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Silent Hill Chat - Printable Version

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Silent Hill Chat - Sacred Jellybean - 1st March 2015

Not gonna lie, I searched for "Silent Hill" to see if you'd given your opinion on that. Awesome! Even though that game isn't to your liking, I still think it's a big touchstone in gaming. Silent Hill 1 is the first one I played and still my favorite of the series.

Quote:As in most survival horror games, Silent Hill has slow tank controls

I think you're right that RE paved the way for this. The controls are necessary because of the style of gameplay: you enter arenas that have different camera vantage points. Silent Hill especially uses this in its opening scenes, where you're running through a dark alley. Since you're not a horror aficionado, I can see how this didn't do anything for you. I think the game does a fantastic job of terrorizing the player, though.

But in any case, these controls are necessary, because you would get whiplash trying to keep up with a traditional analog stick. From a practical sense, you have to consistently keep one thumb down to be able to continue running straight, as demons chase you through dark hallways and foggy alleys. One thing SH did better than RE was, instead of having pre-rendered backgrounds everywhere, there were many areas where you could run in all eight directions and look at things.

IMO, the pixelated graphics actually sort of enhance the game. They make it feel vague (which adds to the mystique) but undeniably sinister. Sort of like finding a VHS tape somewhere, having no idea of its origins, but looking at it and seeing something terrifying. It's like Lovecraft said, "The most compelling emotion is fear, and the greatest fear is that of the unknown". I never really made the Lovecraftian connection to the game until now (I know, doi, underground cult that wishes to summon a demi-god into reality, me big dummy, and isn't there a street named after Lovecraft?).

Quote: and nowhere near enough ammunition to actually shoot all of the enemies.

This is a central plank in survival horror. The game forces you to flee enemies, which means you must be on your guard. Seeing your bullet and health counts drop is part of what adds to the terror. I played through the school recently (I began another playthrough this past fall, had to keep with the halloween spirit!). I found it easier to avoid them in places where I reliably could (like corridors) and don't bother clearing them out until you've explored everything.

The advantage is two-fold: a better knowledge of the area, and more opportunities to find/stow health and ammo.

Quote:You do get a few melee weapons, but I found actually trying to hit anything with them impossible, so that's not much help.

Ya, it's all about the timing. I've played the game for years and even I still have trouble with this. The demon babies have varying walking speeds so it's tricky to get them down right. I favor holding down X to deliver a slow but firm blow to knock them back. Those dead babies are still horrifying, oof. You'd think the effect would wear off all these years.

Quote:As an aside, Silent Hill apparently is supposedly in Maine, but I live in Maine. I can say this right now, there's no town or city that looks remotely like this here. But is there any town anywhere with crosswalks this absurdly wide, among other things?

This is very interesting to me too. I've only been in New England to visit Providence, RI and Vermont, neither of which would be what this game is trying to capture. Even so, I figured that the designers nailed that small town look. If there aren't any places like that in Maine I could see them perhaps in Baltimore. I figured they'd at least get the architecture and small shops right. It felt very touristy but spooky. The amount of details are impressive, Kojima and the Silent Team are a true gift to gaming.

Silent Hill Chat - A Black Falcon - 2nd March 2015

Sacred Jellybean Wrote:Not gonna lie, I searched for "Silent Hill" to see if you'd given your opinion on that. Awesome! Even though that game isn't to your liking, I still think it's a big touchstone in gaming. Silent Hill 1 is the first one I played and still my favorite of the series.
Big touchstone? Why? It seems like just another survival horror game...

On that note, read the Dino Crisis one for more of what I think of survival horror (the second one, not the old version in the first post), and also the two Fear Effect games' ones (again, the redo version of the first game); those games aren't survival horror, but they have some similarities (camera, controls). I don't particularly like any of those games either, for sure.

Quote:I think you're right that RE paved the way for this. The controls are necessary because of the style of gameplay: you enter arenas that have different camera vantage points. Silent Hill especially uses this in its opening scenes, where you're running through a dark alley. Since you're not a horror aficionado, I can see how this didn't do anything for you. I think the game does a fantastic job of terrorizing the player, though.
Huh? You're just walking though an alley, wrestling with the bad controls and awful camera angles (these things are not so much scary as annoying). That last area with the bodies and stuff was a bit creepy, but not so much the rest of it. I guess I just don't understand horror stuff most of the time. (I didn't find much in Eternal Darkness scary either, I loved it for other reasons; it was creepy sometimes though sure, mostly because of the Lovecrafian hopelessness.)

Quote:But in any case, these controls are necessary, because you would get whiplash trying to keep up with a traditional analog stick. From a practical sense, you have to consistently keep one thumb down to be able to continue running straight, as demons chase you through dark hallways and foggy alleys.
RE2 for N64 has a better analog control option, you know. It actually works fairly well.

Quote:One thing SH did better than RE was, instead of having pre-rendered backgrounds everywhere, there were many areas where you could run in all eight directions and look at things.
I agree on this point.

Quote:IMO, the pixelated graphics actually sort of enhance the game. They make it feel vague (which adds to the mystique) but undeniably sinister. Sort of like finding a VHS tape somewhere, having no idea of its origins, but looking at it and seeing something terrifying. It's like Lovecraft said, "The most compelling emotion is fear, and the greatest fear is that of the unknown". I never really made the Lovecraftian connection to the game until now (I know, doi, underground cult that wishes to summon a demi-god into reality, me big dummy, and isn't there a street named after Lovecraft?).
Eternal Darkness is a Lovecraft-style world done right. Otherwise... pixelated graphics rarely make games look better. I'd much rather have N64 blurred textures with added effects (perspective correction, etc.) than ugly PS1 pixelization, polygon seams, etc.

Quote:This is a central plank in survival horror. The game forces you to flee enemies, which means you must be on your guard. Seeing your bullet and health counts drop is part of what adds to the terror. I played through the school recently (I began another playthrough this past fall, had to keep with the halloween spirit!). I found it easier to avoid them in places where I reliably could (like corridors) and don't bother clearing them out until you've explored everything.

The advantage is two-fold: a better knowledge of the area, and more opportunities to find/stow health and ammo.
I quit Dino Crisis this time because I realized that in the hour I had been running around (I loaded my old save, saved about an hour in) I'd found exactly zero bullets. I'd found plenty of health I'd left lying around, but no ammo. Either I was missing it or there wasn't much yet, but there are dinosaurs here and there. So what do I do, just try to run around a dinosaur blocking the hallway? That's called "take damage and maybe die" and it's really annoying. Sorry, no, I have only bad things to say about th stupid, stupid idea of limiting ammo, I hate it!

As for Silent Hill, those stupid birds don't give up on chasing you, but I don't have the ammo to kill them all. Basically I take hits, and eventually die. Nothing can be done about this other than use up the ammo and presumably have not enough later. I think this is awful game design, honestly.

