https://youtube.com/watch?v=J5RjssMC-_I&feature=shared

(level 1 route review)

I’m not gonna lie this game has always been in that small subsection of games that I’ve booted up briefly when they dropped on something I can access them and then I don’t touch them forever. I tend to have a “follow my heart” approach when it comes to picking a game to just hang out with (this is a good and pretty annoying thing), well I did not expect to sit down and beat this game in one sitting lmao and my opinion of it drastically changed but I highly respect its design and appreciate it a lot more now honestly.

While having 3D graphics that made me initially question if I truly was a human being with the ability to perceive depth, over time the game’s on rails design and pattern signaling really helped pull it through even with the rather basic vector graphics. I think it says a lot also that this was an early 3D game where Nintendo was not only trying to welcome new players (it’s probably why it’s this easy lol) but also added detail with your allies being in the fight and wildly different boss patterns. A lot of these things were improved on in the sequel Star Fox 64 but here it feels like the glue that kept the vectorized cardboard together, I went from completely wanting to drop this game to being a fan that says enough.

I am taking a damn break from it cause I also have motion sickness now lmao

At the time of me writing this Silent Hill 1 is the only pure horror game I’ve beaten (I really don’t think RE4 would fit with this lol), so I sat down a bit and read/played this intending to finish it until I realized just how quickly the first hour of the original game passed and I’m here now.

I’m a big defender of compromises in design being used to work around a platform’s limitation but this novel’s existence completely strips Silent Hill of the one thing it had that WAS good in my opinion, legitimate atmosphere. The images in this game are stitches of extremely compressed cutscene images from the PS1 game or custom sprites added, if this wasn’t a commercial product and idk a fan project I’d think this was pretty neat but I keep imagining that someone had to buy this in a package and already you lose so much of the game it’s adapting within the first 20 minutes.

If they made all the assets for this game as a new adaptation I think I really wouldn’t be shelving this but it just is a factually lazy product, it isn’t hard to make a basic menu and text in front of images you dragged over to use it’s interesting if you actively work around the limitations.

Summary: Konami

Compared to my last review I’ve spent a decent amount of hours at one of the arcades in my area playing this game, I genuinely wanted to in a sense defeat how blunt I was in that but even just meeting the game on its terms and practicing I just get frustration more than anything.

While I can squint and see the outline of games like Tekken existing because of this if you think about this existing a year after Street Fighter II dropped and this was developed by the second biggest video game company at the time you add up something that feels gimmicky rather than what it is, innovative.

For starters, there is no cohesion between 2d fighting and the 3D space fundamentally. When you’re off the axis your opponent is on you are essentially caught in the stream of wherever you can move until the game eventually corrects itself. This one fundamental piece crumbles the house of cards this game is built off of, if I can die because my opponent can be in a space I cannot reasonably counter (or because the resources this game provide me do not teach me these mechanics), what good is the 3D space if I can’t utilize it besides being a way to sidestep the entire genre I’m playing?

It’s one thing to develop technology that changes everything (I imagine it was incredibly hard for them to even make the hit boxes as decent as they are here which rival even most 2D fighting games at the time), but it’s another thing if the game you’ve made just doesn’t feel good and the art of game design is making the compromise between fun and technical.

Summary: I wanna see how the other games improve upon this