Favourite computer games of all time. [2]

{{ Good to hear they didn't screw it up, think I'll keep an eye out for it in a sale. How is it on the microtransactions front, nothing hidden behind paywalls I hope?}}

{{ This looks terrible! The latest milking of the Tolkien legacy by Weta, Tales of the Shire- I think its basically Animal crossing with a Shire theme. And of course it has racially diverse hobbits despite that not making a single lick of sense. }}

{{ On a more positive note Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 has been announced, making it a great time to get yourself the first one if you haven't played it already. Its generally on sale these days and can be picked up cheaply, its hours of gameplay and if youve wondered what it might be like to live in historical Middle Ages Bohemia rather than fantasy world there is nothing else like it out there.



I loved the original, just wandering about the forest and fields, or taking in what an actual castle or Church in its heyday, full of art and tapestries and life was oddly satisfying in itself, I spent quite a bit of time just taking screenshots as I played.}}

Spoiler:

Pettytyrant101 wrote:{{ Good to hear they didn't screw it up, think I'll keep an eye out for it in a sale. How is it on the microtransactions front, nothing hidden behind paywalls I hope?}}

No micro transactions. The only paywall is the fact it is 3 games and not 1 as the original... but it is a much expanded game!

{{ Thats good to hear, I expected at least new hats or some other cosmetic money making scheme}}

{{ Fallout London is out! And free! It's a mod, but it's a complete game overall, it's about the size of the vanilla game plus all its dlc. It being London it's quite a different Fallout experience, it's aiming for something a bit closer to the roleplaying of OG Fallout games, with skill checks frequent in conversations and actions, so you're build really counts in what sort of experience you will have and how the narrative plays out. It also has a lot less weapons in it for a Fallout game, you will be hitting folk with melee weapons more often than shooting at them, which makes sense it's Britain not America.

There are a couple of hoops to jump through to play- if you have the current version of Fallout you need to use a downgrader (you should anyway) as Bethseda, being Bethseda, fucked the entire game up with it last update, breaking it. Once you've done that it's mainly a matter of just downloading the mod from Good Old Games (GoG) and following the installer instructions. Switch off cloud saves and never launch through steam if thats how you have the game installed. }}

Pettytyrant101 wrote:{{ This looks terrible! The latest milking of the Tolkien legacy by Weta, Tales of the Shire- I think its basically Animal crossing with a Shire theme. And of course it has racially diverse hobbits despite that not making a single lick of sense. }}

I had no idea this was coming out but my girlfriend was talking about it the other day and seems intrigued (she enjoys the worldbuiling of Middle earth but isn't really a Tolkien fan per se, she's read The Hobbit seen the films and suffered through many a geeky rant by me but not really read any of the books though tbf she is dyslexic and LOTR was a struggle for me the first time I read it) not really a fan of the art style but the basic premise of the game could be fun, the shire chapters of the book are some of my favourites and I always enjoy seeing artwork of it.

I've not played many of the LOTR games, but remember really enjoying 'The Third Age' and the tie in games of The Two Towers and Return Of The King films back on the Playsation 2 (I think I actually still have those lying around somewhere), I suppose with videogames as you are following/creating your own adventure I find the changes to lore/characters easier to accept than the films etc when we are watching a writer/directors own interpretation of the story.

Then again the recent Gollum game was shite (apparently) so lets wait and see.

I still play videogames fairly often, but I haven't bought a new game in years and years, mostly just fire up the old favourites (Skyrim, Fallout, GTA etc) for a few hours of mindless fun now and again. Graphics are important to me, but generally take a backseat to atmosphere and how polished the mechanics/storyline of the game is. Alot of modern games just seem too...shiny and overly complicated to me, and missing the heart of the games I grew up with.

I still have my N64,Dreamcast and Gamecube locked up in storage and all of those still work (or did the last time I dug them out a few years ago), the most recent and frequently used console I have is a Playsation 3.

