Clock Tower - Nitro Rad

[Music] oh [Music] in the early 2000s japanese horror games were starting to bloom in a sort of renaissance for the genre we got some of the best horror games ever made some with nail-biting aspects of survival somewhat depressing and poetic stories to tell and some with ambitious structures that would take an entire community of passionate fans to solve but there's always been a little bit of a debate over where the origins of japanese survival horror games truly was many would argue it was capcom's sweet home a japanese exclusive survival horror game for the famicom based on the film of the same name it would later even serve as inspiration for resident evil but regardless of where it all truly began one of the biggest cogs in the evolution of japanese horror games was this quiet little point-and-click adventure game for the super famicom clock tower i actually played this one a long time ago back in high school on an emulator one time it's never been officially translated so the only way you can play it in english is through fan translations including fan-made reproduction cartridges i managed to snag one of these online a while back so i will be playing it off a real console let's slap that in my piss yellow super nintendo it was like that when i got it plug in those skirt cables and we're all set it's a pretty interesting thing to think about these days though a 2d horror game like how does that work you don't really see that much these days unless it's an indie game or something but you'd be surprised the amount of people i see that are glued to this idea that a 16-bit 2d game couldn't possibly be scary but then again games like yume nikki managed to scare the poop out of me years ago so you never know what these people are going to achieve with their 2d limitations the game was developed by a company called human entertainment a japanese company that made a bunch of stuff sports games wrestling games but of course they're most well known in the west for their work on the clock tower series these guys went defunct in 2000 but the employees went on to work at a bunch of other companies some even going to grasshopper who would go on to make titles like killer 7 and no more heroes but we're not talking about these games we're talking about clock towers so let's talk about clock tower man this game's gotta have one of the most iconic title screens in the history of super nintendo games we start with the ticking of the clock as the company logo appears and fades and once that clock strikes midnight the bell tolls as each letter appears reminds me a lot of chrono triggers title screen there's something about clocks that make such good title screens i'd like to wonder if maybe one perhaps influenced the other but their releases were much too close to each other for that to be even remotely likely but it's so cool how something so similar can feel so different chrono trigger's title screen sparks this whismical sense of adventure while clock towers on the other hand feels intimidating and foreboding a good title screen that sets the mood can make all the difference so that's something this game does really well the story follows a young girl named jennifer simpson who was raised at an orphanage wow that's two games in a row now that i've reviewed starring an orphan girl named jennifer that is a coincidence and a half her name and likeness was based off a character from a 1985 italian film called phenomena the film inspired the game in a number of ways both thematically aesthetically even the plot somewhat similar jennifer and three of her friends from the orphanage were all recently adopted by a rich dude named simon burroughs or maybe it's simon barrows i'm going to say borrows could you say bar and not bear you can get mad if you want i don't care it happened in september okay if you put it that way you know what happened ain't going to be good i don't want to go to this mansion anymore i noticed some minor graphical glitches during the opening and some color errors with jennifer's portraits sometimes too but i'm willing to assume this is probably some sort of issue with my cartridge since it's not an official one the cutscene illustrations look pretty nice some seems it looks like digitized photography but other times it looks hand drawn so i'm thinking they probably used a combination of both after the girls are escorted to this big ass mansion mary their escort leaves the room to go bring back mr burrows but after a considerable amount of time passes the girls get impatient and jennifer decides to go look for her but after she leaves the room she immediately hears screaming after running back into the room she finds that everyone has disappeared and the lights have gone dark left all alone in a big spooky mansion jennifer begins looking for everyone and this is where we get a real taste for the gameplay it's a point-and-click adventure game having you control cursor on screen with the d-pad it'd be nice to be able to control the thing with an actual mouse but unfortunately the game is not compatible with the super nintendo mouse that's a huge missed opportunity right there but oh what can you do you'll hover the thing over different objects clicking on it to have jennifer interact with them sometimes jennifer will simply share her thoughts on it and other times she'll physically go up and do something with it movement is done by simply clicking where you want jennifer to walk to but you can also have jennifer run in either direction by using the shoulder buttons r for right and l for left the game for the most part operates on a 2d plane so this works quite nicely you can also match them both and jennifer will do a funky dance that's always fun i'm stupid i really like the atmosphere in this game there's rarely ever any music most the time it's just pure silence with nothing but jennifer's footsteps filling the void sometimes that's all you really need just the creaking of the wood as you walk it's effective you'll explore the mansion room by room in search of your friends uh we got a parrot here oh no i didn't want to like let it no oh stop okay okay next room next room oh we got a bathroom got some mode 7 fog going on in here this is where we get our first hint that clearly something's going wrong here jennifer finds her friend laura dead in the shower who the hell would do something like this oh it's yeah it's probably that guy this is where we first encountered the game's iconic villain scissor man this stumpy little dude with a big ass pair of scissors there's actually three separate ways you can first encounter this guy you can either inspect the bathroom enter the foyer or you can sneak out into the courtyard depending on where you go his first victim will be somebody different and his method of murdering them will vary as well your first and final encounters with him will both be scripted but throughout the game he can appear randomly in a