I do understand the concept here, though. For instance, in Resident Evil Survivor, the bad RE lightgun-style game for PS1 that doesn't support a gun in the US (I cover it in this thread), it was kind of tense when I was on my last continue in this game that doesn't let you save your progress, with low health and no more health packs... and then I died after a while, and didn't want to have to start the whole game over. But sure, it was tense. Lots of RPGs limit you by having limited mana and healing items and such too. I don't love that design though... you know, "out of health/mana, go back to town now), it's kind of annoying. It can sometimes work, I guess. But the ammo thing in survival horror games is worse, because there's no way around it, you can't just go back and buy more bullets.

Thinking about it, it's probably this kind of criticism that led shooters, for instance, to abandon health pickups in favor of regenerating health. Regenerating health allows you to create each encounter assuming the player is at an even bar health-wise, which is nice. It also doesn't punish worse players like health pickups (or limited ammo in a survival horror game) does -- the good player isn't going to be as affected by the limited health or ammo, but the bad player sure will be. Is that entirely fair? One of my first experiences with regenerating health (& mana) was Guild Wars 1, and I thought it was a pretty good idea that removed the frustration of limited healing items and let the designers create all encounters evenly. I have less experience with it in shooters, but "hide behind wall during fight to heal" seems kind of dumb, as a game mechanic. At least in GW, you had to wait long enough before healing would start that it almost always would only happen between fights, not during one.

On the other hand I love classic games, having to challenge yourself with a game with limited health pickups can be fun for sure! Doom is a great game. I just don't feel that way about ammo in survival horror. Just trying to ignore the enemies is NOT fun, it's frustrating, particularly when they're trying to attack me! I can't avoid all their attacks, and having to leave enemies lying around is very unsatisfying. And as I said (in the summaries) I don't think too much of survival horror games as adventure games either, so they don't make up for it that way.

Quote:Ya, it's all about the timing. I've played the game for years and even I still have trouble with this. The demon babies have varying walking speeds so it's tricky to get them down right. I favor holding down X to deliver a slow but firm blow to knock them back. Those dead babies are still horrifying, oof. You'd think the effect would wear off all these years.
What's the point of even having melee combat options when it controls so badly it's pretty much unusable?

Quote:This is very interesting to me too. I've only been in New England to visit Providence, RI and Vermont, neither of which would be what this game is trying to capture. Even so, I figured that the designers nailed that small town look. If there aren't any places like that in Maine I could see them perhaps in Baltimore. I figured they'd at least get the architecture and small shops right. It felt very touristy but spooky. The amount of details are impressive, Kojima and the Silent Team are a true gift to gaming.
Oh, expecting it to not look like Maine isn't a new thing; I remember Weltall saying sometime that one of the SH games has a subway, or something, in the town? Of course, the only subway in New England is the one in Boston. On that note, Silent Hill is a "small town", but how small is it really? "Small" by Tokyo standards (20+ million people) or "small" by northern New England standards (Maine's largest city is ~68,000 people)? I think it's quite clear that this game isn't made like the Grand Theft Auto games are, they don't do site research. They do use English signs, "mph" on speed limit signs, American mailboxes, and such, though, so there is that.

In the game, you start out in this area with oddly wide streets, those crazy-oversized crosswalks, and sizable grass areas between the street and the buildings. They aren't wide enough to be full front yards, though, but are too much for your average town street... it's a weird look, made weirder I'm sure by the ridiculously bad draw distance. You can see what, three feet in front of you a lot of the time?

Silent Hill Chat - Sacred Jellybean - 4th March 2015

A Black Falcon Wrote:Big touchstone? Why? It seems like just another survival horror game...

I've already listed why I think it's great, so I will just point out that it has many sequels and is one of the most beloved game series. Possibly moreso than Metal Gear Solid, another great accomplishment from my man Kojima. Rtttan loved SH so much he wrote a novelization of... the second game, I think? Wrote it "on a lark", he said, he enjoyed the damn story and characters so much that it was leisure to flesh it all out.

Hey Rkkkan, is that novelization online?

Quote:As for Silent Hill, those stupid birds don't give up on chasing you, but I don't have the ammo to kill them all. Basically I take hits, and eventually die. Nothing can be done about this other than use up the ammo and presumably have not enough later. I think this is awful game design, honestly.

C'mon, those birds are easy to flee! Just hold down square and keep running. No need to stop and smell the flowers, many of the individual houses/stores are background and unnecessary to look at. The game makes it easy by putting clues in the dead ends of streets. The birds aren't too hard to kill with the gun, anyway. You might have to wait for them to fly closer, but once you shoot them they won't actually get you. It takes 3-4 shots, if memory serves.

Quote:On the other hand I love classic games, having to challenge yourself with a game with limited health pickups can be fun for sure! Doom is a great game.

This might be the rub right here, because I always found Doom to be frustrating. After a certain point, killing enemies, dodging their attacks, and finding more health is too difficult. So maybe I suck at FPSs and you suck at survival horror? :)

Silent Hill Chat - Dark Jaguar - 5th March 2015

I have Doom, but never really cared for it. It actually scared me as a kid, though now I realize it was never intended to scare, so much as be a metal album cover you play through. It's just not really my thing. There's a reason I never really got into any FPS games until Goldeneye and Perfect Dark came along. Even now, it's not even close to my favorite genre (but it is America's favorite genre). Basically, my favorite FPS games are the ones that do everything they possibly can to NOT be a FPS (Goldeneye, Metroid Prime, those are the ones I like).

Silent Hill is a very psychological series. The point of the games, other than standard survival horror, is to interpret everything you see. You'll get it later on, if you get to that point.

That said, I can totally understand your frustration. Silent Hill and Resident Evil may be classics, and Silent Hill 2 may be one of the deepest games ever made, but as far as the gameplay? Yeah, it's awkward and outdated. Silent Hill 2 could probably do with a remake, to be totally honest. SB's right though, the heavy use of perspective on those camera angles is a major part of those early entries. As modern survival horror eschew that almost entirely to make way for modern control schemes, something will be lost. However, other things can be gained. The ultimate proof of this would be the P.T. demo.

As much as I love Perfect Dark, for example, I'll be the first to admit the game hasn't "aged" particularly well. Anyone playing modern FPS games as their first introductions, well, I really wish they hadn't, because Perfect Dark will be spoiled by those expectations.

Silent Hill Chat - A Black Falcon - 5th March 2015

Sacred Jellybean Wrote:I've already listed why I think it's great, so I will just point out that it has many sequels and is one of the most beloved game series. Possibly moreso than Metal Gear Solid, another great accomplishment from my man Kojima. Rtttan loved SH so much he wrote a novelization of... the second game, I think? Wrote it "on a lark", he said, he enjoyed the damn story and characters so much that it was leisure to flesh it all out.

Hey Rkkkan, is that novelization online?
I guess SH1 is slightly above average (for its genre), but that's the most I will say for it. The whole genre's not that good, though.

Quote:C'mon, those birds are easy to flee! Just hold down square and keep running. No need to stop and smell the flowers, many of the individual houses/stores are background and unnecessary to look at. The game makes it easy by putting clues in the dead ends of streets. The birds aren't too hard to kill with the gun, anyway. You might have to wait for them to fly closer, but once you shoot them they won't actually get you. It takes 3-4 shots, if memory serves.
But none of that is fun! Running from enemies is no fun and is annoying, and I"m not going to be able to successfully avoid them most of the time anyway, and "don't explore, that's bad" is like the opposite of what I'd want to do in this kind of game...

