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Mr. Sunabouzu posted:deSpiria watch update: Finished it. Would heartily recommend if you want to experience just how close you can push yourself to insanity. Red Bones posted:Door number 3! Let's see who else this game has to show us.
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Jun 8, 2015 23:16
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 00:13 |
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Everything about that scene comes together wonderfully. For a brief moment you've crossed paths with the people who actually know what the hell is going on, and then a bunch of other characters wander in, some people get killed, and you fall down a hole right back into more tunnel mazes. It makes the mesh feel so much bigger and weirder that all this cultist poo poo has been going on off to the side somewhere and when you finally wander past it you've never had quite enough context to get what's going on, or why that man is half centipede, or that they've been hours away from summoning some dark god since the moment you showed up. I hope the monster is just as clueless as you, and just entered through the ceiling instead of a wall.
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Jun 8, 2015 23:55
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hrmmm I don't know what to vote for. Rene seems like a bad rear end, but I like how awkwardly open Ivanoff is. Hrmmm.... I guess Keep Ivanoff.
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Jun 9, 2015 01:00
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Pick number 3, m'lord!
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Jun 9, 2015 05:04
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Alright so far it's 4 votes for option 3 and 3 votes for Ivanoff. It's a lot closer than I would have expected, though I'm saddened no one wants Rene to come along. Apparently though she has a pretty low ammo count, and currently I think Ivanoff still has like 13 shots left which should hopefully be fine for the rest of the game. Also I still really feel the need to point out how much of a dick move the cd-rom is. For the most part the game is pretty good with forcing you to get plot necessary items or having workarounds for things (such as getting trapped by a conveyor belt and needing Kajiwara to begrudgingly open a gate for you), but oh no....not that cd-rom. And the worst part about it is that you could easily overwrite a previous save you have from the second floor and have absolutely no way to go back and get the item you need. You are just stuck and have to replay through the entire game in hopes of finding this easily missable item. An item that doesn't even really seem to help with solving the puzzle it's connected to. Like seriously, maybe the puzzle makes sense in Japanese but there doesn't seem to be a clear answer at all to that puzzle.
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Jun 10, 2015 04:53
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  Open the door....to your mystery date.
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Jun 14, 2015 03:49
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Man, all that Hive stuff kinda came out of left field. Is it possible that Kamiya is related to the Hive? That conversation with Razzo seemed to allude to a connection, along with his habit of calling everyone 'prey'.
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Jun 14, 2015 05:41
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Ah a video game classic. The flesh level. So many games in the 90's had them. They have seen to fallen out of favor sometime around the mid 00's though. This is game has a lot of cool ideas. I wish it was better designed and didn't use so many generic stock sound effects.
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Jun 14, 2015 05:47
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Okay, I think the weird robot-bug-saiyan friend was the proper choice for our final partner, even if he kind of wants to kill us a little bit. Also, the Hive seems pretty cool, and it's a neat take on the whole flesh-level thing. The butterfly-wing pillars in the Reactor Heart were especially cool. Bye Razzo, I guess. If you're dead. Or, if you weren't dead from the start. That would actually explain how he gets around and knows everything, though.
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Jun 14, 2015 05:53
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Limopalise posted:Man, all that Hive stuff kinda came out of left field. D_W posted:Ah a video game classic. The flesh level. So many games in the 90's had them. They have seen to fallen out of favor sometime around the mid 00's though. yokaiy posted:Okay, I think the weird robot-bug-saiyan friend was the proper choice for our final partner, even if he kind of wants to kill us a little bit. Also, the Hive seems pretty cool, and it's a neat take on the whole flesh-level thing. The butterfly-wing pillars in the Reactor Heart were especially cool. edit: Also you guys are missing out on the best anime ever 
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Jun 14, 2015 07:26
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  This was all originally going to be a single video but I didn't want to overwhelm you guys with 50 minutes of ummmm this?
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Jun 20, 2015 20:06
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Niggurath posted:
It's a shame you didn't run into my personal favorite Hive dweller, That Which Tangos.
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Jun 20, 2015 23:21
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Japanese games love the weird sort of techno-digital-whatever you'd call it for the end area of the video games.
