Posts
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0451 Vault - Silent Hill 2 (2024)
The Silent Hill 2 remake had a pretty high bar to clear. The original 2001 game is a cult classic, filled with complex narrative elements and not-so-obvious symbolism. The remake not only had to attract a new generation of fans, but also satisfy the vast majority of old ones with new content. Did it succeed? In my opinion, yes.
One of the things it added, however, was a little digital safe puzzle at the motel, where one of the notes hides a well-known combination - 0451.
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0451 Vault - Still Wakes the Deep (2024)
Still Wakes the Deep is a horror game developed by The Chinese Room. It’s far from being an immersive sim or even something with hub-like design similar to Amnesia - just a linear game. In the first hour of so of the game, you end up picking a fire-extinguisher and putting out some fires, which gets you an achievement “Fahrenheit 0451” - which woud be probably accidental if it wasn’t for the 0 at the beginning.
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0451 Vault - Phantom Fury (2024)
Phantom Fury is a shooter that advertises itself as inspired Half-Life and SiN inspire and while to some extend this is true, it has all of the faults that the other titles of Slipgate Ironworks have. And it features that easter egg - because they implemented keypads ¯\(ツ)/¯
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0451 Vault - Shadows of Doubt (2023)
Shadows of Doubt is a first-person detective game with a procedurally generated world and cases to solve. 0451 Easter egg is easy to miss - when you start a PC in the game, it displays command line text. One of them says:
SBL>LOADBOOTTOOLS[0451]>CRUNCHCrunch? CRUNCH?! Oh no….
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0451 Vault - Fortune's Run (2023)
Fortune’s Run is a fast pace first-person shooter mixed with stealth… maybe immersive sim for some (certainly way of im sim than most of the titles that tried to advertise themselves as such in the last year). Whatever you see it as immersive sim or not - it still takes a lot of inspirations from Deus Ex or EYE Divine Cybermancy (per developer’s words) and it just wouldn’t be complete with 0451 put somewhere as an easter egg - here, a classic, which is: Open the door with keypad in a tutorial segment - code is somewhere in the enviroment. Good stuff!
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0451 Vault - Weird West (2022)
With recent problems of Arkane, we’ve had yet another situation where veteran devs quit to try something on their own. The result of that is 2022’s Weird West by newly formed WolfEye Studios - a very interesting immersive sim with an isometric camera perspective, which once again features good old 0451 easter egg around 1,5h into the game.
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0451 Vault - Redfall (2023)
Redfall is a game made by Arkane Austin - the developers of the fantastic Prey reboot (which wasn’t even supposed to be a reboot) - and is a prime example of what you get when you decide that you don’t really want to have a custom engine, and you don’t want to have a team whose job it is to make sure that the engine can handle the project and what you’re throwing at it, and instead decide to just go with the Unreal Engine, because it is an industry standard and therefore you have a sea of programmers and graphic artists who know how to add stuff to it and who will work for you at significantly lower wages, so you can - in theory - stuff your pockets with all those profits, except… what you end up with is a game with horrible performance (because getting Unreal Engine 4 to work with multithreading requires people who know a thing or two), horrible graphics, brain-dead AI, an empty city that doesn’t give the player any freedom in how they approach their objectives, and that has no understanding of what the fuck an immersive sim is supposed to be, so it just throws 451 references pretty much anywhere it can without a care in the world. Just hollow and soulless.
And since I can’t be bothered, cause clearly something went really wrong with Redfall to a point, where everyone burnt out and could not be bothered eithered - here are some screenshots from Sinnoware that feature lazily put 451 references in this game: https://twitter.com/Sinnoware/status/1653582901529960450
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0451 Vault - Atomic Heart (2023)
Coming out from Mundfish - a developer with spotty history, Atomic Heart is a Immersive Sim-lite somewhat similar to Bioshock, which sadly lacks some of the self-awareness in order not to bore the player towards his/her experience with the game. Ironically, this lack of self-awareness carries over to how its 0451 reference was implemented - as in, an in-your-face line right at the beginning of the game, which is imidietly left and abandoned (somewhat like the one in Mafia 3). Oh well.
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Improving Deadly Premonition 2 using HarmonyX and MelonLoader - Part 2
This is an addition to the blog post entry I have written a month ago about how I managed to improve and fix some aspects of Deadly Premonition 2 using HarmonyX and MelonLoader. In it, I did mention that the terrains used by the game are not using Unity’s terrain component and instead were converted to be meshes and use Mesh Renderer and Mesh Colliders. I also mentioned that terrains often don’t connect to each other correctly, having visible gaps (gaps that are on a few occasions so massive, a player can fall through them) and there would be a chance to fix them if they were using terrain component.
Turns out, I was wrong and all meshes used by mesh filters can be exported with a bit of clever code writing.
Read more...
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Improving Deadly Premonition 2 using HarmonyX and MelonLoader
At the moment of writing, Deadly Premonition 2’s PC port was released almost a month ago. I started working on it almost the moment I heard about how bad the PC port is and worked on it pretty much continuously for over 3 weeks, either investigating what could be improved, experimenting (in Unity 2018.4.16) or just trying to play through the game to see if anything major gets broken by my changes.
Now that my playthrough is finished, I will be moving away from active development to more of a support. This does not mean, no further updates for my hack get released - I started working professionally with Unity about a year and a half ago - there is still quite a lot for me to learn about it - so if I get to know anything that could be retrofitted to the hack, I probably will. Nevertheless, the development will slow down significantly now.
This is a bit of a write-up on what changes I have made and how I have made them. The current version of the hack can be here
Read more...
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