I'd say my favourite games overall (in no particular order) would be:

GTA San Andreas/Vice City (the latter, as for many men of my age is repsonsible for my fondness for 80s rock)
The Elder Scrolls Oblivion/Skyrim (Oblivion for the atmosphere and quests, Skyrim for the exploration and combat)
Fallout 3
The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time (I've played others in the series but this is the only one I ever made much progress in...yes it's very dated and small in scale compared to modern entries but was mind blowing to me as a kid and still has tonnes of charm today if you can get past the dated graphics)
Pokemon Heart Gold (I wasn't necessarily a huge fan of the series as a kid, but Gold/Silver was my jam back then and the remakes on the DS improved the game in almost every way. I have little interest in the franchise overall, but really enjoy going back to this one, and White 2 (I bought a cheap DS on a whim a few years ago to see how the franhise had developed and bought these two games, enormous casual fun)
Medal of Honor: Frontline
Red Dead Redemption (really want to play the sequel)
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (I played all of the games, but I think I put the most time into the first...haven't played it for many years though)
The original Spyro trilogy for the Playstion 1 (I have played the recent remake as well)
Age of Empires 2 (more specifically the recent remastered edition, I don't have my own gaming computer but my girlfriend does and she bought it off steam for me, I've not got very far in the campaigns but addicted to the skirmish mode)

My girlfriend has a switch so I've played Breath of The Wild quite alot and was blown away by it, Amazing game (haven't played the sequel yet though) though I never got very far in it yet so not sure I could call it a favourite, though I'm tempted to buy a switch soley to have my own copy.

I was similarly tempted to buy a Playsation 4/5 (or Xbox equivalent) to play Red Dead Redemption 2 and to upgrade to The Anniversary Edition of Skyrim (which has dozens more expansions than the 2 I have on my PS3 version) but haven't got round to it, not sure how easy those would be to source second hand (I don't do online gaming).

If/when GTA 6 and Elder Scrolls 6 finally come out I do intend to finally upgrade and buy the current consoles...

{{ I'd agree on most of those games (and the ones I dont are only ones I have no experience of so cant say). I just added an xbox360 emulator to my retro pc collection, was playing Red Dead Redemption and GTA: San Andreas on it earlier. The 360 was the last console I owned before I jumped ship to the pc Master Race. So my conosle nostalgia and retro appeal ends there for me - but as it stands I have a good selection of games for the : zx spectrum 48k/128k, Mega Drive/Genesis, SNES, 32x, SegaCD, Commodore Amiga (all models), Ps1, Ps2, Jaguar, N64, Gamecube, Saturn, Dreamcast, Xbox360 and a collection of old DosBox games and SCuMM (for those not old enough to remember this was a propriety engine old LucasArt point and click classics like Monkey Island used to run on). I can pick up and play just about any game I used to own for the last 40 years of my gaming life, it's kind of mad and mindblowing. }}

I find the growth in gaming technology and graphics in the years since my childhood to be hard enough to believe, looking back 40+ years must be even stranger. In my mind's eye Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64 etc are just as polished and immersive as the games of today...when I know they aren't, it's amazing how a child's imagination can fill in the gaps and make things seem more atomspheric than they are.

Look at the original Pokemon games-Red and Blue were a worldwide groundbreaking phenomenon at the time, yet if you were to fire it up now you'd find a incredibly basic game with a janky code, bugs and glitches galore and a non existant post-game, but it was enough for me to spend dozens and dozens of hours replaying over and over again.

I'm starting to sound like a grumpy old fart now, but I think one of the issues I have with modern games is that technology is so advanced and the graphics so lifelike it almost dosen't feel like escaping real life anymore, I play games for escapeism I'm not necessarily looking for complete realism or depth.

On the other hand the ability to easily find emulators or download retro games online is equally strange, I doubt any of the crew of say the original Tom Raider were expecting people to still be able to play it all these years later (not to mention the several remakes/remasters it has had), it does feel kinda strange when I look in my cupboards or drawers and come across games I purchased 20+ years ago gathering dust, when most people now just stream new games instead.

{{ My first console was a knock of Atari 2600, it had various versions of pong built in you selected with a an actual physical switch, it was called Tennis though, it had a few variations of games based on what you could do with a couple of straight lines and a moving square. It even had the fake wood panelling look so popular in the late 70's and early 80's on electrical equipment.
But the first system I fell in love with was my rubber keyed ZX Spectrum 48k.
The first game I played was Horace Goes Skiing, it was pack-in before the term existed, and Horace was probably the first system mascot. The game itself was a brutal ripoff of Frogger and a simple skiing game, with sound that would shred your eardrums.



What really blows my mind is I can play that Horace game still on my spectrum emulator, horrible sound and all, then pull on my VR headset and go for a wander around inside Skyrim, all on the same computer. 12 year old me playing Horace on his speccy would not have dared believe it possible in his lifetime. This was Star Trek stuff (mind you back then so were mobile phones). }}

Having just watched that horace goes skiing video I can vouch for the ear shredding sound! I can see how that would have had some sort of charm back in the day.

mind you back then so were mobile phones

Believe it or not I didn't get a mobile phone until I was about 18-19 (I didn't have much of a social life until then so never really wanted or needed one), and we didn't get broadband internet until 2017(!) (dial up for a few years as a kid, then no internet until my late teens...I relied on dongles and the library etc for a few years until I finally signed up for broadband...so if you look at my earliest posts here changes are I'm arguing furiously about The Hobbit whilst writing in a public library computer).

My parents are quite old fashioned and technophobic so I was rather behind the curve when it came to computers, pop culture, gaming etc growing up and I suppose I still am now in some ways.

It does make you wonder how much further gaming technology could or should go, at a certain point is it really worth trying so hard emulate real life physics and graphics? At what point does it stop being fun...

{{ Most games were ear shredding until the 16bit era, though the Commodore 64 gets a pass for being well ahead of its time in the sound department (but I never liked its blocky squished graphics). But those old chip tunes have a certain charm to me, these days game music is the same as film or tv music, in that its made the same way then just played back at you as you play. In the early days, up till CD, computers and consoles had to have a sound chip and it had to be programmed, it required not just musical talent but programming talent. You didn't just feed it prerecorded music like now, you had write code to make it sing.

And some folk were wizards given what they were working with - you just heard Horace Goes skiing, it uses the farts, hisses and belches the speccy soundchip was famous for - this is another example of spectrum sound, still terrible obviously, but this time, by famed 8bit music programmer David Whittaker-



and when the speccy got an upgrade to a whopping 128k of ram to play with he staretd making it sound like this-



Same machine that plays that horrendous screeching in Horace goes Skiing- now thats talent!

This sort of very electronic early computer music was a massive influence on the dance and rave music that emerged a decade later in the 90's, they grew up playing and listening to this stuff. }}

The Star Wars tune does I admit just sound a bit...farty to my ears! But I can definitely see what you mean about the second video, very 90s rave vibes about that music. But yes i agree, the music does have a charm to it, it feels like videogame music rather the cinematic style music modern games seem to have, again going back to my point about trying to emulate real life or being more cinematic that ever before, techonolgy has replaced atmosphere.

{{ I completely agree. But there is a line you can walk, so far one of the best at it have been Rockstar. Red Dead Redemption 2 has a ridiculous level of detail, and attention to detail, its a game where they paid someone to animate the horses testicles to shrink in cold weather, its that sort of level of detail. Its character models you can see individual skin pores in- but take a closer look at it you see the whole thing is also heavily stylised. The characters are life like, but not actually realistic. The world is lifelike but the colouring, the lighting the position of land and objects on it are all carefully hand crafted and placed to create particular moods and atmospheres or fitting within a single overall art style. I think a game having a distinct style goes a long way to offset the otherwise dreary trend towards ever more real, and so ever more boring.

One of the genres I lament the seeming loss of in the current era of games is the good old fashioned arcade racer - I have been playing Burnout Takedown on the ps2 instead, its ridiculusly overthetop, its super fun and its not in the slightest bit realistic.
The modern racing game seems to be an exercise in who can make it more realistic, more like real driving, more stuff about torque and spin and drag, and spending half the game in a garage staring at charts and stat screens tweaking your spoiler for maximumum co-efficency. And whilst I like the occasional proper driving sim, the lack of decent arcade racers that are just fun is sysematic of the lack of fun in many games released at the moment. }}

{{ My thoughts on the Silent Hill 2 remake.

As some of you may know I have rambled on quite a bit and waxed lyrical(ish) over the original Silent Hill 2, it is one of my all time gaming favourites.

And now its been remade. A remake that has received much praise, and I will to a degree join that praise, I believe Blooper Team who had the unenviable task of remaking a masterpiece, did the best job it was possible to do tasked with that. It is faithful in mood, the majority of the voice recasting is well done and in keeping with the original and the majority of the added narrative scenes do not interfere with, detract from, or undermine anything in the original narrative - well for the most part. If this were a film remake I'd be overall fairly happy with a few major crabbit gripes.
But its not a film. Its a game, that is a different experience than passive viewing and it is here that my main issues with it lies.
So before I tackle that meat of the thing here's the minor gripes-

a) In the original James' sexual frustrations manifested in an overt sexuality to the creatures he encountered, even when in general they are hideous. A good example of this is in the games first major encounter, here's the original. 2.47 – 4.06



and here's the remakes version. 2.38- 3.55



Basically we are talking arses and camera focus here.
In the original the creature has a surprisingly fit and shiny feminine arse and pair of legs, and the camera makes sure you can't help but notice it as it stands there and even while fighting. In the remake the camera is subtly shifted sideways to prevent its arse even being in frame, making for a very awkward framing of the scene. And this de-sexualisation of the game occurs throughout, Maria despite supposedly being a manifestation of what James thinks he wants; a more free-spirited, sexualised and not dying from sickness version of his wife, who is there to tempt him and to lead him from any possible redemption, is now more modestly dressed and less up front provocative.
The encounter with Pyramid Head's simulated sexually assault of two of the Mannequin creatures is toned down and made less explicit what is going on.

Original- 0.17- 1.50



remake 0.22- 1.00



The fact Maria is overtly sexualised, or Pyramids implied rape of the Mannequins, is not to titillate the player however, its part of the slowly making the player aware of the fact the person they are playing as, James, might not be the sympathetic man longing for his wife who died from illness they thought he was, but might possibly be a very sick man himself, who may have done something very terrible indeed.
The sexualisation of certain characters and creatures in SH2 is not there as masturbation material for horny teenage boys playing games, its not erotic in the slightest it is, as intended, disturbing and begins the slow creeping realisation that something is very wrong here. And of course in the end its crucial to understanding James and what has happened to him and drove him to this point; his wife's sickness, the long months, possibly years of seeing her slowly deteriorate in a hospital bed, all the time slowly but inevitably wanting his old life back, wanting to have sex again, wanting his wife whose illness is terminal to just get on and die and be gone so he can move on and start to live again, then the painful waves of guilt and self-recrimination that follows such thoughts. He turns to alcohol and he sexualises in his head and fantasises about the nurses he sees when he visits his wife in the hospital ( this is why the famous SH nurses in the game are the most sexualised female monsters in the game) he becomes more distant form her when he visits, which all leads to more guilt and self-loathing continuing the downward mental spiral.
It's not in the game to excite, it's in the game because its fundamental to character development, and in a game where the player is playing as a character they don't yet know the clues of seeing how his sexual frustrations are manifested in his demons of SH are crucial to the experience and to understanding the narrative.
This seems to have been either missed by Blooper Team, or I suspect deliberately downplayed and under-emphasised, as in changing Maria to dress and act less provocatively, because of fear of offending what they think are modern tastes. But the sanitation of art never improves it. And it doesn't here either, its a fairly large gripe of my two, as this one hits at the heart of the character of James and his story.