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Jun 21, 2015 01:34
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This game is really bizarre. Weird techno-land was really cool looking, though. Funky space-shrimp monster, also cool I guess. In a kind of "why is this thing so complicated when it only got about 5 seconds of screen time" kind of way. I feel like I have no idea what is going on anymore in this game. I'm wondering if I ever really knew what was going on anyway. Probably not. And yet, I am kind of fascinated. Can't wait to see what kind of surreal space-time this takes us to next.
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Jun 22, 2015 06:21
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yokaiy posted:This game is really bizarre. An alien hive crash landed to earth a long rear end time ago, when it crashed their leader was spread out into the atmosphere to later reform. During this eon long reformation, this alien culture sets up a very bizarre means of collecting their leader's fragments and feeding themselves by creating this psuedo religion to gather up sacrifices (which was the Holy Ring). And the final step in their master plan is the unleashing of the Dark Messiah, which is kind of the Dark Prince without all the necessary pieces but is pretty much the harbinger of the end times for a species that is the target of this alien hive....because apparently this isn't the first planet to be visited by the hive? I don't know, it's a bit vague on that end. It definitely all comes out of left field after the initial cult/trapped in the TokyoMesh/hologram baby, but hey, at least it's somewhat different than cult manufactures a hell beast for no real reason. A bit more of this is covered in the final video but the final area is a bit of a mixed bag....a lovely, lovely mixed bag.
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Jun 22, 2015 06:31
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coleman francis posted:It's a shame you didn't run into my personal favorite Hive dweller, That Which Tangos. I wonder what they think of their brethren who left the Hive to become a video game, That Which Sleeps 
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Jun 22, 2015 07:14
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I'm surprised but very glad of the turn the art direction in this game took. The TokyoMesh was getting pretty bland. Also, with all the ghosts you can run into in Technoland, I'm kinda wondering if it's possible to encounter your former, now dead, partners. Or are people killed by the prince not made into ghosts or something?
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Jun 22, 2015 09:54
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Limopalise posted:I'm surprised but very glad of the turn the art direction in this game took. The TokyoMesh was getting pretty bland.   See if you can guess why I won't be playing this game multiple times for all the endings (I'll put a link to someone who has them all uploaded).
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Jun 22, 2015 10:14
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Well how about that. Anyway, thanks a bunch for this LP. It was a truly unique experience. Just a shame about that ending sequence/all the other bits that would be completely unfun to play.
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Jun 22, 2015 11:00
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Man, I've had hellnights just like that. Thanks for the lp niggurath, it was great finally seeing the rest of this game.
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Jun 22, 2015 13:15
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Oof That ending area. They must have been really pressed for time in development for it to end up like that. It seems like this game's story was a bit too ambitious for it's budget. So there's multiple endings depending on characters, right? I wonder how things change if you bring them along. And yeah... those sound effects. yeesh.
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Jun 22, 2015 13:43
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The game really doesn't look fun to play, given the huge amount of walking in long corridors and terribly designed puzzles, and copy and paste at the very climax. On the other hand, I must say I haven't seen many horror game that manages to be (somewhat) tense and scary while constantly throwing friendly characters at you.
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Jun 22, 2015 18:04
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D_W posted:Oof That ending area. They must have been really pressed for time in development for it to end up like that. It seems like this game's story was a bit too ambitious for it's budget. This is the video with all the endings (apparently we got a 'Bad' ending I suppose because we died in the elevator?). It seems the most obvious and different ending is with Kamiya where he allows the Dark Prince to be reborn, while the good endings are seem to involve getting to the surface and seeing where generic looking building models. Personally I didn't mind the ending where we get caught up in a nuke because I doubt I'd wanted to live in a world without my Wandering friend. Also that area with the screams and sound effects is somewhat interesting, albeit super janky. Basically there are triggers in the hallways which queue sound effects to play, so as you're going through you'll here strange screams and monster sounds....but the problem is that you can constantly walk over these triggers and just get constantly repeating scream sound effects when you get lost down infinite tunnel #690. So what could be an interesting idea, especially for the PS1 era of games, becomes super tedious as it goes on way, way too long. CremePudding posted:The game really doesn't look fun to play, given the huge amount of walking in long corridors and terribly designed puzzles, and copy and paste at the very climax.
