Let’s Play Final Fantasy XIII

So, here we are with a new and unexpected Let’s Play. We had planned on doing both (or either) The Darkness on PS3, or Calling on the Wii next, but have sadly been plagued by some technical problems, and then lost some files.

In the mean time, Final Fantasy XIII was released on PC via Steam – we thought this was very interesting, especially since we struggled with getting post game completion on the PS3 edition. So we decided to LP that instead in a more casual way.

Click after the cut for the first week worth of parts.

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Silent Hill 4: Bonus Post!

One of the first in our extra videos of Silent Hill 4, this one is an extras video containing all the endings, all the hauntings, bonus trailers, extra outfits / alternative costumes, extra weapons and hidden items, Eileen possessed, and her possession speeches, one weapon and all weapon modes, and much much more.

All captured fresh in full HD 1080p widescreen with corrected aspect ratios and Dolby Pro Logic II surround where possible (some hauntings are console exclusive and one is only available in software rendering mode).

As a side note, The 7th and 8th of September 2004 respectively (console & PC) were the release dates for the US edition of Silent Hill 4, It is the 17th and the 24th for the EU, so Happy 10th Birthday (roughly) to Silent Hill 4: The Room.

Let’s Play Silent Hill 4: Final videos!

So, here we are. We finished out Let’s Play of Silent Hill 4, we got a half good half bad ending (there are a few you can get) in the end. It was great fun to play, and we’ll be doing a few extras videos of other endings, extras we didn’t show and some other fun stuff to look out for soon. This is our longest in terms of both videos and actual overall length Let’s Play.

Silent Hill 4 Let’s Play Stats:

A total of 73 videos (to SH3 42, SH2 40, SH 29)
A total of 14 hours, 55 minutes, and 29 seconds (to SH3 8 hours, 17 minutes, and 3 seconds, SH2 7 hours, 50 minutes, and 93 seconds, SH 5 hours, 22 minutes, and 93 seconds)
A total of 0 Talkie episodes (to SH3 6, SH2 6, SH 4), as we’ve dropped the talkie format
A total size of 41.3 GB (to SH3 18.1, SH2 18.2, SH 8.4)

Future wise it looks like we’ll soon be Let’s Playing The Darkness, and Silent Hill Shattered Memories. Both of these we expect to go a lot easier/quicker, as they are a lot less fiddly to set up.

But now for the videos!

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P.T.

So, one of the other things we’ve been doing/playing around in/involved in recently is the new P.T. or Playable Teaser (or Play Teaser…or Prototype) demo that was announced at Gamescom for the PS4 that turned out to be a wonderful teaser for the new installment in the Silent Hill franchise, Silent Hills – involving Hideo Kojima, Guillermo Del Toro, and Norman Reedus.

So, we’ve captured some wonderful HD 1080p footage of the P.T. from the very beginning, to the first ending, the screen tear ending.

We then have the secondary ending, or the real ending – this is the part that tells you it’s actually Silent Hills. In our video we also have a bit of a return to our old talkie episodes – where we discuss what we’ve just seen, pick it apart, interpret it, and generally be cool and interesting.

Finally, we have a little bonus video, which does go along with some of the things we talked about in part 2, mostly regarding the use of perspective with the Fox Engine, and if Silent Hills will be all first person, or a mix of both first and third.

Enjoy our videos!

Cinematic Horror at Gamescom

I just wanted to do a brief aside about two video game previews we had at Gamescom 2014.

First off we have the wonderfully scary and interesting looking P.T demo (which we played on the PS4) for the newly revealed Silent Hills from Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro using the Fox Engine (it’s gorgeous). It’s a game myself and Peter were never 100% confident would ever exist, a new Silent Hill that actually looks like it has some money, care and sense behind it. Obviously, it’s important to stress that P.T was just a demo, and does carefully state that it will not have anything to do with the main game, this reminds me in many ways of the Quantic Dream tech demo that came out before Heavy Rain, way back when in 2006.

And secondly we have ‘Until Dawn’ from Supermassive Games, which uses the also new and shine-y Killzone Shadow Fall engine, and also boasts some big names in its voice/motion capture cast. I actually quite like that it has a slasher movie feel to P.T’s higher end quality. They are both very different takes on the horror genre.

Most importantly I wanted to talk about the cinematic quality. It’s a really interesting shift we’ve been seeing in the video game industry which I think is a great indicator of how serious the industry is now – the big titles haven’t been about kids and family fun for a long time, but about high end design and serious stories. I like seeing the motion capture and care and how they’re starting to get proper actor billing in games, such as in Beyond: Two Souls big casting, all of L.A. Noire and so on and so on. Both these games have this, with proper actors and people involved in making them who also make films. So we’re seeing games that are becoming more ‘Interactive Drama’ in the good sense – a fully fleshed out game that has had care taken with its writing and acting as well as its engine and game play mechanics – rather than one focused on at the expense of another and we pretend that that’s fine because it’s just a game, the whole experience is very well made because these things have such big budgets now.

So, that’s all I wanted to say for now, it’s very exciting to see these kinds of story and genre driven games coming out, and how much horror is still being a more popular genre.