Quote:This might be the rub right here, because I always found Doom to be frustrating. After a certain point, killing enemies, dodging their attacks, and finding more health is too difficult. So maybe I suck at FPSs and you suck at survival horror? :)
No, I'm not that good at FPSes. But they can be fun. For survival horror though, I just really hate the idea of having to avoid enemies instead of fight them in a game with combat. If it's a graphic adventure game that'd be something else entirely, but survival horror games aren't that. "Avoid the enemies instead of fight them even though you have weapons" is awful game design!

Oh yeah, and the awful controls in most survival horror games don't help things at all, either. Same for static cameras. The first game to use that is, as far as I know, the original Alone in the Dark. I got the original AitD in 2000 in a collection of classic games from PC Gamer magazine, but it didn't hold my interest at all. Stupid combat, bad controls, awful camera angles, what do people see in these things? Resident Evil games haven't done much better.

Silent Hill Chat - Dark Jaguar - 6th March 2015

It's not really supposed to be "this is a blast" fun. It's supposed to be tense and disturbing. Like, people intentionally play these games to experience those emotions, because humanity is basically insane.

Silent Hill Chat - A Black Falcon - 6th March 2015

Dark Jaguar Wrote:It's not really supposed to be "this is a blast" fun. It's supposed to be tense and disturbing. Like, people intentionally play these games to experience those emotions, because humanity is basically insane.
Tense and disturbing might work if the game is actually fun to play (yet again I need to mention how much I love Eternal Darkness... but it's fun to play!), but no fun to play and tense and disturbing? Yeah, I don't get it.

Silent Hill Chat - Dark Jaguar - 6th March 2015

The symbolism and mood behind the Silent Hill games is on a level about 5 times above anything Eternal Darkness ever accomplished. That alone makes me go through. The puzzles are more engaging as well. I'll give you that the gameplay is outdated though. You've got to be able to forgive those faults, and if you can't, there's not much else I can say. However, for me at least, the gameplay may be clunky and outdated, but it still serves to aid in the overall suspense of the place. I feel very vulnerable in games like that.

Silent Hill Chat - A Black Falcon - 6th March 2015

The symbolism and mood behind the Silent Hill games is on a level about 5 times above anything Eternal Darkness ever accomplished.[/quote]
Based on the first few hours of Silent Hill 1 versus all of ED, yeah, I'd never agree to this for sure. But consider, there is only one Eternal Darkness game, and it released between SH2 and SH3, not a whole franchise. I wish it was a franchise (ED is my favorite Gamecube game, remember!), but it isn't. :(

I love ED's historical settings, the very good attention to detail they put into every time period in the game, the adventure game touches (being able to investigate objects and get descriptions of them, love that), etc. Silent Hill's setting isn't particularly interesting, in comparison, it's not even close. Seems like just another Japanese attempt at an "American" town. It's not bad, but it's not special like ED was... but few games have that level of attention to detail. ED is a fun game, but it's the story and world detail that really puts it over the top.

Quote:That alone makes me go through. The puzzles are more engaging as well.
I didn't see any interesting puzzles yet, but do they get better later in the series? (Seems unlikely, with how not-great survival horror game puzzles usually seem to be -- so many keys or key-style items to collect in RE and its clones...)

Quote:I'll give you that the gameplay is outdated though. You've got to be able to forgive those faults, and if you can't, there's not much else I can say. However, for me at least, the gameplay may be clunky and outdated, but it still serves to aid in the overall suspense of the place. I feel very vulnerable in games like that.
Clunky and outdated gameplay with awful controls and a high frustration factor because of being killed by enemies I can't entirely fight back against is all bad stuff. I just don't quite get why people like survival horror games.


There are other genres I dislike too, of course. Music games are one of the worst genres there is (I am terrible at music and have little interest in it), and crafting-focused games (Minecraft clones, crafting-focused MMOs, what have you) are horribly boring and awful. I hate crafting!

Silent Hill Chat - Dark Jaguar - 7th March 2015

ABF, sorry but until you go through it, you just aren't qualified to say Eternal Darkness is "deeper" in ANY sense than Silent Hill. It doesn't even APPROACH what Silent Hill accomplishes, and I'm not even talking about as a series. DK64 vs Banjo Kazooie? That's opinion, but Silent Hill's deeper meanings vs Eternal Darkness's? Yeah, it's basically objective fact that Silent Hill is deeper.

Let me explain. Eternal Darkness is not deep at all. It pretends to be deep, but it's a VERY shallow storyline. It's Lovecraft as interpreted through Cliffnotes. Now, let me say this. I enjoyed Eternal Darkness. The controls and the magic system? The sanity effects? Nice touches that make the game fun to play through. However, there's no "meat" to it. The characters have basically nothing going on other than their surface, namely because the game doesn't take enough time to actually develop them. The closest it gets is that overweight founding father type fellow, but even then, it's cliffnotes Lovecraft. It spends so much time talking about how overwhelming the elder gods are, it never takes the time to develop the main characters. I really have no idea what's going through the main character's mind, for example. Even the sanity effects are rather blatant and uninspired. Creative from a gameplay perspective, but they've got nothing to add to the narrative except for the whole "elder beings will drive you insane" thing. I'll give you the attention to detail on history. That was impressive, but even there that history doesn't really help develop the individual characters. The best you can say is that the story isn't about any one person so much as the long term manipulations of tiny parts of humanity by an elder being (across three timelines). There's something there, but it is still a shallow story in terms of the human condition or examination of individual trauma.

Silent Hill, on the other hand, DRIPS with meaning from beginning to end. You've barely even started the game, so I can forgive you for not noticing such factors. Heck, I might even suggest you just skip this one and play Silent Hill 2. (The thing about the series is, generally, each game is it's own unique storyline. Feel free to skip around, it won't ruin anything for you.) Avoid 5 and onward, because they end up being "paint by numbers" Silent Hill games, just stick with 1-4. The nature of the games is that they are "secret and personal journeys" (to quote Majora's Mask). There are "elder gods", maybe, but they're barely hinted at and the story doesn't even focus on them. The reasons for what's going on are left intentionally vague, so you can focus instead on the characters. Further, making the background of Silent Hill hidden actually furthers the atmosphere. Look at the best actual Lovecraft stories. The Rats in the Walls is intentionally vague about exactly what the heck is going on, and that's what makes it such an amazing story. By the end, you are left wondering exactly how much of the narrator's story was real and how much was just in his head. Asking for concrete answers is like asking for a definitive answer to whether or not the main character was still asleep at the end of inception. The mystery itself is the POINT.

So we get to Silent Hill. Every single monster, every single location, every single word, person, and puzzle, have a hidden meaning. Those hidden meanings are the real story, because it's deconstructing your main character. In Silent Hill 1, the most moving scene in the game, for me, involved the final scene with the nurse from the hospital you meet at various points. It really shocks you because the whole time you may have thought of yourself as the story's "hero", but that moment steals away any notion the main character, or you, may have had that you were actually any sort of hero. You're just another selfish survivor, that part tells you. No, I couldn't really say what skinless pterodactyls "mean", but that's the first game, they got a lot better at it in the second one.