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Jun 22, 2015 18:22
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I like Ivanoff's ending the best, for being the only ending where steps are taken to further investigate the abandoned military complex and irradiated remains of an alien spaceship underneath Tokyo. This game was not very good but it had some interesting ideas and some really nice design choices, especially all the alien hive stuff. I guess the Holy Ring leader was actually That Which Preaches or something? Explains why he was a weird looking bug man, at least. It's disappointing that the game throws a way all of its confusing, out-of-your-depth atmosphere to just sorta explain everything to you in the last hour and tie all the plot threads together.
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Jun 23, 2015 09:46
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That was sure a thing. I feel like it could have been a much more interesting game if they'd had more money and better graphics. It felt like there was more story to tell than they could get into within their time and budget constraints. Thanks for playing for us anyway, Niggurath!
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Jun 24, 2015 13:00
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Really it looks like the only reason you got a "bad" ending and seemingly died in the elevator is you didn't have a companion to handle narration for you when you got to the surface. Apparently for all his ejaculations in-game, the player character doesn't talk in the outro. So, maybe you got out of the elevator, but just kind of silently wandered away.
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Jun 24, 2015 13:29
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Hey, sorry for bumping the thread, but I just finished this game myself (with Naomi), and in comparing my own experience to the LP, I noticed that the big difference in the ending you get from partner to partner is less in the actual ending sequence and more in the little vignettes you can get in the final sewer sequence, which for some characters are their primary backstory infodumps. Out of curiosity, I decided to go hunting for videos of the scenes that occur when you're with the other partners. There's nothing I can find for the English version of the game (except for, as is mentioned upthread, videos of Naomi walkthroughs), but I did manage to track down videos of the Japanese versions of the sewer scenes for each character. Though I'm way late to the party, I thought I'd share what I'd found, just in case anyone was interested; I've linked the videos I found below. The pertinent info: Naomi (no link for this; just find any of the other LPs of the English version on YouTube): Apparently, Naomi's psychic powers ran amok when she was a little girl and inadvertently caused the deaths of at least three of her little friends. (We don't get much detail about the accident, besides that it was in a road, and bloody, and one least one kid's neck was snapped.) The accident and classmate apprehension about her "weirdness" has led to Naomi being ostracized at school. She'll be met by her mother (who will express fear of her daughter and say that, in her heart of hearts, she really hopes that Naomi doesn't come home), one of her classmates, and her sad & bullied younger self. Oddly, when you visit Kamiya with Naomi, he'll make a play for her, urging her to "give up on that loser you're with and come with me." He'll also address his final speech to her instead of the player. Naomi can also meet the Naomi apparition that guilt-trips the player in the other routes; here, the apparition will attempt to entice Naomi over to the side of the Prince, promising that, in a world ruled by the Hive where all are one, she'll never be lonely again. (This isn't part of the sewer sequence, but having played with Naomi as a partner, I'll note that she gets more and more erratic when you talk to her as you go down into the Hive - having flashbacks to unpleasant childhood incidents, briefly stealing the Sighing Flute to hear the eerie sound it makes and saying "I kind of could get to like it!", etc. She pulls herself together by the endgame, though. Also: You can apparently have a chance to get Naomi back if she's taken at the stairs? I've read in multiple places that if you join up with Kamiya and get rid of him before you first reach "Nice" Makihara, Naomi'll show up in Nice's room?) Kamiya: Kamiya meets a cop he killed. The cop rejoices that, even though Kamiya eluded justice aboveground, he is now inextricably caught in the hell of the Hive. As we know from the ending, though, this suits Kamiya just fine, so he's not fazed. Kamiya will also meet a woman named Sayaka, who seems to be his ex-girlfriend. She'll ask if Kamiya is still going around killing people (his response: "...Something like that") and if he still feels the "thirst in his heart"; she'll then, haltingly, express a wish that he should've killed her, as doing so would probably have slaked his thirst for blood at least somewhat. Kamiya will dismiss this idea outright - she was never "prey" - but Sayaka will merely reiterate her wish to herself. If the player talks to Kamiya after the scene, he briefly considers Sayaka's wish, but then concludes that, no, killing her wouldn't have helped, and it probably would have just made the thirst worse. Kamiya's third character-specific NPC is - a cat. Namely, the kitten he mentions killing in his ending. Kamiya goes on for a good bit at the cat, but the thrust of it is that he's heard the kitten's voice in his head ever since he killed it, and, in a twisted way, he's happy to see the cat spirit - he's relieved to have finally found the source of the voice that's tormented him for so long. The above scene also means that Kamiya spends a good deal of his character-specific sewer scene time yelling at a kitten, which seems appropriate. Small