Cody
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Posts posted by Cody
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Congratulations on winning House of the Year!
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Went to the final show last night. Everyone was crying, both dancers and audience. It was livestreamed by the official HHN Orlando Facebook page if you want to watch it.
I also took about 480 photos during the 7:45 show, and I'll be posting some of my favorites.
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Congratulations on winning Street of the Year!
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The best way to think of the Repository is a demo. I don't know of any other attraction that combines VR, escape room-style puzzles, and actor interaction into a single experience. It's still a concept in the experimental phases, and we're the beta testers.
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On 10/23/2016 at 4:34 PM, clash said:
one thing i have noticed is that the audience are making this show into pretty much a party. people kind of start to dance to the music before the show begins and when the show starts the crowd starts to jump around and sing the lyrics and cheer. I think this show's reception got better and now it's like people are having their own party in the crowd (at least for what I can see)
a lot of energy and a lot of excitement. the energy of the show seems to catch up with the crowdThe show's got a big following now. I always see people rocking out in the front rows every show. Last night the cast cut across Lair of the Banshee to get to a break area and the crowd broke into applause as they came out.
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On 10/19/2016 at 11:26 AM, hunnylvr said:
We were told this directly from security at the metal detector at valet. One of our group had to remove his baseball hat going thru the metal detector so the guard could check it for fish hooks. That's exactly what he said.. so, of course, we said, "WHAT?" He went on to explain that there have been people "smuggling in fish hooks", and they literally use them to attack the scareactors - my assumption is, they are literally hooking them with these and running. We were stunned into complete silence when he told us that.
The fishhooks are typically hung on the hanging moss, curtains, and other crap in houses. A friend of mine who does the RIP and UTH tours was hooked a few years ago.
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I found video on a closed Facebook group so I can't share it here, but last night due to the stage being taken down for the hurricane they performed on the street outside the Horror Makeup show. It was an abbreviated version that skipped the projection, Prisoner 29 sequence, and "Bohemian Rhapsody".
i think it was a very cool thing for them to do, and the crowd clearly loved it.
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On 10/4/2016 at 5:05 PM, Tman875 said:
The reason that all of the amazing things that were done in years past (Bloody Mary website, Both Park HHN, Horror-centric Soundtrack, etc) are not as prevalent is because those of us on this forum and who are very involved and in love with HHN are the small minority. Why would you spend a huge amount of time and money on a website (which I think will be my all time favorite website. period.) that slowly and amazingly unrolls the decent into madness of Bloody Mary for a handful of guests? The Joe Schmoe will go to the HHN website to see when the event is and how to/buy tickets. They don't want to spend hours and hundreds of visits to find out the backstory of the icon.
Most of today's youth (and society, for that matter) is all about the now and how fast can I get the thing I want. Most don't want to wait two extra seconds to say "Thank You" to my barista who correctly took my 5-pump, extra-hot, no water, grande chi tea latte. That is the society and kind of person that the HHN website is for, not the connoisseur of amazing coffee in a tranquil setting who is there for the ambiance and not the wifi......
Has anyone who complains about how heavy IPs are actually talked to A&D about it? Like, these people gushed about getting to do houses based on An American Werewolf in London or The Exorcist. The enjoy doing original stuff, but they also enjoy getting to make houses based on popular horror properties or their own pet favorites. Even before 2007 made licensed IPs commonplace, they were doing houses like All-Nite Die-In or filing the serial numbers off to do stuff like Run: Hostile Territory (almost a beat-for-beat Hostel house), and afterward you got houses like Interstellar Terror (based on Event Horizon).
There seems to be this impression that A&D would love to just do a bunch of crazy original concepts that would blow everyone's mind and are forced to make IP houses under the duress of marketing, who just wants more cash to shove in their pockets. That's really not true. These guys love their horror movies and love being given the opportunity by the owners of those properties to make houses for them.
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On 10/4/2016 at 4:43 PM, criticalanalysis said:
This shows me they saw this as a cash grab. Nothing more.
Because they didn't spend a ton of money and years of development on making the VR look awesome?
Honestly it seems like you're trying to find any reason to dismiss everything this event does as a dumb cash grab while you're in the middle of handing them your money over and over again.
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4 hours ago, Jediwhit82 said:
Absolutely amazing until the VR, after that it fell apart. I still throughly enjoyed it and thought it was worth it for the first sections alone. But there is no exuse for a Major Theme Park to charge extra money and have the graphics look like shit. If I can spend $1000 for a good PC, a copy of Outlast, and an Occulus and get better graphics then the multi-billion dollar company then that is pathetic. I did like physical effects mixed in. Also, the puzzle was just confusing and not well explained, and also a very anti climactic ending.
