Thing is, there's always hope for Silent Hill

At least, there is in my opinion. It's why I'm hopeful every time a new one is announced, it's why I let myself feel hope when everyone is telling me that there's no point. Certainly, that hope is often dashed by what is the undeniable existence of the actual game, but initially there is always hope in me that maybe the new game won't suck.

Anyway, I also decided to just make an entire post about Silent Hill to get this over with. I was watching a Let's Play of Origin recently, and it made me remember why it was such a disappointment, how that disappointment led into subsequent games, and the upsetting fact that they didn't have to be disappointments, it's just that people who are making the new SH games have little understanding of what made the originals so good (and it's not little set pieces of Pyramid Head and Pyramid Head knockoffs walking around and doing a little dance let me tell you that much right now).

Goddamn there are a lot of spoilers under the cut for all manner of Silent Hill games. This is a warning and a divestment of my responsibility.

But Really, Play Spec Ops: The Line

Jesus Christ, Spec Ops: The Line made me feel like doodoo buns. Unfortunately, means that I'm going to get quite deep and heavy here, because there's no other way to talk about this game. Not only due to the contents of the game itself, but how the game is presented, and why it makes such a good game.

I'm trying not to hit the spoiler thing too hard - there is one point that IS DIRECTLY A SPOILER, so avert your eyes and skip to the next paragraph if you don't want it, but this entire thing definitely stretches the boundaries of what is and isn't a spoiler. I really recommend playing Spec Ops: The Line without spoilers because trust me, you won't ... well I can't say you won't regret it, but the emotional journey it pushes you through is worth it.

Batman-ier, Arkham-ier

 

Batman: Arkham City has a lot of things that one can say about it, which is something in its favor. I tend to despise the generic much more than the awful, because at least the awful has something to revile or despise or to laugh at, whereas the latest edition of Middle-Aged Scruffy White Dude Shoots the Foreigners is so self-explanatory that there's nothing to say about it at all. The trouble with what you can say about Batman: Arkham City is that most of the dialogue concerning it can be split into two categories: why it's like Batman: Arkham Asylum, and why it's not. Which is one of the major problems with making sequels, and information concerning the fact that your new crappy Silent Hill game is going to be inevitably compared to the original Silent Hill games and will almost always come up short is a fortune cookie I would dearly love to shoot at the current Team Silent at extreme velocity these days. We all know (including the writers and makers of the sequel itself) that a sequel is going to be compared to the original and on some level I think some of us were expecting Arkham City to be the Dark Knight to the Begins of this series. And as far as sequels go, Arkham City is a pretty decent one, though it suffers that Portal 2 problem of trying to crack the "code" of what made the original so good and trying to give us that but that-ier. Unfortunately at that point the whole formula just falls to pieces because art is weird and unfathomable like why we exist as individual beings in this vast unending universe, and it does mean that it definitely lost a lot of its charm. City definitely tried to be Batman-ier, Arkham-ier, and thus of course, along the line, got frustrating-ier. Er. More frustrating.

There are spoilers, though if you haven't heard them then congratulations! That is an accomplishment.

You are Uninvited to Arkham City

I think, after all these years, I understand what the Maleficent and every incarnation of "my brother/sister/king didn't invite me to their daughter's christening" there ever was. It must have been hard to see basically everyone go, including any assortment of peasants and farm animals, and yet you're the single person that they decided not to invite. This is where personally I'd depart from the comparison because I probably wouldn't throw any curse about spindle pricking a baby on her finger. If I had the ability to do such a thing, I'd throw a curse about spindle pricking the gigantic douchebag who didn't invite me to the party on his dick, but the basic principle of being annoyed at not being invited is the same.

Wakey Wakey Alan

The first game should be a memorable one, so for some reason I chose Alan Wake.

Alan Wake is really the sort of game that I should either love or hate with little leeway in between.

I love media that leans on the fourth wall and messes with the metaphysical, and also the idea of reality being twisted according to some artsy fartsy type or even just a bland everyday Jane type. I like deconstruction of individual interpretation becoming everyone's interpretation, with the mind screw chicken/egg looping of fate and choice (you know, the kind that Steven Moffat utterly fails to achieve) and the examination of why plotholes will cause a horrible shadow darkness to come from the depths of a lake to invade your small cozy town. It's also, according to the box, a "psychological horror game", and horror is far my favorite genre of video game, as it was the genre that shifted my understanding from games being smashy smashy to intricate forms of media capable of telling its own story with an unprecedented level of immersion. It's mildly Lovecraftian (though that's not quite as obvious as the references to another author in this game), which means it takes place in New England, horror homeland of misanthropic ugly jerks who all want to accessorize their axe with your face - and admittedly I find this the most enjoyable thing known about my area. So it's everything I should love.

It's also everything that I should hate. The story covering the metaphysical premise is held together by a main character who is about as charming as a whiny sack of potatoes with a face drawn on and you're completely unable to get into this mindset that the game desperately wants to push of Alan being a competent writer. Just handfuls of minutes into the game, trying to believe that Alan is considered some literary genius goes from being hard to impossible because you are basically forced to read his writing, and it is in a word: terrible, and in several words: the exact sort of terrible that graces bestseller lists for weeks for no understandable reason. The horror element is also rather poorly done, which doesn't stick in my side by just being bad, but of me seeing the potential of it being good and never quite achieving the perfection that I know it's capable of, deep inside.

That said, I love Alan Wake. I love Alan Wake in the sort of "I wouldn't trust this man to make pb&j without burning an entire neighbourhood down" way. The Merlin way, the G.I. Joe way. Charming in its complete idiocy.

The Beginning of the Beginning of a Journey

I've known video games as long as I've known books, films, and television shows (in the cases of television shows, I've actually known video games quite a bit longer). I've shared their experience with my brothers, once played Pokemon using my brother's GameBoy under a table so no one would know for months, collapsed on the floor from that one time with the headcrab I just didn't see coming inside that vent, and yelled in rage as I clicked the single wrong space on my Diablo map that ran me straight into the spear of a very angry zombie Amazon. To sum up: I've been a gamer my entire life and games have always meant a lot to me.

Unfortunately, with the price of games, getting games at all has become a war of attrition between me and game publishers, with me lurking around the shelves of GameStop hoping to glimpse the shining corner of a game that I thought I might have wanted to play two years ago but couldn't afford to, like Indiana Jones hitting stone in the desert in Raiders. I bought Bioshock: Infinite for forty bucks the other day and devoured the game in less than a week and felt real smug afterwards, like I'd just duped Ken Levine into giving me his credit card number.

So this is my journey as a late gamer, examining the games people forgot about three years ago and I picked up, weeping in bittersweet joy at the price tag, the accomplishment of months of spoiler avoiding. I have to confess that I did preorder Remember Me for about five dollars when my wallet and checking account were housing a terrifying moth army, but I did desperately want to support a game that apparently needed to dare to have a leading female person of color. And that is the sort of anecdote that also explains a lot about what you'll find in this blog.

But join me, if you feel like it, on this belated quest, the life of the one-step-behind. It's a hard life, but some of us live it still.