Heck, the second one does even better at ambiguity. That was the first game in the series I played, and I prefer it that way. There is literally no explanation, at any point, as to what the town is or why it's there (unless you count the joke endings), and that makes the town all the more unsettling. The biggest mysteries you solve in any of these games are about your own character or another character, not anything regarding old gods or whatnot.

Basically, if you're going to say that the combat system or interaction in Eternal Darkness is better than Silent Hill, I won't argue with you. It is (though even Eternal Darkness suffers from old fashioned survival horror controls by today's standards). However, let me tell you this. If you play Silent Hill 2-4, you can change the basic directional controls to the one used by Eternal Darkness, switching from "3D" to "2D" in the options. Silent Hill 1 doesn't have this option, which is another reason to skip onward if the first one isn't doing it for you. You still won't have the "highlighted targeting" of individual sections on enemies, but it's better than tank controls at least. Give it a try.

Silent Hill Chat - Sacred Jellybean - 7th March 2015

Excellent post. You make me want to play 2 again. I think I will. It's been years, and it will make a nice companion to weltalls novel :)

Silent Hill Chat - Dark Jaguar - 8th March 2015

Sorry, I was a little harsh above, but trust me I spared you Weltall's response, which would probably be something like this:

[Image: 215543608_oPsC3-1050x10000.jpg]

Silent Hill Chat - A Black Falcon - 8th March 2015

I don't have any SH games other than the first one, and don't have any particular interest in buying them. They're overpriced and I can't think of any reasons I'd actually want to play them. Maybe if I see the discs for a dollar sometime I'd consider it. Otherwise, probably not. I have quite a few survival horror games I haven't played much and mostly don't enjoy all that much...

Also, I think I like ED a lot more than you, clearly. I thought the story was great, I love the historical settings, the combat was fun, solid adventure game elements, etc. The characters were good enough, they didn't need more than they had.

And on that note, character-focused story? Ignoring the world in favor of just a story about a person? Sorry, I don't know if that's what I want from a story. I'd lean towards no. I love videogames, politics, and history, not biographies or human-interest stories. That kind of thing doesn't interest me nearly as much. Notice how I emphasized that one of the things I loved about ED was its impressive historical detail? Of course the gameplay was great too, but that was an important factor.

Silent Hill Chat - Dark Jaguar - 9th March 2015

To be clear, they don't "ignore" the world. The world is used as a tool to develop the main character. The whole world exists almost solely to develop the characters themselves. I gotta say, caring more about world building than character development is... unorthodox to say the least. These days such an attitude is almost unheard of, heck downright blasphemous, but it does go a long way towards explaining our differences in opinion on this.

(Oh, to be clear, if you want history, the "cult" of Silent Hill, when it's explored, dates back to the founding of the town, when settlers mixed their Christianity with Native American folklore. That said, that aspect took over way too much in later Silent Hill games, at the expense of character development.)

Silent Hill Chat - Sacred Jellybean - 11th March 2015

I love that Silent Hill stories are introspective. Character studies are only as interesting as its characters. The first game doesn't much break this mold, it's more like a creepy movie than a character study. I play it to be thrown into an environment of chaos, terror, and helplessness.

In this vein, the second game was weak, but it excelled as a character study for James Sunderland. It didn't have the same stilted voice acting as the first (which btw does not detract from that game, it only adds to the sense of unreality).

Silent Hill 2 is about grief. James has gone through more grief than any other man he knows. His life has been broken since he lost his wife. This is a motif that the first plays on, but instead of exploring Harry Mason's feelings for his missing wife, he's on a mission to save his little girl from the hellish reality of the town.

Introspective stories are important. The full range of human emotions are important, and a chance to meditate upon them is healthy. Stories such as these may help us exorcise our own demons, and if not, at least appreciate those feelings of loss, grief, even guilt.

One thing I noticed in your post DJ is that you believe no good SH games exist after 4. Have you played Frozen Memories for Wii? It's quite good. Not the strongest entry in the series by any means, but I enjoyed it more than 3. SH3 is like they tried hard to capture what made the first two games great, and overdid it. The delivery is off. I'll pick it up again one day, but meh.

ETA:

The movie sucked. Poor acting, and the story was kind of neat but ham-handed. The atmosphere was decent, that's about all. The director Gans I think also directed another movie, Brotherhood of the Wolf? Which also sucked. The second Silent Hill was even worse, total waste of time. If Gans was overseeing it, he failed twice.

Silent Hill Chat - Sacred Jellybean - 11th March 2015

Also interesting to note: I read an interview years ago where the director of the first game (I feel like it was someone else than Kojima) who said he was inspired the The Shining. I would say the soundtrack of the game to an extent mimics Krzystoff Penderecki, composer of the film. Lots of atmospheric noises, violent violins. There is a wonderful hint of spanish guitar, mixed with piano, violin, and some electronic beats. This game hits all the right notes!

I feel like there is also Lynchian influence in the story/setting. Think of Eraserhead and how all the dialogue is stilted, yet uncomfortable. Also I see Stephen King -- read the Mist, it's about a town that is swallowed by, well, mist. And out of the mist come terrifying Lovecraftian creatures.

I'm going to split out these replies when I got home into a new Silent Hill Chat thread. Don't want to derail you too much, Falcon. :)

Silent Hill Chat - Dark Jaguar - 11th March 2015

At this point it probably should be split, yeah.

For a second there, I thought you were talking about the director of the movies in your second post, but then I realized you were talking about the games again. It was definitely not Kojima behind it. He's actually new to the whole franchise. Silent Hills will be his first take on the series.

I must admit, I watched Eraser Head and didn't much care for it. I tried, I really did. I walked away thinking of it as more... pretentious? Sorry, I saw it as the sort of thing an art student would make before telling me I'm an idiot for not "getting it". Spoiler alert: I didn't get it. Not a bit. The whole thing flew right over my head. It was the cinematic version of those paintings that are nothing but random splashes of paint. To the right audience, I'm sure both have deep meaning, but to me, it was just... weird. This is coming from someone who loved delving into the symbolism of the Silent Hill games, so I don't know what that says. I know what I WANT to say that says (I'm right, you're wrong!) but if I'm being honest, I'm pretty sure I just don't "get" that sort of art. Like the movie "Boyhood", it seems like it was made for someone else and I'm just "visiting".

I'm just going to leave this here.


The movies were pretty bad. The music was great, because they got the same musician as for the games, so buy the soundtracks, but not the movies themselves. The second one (Silent Hill 3D) was even worse, because it tried to stick to the plot of SH3 even when they changed too much of the plot of SH1 in the first one for that to even work. Best Silent Hill movie? Jacob's Ladder.

You're right about Shattered Memories. That one was a good one too. I'm mainly talking about Silent Hill 5 and Downpour. Those two were letdowns, especially 5. They had "in your face" subtlety, or in other words, no subtlety.