number of areas sometimes by dropping in through the ceiling but mostly by popping out of one of these boxes they'll even try to fake you out sometimes with a cat instead that classic false alarm i think it was a good idea to make it random helps play with expectations i always say that anticipation is one of the most effective ways to convey horror so having it be inconsistent drives that pretty well though i can't really say that i found the actual encounters with scissor man all that scary it's not very difficult to get away from him but the first sequence shows a lot of promising gameplay there's a couple of different ways it can play out so of course i run away and i go into a different room and i hide under this bed but this [ __ ] parrot that i set free he rats me out and scissor man finds me but if you manage to catch the parrot under some blankets beforehand you'll successfully avoid detection otherwise you'll have to run away again but despite this first area having this much depth to it they don't really explore that as much for the rest of the game there is a handful more hiding spots throughout the mansion but none of them really offer the variety and outcomes that the first one did i also found it just as easy to run really far away from him and then just stay in his bathroom until he goes away clock tower follows that philosophy of making the character weak and defenseless one that's still popular with modern horror games today but not necessarily one i entirely agree with mostly because all the scariest games i've ever played did incorporate some sort of way of defending yourself well except maybe like pt but even in that game you can't get hurt aside from the one scripted jump scare anyway but even being a defenseless character getting attacked by scissor man is still a pretty easy dodge and if you do end up dying there's not really much punishment for it the game auto saves after entering every room so you can just reload your file and lose no progress if you find yourself under attack you can mash the b button to avoid dying so if scissor man gets you in a lock it's not very hard to escape oh my god jennifer's gotta be ripped if she can hold her own against those heavy ass scissors what do they have like a gym at the orphanage or something this only works if jennifer's in good condition her portrait at the lower left of the screen will cycle through a couple of different colors to show you how well she's doing this will decrease as you encounter scissor man and if jennifer gets winded by running it's kind of annoying how running constantly decreases this your default walking speed is so freaking slow so of course i'm going to want to get around a little bit faster i don't really see the point in punishing the player for that by giving them less health for it i suppose they intended the pace to be fairly slow to help build suspense but there's a level of slow where it just gets irritating staircases are the absolute worst in this game it takes an agonizingly long time to get up one and down one two exploring the mansion can get pretty daunting if you don't know what you're looking for some of the key items are tucked away behind very specific clicks and they can be very easy to miss because of that the perfume in this room is real bad for that you can't beat the game without it and there's nothing that indicates that it's here you might find yourself running in circles wondering what you're missing if you weren't really thorough with each room so basically your goal here is to find your friends and escape the mansion and if you want to do that you'll have to follow through the typical survival horror structure you explore every room you find a series of key items that'll unlock more rooms and that eventually leads to the final area where you can see the ending exploring the mansion can be pretty disorienting though every door in the hallway looks exactly the same and there's no landmarks to help you remember which doors go to which rooms so if you ever have to revisit a specific room you might find yourself running in circles a bit before you find it again and if you thought you could look up a map online and use that to get to the game you were dead wrong because they changed the order of the rooms on every playthrough and like yeah that's kind of a cool thing it helps give the game some replay value i guess but like i just want to know where i'm going man the game's incredibly short too you can beat this game in less than one hour if you know what to do but there's a lot of little tidbits in the game that you probably won't see on your first playthrough like apparently you can get kidnapped i had no idea like that's what the ham is for to escape from the cage by uh feeding the guy i played through this game four times before this happened to me that's so cool there's a handful of items that are at first seemingly useless but actually do serve a purpose under very specific scenarios the rope for example if you evade scissor man in this very specific way you can then use the rope to drop down the game encourages multiple playthroughs by having a bunch of different endings all depending on a number of different factors they're all pretty much varying degrees of good you know like ending h is the worst one and ending s being the best one these can range from you being followed home and getting murdered to you escaping and then you escaping while even saving somebody some of these things that determine which ending you get can be kind of dumb though to get the best ending you have to make sure that one of your friends does not die you want to know how you do that when she's getting murdered you just don't look at it yeah like i'm not even joking there's a scene where you'll hear one of your friends screaming and if you look out the window you'll see scissor man kicking her out of a window and she falls to her death but if you just don't look out the window it doesn't happen this game has no sense of object permanence it's like an ostrich or something like if i didn't see it it didn't happen what you got you got murdered i didn't see you get murdered so you're still alive and that's just actually how it works what but with the short length in the multiple endings this is a very replayable game they even made sure to include a quick start option from the main menu so you can jump right in without having to sit through the intro again it's really fun to experiment and see what scenes you can trigger on every playthrough sometimes different key items even spawn in having you take a slightly different path which helps add to the variety i remember the freddy fish games did something similar i used to play the crap out of those games when i was a kid who remembers freddy fish like seriously those games were sick dude but that's all there really is to it it's a very rudimentary and straightforward experience short but very replayable the game's plot isn't much more ambitious