Avaunt, heretical hardware! A mockery thou dost make of Real Man’s Gaming, oh dastardly Wii, with thine skimpy processors and feminine branding. But wait, what’s this? Apparently we have you to thank for one of the better “hardcore” remakes of recent years.
Sam Barlow, Lead Designer on the warmly received Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, has told VGD that the game wouldn’t have made it past the pitching phase if it weren’t for Nintendo’s underpowered box of tricks.
“This game wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the Wii,” he said, speaking at a recent Stateside event. “Partly because the unique technical features of the Wii allow us to do the flashlight controls, this really intuitive way of controlling the game that means people who’ve never played a game before can pick it up and play it just as well as people who have.”
If that sounds like so much regurgitated play-the-mainstream tripe, Barlow served up a rather provocative slice of demographic analysis for dessert.
“At the same time the Wii as a platform meant we could be quite bold with this,” he said.
“If this was going out straight onto the PS3, their might be more pressure to deliver a hardcore, traditional Silent Hill survival horror template, whereas I think people understand with Wii – a third of your audience has never played a horror game, so they don’t have the expectations, they want you to deliver a true horror game.
“A third of your audience are lapsed gamers, so they’ve played horror games 10 years ago, and now they’ve come back into games they don’t necessarily want the annoying aspects of those games.
“And then the other third are hardcore gamers, and they kind of know that “if I’m playing this franchise on Wii, it’s probably going to have a unique spin to it. It’s going to be fresh and interesting”.
“So that kind of empowered us. When we started the game, we said “this is a Wii Silent Hill, so be bold and go do those interesting things”.”
Shattered Memories, which our friends tell us is just the boot up the backside the franchise needs, hits UK shelves on 26th February.
It’s also coming to PSP and PS2, by the way. Presumably PSP and PS2 owners are keen on “interesting things” too.
Yeah, they would have made a real silent hill game for the 360 or PS3 instead.
Somebody already tried. It was a bit pants :p
http://archive.videogamesdaily.com/reviews/xbox360/silent-hill-homecoming-p1.asp
Shattered Memories is said to be excellent. I for one welcome the de-emphasis of combat.
Shattered Memories on the Wii is my favorite Silent Hill game since Silent Hill 2, but I find it odd that Sam Barlow specifically targets the PS3 when the PS3 is the exclusive home of other “bold” games such as Heavy Rain, Flower, and LittleBigPlanet.
Anyway, I hope future Silent Hill games follow in the footsteps of Shattered Memories or even Heavy Rain.
@Climax: If you make a sequel to Shattered Memories, please put in more profile/save slots. There are only 3 slots for at least 5 endings. Even Silent Hill: Homecoming allowed 5 save slots for its 5 endings.
I wish I could understand why the PS2 version of the game is selling for $29.99, and the Wii version is selling for $49.99.
Isn’t it the exact same game, minus controls and graphics?
The main difference outside of controls, is that the PS2 version looks like @ss. It looks unfinished. You can’t even see the first monster in the first nightmare cutscene. At least in the NA version. Maybe they’ll clean up the UK version.