I'm going to have to step in to defend Universal here. Complex and realistic graphics are actually pretty challenging to make in a short amount of time and on a decent budget. SOMA spent 5 years in development, which is far longer than I would imagine the Repository's VR segment has been worked on.
Also, the puzzle at the end was pretty damn easy if you paid attention. The only reason we failed was that we didn't realize that we had to switch the two sets of blocks to opposite sides of the table from how we had them.
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Wait. so what did Aiello do?
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Okay. This is everything as I remember it.
You enter a room in the Soundstage 19 and 20 offices commonly used for events. It has 8 numbered tables with waivers and pens at every place, TV screens showing a rotating Legendary Truth logo, and several displays in one corner. Upon arrival your Repository ticket and HHN pass are both scanned, and you're directed to the table for your selected time slot to fill out your waiver. There are alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages available while you wait. The displays in the corner consist of information on the Repository and some of its artifacts, including faux-Wikipedia and faux-eBay screenshots displaying artifacts and history.
From what I remember of the backstory, the Repository was originally a Scottish armory built shortly before the American Revolution by Silas Grimslew. The armory was used to hold spoils of war, and its reputation as a secure "black site" for valuables grew until people began storing supernatural artifacts in it. After Grimslew died in a fire in the 19th century, his partner had the Repository transferred to the United States. Descendants of this family are now the only ones allowed to be the caretaker. The most prominent artifact is a temple of the dead that seemingly predates the Neolithic period and allows humans to communicate with the other side.
Intermittently, the screens switch to Ignatia Himmel of Legendary Truth and she explains some of your mission. You're LT agents being sent into the Repository to investigate a curse on the collection, and you have certain keys that you must find.
Shortly before you're ready to enter, you're given a safety briefing for the VR headsets at your table and given Legendary Truth passes on colored lanyards. You enter the Repository in groups of up to 12, but you're divided into groups of 2 to 4 for the actual experience through the colored lanyards.
You're taken outside to a fenced-off area, where you enter the actual Repository in Soundstage 19 through a side door. The facade for the brick building is located just inside, and you enter a room lined with shelves covered in artifacts of all kinds. There's the artifacts you saw in the displays in the waiting room (like a camera that was used to photograph murder victims, and bells haunted by dead Virginia coal miners), but also gas masks, Egyptian figurines, sculptures, boxes, and every other kind of knick-knack imaginable. The caretaker is furiously writing at a desk next to an armored guard, and he spins on his heel in anger at how late you are.
The caretaker talks to the group, trying to explain what the Repository is, before a phone at the desk rings. The guard answers it as the caretaker shouts that you aren't ready yet, but the guard won't listen and walks out. The caretaker takes one of the colored teams to a corner and whispers to them information about the keys before the guard returns and demands that they follow them. After they leave, the caretaker invites the remaining players to ask him about artifacts, which he explains the history of. He says that if the guard comes back and grabs another group, that team failed. Eventually your team is called and you follow the guard through the door.
He leaves you in a small room next door with some supply crates and a few more artifacts sticking around, telling you not to touch anything. A few seconds after he leaves, a crazy man in a patient's gown surprises you from behind a box. He motions at you with a flashlight to follow him into the next room.
The next room is covered in scrawlings on every surface and papers with similar messages are torn up and scattered around the floor and tables. Also scattered around the room are hundreds of keys of every size and shape on every surface. There are even keys rigged up in mousetraps. The patient giggles as he tells you to find his key, which he emphasizes is in a "safe place". There's an old safe in the corner with a dial built in. You're given about 2 minutes to figure out the combination from clues hidden around the room, while the patient harasses you by yelling, shining a flashlight at you, and even throwing keys at you. I still have no idea what the clue was, as I only found a few numbers among the writing. Whether or not you succeed, the patient undoes the chain on a box he's sitting on and opens it. Inside are 4 cubes, each with a light on top glowing a different color: yellow, green, blue, and red. Each one has the symbol of a different Legendary Truth faction on it.
A doctor comes in from the doorway and demands that you follow her into her lab. It's a sterile and high tech environment, and another man in a patient's gown is slumped in a chair behind her table. On the table are three patches of flesh carved from a body with the symbols of three Legendary Truth factions on them. She explains that the cubes you picked up are 4 of the 6 keys you need for the temple, and you need to find the other two. The patches of flesh she has were carved by the patient in the corner (her assistant) into his flesh when he attempted to travel to the other side. She wakes him up to try and find out where he went when he crossed over and he's able to say that he went to a mausoleum before attacking her. She fends him off with a stun gun and tells you what you need to do: your group will be separated and given headsets to let you cross over into the world of the dead. You'll see 3 colored symbols, which you must memorize before being pulled out. Once that's done, you need to find the other two keys. As she talks, her assistant occasionally recovers and attacks her or reaches under the table to grab your legs.
