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Post by wyrdwad on Sept 6, 2015 5:35:53 GMT -5
Oh, the memories. CT (SNES) was one of the first games that I successfully emulated and played through. It was pretty scary in parts, so I have a fondness for this series... ...that ultimately was repaid by the sheer mediocrity of the second game. Nothing in that game worked for me as well as the first. The graphics, though 3D, were less convincing than the first game's realistic 2D graphics, nor as convincing or atmospheric as the prerendered backgrounds of RE1, or the grittier but stylish graphics of Silent Hill. The first game did a really good job of putting you on edge, but the second game lacks such a virtue. The game seemed a little gorier than the first, which I found unnecessary and didn't make up for the lack of atmosphere. Awww. Maybe it's because I played the PS1 game first, but I find it immensely atmospheric, even despite the awful 3D graphics. Nostalgia likely does play a huge role in that, though, as Clock Tower was a favorite PS1 game among my housemates in college -- and one housemate, Jenn, would get ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED when she played it, screaming so loudly whenever Scissorman jumped out that people from outside would come in to make sure everyone was OK. It was fun times! When I later went back and played the SFC game, I was a little disappointed by it, as I found the environments a little too samey, the control a little lacking (you couldn't walk absolutely anywhere like in the PS1 game, but were rather restricted to a single horizontal plane + the areas around specific objects or people of interest, leading to odd pathing that I felt pulled me out of the experience somewhat), and the Scissorman scares a little less creative (nothing stands out in my mind like Scissorman sitting in a rocking chair, watching cartoons -- that's one of my favorite moments from the whole series!). -Tom
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Post by kaoru on Sept 6, 2015 5:47:21 GMT -5
CT2 has those really long and boring intermissions that are such a drag to get through. See, I was OK with those. They felt like a really entertaining B-movie horror flick to me, and for as dumb as it was, I really did get into the story. Oh, I totally like the b-movie vibes of the CT series (the opening movie to CT2 is deliciously like a trailer for a 50s horror movie or such). And I'd be Ok with getting some intel between the main stages of CT2. But the intermissions are just so slooow. They let you pick where to go on the map, but besides two or three locations, all of them are locked away anyways, so why let me even choose? And the text crawls so slowly and is even out of synch with the voice acting. If you could just click through the text as fast as you read it, that'd be ok, but the auto scrolling is like ten times slower than that.
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Post by Resident Tsundere on Sept 6, 2015 17:16:42 GMT -5
Oh, the memories. CT (SNES) was one of the first games that I successfully emulated and played through. It was pretty scary in parts, so I have a fondness for this series... ...that ultimately was repaid by the sheer mediocrity of the second game. Nothing in that game worked for me as well as the first. The graphics, though 3D, were less convincing than the first game's realistic 2D graphics, nor as convincing or atmospheric as the prerendered backgrounds of RE1, or the grittier but stylish graphics of Silent Hill. The first game did a really good job of putting you on edge, but the second game lacks such a virtue. The game seemed a little gorier than the first, which I found unnecessary and didn't make up for the lack of atmosphere. Awww. Maybe it's because I played the PS1 game first, but I find it immensely atmospheric, even despite the awful 3D graphics. Nostalgia likely does play a huge role in that, though, as Clock Tower was a favorite PS1 game among my housemates in college -- and one housemate, Jenn, would get ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED when she played it, screaming so loudly whenever Scissorman jumped out that people from outside would come in to make sure everyone was OK. It was fun times! When I later went back and played the SFC game, I was a little disappointed by it, as I found the environments a little too samey, the control a little lacking (you couldn't walk absolutely anywhere like in the PS1 game, but were rather restricted to a single horizontal plane + the areas around specific objects or people of interest, leading to odd pathing that I felt pulled me out of the experience somewhat), and the Scissorman scares a little less creative (nothing stands out in my mind like Scissorman sitting in a rocking chair, watching cartoons -- that's one of my favorite moments from the whole series!). -Tom I do think that the first game has issues with keeping you from getting lost. At one point near the end of the game, I would always get lost in the mansion and wander around aimlessly. And that's when I realized that the game can be kind of empty and dull when you're just plain stuck.
