Silent Hill Chat

[A Black Falcon]

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.