A guard physically drags you into the next room, where you're told to wait next to two doorways. The guard gives you basic instructions before the doors open and you're pulled into a simple, mostly bare room. It's about 20 x 20 feet with a sigil in the center of the floor and a table with equipment. The technicians inside (wearing hooded clean suits and surgical masks) take your keys to "affix them to a staff" while you get the VR headset and a pair of headphones put on. You're handed the "key staff" (actually just a tracker wand for the VR headset to detect your hand movement) as the headphones are put on over your headset. You initially see a digital representation of the room you're standing in, minus the people. A tall figure with glowing red eyes and a dark cloak appears in one corner.
The visor goes black, and now you're standing in a 19th century study. You see the staff you're holding as a rod with a cube on it, held by a skeletal arm. You appear to be able to see the other players on your team in the room with you, represented by floating white masks and disembodied skeletal arms moving around. Your staff acts as a torch (in later sections, a flashlight) illuminating symbols hidden around you. The symbols for three of the colors (either red, orange, and purple or yellow, blue, and green) are hidden around the room, and you need to find them and memorize them. You hear the Legendary Truth command trying to communicate with you over the headphones. After a minute or so of walking around, the room bursts into flames and goes black.
You're now standing on top of a tall stone tower in the middle of blasted wasteland, as lightning flashes in the distance and flocks of crows fly around. Off in the distance, you can see an identical tower with what appear to be other players walking around on it. Wind blows around you as you illuminate symbols on the cornerstones. Your connection to LT command dissolves into static, and you hear a voice whispering to you, trying to convince you to give up the keys. As it grows more and more demanding, lightning strikes the tower and blows away stones around the outer edge, shrinking the space you have available to walk. Lightning strikes the tower in the distance, collapsing it and sending the other players crashing to the ground. Finally, the voice grows tired of you and sends in a flock of crows to attack you. As the birds swarm around you, the technicians in the room surround you and beat you to make it feel like you're really caught in the middle of the flock.
Everything goes black again, and now you're standing in a fenced-off square in the middle of a cemetery. The symbols are hidden on gravestones surrounding you, illuminated by your flashlight/staff. Smoking skulls with devil horns fly around, at one point flying directly in your face, and as LT command comes back in your headset you see the robed figures from before surrounding you. They continue to get closer and closer, but just before they can reach you it goes black again. The technicians pull your headset and headphones off and hand you back your keys, trying to demand what you saw. Before you can tell them, another guard whisks you away at a run through the hallways.
At the end of the hallway, the guard tells you everything you have to do inside the temple of the dead: the other two keys (purple and orange) are hidden inside, and there are slots for them. You need to put the keys in the correct order (represented by the colored symbols you saw on the other side), which will cause a set of crystals to light up white. If you get the order wrong, they'll light up red and you need to rearrange them.
The final room is small and smoky, with the centerpiece being a demon face that occasionally belches fog. There are 6 cubical slots divided into two sets of 3 on the altar in front of it. The other two keys are hidden on shelves and in alcoves in the room, and after finding them you need to determine the correct order to put them in. The colored symbols you saw in the VR section indicate which side each set of 3 cubes go on (like blue, yellow, and green all go together on one side). The crystals don't light up until you put all 3 cubes down, so you won't know what's correct until you try a combination.
Whether or not you succeed (if you fail, the room fills completely with a cloud of fog) you're led out of the temple by another team member. You're given a green Legendary Truth sticker if you succeeded and a red one if you fail, which you can affix to your badge to keep. You exit into a tent next to the AHS exit, where another crazy patient wanders around to interact with players and take photos. A few crates are scattered around with artifacts, and there are tables and a small bar with drinks. You can speak with the creative team and discuss the house and solutions to the puzzle (they randomize the solution at the end so nobody can memorize it and come back), and there's a monitor with an infrared camera view of the temple where you can watch the teams after you attempt the puzzle. I got to see one group fail because they kept putting the keys in upside-down.-
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Okay, this was interesting. It's not a 100% VR experience, nor is it a traditional house or escape room. It's a somewhat unique experience that combines elements of everything.
The VR section is surprisingly short. You actually spend more time in the real world than in the alternate dimension, and you're limited in where you can go with the headset on by the size of the room. They do their best for immersion, though; the graphics aren't exactly photorealistic, but you wear headphones so you only hear what you're seeing and there are some physical effects that I won't openly spoil which help sell the environment. Also keep in mind that this is a very contact-friendly house; you'll be grabbed, dragged around, and generally have your personal space invaded regularly.
The few flaws I can immediately see:
1. The puzzles can be pretty difficult to solve in such a short time span. The first one with the safe at least lets you progress whether or not you complete it, but I found it virtually impossible to find any meaningful clues. The experience is only about 30 minutes long, so you only get 2 or 3 minutes to solve a puzzle. The final one was easier, but we were stymied in part by technical difficulties.