b) The voice-acting. For the most part its good to excellent, of the main characters, James, Maria/Mary, Eddie and Laura only the actress for Maria/Mary doesn't hit the bar for me. In any other game she would be fine, it would not be noted her delivery was not as it should be - and that may have been direction not the talent, I don't know, but either way its not right. And that's a shame given Maria in particular is with the player for so much of the game and so central to the story.
The remake its just far too gentle, yes it looks miles better and that you can now convey so much more emotion and information in characters is great and they do that well, but it reigns in Maria's seductive side and how she consistently physically tempts and taunts James and there is less difference in tone between the Mary and Maria sides, it doesn't throw and disconcert you the way the original does when she switches between, particularly in the famous jail scene where the delivery is just too flat in tone between Maria and Mary to have the impact of the original.
And as for Mary reading the final letter, if you can make it to the end of the original without a tear in your eye then you are not human. The pain in her voice is astonishing. I didn't feel anything but nostalgia for the original when I heard the remakes version.


Right those are, um 2 pages in, the minor gripes. Now for the meat. How it looks. Which might seem odd for a game that both looks visually stunning and almost perfectly captures the mood of the original game to a tee. Its pretty much flawless on showing how the PlayStation 2 era graphics would look if it were something very close to real life and fully realised in 3D. It looks in fact like how a very, very good tv or film adaptation with the attention to detail of say the Fallout show, would look were SH2 made for Amazon. Its pretty much visually perfect.
But again its not a film or tv show, its a game, and one big sadly inevitable change they made was to remove the originals fixed camera viewpoints in favour of the 'modern' over the shoulder view. This in my view is disastrous for several crucial elements of the original all at once.

if you know what is meant by fixed camera in games versus a free camera skip this bit. Fixed does not mean the camera doesn't move, rather that the player has no control over what the camera is looking at. In some games that use a 3rd person view the camera is fixed, usually with variety of distance options, so the camera will be behind and slightly above the player, but with the choice of say three stages of how far behind the player, such as in Red Dead or GTA games, with the ability to take control of the camera at any time and make it a free camera that will move around the player character. In most modern 3D games the player has control over the movement of the free camera to some degree or another, allowing the player to move it around their character in order to see the game world around them. In a game with a true fixed camera what you see is only what the game makers want you to see and you cannot manually alter the cameras position or where its looking. The key point with a fixed camera is that the player cannot alter it.

The first thing I want to address is what the original fixed cameras add so we can see what is lost.
Watch this, you only need to watch from 9.43 to 10.00 get the point-



A fixed camera is voyeuristic. The player is playing as James, a character in a game, they are not playing themselves in the game, and you are never put right in the action, down in the thick of it, you are always whilst guiding James, simultaneously observing James from a distance. You are both player and voyeur. This is narratively crucial, you are playing as a character who you don't know and what you think you know comes from him and is only a hint at the actual truth, and about whom you will learn a lot more that is uncomfortable. This distance from the player and sense you are sort of just watching James and judging his actions, despite you making him do them, is crucial to the games feel. There is a notorious scene where James sticks his hand down a filthy toilet to retrieve something, and even though as player you have to press the button prompt to make him do it, though you don't actually have a choice if you want to continue the game you have to do it, the response of most players to this is something like”Who would do that?” or “what the hell are you doing James?” and this having the player questioning James' choices as if only observing even whilst playing, and questioning why he does things in the manner he does them, grows ever more persistent and its crucial, “why would you jump into a dark hole you cant see the bottom of James?” And that is exactly what you are being carefully led to do, question James. And the heart of it stems from the use of the fixed cameras. The structure of the game was originally designed around them. You can't remove them without fundamentally altering that structuring.

Its easy to forget that SH2, unlike the games which defined the style, the Resident Evil games to that point, is not a fully fixed camera game, its a fully 3D world.
Resident Evil to get round the PlayStation 1's specs used pre-rendered backgrounds, just jpgs, so the console only had to render the 3d models of the characters and enemies on top of it. SH2 used the greater power of the PlayStation 2 and so is not like this, its got a movable camera, if you hold down one of the shoulder buttons in outdoor and in tight corridors the camera will swing round behind James into a 3rd person viewpoint. Still a good way behind and slightly elevated to preserve that voyeuristic feel, and the omnipresent SH fog prevents you seeing too far ahead, but it is not necessary to stick to only the fixed cameras.
But crucially at important points the camera is fixed and you cannot swing it round, the opening car-park is one such example, this is deliberate because it plays into the second major use of fixed cameras – directorial control.

Hitchcock once said that what really scares an audience is not what's on camera, its what they know is just off frame but they can't yet see. SH2's use of fixed cameras is Hitchcock film making theory applied to game design. Thanks to the fixed camera and its relentless focus on James you will more often or not hear an enemy long before the camera lets you see it, you know its there, you know its ahead of you, in your way, but you don't know exactly where and you don't know what it is that is awaiting you in the dark. This is added to by the device of the radio James finds early on, which emits bursts of static when enemies are near, this gives the tension of knowing something is there and the fixed cameras give the added tension of not knowing where it is. Combined this gives the game designers the opportunity to set things up to deliberately play on and build this sort of fear of the unknown horror, its unsettling and unnerving, and its completely ruined with a player controlled camera where you can jut swing the camera round to see clearly the monster ahead of you, it loses all that tension immediately and it just becomes another game adversary in your way.
It also allows the game designers to lead the players eye by focusing the camera on particular areas of the scene, this can be used to lead the player where they should go, to an important item or object, or to set them up for something. It gives a great deal of flexibility to the designers to manipulate the mood, the tension and the player.

And then there is the new camera in combat. In the original combat is clunky and unwieldy, and whilst this does to a degree add to the feeling that James is not great at fighting and is not a super hero but a Joe blogs bloke, its mainly a restriction of the ps2 era capabilities and the tank control method. The remake however goes completely the other way, combat is more intense, its more gamey and it's right in your face with the over the shoulder view. And there is more of it you cannot avoid. Its exactly what you'd expect from a modern 3rd person over the shoulder games combat. In that sense it works perfectly fine and as you'd expect. But it also makes it feel like every other 3rd person over the shoulder combat in any game. It's lost its uniqueness along the way.

In the original game, bar a few story related fights that have to happen to continue, for the most part when playing you can go through almost all the game without fighting anything. The enemies in the original are generally easy to simply run away from or run around and the game has a hefty supply of health drinks scattered all around. In most play-throughs you will end the game with a dozen health drinks still stashed in your inventory and stacks of bullets. But there is a reason for this- SH is not Survival Horror like the zombie infested Resident Evil series where the Survival bit refers to resource and supply management being a game mechanic. SH is a Psychological Horror. Silent Hill the town is not trying to kill James. Its trying to force him to confront his demons, understand his own actions and accept what he has done. The monsters are manifestation of James own inner turmoils, they are there to torment and drive him towards realisation of the truth. Making the game more combat focused and more visceral in its combat makes the manifestations feel more like generic computer game monsters than they did before and less like elements the town has manifested out of James guilt and vices, guilt the player in the original can choose to make James ignore by just running round them, playing again into James own deliberate refusal to accept his own actions by ignoring what he has done and pretending it never happened.
And this is all again in part down to the fixed camera view.

So the camera doesn't work for me. Its change to suit modern sensibilities loses more than it adds in my opinion, and the things it loses were crucial to the feel and mood of the original game.
I am now hoping that some clever modders will step in and restore the fixed cameras and original 3rd person player controlled camera.

There is another reason besides modern style they changed the camera, the only real way fixed cameras work alongside smooth player control is some form of tank control, and that's well out of fashion in the modern gaming scene, like flares.
But here's the thing. Tank controls are great.
There I said it.
Are they intuitive? No, not in the slightest. Will your first few attempts to control your character end up with you walking the wrong way, flipping back and forth between camera views by accident, turning the wrong way all the time and going backwards when you wanted to go forwards and getting frustrated and annoyed? Yup, all that will be your first experience with tank controls.
But then it suddenly clicks, then it becomes second nature and suddenly your darting round monsters, running smoothly through scenes and around obstacles without needing a thought. And the fact it takes your character a second to fully spin round on the spot to face the oncoming thing behind you, or to run away from it, like many of the enforced limitations of the technology, actually helps the tension and sense of panic in such situations. Tank controls need learned, that's their downfall. But once learned it becomes easy and obvious why its the only way to do control with fixed cameras.

Few other crabbit notes - the additional material as far as extra gameplay go felt more like padding to me. The puzzle additions are just that, more puzzles to do in your way, so it depends on your mileage for having to find bits of things to make something to get you to the next bit, they don't add much if anything for me save more game time SH2 doesn't need to tell its narrative in. For the most part the narrative additions in new cutscenes ranged from unnecessary, to pretty good - Maria and James in Heavens Night which gives just enough more of a hint of James turn to alcohol during his wife's sickness is a well done inclusion, to completely missing the point- Eddie is a good case of the later, they changed the bowling alley encounter to a cinema and took Eddie stuffing his face with pizza out and replaced it with a tub of ice-cream, this was mainly to remove the dialogue line from James about Eddie just sitting there eating pizza, as in the context it sounds ridiculous and tends to make the player laugh. But that was the point- not that it was meant to be a funny line, but it was meant to reinforce in the player the view that Eddie is a just a fat, useless idiot, a ridiculous person who is of no use to you. And the reason for that is because we eventually find out Eddie's demons arise from a lifetime of being bullied and name called because everyone has always assumed and treated him as a fat, useless idiot. You are implicit in provoking Eddie without even knowing it by dismissing him the same as everyone else has, the whole original scene is deliberately ridiculous and off, and that pizza line was the crowning of it. The first two encounters with Eddie the player is encouraged to see him as foolish, useless and almost comic relief- he throwing up in the toilet the first time and stuffing his fac in an empty bowling alley in a town full of monsters in the second. It makes you expect that any future times you might encounter Eddie they will just be ridiculous and he'll be useless and comedic. By removing this James is less complicit and less judgemental, Eddie is more sympathetic when first encountered in the remake, and he shouldn't be, the player like James in these first meetings should think little good of him, seeing him more as a figure of ridicule than someone to take seriously, making the player also complicit in judging Eddie and helping him to his inevitable mental breakdown. That's the bloody point!

Lastly SH2 has always been ambiguous and open to a certain amount of interpretation - why does SH call certain people and not others, why does it do it at all? How do the manifestations work? What is Pyramid Head? Is he helping or hindering James? Does everyone get their own special version of SH, are Eddie, Laura and Angela seeing their own SH? Are they even real people or just more manifestations? And a long standing fan favourite, is James stuck going through SH over and over until he gets it right? This one is fuelled by a series of notes giving hints seemingly written by someone who knows what is coming already, and that there are several corpses spread around the game that if looked at closely (and here the fixed cameras means you can only see them from the view the game wants you to, so never clearly or closely enough) appear to be, possibly, James corpse. There is one notable corpse in the apartments that is dead in a chair in front of a tv of static, this is the one that most clearly looks like James, but again its just ambiguous enough thanks to the fixed camera and flickering light you cant be sure, hence the loop theory is always just a theory, an interpretation of events.
In the remake as the player can use the camera to look at anything closely the corpse in the room now has a sheet over their head, which doesn't make it a bit ambiguous as in the original, it plain hides him, not only confusing the scene but making it even being here rather pointless. Its one of the few cases where something is here that no longer serves a purpose, but is here because everyone remembers it. But they remember it because it looks a bit like James after messily blowing his own brains out. Not a bloke with a sheet over his head. But they had to do that with the new player camera control or the player would be able to clearly see it was in fact James and so the whole ambiguity would be blown. Hence the sheet. But then they blow it anyway so why bother?
The remake, to pad the game out more, adds more of these 'James' corpses and notes to find and elevates the loop theory from, could be what's going on to almost certainly that's what's going on, it's as if Blooper liked the fan theory so much they wanted to confirm it more - but that ruins it as it stops it being one of many possibilities, it takes away the ability of the player to form their own conclusions based on their own games experience. They made it too prominent and too blatant, connecting too many dots best left unconnected. SH2 has always thrived on its ambiguity.

