{"id":2057,"date":"2012-04-09T23:38:41","date_gmt":"2012-04-10T04:38:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/?p=2057"},"modified":"2012-04-09T23:38:41","modified_gmt":"2012-04-10T04:38:41","slug":"the-rain-wont-let-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/?p=2057","title":{"rendered":"The rain won’t let up"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have finished Silent Hill: Downpour<\/strong> twice now. One more run and I’ll be part of the 1000\/1000 club. You may have gotten the impression that I really liked the game last time I talked about it, and to that end, you’d be right. It’s exactly what a Silent Hill game should be: creepy, atmospheric, mysterious, and mind-bending. It has all the best qualities of a classic-style survival horror game, but cuts off most of the cruft to make it a more brisk, enjoyable game.<\/p>\n

There are, however, a few downsides. Pobody’s nerfect, and the Vatra team is no exception to that rule. They did a really excellent job for a relatively inexperienced studio, but there are a few things that made my playtime less than optimal. The most obvious flaw with Downpour is the horrible, horrible<\/em> lag. On my first run it wasn’t really an issue until I was wrapping up a few side quests near the end. Because I was taking my time and looking into every nook and cranny, the game had more than enough time to get everything loaded up and keep the framerate at a decent level. Only when I started motoring back and forth across town did I start to notice that the engine was having a lot of trouble keeping up with me, and things got really choppy. My second playthrough was even worse, because I was basically gunning it to wherever I needed to be next, and that is apparently not how you’re supposed to play. I worry about how my third run will go, since it’s essentially going to be a speed run to pop the last three cheevos.<\/p>\n

The other thing that really got under my skin is that there’s only one save file. I’m not such an obsessive gamer that I save over multiple files in one run, but I do like to have more than one save on hand at times. Especially since there is a point of no return near the end of the game. Aside from that though, there isn’t really a need to have more than one save in this game, but I’d like to have the option available so that I could say, have a save game that leads right into the joke ending. Downpour is also the type of game that auto-saves. And it only<\/em> auto-saves. There are checkpoints everywhere, and even if there isn’t an obvious one around, you can always go into a building to save. I feel like it would just be a lot more convenient to have a button on the menu to save though. Is it really that hard? The auto-save slavery still beats having to find an actual save point, I guess.<\/p>\n

Aside from the framerate issue, these are very minor complaints though. Having multiple save slots and a manual save option would be nice, but the game works fine without them.\u00a0 Other than that, I am pleased as punch with Downpour. The sentiment doesn’t seem to be too popular with the rest of the internet, but nuts to those guys. Vatra took Silent Hill in a great direction, and Tomm Hulett is most definitely still<\/a> in my good books for the work he’s done with the franchise. Here’s hoping that the next one is just as good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have finished Silent Hill: Downpour twice now. One more run and I’ll be part of the 1000\/1000 club. You may have gotten the impression that I really liked the game last time I talked about it, and to that end, you’d be right. It’s exactly what a Silent Hill game should be: creepy, atmospheric, … Continue reading The rain won’t let up<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spooky","category-video-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2057"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2058,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057\/revisions\/2058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}