Silent Hill Chat - A Black Falcon - 11th March 2015

Dark Jaguar Wrote:To be clear, they don't "ignore" the world. The world is used as a tool to develop the main character. The whole world exists almost solely to develop the characters themselves. I gotta say, caring more about world building than character development is... unorthodox to say the least. These days such an attitude is almost unheard of, heck downright blasphemous, but it does go a long way towards explaining our differences in opinion on this.
"Blasphemous"? That sounds like quite an exaggeration, I'd think... but sure, sometimes I care about the characters in games, but yeah overall I care more about the world than the characters in specific.

Quote:(Oh, to be clear, if you want history, the "cult" of Silent Hill, when it's explored, dates back to the founding of the town, when settlers mixed their Christianity with Native American folklore. That said, that aspect took over way too much in later Silent Hill games, at the expense of character development.)
New England colonists, mixing with Native American folklore? Uhhh, yeah, no, that would not ever have happened. The American colonists were very unwilling to consider any significant mixing with Native Americans. This sounds quite implausible, but horror stories seem like they usually are that...

Silent Hill Chat - Dark Jaguar - 11th March 2015

Huh, okay how about this? Aliens did it.

Silent Hill Chat - Sacred Jellybean - 11th March 2015

Dark Jaguar Wrote:For a second there, I thought you were talking about the director of the movies in your second post, but then I realized you were talking about the games again. It was definitely not Kojima behind it. He's actually new to the whole franchise. Silent Hills will be his first take on the series.

Huh, could have sworn he was involved with at least the first and second. Hopefully he doesn't MGS this thing up too much then. MGS is bad, it's like MSG. No, I've actually not played many of those so I can't judge, but I hear it goes off the rails from the second game on.

Quote:I must admit, I watched Eraser Head and didn't much care for it. I tried, I really did. I walked away thinking of it as more... pretentious? Sorry, I saw it as the sort of thing an art student would make before telling me I'm an idiot for not "getting it".

The film's lead thought the same thing when he heard the premise. :D Then he and Lynch got to talking about... car roof racks, of all things. And they got to be good buddies. I don't know, something about that Jack Nance is compelling. Very odd duck for sure, and I think he had an atmosphere about him. I watched a documentary on him that was made post-mortem. Guy had a lot of trouble with alcohol.

But I digress, I think Lynch nails it with Eraserhead. The concept itself isn't necessarily deep. It's all about fear of childbirth and fatherhood. Lynch lived in Philadelphia and it inspired him (moreso than living in Europe, purportedly). I think Eraserhead is his masterpiece, but it's absolutely esoteric, so a good amount of people don't like it. For my money, I like the delivery, the long, slow shots, the mechanical soundtrack (Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails was inspired by this), the weird girlfriend. I try to noodle out meaning in the more surreal parts and there might be some imagery I don't get yet.

Most of all I think it's a sad film. I think the last time I posted about it here I called it "terrifying" but I was just getting caught up in the hype. It's more depressing than anything. I wish I could see it on the big screen, that's one of the greats like 2001 that's meant to be seen large, imposing, lending the feeling of overwhelming helplessness and filthy industrial drudgery.

I actually frequented message boards (the SomethingAwful forums) where the people hanging out in the cinema subforum would put on airs about David Lynch. "Hmmphh, either you get Lynch or you don't" [Image: mh5UOBD.gif]. It kind of put me off to him, but having seen a full body of his work I have to admit he's very talented. Twin Peaks is a great show, for instance. It's almost... campy, but real. It starts off as kind of a corny soap opera but the actors give you the feels. The series is about the murder of a high school girl named Laura Palmer, and it does quite well in showing the parents grieving.

Anyway, this is getting off-track. I do see a similarity between Lynch's work and the first Silent Hill. It's about a small tourist town that has inexplicable evil underneath. Lynch plays on the same theme but in suburbia, less urban.

And dammit Falcon, colonists and Natives? That makes it the ultimate American horror story. :D C'mon, haven't you heard of suspension of disbelief? I mean, the plot is nothing but a vehicle for better things: atmosphere in the first game, character study in the next. You nuts, man.

Quote:Like the movie "Boyhood", it seems like it was made for someone else and I'm just "visiting".

The method is gimmicky but interesting. I want to see this. I like Linklater anyway. A Scanner Darkly in particular was sad but poignant.

Quote:Best Silent Hill movie? Jacob's Ladder.

Totally.

Silent Hill Chat - Dark Jaguar - 11th March 2015

I really appreciated Boyhood at least. I thought it was very well made, and I liked the overall theme of "things don't work out the way you plan, and you're always always growing up, forever". When I say I felt like I was "just visiting", I mean I don't see myself in the kid, like at all. Not a single bit was relate-able to me. I see how he got to that point, but the adult he ended up at is the sort of adult that would make Eraserhead and then explain that I just haven't backpacked across Europe enough to "get" it, basically someone I'd normally consider unlikable, had I not seen exactly how he ended up there. Basically, I did precisely NONE of the things that kid did growing up. I suppose I should have expected that going in mind you :D, but again I have to say it does a great job showing how that kid got to that point, and LOTS of young men, (a lot of them born around the year 2000) say they DO see a LOT of themselves in that kid, so heck, it's a good movie, just not one aimed at me or my experiences, that's all. Go see it though, I think you'll like it.

Eraserhead is a whole other beast. I can't even pretend to START understanding what the heck that was all about. You say it's about fatherhood, which means the monster his girlfriend gave birth to really was supposed to represent just... a kid. Not something like "the main character is you and the girlfriend is society and their relationship represents society's demands of you and the baby represents the monsters it makes of us all, who is the REAL society?". No, it's just flat out the fears of fatherhood? What am I to make of him killing that baby then? Does that represent him actually seeing a real baby as a monster and stabbing it with scissors, and not "severing his ties with society" to "kill the monster" it made of him? That sure makes me really hate the main character...

I'll need to check out Twin Peaks. I've had it sitting in my Netflix queue for a while now. It looks interesting. I do love surreal things, and that looks like it'd be really good. I at least have some idea of what's going on from what I've heard.

Silent Hill Chat - Dark Jaguar - 11th March 2015

What if that particular town was on the very fringe of the European settlements, and they felt the need to mix with a local native tribe or die out entirely, and thus their cultures mixed that way? What if they were cut off enough that this particular town didn't communicate very often with the other settlements? What if all of this developed as their culture merged and evolved separately from the rest of the settlements until eventually they reestablished contact with the rest, reconnecting with the other settlements as America eventually took form, but always maintaining their heritage? Could a situation like that have happened?

Edit: Scrap that, here's the timeline as put together by fans. How much of this seems like it could happen in a slightly alternate history of America?

http://silenthill.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline

Silent Hill Chat - A Black Falcon - 12th March 2015

I haven't watched any of the movies either of you have mentioned, I'm pretty sure. I've heard of David Lynch, but don't really know anything about him. I have not seen The Shining either, or any of Steven King's other horror stuff.


Beyond that though...

