Black Plague then those are also worth checking out. They're less polished than Amnesia as they came first but there's still horror goodness to be found and it's interesting to experience Amensia's spiritual roots. Personally I didn't enjoy Requiem, the expansion to BP, as much as the others but YMMV.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth offers great Lovecraftian story in game format but I caution that some people get frustrated with particularly difficult segments or worse, end up experience significant (game breaking) bugs.

Found this which is interesting.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthre...