silent hill the movie game

[Umon Daisuke]

I rented today, and so far, I'm finding it hard to dislike the game. In fact, I'm finding it far more enjoyable as a game than SH4, and the atmosphere is great. I couldn't care less if the story elements are a mixture of the first 3 games and the movie; a storyline can't save a game (see SH4).

The control overhaul isn't bad as I heard from some people, and it works very well. I'll post my impressions when I finish the game, but the first impressions are very good.

[Rombie]

^ So you did your 1 hour drive for the rental in the end.... heh

[Nomad9026]

I liked the game and it's story a lot, but it is too different from classic sh games. But I can live with that, what I didn't liked is that developers boroughed lots of elements and desighns not only from sh movie but clearly from the Saw and the Hostel as well. And it felt kind of unusual to kill so many real people in sh game.

[Umon Daisuke]

^ So you did your 1 hour drive for the rental in the end.... heh

Nope, the game store owner bent his rules a bit. I paid in full for a used copy, and when I return it within a week, he'll refund the amount sans $5 for a rental fee.

EDIT: For any Canadians here, Alliance FINALLY got around to releasing the SH movie on BD. It's just $20 at Future Shop, but unlike the DVD, it's actually bare bones. Just the movies by itself and being an early BD release, it's not the the best master out there. They opted for uncompressed PCM for the audio, so that's the highlight of the transfer.

The box art is different than the US one. Like the DVD, it's the theatrical movie poster.

[Biohazard EX]

I liked the game and it's story a lot, but it is too different from classic sh games. But I can live with that, what I didn't liked is that developers boroughed lots of elements and desighns not only from sh movie but clearly from the Saw and the Hostel as well. And it felt kind of unusual to kill so many real people in sh game.

I still thought that the storyline was true to the franchise. Yes, it was a little more on the 'reality' side, but it's not like it totally deviated from the artificial universe, like some other Survival Horror series, I can think of.

The three biggest disappointments about this game, for me, were the scares, the graphics and the sound. Now, the scares, I attribute entirely to the camera. There hasn't been a single 'horror' game which had the behind the back/over the shoulder camera and actually managed to scare me. Still, Homecoming did a better job than Dead Space.

The graphics were good on the enemies, but other than that, they were pretty disappointing. I mean, some doors didn't even have door knobs, instead the knobs were drawn on the texture. That's just sad... For this generation...
Same with Alex's coat. For a current generation game, I'd expect the coat pockets to have some geometry, not just be painted onto the texture. I could've done it, and it would've taken me less than a day.

The sound was worst of all. There were some instances where I hit an enemy and there is no impact sound. Sometimes enemies would have missing sound effects. The dialogue was inconsistent, some parts were really loud, some parts were really quiet.

[Nomad9026]

Yeah, the real factor of sh games was gone in homecoming, sad. But the music was great, as always. That's a bright side

[Mr_Zombie]

It seems the game is available on Steam, but for North, Central and South America only. Europe is once again ignored. The game is already over one month old so why do we, Europeans, have to wait for it to be released... even the PC version.

Screw you too Konami :/.

[Biohazard EX]

Yeah, the real factor of sh games was gone in homecoming, sad. But the music was great, as always. That's a bright side

The storyline, I thought was excellent. It's actually my second favorite storyline out of all the games, second only to SH2.

[Umon Daisuke]

Technically, the game isn't exactly a marvel to look at or hear. EX already touched on some gripes; footsteps' audio skips quite a bit.. trying walking while drawing a weapon.

Repetitive textures and re-used assets (the whole hotel had the same 3 portraits everywhere) stick out. The filtering a bit much too. It did the job of creating the atmosphere well though, but that's about it. The game is far from hideous, but it's nothing special.

So yeah, this is definitely not the apex of what current gen consoles can do for the series, unlike SH2-4. SH3 was a showcase title for the PS2 hardware.

[Biohazard EX]

Well, that's what I'm referring to. When I first picked up SH2 and saw those graphics, I thought it was by far the best looking game I had ever seen in my life. SH3, I'm sure, is still the best looking game on the PS2.
So let's say... Comparing PS2's full potential to SH3 graphics... And PS3's full potential to Homecoming's graphics, there's a huge difference.
For PS3's potential, the graphics are pretty bad, though. Like I said, Alex doesn't look TOO far from what the characters in SH3 looked like, quality wise. So he looks almost last gen, if it weren't for his facial features.
But even characters like Elle, she was pretty badly textured. Her hair, and her sweater, looked pretty bad.

