On Silent Hill

I just hit up half-price books and found a graphic novel released a year or so back that collects some of the Silent Hill comics they've had out. I think they have two of these books out so far, but this one is a collection of one storyline whereas the other one is three one-shots. Anyway, I grabbed it and as I was trying to pay for it and leave the disheviled 50's-something man working the register forced me into the following exchange:

(Guy looks at the comic) Oh, so this is off that new movie.
Uhh... yeah, kind of. It was actually out a while ago.
(Looking a little offended about something) Yeah, because this is another one of those where they take a graphic novel and turn a movie out of it.
Well, no, there was a game that was out 8 or 9 years ago, that's actually what it's based on.
(Doesn't want to admit that he's clueless on the subject) Right, because they had a game off of it and then they decided to do a movie off of it later.
Sure. (I pay for the book)
I don't like movies now.
...have a nice day, sir. (turn and bee-line for the door)


The majority of my time is for sure spent working, and when I'm not working I tend to be out and about with friends. As such, over the past two years I've come to the realization that I've pretty much stopped playing video games, even though I still follow the newer titles and can talk like I spend vast quantities of my time with an XBox controller in my hand. I still occasionally make the mistake of buying a game only to realize the next day that I'm never going to make the time to play it. Exceptions to this would be if I'm amongst friends. If I was hanging out at home and Mike asked if I wanted to play some Halo 2? Fuck yeah, I probably would. If I'm in the city and DS's are broken out? I bought one for a reason. But on my own when I think about sitting down to play something I think about the actual investment of time that has to be made and almost always opt to watch a TV show or screw around on one of my guitars instead. This has made the involving games like RPG's impossible for me to even think about playing. Too much time, too little reward.

With that said there are a handful of titles that I can't imagine myself ever growing out of. These include a good handful of old NES titles, such as Mario and Zelda, that will always draw me back into the fold. The Final Fantasy games that aren't online or spin-offs will almost undoubtedly get my attention when they come out every few years. The Metal Gear games have some of the best and most political storylines of any games, even moreso that film and tv I would say, and I'm partial to those. And lastly: the Silent Hill games.

They've gone through a lot of changes in the 4 released, some good and some bad, but Silent Hill is one of the few titles that I expect to leave me befuddled and bemused, and THE only title that has ever creeped the shit out of me. Horror movies don't do it for me. The Ring was pretty intense, I thought, and they can be suspenseful and make you jump, but when you're actually holding the reigns of the character set in front of you and they have you descending into twisted basement boiler rooms and abandoned hospitals... it's a lot more intense. There are a good handful of survival-horror games out there--most notable Resident Evil--and I've liked a lot of them in the past. None of them have ever come close to being as dark or disturbing as Silent Hill. I remember playing the demo of the game back as a freshman in High School and saying to my friend I can't believe they would allow a game like this to exist. Granted in the post-GTA era the shock factor has worn off, but we're talking about a game where the plot is stemmed from an incident where they burned an 8-year old girl to as close to death as she could come and then refused to let her die. And with that aside, as the main character looking for his daughter in an abandoned town you focus solely on that. You obviously know something fucked up is going on but the game isn't about making sense of that; it's about getting your daughter and getting the fuck out. And in this sort of situation it's hard to use a term like realistic but seriously--who would think they could save the day? In your standard game, that would be the goal.

This was the first game to have a warning intro that read something along the lines of "This game contains violent imagery which some may find dark and disturbing". And to top that off the puzzles they give you require intimate knowledge of shakespearian work and musical scales. It's not "Find Blue Key for Blue Door" but rather complex logic, math and word puzzles.

I've already said that if you don't know the games you're most likely not going to enjoy the movie. I'm sticking with that. But check it out anyway. Do it.