2. The house shares space with AHS and the noises of that one leak into the Repository. The headphones help with the VR section, but the rest of the house is still just as loud as any typical HHN house even during speaking sections. The actors with speaking parts even get microphones so they can be easily heard. The Repository could definitely use its own independent location away from other houses, where noise can be controlled.
3. The relatively short experience means that it's very rushed. Instructions are essentially yelled at you very quickly and the actors often have to repeat them several times to make sure you fully understand what's being thrown at you. There's very little time for story building, so the subtler stuff gets easily lost. And as I said earlier, the puzzles give you such a limited amount of time to solve them that you have little chance to stop and think. I'd honestly be surprised if anybody completed the safe puzzle at the beginning, since the room is so cluttered with false clues and papers that you simply can't figure out what has meaning.
Overall, I think the experience was worth the money but I'm hesitant to repeat without friends who are new to it. In such an abbreviated state, it doesn't feel like I'd get a ton out of a repeat play. That said, I did get the opportunity to speak with a creative team member at the end and he said that they're definitely planning on doing more interactive experiences like the Repository in the future. Hopefully this acts as a test bed for a bigger and better one.
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On 9/30/2016 at 3:52 PM, Tich0las said:
Don't know how many runs through Halloween you're currently at, but it seems like you missed a couple non Michael Myers scare actors. I believe there are 3 or 4.
To my knowledge, there are 4 non-Michael scareactors in the house.
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I'm currently on the 8:30 time slot tonight.
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You can identify the GAT rope because it noticeably pulls down like it's attached to a lever.
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On 9/29/2016 at 1:54 PM, Pandry said:
Take this with a grain of salt, as I always do: but if you're arriving at gates open and see the wait time for this house being uncharacteristically long, it's supposedly on purpose. My friend is in the Vamp '55 zone and, according to him, his stage manager said they post an artificially high AHS wait time at the start to encourage people go to other houses first. The reasoning is that with its location serving as the house most would go into first, this time trick would help move people to other houses and then circle back. HHN up to its Jedi mind tricks again.
This wouldn't be the first time HHN has done this. In 2014 I repeatedly went through TWD and compared the wait time posted to the actual time spent in line, and found that it was consistently claiming much higher times than there actually were every night. It got to the point where a 120 minute wait time was being posted for a line that was only 20 minutes.
Having been through AHS twice so far, it's said 45 once and 90 the other and both times the wait was 15-20 minutes. A good way to tell is to enter the queue and look at the switchbacks inside the soundstage. If about half or 3/4 of the soundstage is full, the wait is only about 20 minutes or so from that point.
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13 hours ago, hhnholdem said:
I was wondering if anybody knows how many Leatherfaces there are in the house. My friend and I went through the house and tried to keep count and then compare numbers. I came up with 10 and my friend came up with 7.
Looking at my room list, I believe it's 10. There are two in the backyard and the only rooms without a Leatherface at all are the first room and the flashing light room. The hallway with fenced windows has a Leatherface outside, along with the scareactor in the hall with you.
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As of last night someone put a pair of 3D glasses on one of the security guard corpses early in the house.
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On 9/23/2016 at 8:13 PM, OrangeRyan said:
Could anyone possibly tell me what the room order is for this house? Like From Facade to the End?
The best I can do from memory after two trips:
1. Living room
2. Entrance with stairs and metal door
3. Basement (Kirk butchering)
4. Hallway with windows
5. Dining room
6. Living room?
7. Sitting room?
8. Entrance with stairs and metal door
9. Hallway with Grandpa's room
10. Window escape
11. BackyardAfter the dinner scene, the house begins to repeat rooms as it simulates Leatherface chasing you through the house.
The chainsaw noises from the speakers are really loud in here. One room toward the end is loud enough that it vibrates in your chest.
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2 hours ago, jorgito2001 said:
I did this house about 4 times since last weekend. The sets were PHENOMENAL and did feel like I was walking through the actual movie sets! My only complaint is
it also helped it was one of the shorter waits at the front of the park!
Look up on the roof when you go outside for the first time...
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I remember when I used to see Bill & Ted once every night, always making sure to fit it in between houses.
Since 2014, I've seen it once to say that I've done it and then ignored it for the rest of the year. This time, Academy of Villains is going to be my go-to show.
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I've noticed this is getting a big crowd now, extending as far back as the Mel's parking lot, with fans showing up as much as 30 minutes early for front row spots.
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I got dragged into the cast change last Thursday. Both sides gather up all of their actors and the guests on their side for a big standoff in the center of New York before breaking apart.
I've also heard rumors from a tour guide of an intermittent "capture the flag" game that scareactors occasionally ask guests to participate in.
Halloween Horror Nights 26 Discussion
in Halloween Horror Nights 26
Posted
Keep Bill & Ted and AOV, but switch their stages.