Incoming from Comic Con: Silent Hill & Little Big Planet

 

Silent Hill: Homecoming

So Silent Hill is back for another go around. The opening is clever. A first person view where you're being taken to somewhere in an abandoned hospital while you are tied down to a table. Eventually you get into an operating room where the surgeon pushing you into there leaves you to rot. He's actually human. A moment later, some freakish thing stabs him through the chest and really, really kills him. While this is happening, your suppose to rapidly tap a button to break yourself out. This main character is a little more combat savvy than the previous ones.

Immediately I could feel a difference in the controls. There's no longer a run button. You're always moving at top speed and you can ram through doors now. There's even a dodge button. All I got to experience was melee combat, which worked really well. While locked on to a target, the camera moves to a fantastic angle to get a great view of what you're doing and what you're hitting.

Controls aside, there are a lot of blemishes to this thing. For one, the graphics where really not impressive, which is sad for a game that is renowned for its horrific beauty through grime and rust. The people at the booth assured me that the graphics would get some polishing. This better be the truth considering Konami did just create Metal Gear Solid 4, which is so beautiful it should be illegal.

The pause menu was also clunky. They made it so a few button presses could quickly get you to what you needed, like using the right and left triggers to move through it and some items were mapped to certain buttons, but it all just felt strange. A pause menu doesn't need to have a bunch of "shortcut" buttons to move through it. What it needs is an intuitive design that is easy to understand and maneuver through.

By far the biggest problem is that this is just another Silent Hill. Silent Hill 4 had some great concepts but took some weird turns when it came to gameplay. The pacing of this game SLOW. Very slow. Like, I felt sleepy in between the action. When there was action or good scares it was great, but that was only the experience 1/8 of the time. The rest of the time I was looking for items or watching a cut scene with badly acted dialogue. If they cut all that stuff out, this would be a much better game.

It didn't help that I had played Dead Space the day before. Dead Space completely overshadows this game. Silent Hill has pretty much fallen into the very average category unless they make some serious changes with this game.

 

Little Big Planet

Little Big Planet was a feast of undeniable cuteness. At the beginning of the demo, you get to make your own doll-avatar. The number of options were nearly overwhelming. The most distinctive feature of my guy was that he was wearing a dragon headdress that had a tail that dragged behind him.

I'll admit that I quickly fell for this little guy. In my mind he's a half-dragon voodoo priest named Edwardo. So I played Edwardo against two other players and a lady that led the demo. Her doll-avatar looked like a fairy, and the other two looked like a samurai and a soldier wearing a gas-mask from Killzone. We were quite the crew.

The lady working the booth kind of rushed everybody through the levels to show off what all features the game had. More than anything, I wanted to stand around and mess with Pike and the other players. Just seeing his flowing dragon-scarf was amazing. It was at least three times longer than he was.

With the D-Pad you could change your doll-avatar's emotions, ranging from sad to mad to scared to happy. There were also two levels to each emotion, so if you wanted a more exaggerated expression you could easily obtain it. Just watching his face was the most fun I had during the entire demo, which makes the game sound weak but I think the problem was just with presentation.

You would collect bubbles that laid upon the ground for points and there was some puzzle solving. There was a bridge that no one managed to jump across properly, a bunch of humpty-dumptys that could get knocked over for more bubbles, and a sign where we needed to place stickers on it to solve the puzzle. We were suppose to make the blank sign look like a man, but there were so many stickers available that it was a bit overwhelming. Once the puzzle was solved, the sign floated over, broke down a wall in our way, and revealed a couple of gofers with very creepy eyes who congratulated us. We were then faced with a boss that we had do use a mine-cart that we could push back and forth to deflect his own ammo back at him. It took awhile because we kept missing.

They tried to show too many concepts too quickly. They should have kept it simpler and encourage players to interact with one another. I should have brought my friends to play the game along with me. I would have probably have had a better time that way.

Hopefully the game is a little more player-friendly that I perceived it to be and I have no idea what the level editor is like. This game just screams user-created potential. It looks like you can create entire campaigns of levels. I think a narrative is actually possible with this game. I'm really looking forward to what players will come up with.