PixlBit

...Did someone call for me?

Lol I like the pic ^_^

Hey Rob, you realize you're a marked man now right?

I've been a marked man since '89, gents, since '89.

Just wanted to throw my 2 cents in about Dead Space. I don't find Resident Evil scarier, I just think 4 (which Dead Space clearly takes inspiration from) is a much better game. Dead Space was a game about being scary and it failed at that for me because it was obvious when the monster was going to jump out from the shadows. Resident Evil 4 is not about that, which allows it to be a much better game.

More to come as I continue to listen. Oh and Chessa and I were about to start Heavy Rain, but now I doubt she'll want to play it based on that Jason bit. She's going to lose it when that situation occurs.

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Romance in video games doesn't work for me. Especially in BioWare games. While they give you choice, the choices rarely reflect how I feel, so there's a huge disconnect for me. Plus I find that they give me too many instances to make choices. Sometimes I don't want to think about every little thing, just let me move on and continue to play the game.

I said it before and I'll say it again - stories are pretty inconsequential for me in games. Every game rarely takes its own story seriously, so I have a hard time paying them any respect. Usually they function as a means to push the game along and that's all.

xD Yeah the beginning of the game is kind of stupid, and the Voice overs are kind of bad, but the pay off is pretty huge. The story is definitely rewarding and some scenes are really exciting. Hopefully you guys make it past that stupid scene, lol

Romance in games is usually a fail for me too, and I 100% agree with the implied observation that it usually boils down to "what do I have to do to nail that chick."

That's not romance.  

I also agree on the stupidity of achievements based on said nailing of chicks.  It's almost as tastless as getting 'baseball cards' was in the original Witcher. Maybe stuff like that in games that don't take themselves as seriously wouldn't be too bad, like some of the cornier JRPGs, but not games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age.

Having just played Resident Evil 4 for the first time since the Gamecube with the HD release, I have to agree. RE 4 feels better from a purely action sense, and since the game doesn't try to scare you, it has the opportunity to instead wow you with amazing setpieces that the first Dead Space doesn't have. I applaud the first DS for its atmosphere, elegant UI, and world building though. But Dead Space 2 has a pacing that is nearly perfect, and again, the issues that it deals with are impressive.

You and I will just have to agree that we won't see eye to eye on that. Since Final Fantasy IV, I have sought out games with strong story elements. While I have plenty of games that I play just for fun or addictive mechanics, the ones that stay with me, and the ones I talk about years later almost always have a strong story. It's the reason that Catherine and Dragon Age 2 made my top 5 games for 2011, even though the games in the bottom half of my top 10 are probably more impressive on technical and mechanical levels.

The problem with my misunderstanding of how you feel about Dead Space probably stems from the fact that I don't see much of the appeal of either Dead Space or Resident Evil. Oh well.

And never don't press X to Jason.

I think that's your new catch phrase.

Ethan Mars looks like the lead singer from Maroon 5.

You look like the singer from your mom.

Dorothy Mantooth is a saint!

Silent Hill is one of the most terrifying experiences in games for me. Silent Hill 2 scared me, but I agree that disturbing is the right word for it. Who can forget that scene with Pyramid Head and the manniquin legs? *shudder*

Just because you play through a game looking at mutliple sides doesn't mean you don't have an emotional attachement to the specific moments in a game. Just thinking of a few games off the top of my head inFamous, Kotor 1 & 2 these games provided multiple angles to the same events and each time I can justifiably say that the different outcomes had profound effects for my gameplay. When trish dies in inFamous, granted I didn't have that much of an emotional attachement to the game as a whole, but that moment where the protagonist has to decide between humanity and his love, its powerful stuff.

Valid points, Anonymous, and well said.

I think the beauty of video games is that you can have the opportunity to see a different outcome. I'm currently playing Mass Effect for the third time, but I could easily see myself playing through the game a couple more. Same with Dragon Age. I want to see all the content, and for me, each character has different motivations and feelings. So something that one of my characters wouldn't bat an eye at may make another character cringe.

