It's About a Town that Burned Down or Something...

I had a good childhood... it was perfect, actually... There are so many things that I miss from back then, for instance, how easily I frightened. These days I'm not really scared by anything, nothing fictional anyway, but when I was a lad, every horror movie was un-see-able, every eerie novel was forbidden, every ghost story told by the camp fire was so mysterious and beyond understanding. Rumors of haunted classrooms stayed with me for weeks, dark hallways gave me the willies, and no spooky tale ever held an ending that was foreseeable, it was always unexplainable and felt chillingly real to me. In fact, when I was 4 or 5 years old there was a video rental store less than a mile from my house, where I would wander around the horror section, looking at the box art on the VHS copies of "Friday the 13nth" and "Silence of the Lambs." Just by looking at those boxes I got scared even imagining what the art could possibly symbolize. These days however, we're all a little more desensitized.... Damn...

Either way, one of my fonder memories was of a commercial for a video game that left me shaken and curious beyond all means as to what the game was about. I was 8 or 9 years old then, and the commercial was for the infamous "Silent Hill." I've searched for the commercial, casually, over the internet, but I still can't seem to find that particular one. I'm not even sure it was the ORIGINAL game and not one of it's sequels, but then again, I was fairly young the original came out in 99, so that would lead me to believe it was. However, I don't remember the twisted imagery as much as the voice over (don't misread me, though, the imagery still made me shiver) All I remember was a girl's (or woman's) voice saying something like,

"I'm going to Silent Hill. You were there before. You told me never go to Silent Hill, but I went there anyway *Balalaika in the background going tickilickalickalicka*"

Regardless of which game it was, I was pretty certain I wouldn't be able to unravel this "mystery" myself, given that I wasn't all that good at games back then, I mostly just watched my bigger brother play, and even so, I wondered if I would be too terrified to beat such a nightmare. Still, I had to know. I went to school and almost immediately some of the kids where talking about it. I wasn't very popular (infamous is a better word for it) but all the kids there could easily relate to my curiosity surrounding the horror game that we had all seen the commercial for. (The advertisement must have been playing during SOME sort of kids programming, otherwise we probably wouldn't have watched it) Some of the kids reported to have played it, but were immediately called out, since they didn't know anything about it. Some proclaimed that they had older cousins or siblings that HAD played it, but the most that we ever got from them was,

"It's about a town that caught fire or something...."

Last Christmas my brother bought for me a copy of "Silent Hill: Homecoming." Mind you, at this point I understood a little more about the games than your average frat-monkey, and I had learned to eat popcorn and giggle while watching SAW IV. (Does that make me sick?) With casual interest, I had watched the review on Gametrailers.com, and I can't say that I would have bought it with my own money. But this was a gift, and I have to admit that I had been itching for a new game to play.

Ok ready? This is your reward for READING THIS FAR! Here's a video I made out of frustration after getting stuck SEVERELY and for poor reasons while playing this game. I never released it until now:








Yeah, that puzzle... my, my, my. Don't be mislead by the video, I still enjoyed playing the game. I actually wrote a review of it on Gametrailers, just for the hell of it. Unfortunately, Gametrailers is also changing it's website for the worst, and through the power of bad coding found a way to HIDE people's hand written reviews on the site, probably in an effort to divert more attention to the site's video reviews, from which they generate more profit. I was forced to run a google search, and luckily it came up:

http://www.gametrailers.com/users/TolstoyKafkaEvsky/gamepad/?action=viewreview&id=51794

In that particular review, though, I couldn't describe EVERYTHING that made me love that game, and I think the biggest reason why I was so impressed was simply because I had low expectations to begin with. For a long time I've theorized that the secret to enjoying video games (among other things) is partially to be very pessimistic when beginning, and then when the game SURPASSES your expectations you feel you were better off for the experience. Also, the other thing I was craving for at the time that this game satisfied so well was the feeling of the "Zombie Apocalypse Scenario." Silent Hill: Homecoming had a similar flavor to the movie "I AM LEGEND," which also helped to fulfill people's desire to be "The Last Man Left." Don't ask me why, but I am pretty certain that there are many people out there who are still praying for the zombie invasion (or the less cliche' equivalent of that) perhaps because we feel that it would give us all a chance to improve our lives in a very strange way. If that sounds preposterous then I propose that one should watch the episode of Futurama where they describe an evil Santa-bot (played by John Goodman) goes on a merciless rampage every Christmas, and through their collective fear of becoming victims, it causes everyone to reach out for each other, and comfort one another. As if, such a catastrophe would somehow re-humanize us, allow us to go back to a more primal place, and destroy the bland, inhuman, corporate society that is in place now......

I said SOME people might want that, not necessarily me... just stop starring, alright!?

Anyway, after the game was over, I felt that I would definitely need another experience very similar to that. After a little research, I decided to go out and purchase "Silent Hill 3," vaguely recalling the positive X-Play review of the game, as I walked up to the counter and forked over my debit card. The bad camera angles and clunky "TANK controls" didn't bother me at all, for some reason I've always felt quite at home while playing games like that, and of course the oldest excuse for building horror games in that fashion is proposedly because:

"It makes the prospect of combat or fleeing more terrifying."

In fact, after playing Silent Hill 3 (and finding it unsatisfactory) I became enthralled for a few weeks with my old Playstation 1 copy of "Dino Crisis." The whole experience got me saying,

"They just don't make games like this anymore." And miraculously it didn't make me feel old at all to say that.

As I was saying, after the first few chapters of "Silent Hill 3" I stopped playing. Originally, I tried to prepare myself for the shift I would inevitably feel between the American approach to horror and the Japanese technique, however it was to no avail. In a cutting statement against the game, I once compared the experience of "Silent Hill 3" to:

"Walking around a grimy hotel, while off-putting music plays, trying all the handles on the doors to see which one's were open, while casually trying to avoid hideously disfigured beggars who are obviously on some form of narcotics."

Doesn't exactly sound like the ideal horror experience to me. Months later (a few days ago) I ran out of any other video games to play, and out of desperation I moved my PS2 downstairs, turned off all the lights, snuggled Benny up beside me, and loaded in "Silent Hill 3." I began playing from where I had left off, having pretty much the same dull experience as before. But I kept playing this time, and for some miraculous reason the quality of the game seemed to improve. Perhaps it was because for all those months I had not played the game, and had been thinking poorly of it, and as I said before, this set the standards of what I was expecting quite low, and therefore, easy to surpass.

Just last night I finished the game, and in the end, the voice acting got better, the environment felt slightly less tired, the story actually fulfilled promises of coherency, and I felt something akin to satisfaction. My only complaint is that the ending boss wasn't anything like what I was expecting, and could only be described as slightly anti-climactic.

My collective experience in Silent Hill games has left me with a desire to make some sort of cinematic "credit" to the series, a short skirt of film, something that could replicate the feeling in film. I recognize that they've already made a movie (and greenlit the sequel) but that's not exactly what I meant. Try as they might can Hollywood REALLY recapture the elusive notion of Silent Hill? Well, I suppose that's up to interpretation.