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PaperclipPerfector
10hr ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
What video game(s) are you playing? :D
I've only played for a couple of hours during the last two weeks, tbh. I was really impressed with Roseymorn Monastery in Baldur's Gate 3. The Shadow-Cursed Lands are a bit of a letdown afterwards. I screwed up a quest which, someone later told me, was a more important one than it seemed. So I have to backtrack a little bit. Which is a meh thing to do when you're not really enjoying the environment. Bring on Moonrise Towers.
A few weeks ago my girlfriend was on Instagram and found a reel of a group of women (and one man) respectively cosplaying as the Bubble Head Nurses and Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2. I mentioned that the game is really good and we could try playing it together if she liked, a suggestion she responded to with enthusiasm, despite not really being a gamer.
I have a complicated relationship with Silent Hill 2. I was aware of the franchise (and I think even played the demo for Silent Hill 3 as a child, without having played either of the previous two instalments, only to find that my PC couldn't hack it), but the first time I encountered the idea that Silent Hill 2 specifically was a game with real artistic merit was from hearing Yahtzee relentlessly gush about it. Curiosity piqued, about fifteen years ago I bought a secondhand PS2 and a copy of the game and gave it a whirl, only to give up on it an hour or two in. The same thing happened on my second attempt. On probably my third attempt I decided to just power through it and made it to the Brookhaven Hospital — at which point it finally clicked for me, and I played all the way through to the end. I played it through to the ending a second time, and haven't touched it since.
With my PS2 gathering dust somewhere, I installed the PC port of the original game* which is apparently abandonware, along with the "Enhanced Edition" mod, which optimises the experience for modern PCs and enables controller support. We booted up the game and got stuck in, with my girlfriend playing until she got too scared and then asking me to take over. I don't scare easily, and even on the times I've played the game to the end generally found it more creepy and unsettling than outright scary. My girlfriend scares much easier than I do, and after subjecting her to innumerable scary movies over the years, I can say without exaggeration that Silent Hill 2 was the most scared I've ever seen her: she was literally shrieking in terror in places, and mentioned having had nightmares about Pyramid Head. In much the same way that comedy films can seem funnier when watched with a group, playing a horror game with someone sitting next to you who's frightened out of her wits really enhanced the experience, and I found the game scarier and more unnerving than any previous playthrough. By the time you've emerged from the Historical Society and are making the lonesome voyage across the lake, the game has become utterly hypnotic.And then you get to the ending, and the game turns on a dime from scaring the bejesus out of you to breaking your heart. We were both devastated when it's implied Angela kills herself, the twist of how Mary died came as a complete surprise to my girlfriend, and when Mary reads out her letter to James at the end we were both sobbing.
In some ways my opinion of the game hasn't changed: almost everything prior to the Brookhaven Hospital remains a boring slog through a set of bland, repetitive environments. (Maybe that's necessary to lull the players into a false sense of security so they can pull the rug out from under them later, modulating from survival to psychological horror.) The titular town is terrifying at nighttime but dull as dishwater during the day, fog notwithstanding. The transition from in-game cutscenes to pre-rendered cinematics might be the only thing that really dates the game to the early 2000s, as it's a trope that completely fell out of favour once graphical fidelity hit some floor. In other ways I'm surprised to admit that I get it now: the people claiming that the dodgy voice acting and imprecise facial animation contribute to the game's dreamlike Lynchian atmosphere sounds like pure cope — but goddamn it, those things do contribute to the game's dreamlike Lynchian atmosphere, whether intended by the creators or not. (Part of me even wants to call the game a spiritual adaptation of Mulholland Drive, given that both stories are fundamentally aboutthe psychological coping mechanisms their sympathetic protagonists resort to in order to avoid confronting the fact that they have murdered their loved ones; maybe the Man Behind Winkie's serves the same purpose as Pyramid Head? — and yet it couldn't be, because it came out only four months after Mulholland Drive debuted at Cannes. That's how far ahead of the curve Team Silent were: they were making Lynchian games before Lynchian games were a thing, without even having the man's masterpiece to crib from.) Since Silent Hill 2's release, there have been dozens of video games which marketed themselves as "psychological horror", and yet I can't remember any which came close to getting so deep under my skin. In a medium in which "mature" or "adult" is still widely seen as synonymous with more cursing and more realistic gore and tits (or including these elements, but rapping the player on the knuckles for daring to enjoy them), Silent Hill 2 actually feels like a story for grown-ups in a way that most games that have been released ten, fifteen or twenty years later couldn't hold a candle to. I recall when Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy came out, some critic made the comparison that Grand Theft Auto is a game which, owing to its content, should only be played by adults, whereas Fahrenheit is a game for adults. With all due respect: bullshit. David Cage wishes he could craft something half this mature and powerful, and twenty years after Fahrenheit came out he doesn't appear to have come a millimetre closer.
Roger Ebert once said that, for him, cinema is first and foremost an emotional medium: he dislikes films that delve into intellectual debates, considering it a misuse of the form. I tend to agree: I can't remember a film I loved specifically because it made me think (although it may have done so incidentally). By contrast, despite video games' strenuous efforts to replicate the visual iconography of cinema, I've long thought the medium they most resemble is actually books, in the sense that they are long-form storytelling media the consumer must actively engage with to move the story forward, unlike passively consumed movies or TV shows. It is for this reason that I've long considered games more compelling from an intellectual standpoint than an emotional one, which makes sense when you consider that even getting to grips with the game mechanics is, to a greater or lesser extent, a fundamentally intellectual exercise: most of the games I've loved, I've loved because they made me think, not because they made me feel (e.g. Metal Gear Solid 2, Spec Ops The Line, SOMA: they all made me feel emotions a little bit, but the main reason I loved them was because they made me think). But I now think Silent Hill 2 might be the exception to this trend. Having now completed my third playthrough, I think it might be the most unsettling, moving, emotionally affecting video game I've ever played, bar none.
gushing over
I've become vastly fussier as a gamer in my advancing years. Last night I wanted to play something by myself, so I played the first half-hour of Trek to Yomi. Gorgeous to look at and I like that the spoken dialogue is in Japanese, but the gameplay was already starting to feel a bit rote and repetitive, so I gave up on it. Next I tried Advent Rising, notable for having its story co-written by Orson Scott Card. Gave up on that even quicker, inside of ten minutes.
A few years ago I tried playing Undertale after the world and its mother were raving about it. I think I played it for about two hours and remember enjoying it, but for some reason I never got around to finishing it. Last night I took another crack at it, playing about as far as the title card (i.e. the game held my attention for significantly longer than the previous two games I tried that evening). It's rare for a game to make me laugh out loud, or to make me think "aww, how sweet", so props to the game for doing both. Will see if I can manage to make it to the end this time.
*No remake for me, thank you very much.
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