Oh and one last throw of crabbit at it, the music. Its the original composer, but he is reworking his older themes, and as a whole I prefer the originals, particularly Laura's theme which now sucks.

So overall, for a game that was inevitably going to fall into the modern tropes of over the shoulder cameras, more fluid and visceral combat and less ambiguity and more explicit simpler storytelling, this is as good as it could have been. Its a good modern game. If there was no SH2 original it would be a very good game with an exceptional narrative. But there is the original game and its an outstanding game with an exceptional narrative, and a large part of what makes it outstanding is that the limitations of the technology at the time was what forced Team Silent into being creative and to finding ways to use those limitations to help rather than hinder the storytelling and gameplay. With those restrictions gone it loses the creativity it took to get round them with it, leaving in the end a good, but shallower less engaging, in the end less memorable game that feels all too similar in play to every other over the shoulder game you will play these days.

Only 6 pages! You got off light! }}

You are back and how!  Unfortunately this mighty effort is wasted on me since I will never play said game.  But I'm so glad to see you back that I may read it anyway. It's been long since I've gotten a proper dose of crabbit.

{{ 2024 was a hell of a year for Skyrim modding, especially if you play SkyrimVR.
The main big additions this year were the Community Shaders - not VR specific but designed as a replacement for enbs has had VR support since the start - it adds all sorts of graphical effects as an enb does; wetness, effects, temporal occlusion, subsurface scattering and such, and some stuff enb's don't do- like the light limit fix which does what it says on the time and lifts the limit on the amount of active on screen light sources.
Then at the tale end two huge new ways to do lighting turned up LightPlacer/Placed Light and the Modern Lighting Overhaul.
My own set up as all the Community Shaders, Placed Light/Light Placer the Modern Lighting Overhaul combined with good old Enhanced Lights and FX.
And the results to the lighting are simply stunning.
On top of this there was the introduction of PBR to Skyrim,which basically just means surfaces of stuff react much more realistically to light, metals look more like metals that sort of thing.
And then the crowning of it all parallaxgen- a genius tool that does wizary and merges all your parallax, complex materials and pbr files into a neat whole.

You put it all together and you get, well this-

Spoiler:

I can happily spend an hour or so in Skyrm not really doing anything but sightseeing, its at times stunning in a way only fictional reality can be.}}

{{ 2024 was a hell of a year for Skyrim modding, especially if you play SkyrimVR.
The main big additions this year were the Community Shaders - not VR specific but designed as a replacement for enbs and has had VR support since the start - it adds all sorts of graphical effects as an enb does; wetness, effects, temporal occlusion, subsurface scattering and such, and some stuff enb's don't do- like the light limit fix which does what it says on the time and lifts the limit on the amount of active on screen light sources.
Then at the tale end two huge new ways to do lighting turned up LightPlacer/Placed Light and the Modern Lighting Overhaul.
My own set up as all the Community Shaders, Placed Light/Light Placer the Modern Lighting Overhaul combined with  good old Enhanced Lights and FX and ELFX Shadows.
And the results to the lighting are simply stunning.
On top of this there was the introduction of PBR to Skyrim,which basically just means surfaces of stuff react much more realistically to light, metals look more like metals that sort of thing.
And then the crowning of it all parallaxgen- a genius tool that does wizardry and merges all your parallax, complex materials and pbr files into a neat whole.

You put it all together and you get, well this-

Spoiler:

I can happily spend an hour or so in Skyrm not really doing anything but sightseeing, its at times stunning in a way only fictional reality can be.}}