things: When Kamiya meets Kamiya, the illusion will claim to be a manifestation of the "dark beast" inside him that thirsts for blood. (The Holy Ring acolyte, too, will mention that Kamiya will assume his true "dark beast" form at the Great Union.) When Kamiya meets the Holy Ring priest, he'll get fed up with his proselytizing and attempt to shoot him but be perplexed when his bullets pass right through. Ivanoff: As to be expected, Ivanoff's encounters are with his fallen squadmates: one who laments that he always wanted to be as strong as Ivanoff and asks why his commander failed him; one who, in a rather creepily-detailed and pitiful first-person narration of his own death, relates how he heard the cracking of his own skull between the Hybrid's jaws (detailing how he sensed every painful aspect of his demise long after he should have lost consciousness in death); and one who relates a story about Ivanoff's past: how Ivanoff ended up shooting a commando to death right in front of the man's daughter in Biafra (the commando shielding his child with his own body), and how Ivanoff ended up adopting the girl (named Kima) out of guilt. The soldier accuses Ivanoff of winning all his military successes not through audacious action based on fearlessness in the face of death, but through a genuine death wish - a desire to atone for killing his adopted daughter's real father with his own demise. The soldier then asks why Ivanoff had to take the rest of his squad down with him. Ivanoff never evinces anything but concern for his troops and genuine remorse for his actions (claiming that he never should have taken the mission, as there were too many unknown variables). He takes full responsibility for their deaths and asks their forgiveness. Creepy note: If you talk to Ivanoff in the sewer, he'll just chant "I'm sane I'm sane I'm sane I'm sane" to himself over and over. Rene: Infodump ahoy: apparently, Rene's family is part of an ancient bloodline descended from demons or something (demon blood is flowing in their veins, at least). Its members can undergo a ceremony (handed down by medieval devil worshippers!) to become ageless and deathless at the cost of becoming, well, a demon, or something like one. Rene's dad has done this (hence his resemblance to a Despiria random encounter), and he wants his kid to follow in his footsteps, but Rene's not down with that. Rene will also meet an old flame named Bernard, a wishy-washy sap who's the scion of another rich French family, the Elans. Bernard apparently broke off their relationship at the instigation of Rene's dad (who said it was for Rene's own good). Bernard pleads for another chance with Rene, claiming to have cut off relations with his family, but Rene says no way; she's through with both her family and his. (It's unknown how much the Elans are involved with the demon business, if at all.) Rene meeting Rene just amounts to the apparition claiming that she can't fight her demon fate. Apparition Rene will also exposit that the power of the Lorraine family blood is similar to that of the Hive creatures, in that it can convert fear into pure energy. (Similarly, the Holy Ring acolyte will mention that Rene's demon blood would be of great help in resurrecting the Dark Messiah.) Also, in the weirdest sewer scene that doesn't involve cats, Rene meets a photojourno colleague of hers named Daryl who briefly accuses her of sleeping with someone to get a job; Rene, in turn, accuses Daryl of basically taking amateur porn pics with male models on the job. Because we needed a Real Housewives scene in this horror game, apparently. (Rene, incidentally, is not perturbed by anything that happens. She outright laughs at it all, actually. It's hard to argue with her reaction; Rene's vignettes are a big jumble of plot fragments to bring in at the eleventh hour, and they don't serve the purpose that the other character-specific scenes do of instilling fear or despair or attempting to convince the partner to submit to the will of the Hive.) Alone: Not much. There's an appearance by That Which Wanders, which doesn't amount to much (just TWW soliloquizing that if he "joined" with the protagonist, he could access the Prince's great destructive power...and the power to rule the world? He doesn't do anything, though), and, in his only non-partner appearance in this maze, Ivanoff, who will simply (but painfully) lament the futility of taking up arms against the Hybrid. The sewer scenes viewed alone are a gallery of partners you've failed, basically. Razzo (or "Razzo") will also make an appearance and allude to his role as That Which Leads, claiming that he was responsible for the protag (as well as a number of other folks over time, to serve as prey for the Hive denizens) getting trapped in the Mesh & Hive in the first place. The other part of the Dark Messiah himself will also show up, but he looks just like a formless blob and will briefly just tell us info about his splintered soul that we already know. Finally, the hints for the puzzle in the computer room with the three cards are nonsensical in English because, as speculated, they involve Japanese characters. In the Japanese version, the three card slots are marked with special-use characters for 1, 2, and 3: 甲 ("kou," or first), 乙 ("otsu", or second), and 丙 ("hei," or third). (These characters are mainly used in contract language: "first party," "second party," etc.) The first three personnel listings on the CD pair Holy Ring members whose names contain the readings of these characters (Otsure, Kosho, and Heikura) with positions that correspond with the symbols on the three cards ("Celestial Observation" = the card with the "heaven" character; "Terrestrial Division" = "earth"; and "Anatomy Division" = the "human" card). None of this was ever localized into a puzzle English speakers would understand. (This also means that the wrong listings are highlighted in the English version, not that it at all matters.)