Like, I don't really have a problem if Konami decided that another developer should work on it. Frankly, I thought Origins was done justice to, as far as Silent Hill games go, but that was Climax.

But Konami should've at least went to a company that... Has more man power, or something. Maybe gave them more money to hire more people. I refuse to believe that those odd things look (or sound) so bad, because the guys were lazy. I'm willing to bet it was lack of manpower.

[Mr_Zombie]

If anyone is interested, an artist that used to work on Silent Hill: Homecoming, Kenzie LaMar, has a gallery on DeviantArt: LINK. Among other things like concept arts of SH:H characters and monsters, there are also few beta models. The interesting one is Elle's model, which looks very different then what you can see in the game, and a lot better technically wise. Unfortunately, when the guy left the team, most of characters he designed were changed :/.

In comments he also wrote about why the game looks the way it looks now:

Well, hair was a major issue because of having to use alphas. Our engine handled alphas really badly. Most of the characters were not low poly and initially had quite nice high res textures. At least before I left. I have no idea what went on after I left. We had tried so hard to get them to make a hair shader for us but I guess that never happened. When the texture res got quartered I am sure it ended up looking not the way it was intended by the artist. It was far less an artistic issue making things look bad and more a lack of time and engine issue. The artists on that project are some of the most talented people I have ever had the pleasure of working with. If they had there artwork up here it would be as good as my own or better.

Initially we set our goals to be higher than what had been done before. In terms of poly count and texture sizes. BUT, the poly counts in previous Silent Hill games were actually higher than most games coming out now. Because we had real time lighting and shaders that have up to 4 textures per material, each characters budget actually had to be lowered rather than increased from the previous Silent Hill characters. This next generation of games is not as limitless as everyone seems to think. Because we are trying to do so much more in terms of rendering and animation, the limitations are actually even harder now. There are more things to keep track of.

There are reasons why the pockets were removed a well. Most technical and not budget restraints.

[Umon Daisuke]

So basically their engine wasn't quite on par with their ambitions. I guess the game's budget was quite limited, otherwise Konami should've stepped in and brought some of their technical talents to help. The current systems may be not limitless, but they're certainly capable of more.

EX, I'm certain that the initial mess with Origins is what turned Konami off Climax, otherwise this game was theirs.

[Biohazard EX]

So basically their engine wasn't quite on par with their ambitions. I guess the game's budget was quite limited, otherwise Konami should've stepped in and brought some of their technical talents to help. The current systems may be not limitless, but they're certainly capable of more.

EX, I'm certain that the initial mess with Origins is what turned Konami off Climax, otherwise this game was theirs.

Well, come on... If the PS2 SH games have a door knob on EACH door, the PS3 version can too. That's just lazy. No, that HAS to be laziness... It seems like they basically said, "Well, those doors aren't gonna be openable anyway, just paint the knob on it.


What mess with Origins? I heard nothing about that.

[Umon Daisuke]

By "their engine", I didn't mean the 360 and PS3 hardware, but their in-house engine that they used for both versions. As I said, the hardwares may not be limitless, but they're certainly capable of more.

SHO hit scheduling problems that made Konami miss their original target release date by nearly a year. Climax's management didn't dedicate enough people to work on the project initially, and set unrealistic deadlines resulting in quite a bit of delay that Konami was told off quite late. Consequently, the project was moved from the US offices to their UK headquarters.

If you compare the earliest SHO footage to the final game, they're completely different. The original version was more RE4-esque, while the final ended up being more traditional.

[Rombie]

Additional to Umon's comments,

Origins was originally being done by Climax's LA based studio. As mentioned the game they developed was exceptionally different to the one released, being an over the sholder action game akin to RE4 for the PSP. There are videos of this version released online, such as the one at this link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGROzNgf_mY

Apparently aside from the delays the game didn't go down well with test audiences and when it was shown off to press at both trade shows and for previews. Konami wasn't happy with the way the project was progressing and the LA studios development and in the end Climax moved the game entirely to the UK and shut their LA office entirely.