Now Resident Evil: Outbreak was an example of a how a good game gets dragged down by a couple bad ideas. What about a bad game with many bad ideas?
Oh boy.
Look no further than Silent Hill Homecoming. I could give a lot more flak toward Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, but I'm giving it a pass temporarily for two reasons.
1: I haven't played it.
2: It did try to be innovative.
Silent Hill Homecoming is a mess. Some of the intentions for the game were placed right, such as making the protagonist more combat-oriented with a war-themed background. Elements of the game were properly atmospheric, and a couple of the enemies were rather well-designed, like Siam and Scarlet. But Silent Hill Homecoming commits the #1 sin of any horror game: it isn't scary.
You see, horror comes in two flavors: the kind that startles, and the kind that unsettles. You hear this all the time, and it's clear who knows how to exploit which. Startling someone is easy: loud noises, screams, roars...the good kind of horror uses it sparingly, such as Resident Evil with the dogs breaking in through the window. It didn't abuse these, and favored unsettling scares: the first zombie encounter, the journal (itchy tasty), ambient noises and music, traps...best example was in Resident Evil 3, with the Nemesis being an ever-looming threat, his ambient music playing to remind you that you hadn't escaped him by running into the next room.
Silent Hill did this even better, even on the Playstation: crying, creaking, the ghost babies that freaked everyone out the first few times, or just plain cracking glass that made you unsure of what happened, if anything. Silent Hill 3 has, hands down, one of the best scary traps ever made in a video game that I've seen to date. If a game throws you a curveball that make's you helpless, and you're not sure why, you begin to panic. You begin to try everything, do everything in an attempt to evade the danger. Granted, the room could result in a cheap death, but due to the room having nothing at all in it, you could just avoid it. Amnesia: The Dark Descent has this kind of fear down in aces.
Homecoming had very little in the way of creepiness. It's kind of sad when you think about it, because changing the protagonist to a war vet meant that combat would've been easier, and that removes one half of the challenge you had if you were just a single journalist father looking for his daughter, or an ordinary man looking for his wife. They had reasons to run or be poor in combat. Alex Shepherd knows how to fight, to dodge, to deal effective damage with the weapon at hand. They knew this, they limited the amount of ammo he could hold, but that could not stop Alex's knife skills.
You can beat the majority of the enemies in the game with the knife, because you have all the agility and counter-attack potential you'd ever need. Enemies hardly swarm you, most attacking in pairs or trios. The faster the enemy, the more likely you'd be hit; but then you could use your ammunition on them anyway. Not that'd you'd need to, since the designers decided it would be a good idea to add health extending medkits. Now not only do you get a free heal, you get more health and make the enemies less of a threat. When you keep killing the main element of horror in your game, you're doing the Silent Hill games a disservice.
Shattered Memories at least had some tension to it. Don't get me wrong, the game still has too many problems, but it kept the enemies mildly threatening. Silent Hill 3 even had the bright idea to give the enemies the occasional GUN. To think that a nurse could be shuffling down a shadowed hallway, ready to take aim and blow a hole clean in your skull and waste your healing supplies...that's tense. When one enemy can even pack an Uzi...well, you better kiss your supplies goodbye.
Homecoming didn't even have the goddamn courtesy to have you fight Pyramid Head. James Sunderland had to fight three of his own personal demons off, but Alex's punishment wasn't nagging him enough to have to face one down? You couldn't have made it at all threatening? This game parades him around, pumps him up as this big badass, and then does absolutely NOTHING with him. How. Do. You. Do. THAT. That'd be like Metal Gears not being fought at all in the whole damn Metal Gear series. You can't just parade a threat around and NOT use it. That's not how an action game works, and that's certainly not how horror games work.
The choices in design here baffle me. You make your protagonist stronger but his weapons weaker. You make the knife the only weapon he needs and make the enemies sparse enough to allow for this. You let him have more HP than he should; you even SHOW how much HP he has, rather than a vague assumption based on the condition of the status screen. An enemy with a glowing weak point, nurses that can be safely avoided with the flashlight turned off...this game did so much hand-holding, you might as well have been doing a tour through Silent Hill, Pyramid Head as your guide.
I could argue that Silent Hill 4, a game that wasn't even intended to BE a Silent Hill game, managed to accomplish it through a limited inventory, a mid-game shock in terms of losing your main source of healing, the persistent threat of ghosts in the same vein as Nemesis...it challenged you if nothing else. Yes, the health bar was there, but it was played on; early on you knew you could regenerate in your home, but then the game removes that element, and suddenly you're watching your health bar with greater scrutiny, keeping and using health items. The mechanics change, but they're for the better. The game let you get a feel for what was going on, and then pulled the rug out from under you in a good way. Granted, Silent Hill 4 is still flawed in many ways, but the positives allow me to forgive it.
Silent Hill Homecoming sold somewhere around 750,000 to a million copies, and it was cancelled for release in Japan. The most amusing part is, no reason was given for a Japanese cancellation. It was just decided. I have my own amused speculations, but I'll leave you to your own thoughts on why they'd reject this game.
Now to tackle Downpour...
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