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Jul 30, 2015 02:42
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Man, this game has an entire novel of content that they wanted to shove secretly into the last 1/10th of the game. Some of it seems super interesting and out of left field, but it makes me wonder if there was supposed to be more to it and they just ran out of time. I mean, it seems like if maybe they had just allowed the player to select a specific team mate at the start and letting them learn over the course of the game about the character it might have worked better (like if through fateful encounter they all ended up on the subway together and ended up down in the subway, with the player splitting up with one of them while the others went their separate ways?). Still I do appreciate the effort and hope that my romp wasn't that painful (I was kinda running out of poo poo to say in the hive end areas...that didn't involve me saying how stupid everything was). Also since you played the game yourself, how did you feel about your experience once it was done?
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Jul 30, 2015 02:55
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Man, I'm sorry for the huge delay in replying here. Basically, I think I liked Hellnight better than most would. I see where others are coming from with frustration over adventure gameplay and graphics, but I liked the game's use of sound and its unusual setting - and it is quite tense, having to be perpetually ready to flee wherever you go. (To be honest, I actually did like the Clock Tower combination of adventure gaming with chase sequences, but I recognize that's not a combination that's to everyone's tastes.) The game also has to it some of that brand of weirdness unique to some 32-bit titles made by folks that were...well, not entirely strangers to making games, but who took the then-new freedom of CD technology and 3D in kind of odd directions in comparison to what more professional teams were doing, and ended up with results that were interesting in some ways but startlingly unpolished in others, if I'm making any sense. I'm thinking of things like how Overblood aimed for a somewhat "hard" sci-fi story and hired a somewhat higher caliber of actors than stuff like this usually got in that era (not that it showed in some places) but had absolutely no idea of how to animate characters. I think Hellnight is considerably more successful than Overblood, but stuff like the character models that were stuck in the microwave for a little too long comes from the same font of weirdness. I like seeing the mistakes and odd choices made in these scenarios. The maintainer of the Chris's Survival Horror Quest website used to be a big proponent of Hellnight, and what he wrote got me interested in it, but I never got around to playing the thing; after seeing this LP, I decided finally to dive into it so I could see how others reacted to it after all this time. It was really interesting to see another path in your playthrough, plus hints of all the others; I really enjoyed it. I myself would, eventually, like to go back through it with another character (probably Wesker for Fuckers, since his path seems to have some wrinkles that the others don't). The idea of choosing a partner at the subway accident has merit - there's a good amount of dialogue in the game that hardly any player ever sees, since folks are loathe to get Naomi killed (as evidenced by the preponderance of Naomi runs in English-speaking LPs). I would say that putting the big reveals in that last loop through the subway works better for some characters than others - I felt it worked for Naomi (though her childhood psychic accident could've used a bit more elucidation), but the stuff with Rene just seems too out of the blue.
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Aug 20, 2015 04:52
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It always warms my heart to know that my LP might have pushed people to play a game and enjoy it. And ya know, I think Chris' site was how I first learned of the game so long ago as well. Or maybe it was hardcore gaming; either site is pretty useful for finding out new obscure games. Hopefully though this should be added to the archives at some point. Also in case anyone missed it or was in the mood for more odd horror, I did just finish an LP of a PS2 FMV horror game: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3730843
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Aug 20, 2015 07:18
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 00:13 |
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You've really carved yourself out a niche here for these obscure games. This one... this one actually reminds me of nothing so much as the Amnesia series in modern-day. Dodging threats in 3D and doing adventure-game puzzles in the rooms in between.
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Sep 30, 2015 21:17
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