Another long awaited week of Silent Hill 4 Let’s Play episodes. It’s been a little while since I posted one of these, the last LP post was actually Sam & Max, but here we go…catching up.
Videos after the more!
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.
Let’s Play Sam & Max – Bright Side of the Moon
So here it is, the completed final episode of Sam & Max Save the World, Bright Side of the Moon. It’s been great fun doing this game in particular, and in giving solo LP a try in general.
Let’s Play Silent Hill 4 – Parts 43 to 49
So, just a quick linking post to the next seven videos of our SH 4 LP, stuff’s getting dangerous.
Let’s Play Silent Hill 4 – parts 36 to 42
Here we are back for another week of our Silent Hill 4 Let’s play. We’ve come a long way since we’ve started, and are now about past the half way point. We’ve seen lots of people die, done lots of weird things, and there’s more to come.
Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch
This is just going to be a quick impressions post as I’ve finally bought, played and finished Level 5’s 2013 Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch.
Let’s Play Silent Hill 4 Parts 29 to 35
So, we’re still getting on with our Silent Hill 4 LP. We’re at about the halfway point now of the game, and it’s beginning to look like it will rival Eternal Darkness for position of our longest LP.
Let’s Play: Sam & Max Reality 2.0
I am still doing Let’s Play’s of Sam & Max, and this episode Peter is joining! While these aren’t as popular as our usual Let’s Plays – not that that’s at all why we do them – I still like doing them. So, look for the videos after the cut!
Silent Hill 4: The Room – Let’s Play parts 22 to 28!
We’ve had a bit of a break between Let’s Play vidoes, one of the main reasons for this is both myself and Peter caught the flu, and had it for about 2 weeks in total running between one of us getting better, and then the other catching up, so we didn’t really want to record ourselves with ill voices, since the only thing from us in these LP’s is our voices!
We’re now well, and recorded more. There’s also a whole new episode of Sam & Max to come soon, so look our for that too. Videos of SH4 under the cut!
Other Interesting Videos Part II
The other interesting video I wanted to talk about real quick is Peter’s Camera Hack demonstrations.
The most recent one up on our channel is from our Silent Hill 4 Let’s Play, and I think it’s really interesting what it shows, in terms of…how they do things to put the game together.
So, here’s the video:
One of the first things in the bedroom window, where it shows how…looking outside the window works, so there’s a little box outside the window with a low resolution view, so when you click the window to actually look at it, what you’re looking at is something else, that’s rendered elsewhere, it isn’t part of the main room level/model. The same is true for the front door.
We then look through all of the pictures which is the more interesting part, the reflections on the pictures aren’t done with some fancy programmed reflective surface, there is actually just another version of the room on the other side of the picture, blurred and low resolution to look like the reflection. These extra rooms are also just the complete room, rather than specifically what the game developers were sure you’d need to see in the picture frame. These box rooms also change in colour along with the day night cycle that happens throughout the game.
Each of the rooms in the apartment exists separately, so we have the door loading thing.
We also got to see the dismembered/dis-embodied head right at the end there, and how it simply pops in and pops out when it’s in and out of view of the player (usually).
I think the room reflections part is the most interesting part, essentially. Especially compared to the previous Camera Hack video for Silent Hill 2, which I’ll add here:
In this video you can see that the whole room’s and character models are reproduced whenever there is a mirror, in actually quite high resolution. So in rooms with mirrors, there are actually two rendered rooms, and two rendered characters that you are controlling at the same time to get a really high quality mirror effect.
As an aside you can see the how to/how it was done video for the Cam Hack here.