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varg
New Member
Posts: 3
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Post by varg on Sept 6, 2015 19:31:38 GMT -5
I think that should be Suspiria, the Argento film with a bunch of girls in a old mansion with occult magic and someone being stabbed while falling through a stained-glass ceiling, not Disturbia, the 2005 thriller with Shia LaBeouf. The only problem I have with the first game is that Scissor Man never triggers on his own. So once you know the couple of spots that might trigger him in subsequent run throughs - and most of them you never have to get close to to get through the game even - it loses a lot of its atmosphere, because you never have the feeling of he could pop out any time, because he won't. Are you sure? I know he has certain spawn points, but I remember him sometimes just appearing completely at random in the corridors as well, even if it was rarer.
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Post by kaoru on Sept 7, 2015 4:35:31 GMT -5
I can't say that ever happened to me in any of my playthroughs of the Super Famicom version.
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Post by GamerL on Sept 7, 2015 6:45:10 GMT -5
I played Clock Tower (the SFC one to be exact) for the first time a few months ago and it's pretty awesome, though a bit difficult, I never actually made it to the titular clock tower (though I definitely plan on trying again one day), but I how loved you can keep replaying the game and discovering new things, piecing the story together, plus it has to be said the graphics are very pleasing to the eye. Then I tried the PS1 Clock Tower and unfortunately instead of the elegantly aged SFC graphics it has dated, blocky graphics and that, coupled with the Godawful voice acting really put a damper on it for me, I may give it another try again one day, but we'll see. Clock Tower is 3 decent for the first chunk, but I feel that after you kill the Corroder the game gets pretty bad. Finally I really love Haunting Ground, it's not only the last true survival horror game Capcom ever made but one of the last hurrahs for the genre in general, I love the Gothic, surreal architecture of the castle and I love Daniella, who in an interesting bit of trivia is voiced by the referee of the 90's Nickelodeon gameshow GUTS Moira Quirk, the fact that I distinctly remember seeing her in that show as a kid only to years later play a video game where she voices a character that chases you with a big piece of broken glass is, I don't know man, highly amusing to me.
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Post by wyrdwad on Sept 7, 2015 7:13:55 GMT -5
Finally I really love Haunting Ground, it's not only the last true survival horror game Capcom ever made but one of the last hurrahs for the genre in general Hey now! Corpse Party, yo! Corpse Party is a different type of survival horror, but still carries the torch that the Clock Tower games and Haunting Ground passed it, I feel. -Tom
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Post by alphex on Sept 7, 2015 9:06:54 GMT -5
Clock Tower 2:
Should there be a negative adjective in there?
Say what?
Ghost Head:
Younger.
The headline "Spiritual Successors" appears twice, once before "Drama Discs", and then again above the actual spiritual successors.
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Post by dskzero on Sept 7, 2015 19:52:48 GMT -5
I think that should be Suspiria, the Argento film with a bunch of girls in a old mansion with occult magic and someone being stabbed while falling through a stained-glass ceiling, not Disturbia, the 2005 thriller with Shia LaBeouf. The only problem I have with the first game is that Scissor Man never triggers on his own. So once you know the couple of spots that might trigger him in subsequent run throughs - and most of them you never have to get close to to get through the game even - it loses a lot of its atmosphere, because you never have the feeling of he could pop out any time, because he won't. Are you sure? I know he has certain spawn points, but I remember him sometimes just appearing completely at random in the corridors as well, even if it was rarer. I'm completely possitive that he did not appear at random. He did appear out of the blue in certain spawn points triggered by certain actions: it did seem random because most of the game is non-linear (And I should know, I wrote a guide some... 15 years ago for gamefaqs). I loved the article even though i didn't play much of the series except the first one - the one with the two personalities was borderline unplayable and the PSX2 was okay but... was it even a CT game? - but that one is brilliant. The music is also amazing: that said, the killer might have a pair of shears like that guy from The Burning (AKA "that movie with the young George Constanza"), but the character is clearly based on the killer kid from Phenomena. Actually, the whole game takes almost all of its inspirations exclusively from Argento's early works. (EDIT: This is obviously based on the first game, which was the only one I played enough) On a side note, thanks to that movie not only I became an horror film fan, but also a Dario Argento fan... and a Jennifer Connely fan. >_> On a second side note, I am really annoyed at how Remothered was changed from its original vision.
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Post by kaoru on Sept 8, 2015 5:20:15 GMT -5
Phenomena even has someone getting killed with a pair of (normal sized) scissors.