Sacred Jellybean Wrote:And dammit Falcon, colonists and Natives? That makes it the ultimate American horror story. C'mon, haven't you heard of suspension of disbelief? I mean, the plot is nothing but a vehicle for better things: atmosphere in the first game, character study in the next. You nuts, man.
Suspension of disbelief? Sorry, yeah, I'm not very good at that. I mean, I can for something like magic in a fantasy world (I mean, there is no magic like that in the real world), but when you have a "realistic" setting and then get the details wrong, I often notice, and it can REALLY bug me. Videogames are absolutely loaded with unrealistic things impossible to the actual setting the game is supposedly set in, yeah, but that doesn't mean I don't notice them, I still do. Sometimes these things make sense (changes for censorship reasons, etc.), but other times not so much.

So no, suspension of disbelief? I'm kind of the other side of that one, particularly for things involving setting accuracy.

Dark Jaguar Wrote:What if that particular town was on the very fringe of the European settlements, and they felt the need to mix with a local native tribe or die out entirely, and thus their cultures mixed that way?
The problem is, after the early days the Indians didn't try to mix either, not after the way the settlers treated them. If you're on the frontier you are afraid of Indian attacks, not making friends with them most of the time. Many place names do come from Indian words of course, but cultural connections, not as much. It's not impossible I guess, but it is quite unlikely.

One thing you should realize is that in northern New England there weren't very many Indians to begin with. Massachusetts had had more, but once the Europeans arrived Indians started dying of old-world diseases. It is estimated that in the ~400 years after 1492, as much as 90% of the native population of the Americas probably died; this depends on pre-Columbian population estimates of course. And the US didn't have large populations of settled people, those were down in Mexico through to Peru. And north of Massachusetts in particular, most Indians were only hunter-gatherers, not settled farmers. Hunter-gatherer populations are low because only so many people can survive off the land, you need a lot of land for each person compared to more settled people. So Maine (and New Hampshire and Vermont as well) started out with relatively few people, then a lot of them died, and then the British settlers slowly pushed most of the survivors back. There was plenty of fighting in Maine during colonial days between settlers and Indians, to be sure, and down in Mass., RI, and Connecticut they had actual wars against Indians (King Phillip's War was the last major one, if I remember right), and many of the surviving Indians eventually fled into Canada where European populations were lower, but Indian populations in northern New England today are tiny as much because they always were small as because of anything else.

Quote:What if they were cut off enough that this particular town didn't communicate very often with the other settlements? What if all of this developed as their culture merged and evolved separately from the rest of the settlements until eventually they reestablished contact with the rest, reconnecting with the other settlements as America eventually took form, but always maintaining their heritage? Could a situation like that have happened?
Without contact or connections to the rest of the colonies I'd think that the place would die out, not have some weird colonist/indian cultural merger... colonies relied on supplies. A lone family might live off in the woods somewhere, sure, but for protection from Indians and for supplies they need most needed some kind of connection to civilization.

Quote:Edit: Scrap that, here's the timeline as put together by fans. How much of this seems like it could happen in a slightly alternate history of America?

http://silenthill.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline
I don't see much there that connects to the Indians after the beginning part, unless it's in the game but not in that timeline? I mean, it's mostly just a long list of characters from the games and when they did stuff, it seems...

But yeah, no mention there of Indian ideas mixing into the colonial settlement.

On a few points:

Quote:Jennifer Carroll is executed for witchcraft. She was one of the founding members of what would become the Order.
I don't know if anything like this ever actually happened here in Maine; of course there were the famous Salem trials down in Mass. during colonial days, though. They were probably thinking of that. Wrong state.

Quote:Around this time, a coal field is discovered and Wiltse Coal Mine opens, which leads to the revitalization of the town. [1]
There has never been any coal mining at all in Maine, and I've never heard of any coal being found either, so this is totally wrong. Maine has a great amount of natural resources, including lumber (forestry), fishing, slate and granite quarries, and more -- it's a poor state that has historically relied mostly on natural resources and now tourism for income -- but mining, no. Not here. That'd be, like, Pennsylvania or West Virginia or such.

http://silenthill.wikia.com/wiki/Devil%27s_Pit#Devil.27s_Pit_Mine
You'd have to go out west to find anything remotely like this crazy-big canyon gorge -- Arizona and such. Maine has a bit of limestone, but not much, it's mostly a state made of granite and igneous rocks. Also, I know of no large caves anywhere near here, "here" being New England in general pretty much.

And for a massive waterfall... 1500 foot waterfall? That's fine for videogame-land, but in reality, there aren't any within 500 feet of that height east of, like, Montana. :p Maine doesn't have big waterfalls. I guess New Hampshire might have one, though that's just a waterfall going down the side of a mountain, not something going into a crazy giant cave which doesn't exist in New England. New England doesn't have big caves. Too much igneous rock and granite.

Quote:Portrayed as what could be considered an archetypal New England tourist town, Silent Hill is shown to be anything but ordinary. Its chief industries are tourism and, to a lesser extent, agriculture. In the first Silent Hill, it is described to be a small town with a population below 30,000 and its key industry, tourism, is in a state of steady decline. However, it is still growing and expanding and may be considered a city by the events of Downpour.
For Northern New England, 30,000 is not a "small town". It is a large town. There are only three towns/cities in Maine with a population over 30,000 (Portland, Lewiston, Bangor). The town I grew up in had a population of a bit over 20,000, and is regarded as one of the larger towns in the state. Vermont has even fewer towns that large (I think there is only one), and New Hampshire isn't much different from Maine, though its largest cities have higher populations (smaller state, but the same number of people as Maine).

Quote:JP stating that the pit is 490 meters down is likely a script error as a sign found behind JP states that the bottom of Devil's pit is 1,607 feet (490 meters) above sea level, and that the platform is 3,350 feet (1,021 meters) above sea level, making the pit at least 1,743 feet (531 meters) deep.
... Uhh... I already addressed above that this gorge is on the wrong side of the country and there's nothing remotely like this east of the Mississippi, but beyond that, that base elevation is way too high! While New England has some tall mountains, if we pretend it's near a mountain instead of a mini Grand Canyon, somewhere with a large lake at such a high elevation? I doubt New England has anything like that, much less one with a big town next to it. The elevation isn't TOO absurdly wrong -- Maine's largest lake, Moosehead, is apparently at a elevation of about a thousand feet, and it's near Maine's tallest (mile-high) mountain -- but it is off. Oh, and the only towns on the lake are quite small. Larger towns in Maine are next to rivers, or where a river meets the sea.

http://silenthill.wikia.com/wiki/Hazel_Street_Station (and such)
As I said earlier in the thread, the only subway in New England is the one in Boston, Mass. Only big cities build subways, and not even all of those have one!


It's fine to have extremely unrealistic things like this in a game; they are games after all, not depictions of a real place. Games would be VERY boring if they were just like the real world, that's for sure. I don't want to have to walk for days to get from one town to the next in a game, for example... :) But this does show the perils of setting your game in a real place and then having things which are too obviously completely wrong in the game, it stands out as questionable to anyone who knows better. This is why Rockstar does so much location research for the GTA games, to get the details right even if the place is theoretically fictional. I don't care for those games too much gameplay-wise, but at least the settings seem to be pretty solid. I can't expect something like Silent Hill to match GTA's insane budgets of course, but they obviously don't try at all. And that's okay, but I live in this state, so I notice. :p

Silent Hill Chat - Dark Jaguar - 12th March 2015

Fair enough, but then again what exactly makes Eternal Darkness' story so historically accurate by comparison? I'm not sure of any historical context for those underground cities, for example.