Oh, and I agree. That moment in the first inFAMOUS was powerful stuff in a game that didn't do much for me in the way of narrative.

Sorry I'm late to the parade guys, but I just got the chance to listen through today and thought you guys really fit a lot of good stuff into this episode, it was awesome. However there was some shenanigans when everybody agreed on Silent Hill 4 not being a good game! It absolutely was infallible and anything you say bounces off it like glue and you know. I forgot how that saying finishes. So...nana nana boo boo lol. Just kidding. I never played the first three SH games and SH4 was my first experience with the games. It was mechanically insufferable and it was the most trouble I've ever had trying to figure out level designs, puzzle logic, and how to simply survive and progress the plot. SH4 was the one of the first games that I had to obsessively use an online walkthrough for. Not because the game was tough and I was some feeble mind that couldn't conquer it, but instead because the game was so hard to make sense of. There were some puzzles and situations I literally wouldn't have ever made the "right" reasoning and problem solving that the designers had in mind.

Everything was so cryptic and sometimes the way to make it through an encounter space, grab items, solve puzzles, and survive, was just odd and the game never trained me to do it. If I ever was to make it through SH4 without a guide, it would literally be because of luck. There's no skill involved when you enter an area and ghosts are chasing you down, you have no health, have a golf club that doesn't do any good, you have no idea where you are, where you're going, what needs to be done, and essential items are neatly tucked away in corners and you have to run for your life yet accomplish objectives and tasks that you had no idea even exist.

So much of that game was bullshit, but even with all that craziness I still loved the game because of the settings and the story. It dealt with issues I had never seen before and took me way out of my comfort zones. There were prisons where kids were being tortured and brainwashed, all your neighbors are weird and have their own cryptic fucked up little narratives and apartment rooms you explore, there was an antagonist that has this tragic story of being abandoned by his mom and he's delusional thinking that the apartment room is his mother and uh, it's just much easier to say he's fucked up but his story is sad and if he just stopped killing people you could sympathize with him and try to understand him. The characters and narrative was so different than what I was accustomed to, which was always one-dimensional violent aliens and tyrant kings or wizards. I don't ever want to play SH4 again, but it sure left a powerful impression and I'm glad I played it.

I'm really excited for the new Rainbox Six game and I'm in love with the target game-play footage because the gameplay serves the story and those are the kind of games I want to make and play. When the sniper team is on the bridge atop the support columns providing overwatch and repels down the bridge to the road proper to engage, shooting as they go down, and the whole sequence is interactively getting you from point A to B, that is so much more fun than just making the player take an elevator and wait for a 5 or 10 second cutscene or even worse a loading screen. It would be so much cheaper and easier to just make it non-interactive and just cut some corners, but it appears they don't want to cut as many corners as desiners are accustomed to cutting and that's why I get excited. I don't know how the logical/ethical choices and narrative will play out, and how much they will effect us emotionally, but I'm more exicted for the gameplay and that's what I want to see. Making the gameplay mechanics, environment traversal, and combat more versatile, cinematic, fluid, abstract, and dependent on the situation at hand makes it much more interesting to me. If it just follows old design ideas algebraically and keeps the status quo, I'm not going to want to play it.

Michael117, you're so spot-on with your assesment of SH4, brilliantly-put. I've never been lucky enough to see someone put the thought into that entry as you have, so, thank you. SH4 is my second favorite in the franchise for those very reasons.

I don't remember agreeing with everyone that SH4 wasn't good, but if I did, I appologize for not sticking up for the game, and I promise to never to let my co-hosts do it again, lol.

Thank you Rob I appreciate it. Lol sorry I called shenanigans on you. The segment where SH4 came up went by pretty quickly and from what I remember it consisted of Julian saying that it wasn't a good game and at least one other person agreed with him and the conversation moved on, must have been Jason or Patrick. At the very least I'll just call out shenanigans on Julian and single him out. Lol Julian, I know you're out there, if you read this...shenanigans!