than your typical slasher flick you know like there's a killer and you escape and that's pretty much it there is some cool backstory regarding jennifer's father and the origin of scissor man explaining how he relates to the owners of the mansion but outside of that it's very light on story it's really interesting because down the line a lot of horror games would start having very deep and complex stories horror used to be about escaping a dude who wants to kill you and nothing more but later on i guess people realized how much potential the genre had for telling something so much more meaningful than that i'd say it still holds up alright it's not like an amazing experience or anything but there's a lot of little things that make the game really fun to explore and dissect to its fullest and because of that nature of it i'm sure the die hard fans always get a little excited when they hear about the expanded playstation port clock tower the first fear this version like the original only came out in japan and features a number of additions and updates including a brand new fmv opening sequence it's all right i don't really think it needed one but it's kind of neat i guess i mean it's just your typical primitive 3d ps1 intro it also adds updated sounds of music a handful of new portrait scenes and even a new room though it seems more like a fix than it does in addition in the original game there is this one door that you just could not interact with for some reason but in the playstation version they made it so you can actually go in there mind you there's not really anything in here so it really doesn't add much to the game it just seems like they patched an oversight or something some of the new sounds are a lot better like the phone which actually sounds like a phone now but i think a lot of others have been notably downgraded the new screen for example it's so irritating yes this is actually what it sounds like this is not edited this is actually how long it goes on for to and it is still going [Music] wow yeah it is it is it is still going mm-hmm are you done thank you finally that is so freaking annoying but not only just that but i find the footsteps don't have that same punch as they did before they feel a lot more softer this time i find i know that might seem like a nitpick but you have to keep in mind that these footsteps are the only thing you're hearing for the majority of the game so it's very easy to notice some of the graphical changes were also for the worst in my opinion the bathroom fog for example it doesn't look nearly as good the original had that mode 7 wiggle to it but the new version just flips the sprite back and forth it looks dumb however there is one big benefit of playing the ps1 version it's actually compatible with the playstation mouse i don't have the official one this is a third party mouse but it works just the same you'll access the inventory by hovering the cursor over the bottom of the screen and you'll run by simply double clicking i was originally thinking that it might be a little bit more cumbersome to perform certain actions since you no longer have all the buttons of the controller but i find they fit everything into the mouse quite nicely the playstation version also allows manual saving instead of only relying on the game's auto save feature you could even quick start a new game from the pause screen instead of having to go back to the main menu for it but overall i don't really think the changes and additions they made in the playstation 1 version really make it that much worth playing over the original i mean like using the mouse that's kind of cool but at that point you might as well just play the windows version but playstation 1 and windows weren't the only two things i ported this to no for some godforsaken reason they put it on the wonder swan who remembers this thing nobody yeah i don't blame you guys it was only released in japan and it didn't really have anything noteworthy on it other than a bunch of ports anyway and it never really did that well commercially either but for some freaking reason they thought to port clock tower to it so if you want to play clock tower on a dinky little screen that you can barely even make anything out on then i guess this is the version for you i can't really say i'd recommend this this is borderline unplayable i'm sure the newer models of the wonder swan have much more viewable screens but i got the base version you know the first run and it's yeah you can't see anything at least the box art and the cartridge look really cool you know looks good on a shelf i guess honestly it's worth owning this thing just so friends can ask me what the hell it even is whenever they see it but uh yeah i guess that's clock tower definitely an interesting little piece of history i don't think i'd really recommend it to people that aren't very patient though just because of how easy it is to end up running around in circles if you don't already know what you're doing but the game's replay ability is definitely its strongest suit they would go on to make a bunch of sequels to this game all of which actually did see western releases in a bit of a final fantasy scenario with the titles however clock tower 2 got released here is just a clock tower since we never got the first one and that's always caused some confusion over which game is the first in the series but we'll be taking a thorough look into it next time i'm always excited to see how they handle the transition into 3d so i'll see you guys next time with clock tower 2 or clock tower playstation i don't even know i'm going to call this next video [Music] you

Channel: Nitro Rad

Views: 530,548

Keywords: nitro rad, review, clock tower, survival horror, japanese, japanese horror, jennifer simpson, scissor man, bobby barrows, scissors, point and click, adventure game, replayable, replayability, wonderswan, clock tower wonderswan, the first fear, playstation mouse, super nintendo mouse, super famicom, snes

Id: P8ZuQmfTu_0

Length: 18min 19sec (1099 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 05 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Shadowforks]

Never seen this guy's videos before, and Clock Tower is one of my favorite Super Famicom games and he gave a pretty good overview. Any other YouTubers like him?

[u/BillMurrie]

Hiding in a bathroom stall and wondering whether I'm going to get impaled or not was like my first experience with tension like that in a video game, it was mostly platformers and RPGs for me up to that point.

But God damn do I hate how slow the text moves, and it was unskippable IIRC. I still remember that being frustrating like 20 years later.

[u/jlitwinka]

Last Halloween I wanted to play the original Clock Tower and was surprised to learn that there really is no legit way to play it that I could find and wound up emulating it. I really enjoyed playing it. It was a fun experience and a really intense horror game.