Silent Hill Chat - A Black Falcon - 12th March 2015

For the desert ruins, I've always thought that the idea is that it was originally aboveground, but over time was covered by the desert... it's supposed to be ancient. Now, the game does take some creative liberties here, probably -- the whole thing should probably be totally filled with sand and require a LOT of work to clear out -- but beyond that it makes sense.

I'm sure what you really mean is the giant underground city filled with giant spiders and such. Of course that's fictional, yes, but that isn't based on history, it's based on Lovecraft's writings. That place is something outside of the normal human experience, which is kind of the whole point -- remember how the first guy who finds it ends up in an asylum because no one believes such a thing is possible. Obviously the zombies you fight and such aren't historically accurate either. :p

Silent Hill Chat - Sacred Jellybean - 12th March 2015

The stabbing of the baby was euthenasia. Henry removes the bandages and sees only organs underneath. Not only was his (premature) baby a mutant, but the bandages were literally the only thing holding it together. I think Henry panics, and I probably would have done the same thing. Okay, I'd probably just call a hospital or let it die, stabbing it is kind of extreme, but euthenasia would have been on my mind from the moment I laid eyes on that baby.

[Image: PpC1jr5.png]

Honestly, the movie didn't fall into place until someone explained to me that the white lines inside Henry are sperms. The opening shot is of him, horizontal, looking off into the distance, always so somber and thoughtful. Jack Nance has a presence that could not have been emulated by any other I think. He's a big reason why the movie is so strong.

[Image: 2AcRJWB.png]

A little man at a control panel pulls a level and releases the sperm. Then the real opening begins, with Henry walking home from his job at the printing press. He passes by chain link fences, smoke stacks, abandoned buildings. He steps in a puddle.

He goes upstairs into a tiny room with a window that looks straight out into a brick wall. He takes off his sock and puts it on the radiator and tries to relax. He goes to his dresser and takes out a torn up picture of his ex girlfriend, Mary. She left a message for him, an invitation to dinner.

He goes on over to her house, and I love the exchange that they have.

"You're late, Henry."

"I didn't know if you wanted me to come or not. Where've you been?"

"..."

"You never come around any more."

[Image: WshGvjX.png]

"... ... Dinner's almost ready."

[Image: a74iWIj.png]

It sounds campy on paper but the performances really drive it home. The whole script is only something like five pages, the rest comes from Lynch's imagination, which I think is impressive.

Mary's family is even creepier. Women seem to domineer Henry. Her mother doesn't cut him any slack, she chews him out. Mary panics, mother brushes her hair.

The father is sort of a good ol' boy hillbilly. He rants to Henry, a train passes by, shaking the whole house as though the track were overhead. "I LAID EVERY DAMN PIPE IN THIS TOWN!" he yells, and you don't know if he's angry or just excited.

The dinner scene is a money shot in its own. "Try these new chickens, man-made," the father explains. Henry cuts into them and the legs move, blood spurts out between them, it's a little chicken abortion but oh, no egg.

[Image: 1g1QDug.png]
[Image: mVQRm1N.png]

The mother flips out and runs from the table, Mary follows. The two men are left speechless. Minutes of awkward silence pass between Henry and the father. Film makers these days don't drag shots out and let them linger. You can see that as a means of efficiency (the attention span for movie viewers is probably at an all-time low) but the scene feels pregnant to me. Not disturbing, but awkward.

"Well, Henry, what do you know?"

"Oh... I don't know much of anything..."

"..."

[Image: THgjdJ4.png]

The mother returns and asks to speak to Henry alone.

"Did you and Mary have sexual intercourse?"

He tries to bat away the question but the mother tells him it's a baby.

"Mom, they're not even sure it is a baby," Mary sobs.

"It's premature, but it's a baby alright. After the two of you are married which should be very soon, you can see it."

[Image: B2ZjYV1.png]

The next scene is them home with the baby. Henry returns and almost tries to be happy, but Mary is frustrated. The baby won't eat. The baby won't stop crying, she can't sleep. She's fed up and leaves.

Henry is tasked of taking care of the baby. More scenes go by that don't make sense, there's a scene with a worm I don't understand. Henry has an affair with the woman next door. He delves down with her into a primordial soup, a kind of "from chaos rises order" symbol. Though he's going down, not rising.

I don't know if the sex was supposed to make him feel whole again but he has a vision. His head drops down and falls onto a street, outside in some alley. A little boy runs up and steals the head before a dying homeless man can stop him. The boy brings the him to the factory. The foreman thanks him and they go to drill inside the head and extract little pencils. Eraserheads.

[Image: TZZrXaX.png]

Is the message that society will grind us down into nothing but tools for the corporate fools, maaaaan? Just a bunch of cogs in the MACHINE? That seems to be the message, and even if sophomoric, Lynch has an eye for showing it visually that's still interesting.

Henry awakens and finds the woman next door with another man, he's crushed, did he think he was replacing Mary or what? They laugh at him and his head becomes that of the baby. Does he feel humiliated for being a single father?

There's lots more to look at, there's the woman in the radiator. I've already typed a lot but that's a weird reoccurring symbol. She seems like a matriarch. She has two large ovaries on her face. "In Heaven, everything is fine," she croons, then she giggles and stomps on more of the little sperm things.

[Image: dJvluHX.png]

If you had to ascribe a specific meaning, it's as though he wants to regress back into childhood. Perhaps he had a strong relationship with his mother. And she's there, stomping the sperms, the thing that made Henry miserable to begin with.

You see the same woman at the end of the film, which I think is Henry's death. Everything goes white. You see her gentle smile. Henry and her embrace. It's one of the few times you get to see him feel peaceful, then the movie ends in white mist.

[Image: 1z9yV3K.png]

[Image: EZVldXa.png]

I've already typed a lot, but I want to mention how much I love the score to this movie. Lots of ambient noises: electricity buzzing, trains running in the distance, faint carnival type music. It has a rhythm to it all. As a friend put it, "I love the tempo to this movie."

I think it's Lynch's most interesting piece. I like to watch it at night to get the full effect, and it always puts me in a mood. Any film that can keep me in its spell after the reels have ended gets a good grade from me. His films tend to work on a weird sort of dream logic, and it may or may not resonate.

[Image: gmac9HL.png]

I saw Lost Highway for instance and didn't care much for it. Same with Muholland Drive. I know other Lynch fans love those movies, though. So I would say it's subjective even among his fanbase.

If surreal art isn't your game, he has other straightforward movies. The Elephant Man is excellent. Mel Brooks was so impressed by Eraserhead that he asked Lynch to direct the movie. Blue Velvet is another, a flick about a high school boy who gets in over his head when he witnesses a crime. It starts with him finding an ear in a field. Honestly, it was kind of boring. It's not that Lynch can't do conventional. Twin Peaks is mostly conventional, with moments of surreality thrown in.