OMG, it was Rob! IT WAS ROB!!!

Seriously, it was. But I agreed with him.

I can totally understand your affection for The Room, especially if it was your intro into Silent Hill. The game felt off for me the entire time I played it, and when I later learned that the game began life as a new IP that later got shoehorned into the SH series everything clicked.

My problems with The Room are twofold. The first has to do with the ghosts. While the idea of an unkillable enemy is terrifying in concept, in execution (at least here) it just makes for an annoying combat experience. I wasn't scared of the enemies more than I was pissed off that they were keeping me from exploring or advancing the plot.

The second problem I have is the fact that you can return to your apartment for healing and to take a breather. It ruins any tension the game has. While I think the bits in the apartment are also the scariest, I think simply not letting the player return until the level is complete would have been much more effective. Now, I realize that you can get to a point where the apartment is no longer a safe haven, but that can also lead to a fail state, as I experienced. I didn't finish The Room because I had no more healing items, the enemies don't die, and I couldn't go home to rest up. I could have restarted, but I was close to the end and quite frankly had no desire to play any of that game again.

I think Julian is on the crack. I love SH4. Maybe I was feeding the trolls, lol.

"Silent Hill 4 is not a good game."

-Rob Ottone, PixlTalk Episode 48, 1:02:00.

A temporary moment of madness on my end.

Nah, wasn't me. I don't know anything about Silent Hill anything, really.

I could've swore it was you who said that Julian, but I was wrong. I called shenanigans on all the wrong people and created division and near-mutiny within the crew, it was a tale for the ages, one of political intrigue and betrayal lol.

I didn't know SH4 was meant to be a new IP, looking back they should've either went with the new IP or just rethought the mechanics and level design. The brand name is good for sales and the SH universe allows for great stories but that doesn't mean the game was going to turn out great, and it didn't at least mechanically. I didn't design the game but I feel terrible that you weren't even able to finish the game.

One of my pet peeves is when a game is built so specifically that there's a clear way to play it wrong and right, and they don't let you know. For example Portal is a game that has clear rules and a right way to play it, you need to solve environmental puzzles and have good timing, and they give you time to learn these things and teach them to you and things get more difficult as you go. In SH4 they put you in combat situations but don't tell you the ghosts are invincible and the right option is to run. They give you friggin guns but don't tell you that you can't use them, and the right thing to do is just suck it up and save them till you need them possibly hours from now. Being deprived of ammo in games like the Condemned series worked for me, because even when I was out of ammo the game was playable and I could literally fight tooth and nail to survive a brawl. In SH the deprivation of ammo is just a game breaker. It makes me mad that they give me a sweet pistol and shotgun and I get penalized for using them to shoot at the monsters that want to kill me. Don't give me weapons then. Make it a stealth, evasion, survival game with a horror setting. Similar to the problem Mirror's Edge had, remember when we talked about that a while ago? If you can't do weapons right and weapons aren't working well or fitting into your design, just get rid of them and think outside the box instead of shoehorning guns in and letting gamers play wrong.

That was one of my biggest frustrations with the game: the fact that you can easily and irreversibly screw yourself over and not be able to progress in the game. It's not only entirely possible but it's easy to find yourself walking into a boss battle without any ammo for a gun, broken melee weapons, no health, no health items, and basically no hope to move past it to the rest of the game. Players are left thinking that either they suck at Silent Hill games and should quit, or that the game is poorly designed and they should quit. Both thoughts would be a designers nightmare. Another huge bad sign was when you said that the invincible enemies weren't scary, they just pissed you off because they restricted you from exploring or advancing the plot. I had the same problems and it sucks because the SH universe it great and I want to explore it freely at times. Not to the point where it gets boring and I feel no danger for hours in the game, but exploration, spectacle, and mystery need to be key to a good SH game.