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Post by blenheim on Sept 25, 2015 14:00:35 GMT -5
Hi there; read the article and signed up to note a few things: - The Windows and PS1 versions of the original Clock Tower game have received translation patches fairly recently: Windows: punkrockhacker.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/hacking-clocktower-first-fear.htmlPS1: www.romhacking.net/community/3497/The PS1 version has Spanish, French, and Hungarian patches as well as English. Also, if you go down the page for the Windows romhack, you'll find another link to a version of the Windows patch that was tweaked by a third party and claims to improve the grammar a bit, as well as some other refinements; I haven't fooled around with either version of the Windows patch yet, so I can't throw in an opinion. - Unfortunately, there were not several seasons of Clock Tower radio dramas produced in the vein of the Clock Tower 2 program. There were drama CDs released for Ghost Head and Clock Tower 3, but not as part of an ongoing Clock Tower radio drama series, and not in the call-in vote format. There was no drama CD released for the first game. - I wish I had something concrete to back this up, but I know Remothered's been in development for longer than 2010. To my recollection, it went through three concepts: first, a PS1-y polygon version (where the analogue for Jennifer - a character who's 14 in that game - had, er, huge bowling-ball tits); then, the 2D-ish version shown in the article, with a distinctive photo-collage style & method of animation (video here); finally, the overhauled version featuring a "Red Nun" as the main stalker, with an adaptation of Scissorman as one of several secondary stalkers. This last version received a lot of lavish concept art from Chris Darril (see here and here) but, to my knowledge, did not release any gameplay footage. Remothered would've had significant legal problems being released, though, as even in its most recent form, it was a very bald remake of the first Clock Tower game, right down to character names. It's noteworthy that Chris Darril now has a position on the NightCry team as an artist; much of the promotional character art is done by him. - As others have touched on, NightCry is, allegedly, funded and in development. The project's been ominously quiet even since the Kickstarter ended ~5 months ago - but not because funding didn't get met/found. - There were a couple novels for Clock Tower 2 released in Japan, one starring Jennifer and one starring Helen Maxwell, featuring a mild choose-your-own-adventure format with multiple endings (four total for each book). The novels featured the unusual plot point of Jennifer being a Barrows as well - there's even a bad ending where it's hinted in the future that she becomes a Scissorperson. Helen's novel was fan-translated into English. - Plot point misc.: You don't know Mary's connection to the Barrows family when you first meet her (to the girls, she's just a member of the staff at their orphanage, escorting them to their new home); Clock Tower 2 takes place one year after the first game, as mentioned further in the article, not two; the stalker from NightCry is dubbed "Scissorwalker"; and the "Shiver" naming scheme for chase themes is unique to Ghost Head and not shared with the other games. Also, things get a little odd if you try to take CT3 as explanation for 1 & 2, as there's some conflict with the background info in the first two games; it's best treated as its own thing. Thanks for giving some coverage to the Clock Tower series!
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Post by ReyVGM on Sept 30, 2015 20:15:57 GMT -5
My favorite memory of First fear is contributing screenshots for all 8 endings to VGMuseum at the same time as some other guy and poor Rey had to make a compromise between our submissions. I did? I don't remember at all Speaking of which, I'll eventually have to do that for the PSX Clock Tower games. Unless someone helps out.........?
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Murphy
Junior Member
Posts: 75
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Post by Murphy on Mar 22, 2018 0:36:31 GMT -5
It's a bit too late, but I think it's worth mentioning that Tatsunoko vs. Capcom has unexpected, totally awesome reference to Haunting Ground, where Joe the Condor comes up to the mansion and blow away the whole story with his much beloved Bird Missile.
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Post by GamerL on Mar 22, 2018 8:02:34 GMT -5
Also, nobody mentioned and I forget myself when this article was published, but there was actually going to be a Hollywood movie adaption of Clock Tower, from the director of the American remake of One Missed Call, that got as far as having teaser posters.
It was never actually filmed though, probably because at the time (2009-ish I think?) it had been years since there was a game with "Clock Tower" in the title and it was a fairly obscure series to begin with, but that's what makes it a bit of a shame the movie never happened, I mean what would it have been like?
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Post by Bumpyroad on Mar 22, 2018 9:29:07 GMT -5
Also, nobody mentioned and I forget myself when this article was published, but there was actually going to be a Hollywood movie adaption of Clock Tower, from the director of the American remake of One Missed Call, that got as far as having teaser posters. It was never actually filmed though, probably because at the time (2009-ish I think?) it had been years since there was a game with "Clock Tower" in the title and it was a fairly obscure series to begin with, but that's what makes it a bit of a shame the movie never happened, I mean what would it have been like? Why cancel it, i mean, Uwe Boll was always willing to "help". Speaking about teaser posters, remember this: I think it's gonna happen though.
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