I was thinking of typing a Twin Peaks post too, so perhaps some time next week. If you do get into it, let me tell you -- it gets better after the first episode. It's an hour-and-a-half TV premiere. Perhaps if I knew I was getting into a movie-length thing, I wouldn't have bailed. But I got bored and shelved it for months.

Once I got through that, though, I was pretty much hooked by the end of episode 2. It gets only better from there. It climaxes during season two, when the network pressured Lynch to reveal the killer. It gets... bad after that. Very bad. I think they come up with guest writers/directors, other than the David Lynch / Mark Frost partnership that forged the thing. The show doesn't really redeem itself until the last episode, which Lynch stepped back in to direct, and OH THANK YOU for at least giving us a sweet farewell. It made slogging through those last episodes worth it.

Silent Hill Chat - Dark Jaguar - 13th March 2015

That was a detailed breakdown there, and I thank you for it. I still can't say the movie really resonates with me, but I have some understanding of where you're coming from when you see it. I do have to ask though, are you sure that baby's defects are supposed to be taken literally? I mean that's a pretty "real" interpretation of what that baby's all about, considering how unreal most of the scenes involving it actually are. I had assumed it was intended as metaphor more than anything else.

I think the reason I don't really "connect" to this movie is I find the main character extremely unlikable. He just seems like a terrible person, constantly reacting like nothing that's happening is his own fault. To be sure, that's true about some things in this Kafkaesque nightmare he calls a city, but just about everything involving his relationship, especially the baby, is DIRECTLY his own fault and he acts like it's just something that "happened", out of his control. Perhaps it's a matter of perspective, and frankly I will never end up in his particular situation so I don't think I'll ever be able to relate, but that's the thing. If I can't find SOME touch stone where I can connect with the main character, well, that's the problem.

(On a side note, look out for a baby that's a clear homage to this one in the P.T. demo.)

Silent Hill Chat - Dark Jaguar - 13th March 2015

ABF, if I understand right, you're basically saying the differences in this alternate reality would go MUCH farther back then, to when the land itself was young, and therefor much more likely to have unimaginably huge consequences on exactly what people did and even what nations would form in early America, thus making such significant differences a bit hard to swallow in how small the changes in the rest of the nation are. I think I get that.

Silent Hill Chat - Sacred Jellybean - 13th March 2015

Quote:I do have to ask though, are you sure that baby's defects are supposed to be taken literally? I mean that's a pretty "real" interpretation of what that baby's all about, considering how unreal most of the scenes involving it actually are. I had assumed it was intended as metaphor more than anything else.

That's a good point, I don't think I ever considered that. Distilled to its essence, a baby is a creation. A duplicate of ones self. Henry gives birth by accident to something that's not only repulsive, but a burden. Henry is responsible for this thing he created, even if under the worst circumstances. If it's a symbol for anything, I think it could be one for art itself. Lynch of course was living in Philadelphia at the time as an art student. One who likely struggled and was insecure. Perhaps he felt inadequate about the things he would create. Perhaps he felt as lost and isolated as Henry.

Quote:I think the reason I don't really "connect" to this movie is I find the main character extremely unlikable. He just seems like a terrible person, constantly reacting like nothing that's happening is his own fault. To be sure, that's true about some things in this Kafkaesque nightmare he calls a city, but just about everything involving his relationship, especially the baby, is DIRECTLY his own fault and he acts like it's just something that "happened", out of his control.

Huh, I didn't really see that. The baby was an accident, but Henry doesn't seem neglectful of it. I think that his relationship with Mary is toxic but I don't think he's to blame. I can't think of any instance where he's reckless or harms others, he seems to spend most his time alone and introspective. The worst you could lay at his feet is the mercy killing.

Silent Hill Chat - A Black Falcon - 14th March 2015

Dark Jaguar Wrote:ABF, if I understand right, you're basically saying the differences in this alternate reality would go MUCH farther back then, to when the land itself was young, and therefor much more likely to have unimaginably huge consequences on exactly what people did and even what nations would form in early America, thus making such significant differences a bit hard to swallow in how small the changes in the rest of the nation are. I think I get that.
That is a good point, but I was mostly just focusing on how it is clearly quite inaccurate. I think that they seem to have chosen "Maine" as the setting because they liked Steven King books/movies, or something like that, but didn't make any attempt to actually make the place fit in with the supposed setting. It's just "generic American town", not "Maine town", pretty much. And the "gorge" thing shows a lack of understanding of America, that kind of thing is, as far as I know, only in the Western half of the country, and certainly isn't in New England, and the same goes for the waterfall. The natural things on my list there -- elevation, wrong resources (coal), giant canyons, a huge waterfall -- would certainly change a place versus what we have, yes.

They probably should have just said it's some generic American setting without choosing a place. That way you wouldn't have these issues, though plenty of games have thoroughly impossible fictional world designs (Think of how often RPGs, Castlevania games, etc. mix stuff from different time periods together with no attempt to actually make it make sense beyond "but that is a genre trope so we will use it too", but this is a different issue). Either that, or actually try to have the place be a more plausible fictionalized version of reality. Most games don't have real-world settings in part to avoid such problems... either that, or they're in a clearly fictional version of "reality". One example of that is a game I just started playing recently, SSX for the X360 (and PS3). The game has "real-world" settings, but clearly is quite fictional in its actual course designs. But each place is at least loosely based on the real mountain it is set on, which is interesting.


Oh, and I didn't mention that "Christianity mixed with Indian folklore" thing in that list because I didn't see mention of that on the timeline or the couple of other pages I linked from there. Do you have anything explaining more about that, if it is indeed a thing in the games? The "the town has a subway" thing is kind of similar in a way, in that it's something that is certainly wrong efor the place but for cultural, not geological, reasons, but the Christianity-mixed-with-Indian-ideas thing might be even weirder if true.

Silent Hill Chat - Sacred Jellybean - 14th March 2015

Also wanted to say, I think the photography in Eraserhead is great too. Kudos to its cinematographers. I took this screengrab but didn't share it.

[Image: rYuCtjb.png]

You should check out Elephant Man if you want to get a lot of the same vibe. And see an excellent movie. :) It's heavy, but not heavy-handed. Real pleasure to watch.

Silent Hill Chat - Dark Jaguar - 24th August 2015

I watched Blue Velvet last night, as I'd heard it inspired parts of Silent Hill. Near as I can tell, aside from some plot similarities and the sound design when the main character is wandering around the apartment, it's really a distinct creature.

As for my thoughts on the movie itself, well, David Lynch sure knows how to make me, personally, feel like an alien completely out of touch with Earthling culture. This movie is lauded as "important" and "super serious", but I just don't GET it. I really don't know what it is, but when I watch a Lynch movie, I feel like I'm just missing some fundamental part of the human experience or something, because what I saw were a bunch of characters not, like, acting realistically. What am I MISSING?

I feel like this:



But I haven't reached that part at the end where it "clicks".

Same with Adventure Time, now that I think of it. Maybe I'll just need to lock myself in my room and watch every episode of that show in order until I "get" it.