(no subject)
Allow me to preface this with a disclaimer. I follow hockey sometimes, and the playoffs just started. It's kind of distracting so bear with me. Or just ignore the first paragraph or two.
Earlier tonight I watched a Stanley Cup playoffs game. It was San Jose at Colorado. Naturally I follow my home team, and it's always a tense situation whenever the Sharks get into the playoffs because they're the best team in the league generally, during the season, but during the playoffs they just suck for some reason. Now, we're playing against a team that just is't that good. If you don't know how the playoffs brackets work, the top team plays the 8th best team in the first round, the second best plays the seventh best, et cetera. So we're playing Colorado. The first game both teams were still working on their sea legs. Playing in the playoffs is a huge change from season play, because that's when all that work begins to culminate into tangible reward (aside from the millions and millions of dollars hockey players get paid each year). So not much happens. no one scores a goal until Colorado in the third period. No bi deal, they were both playing mega sloppy, we lost game 1. Not even unfeasible to win the stanley cup from that position. The second game, first period looks kind of bad, lots of goals being scored though as opposed to the nothing that happened first game. This time it's the goalies that need to get their sea legs. They were still playing season hockey before, maybe it just takes them longer to adjust or something. In any case, during the second period of that game, the sharks kicked into gear and started really playing. It was clutch but we did score the game winning goal in the last fifteen seconds of game two (out of seven). We're bright eyed and bushy tailed coming into game three and we dominate them all three periods. Their only talented player (milan hejduk) gets steamrolled right off the bat and he's out for the rest of the game. now he can only look on in horror as the rest of the game is essentially San Jose playing alone. The shot total was something like 53-15 in SJ's favour and their goalie Craig Anderson somehow blocked every single shot. He was a god on the ice, and the avalanche are a blessed team to have him at this stage of the game. But we dominated them the entire time. We play all three regulation periods totaling an hour's of game time and still no score, so we go into overtime.
Not one minute into overtime, Dan Boyle attempts to play the puck from our end and puts it past our goalie off the backhand, losing the game for us. In the interview with him shortly after the game, he looked as though he had just caused the death of three innocent families. "I don't know what happened," he opines, while trying to wipe the guilt and shame off of his face. The emotion laid bare on his face eroded my personal bubble.
We were at my friend's house enjoying the game, he has a large HDTV and a nice tri tip barbecue. We generally watch the game there, as it has the best amenities. For example, a $20,000 upright piano. Now, seeing that I'd just played through the latter half of Silent Hill 2, and being that I am very musically inclined, I attempted to try my hand at playing some songs. Now I'll be the first to admit that I am completely terrible at piano, but I do know some things about music theory, so I can sort of improvise, sometimes, but not with any fluidity. I have a decent ear for notes too, so I can sometimes pick out a melody simply by hearing it, so a few youtube videos later I'm one knuckle deep into a very creative rendition of the Promise reprise (leave this playing as you continue to read the piece). Now, if you're at all familiar with Akira Yamaoka, then you already know exactly what I'm going to say. This man is a genius. He was the composer, sound designer, and audio director for the entire Silent Hill series, and the game fairly drips with his handiwork. Yamaoka cites Angelo Badalamenti, Metallica, and Depeche mode as his chief influences. Coming together with his own vision he manages to so expertly craft a bed upon which every one of your nightmares is brought rise.
Silent hill is a game about death. It is about nothing else. The seemingly terminally absentminded protagonist wanders around a surreal, hostile town while sporadic encounters with other folks exploring the town struggle by themselves in order to unravel the mystery of Silent Hill. While with the ending I got it is unclear that anyone did that, or even managed to live through their ordeal, you are gently goaded into realizing the true nature of he inhospitable town.
Spoilers ahead: The ending that I got (the game tells you after you beat the game that there are 4, but there are actually 7) entailed James leaving Silent Hill. The entire reason James is in Silent Hill to begin with is because he killed his wife. It was both a mercy killing and a resentment killing. The death of suffering. And in the ending James experiences the death of regret, and the death of resentment. Mary's illness had consumed her and thereby their relationship. She lashed out. She made life miserable for them and didn't realize it until it was far, far too late. So, in the throws of limitless regret, Mary writes a letter to James to be delivered posthumously. James then travels through the town which is undeniably neither real nor imaginary. It at once contains all the mundane trappings of real life and the insane, clouded gropings of a shattered mind. The game is deliberately nebulous. Itself embodies the death of meaning. It isn't important anyway, the frame of the game clearly outlines (eventually) a man's inner struggle between his guilt and his hatred in killing his ill wife.
Pyramid head hunts you for most of the game. He first appears in a dilapidated apartment complex and you chance upon him raping some kind of torsoless leg-ridden mannequin creature. He approaches you as you hide in the closet during a cutscene but you unload a clip of handgun ammo into him. He seems nonplussed by the trauma, but leaves nonetheless. Just as the human mind is its own worst enemy, Pyramid head seems to manipulate the town to his whims as you stumble about Silent Hill, eking a path toward the ultimate mystery. You encounter him several times during the game, and in all its metaphorical beauty, during the game not only does he drop his old weapon which happens to be a man-sized butcher knife for a spear which he's much more effective with. He takes this offensive approach to the next level by becoming two whole pyramid heads with more than capable spears. You end up getting the great knife late in the game, but as the game's point becomes more honed, so do you. Ideally, the imagery of using the antagonist's own weapon against him isn't lost, especially in a game this psychologically involving. But after all's said and done, the downfall and the beauty of this game is that even after you learn everything there is to learn you can still but guess at what anything in the game is supposed to be about. Like the main character, Silent Hill is all in the mind of the adventurer. A significant portion of the game is spent in the Rosewater Historical Society, which deigns to be a museum until our intrepid psychonaut finds a hole which he doesn't hesitate to jump in. Thus begins our descent. During this portion of the game, you can expect to continue descending in various manners, and after you've reached the very bottom of this surreal sequence, you find yourself at the docks, a mere fifteen feet away from where we began that part. At this point you row a dinghy through impenetrable fog towards the only identifying feature in sight. The game let me know that I'd rowed just over ten minutes after I finished it. I'll never know why.
James Sunderland is led to Silent Hill by a letter from his dead wife. The game begins with death, and ends (if you're unlucky) with death. And all through the middle of the game, you're coming across death, and despite the fact that you're killing anonymous demons throughout the game, each and every one of them eventually takes on meaning. The other inhabitants are explained. Every conceivable concept depicted in the game is tied to death. Even the music itself is intrusive and terminal. And when you fully digest this game, you experience a death all its own.
Earlier tonight I watched a Stanley Cup playoffs game. It was San Jose at Colorado. Naturally I follow my home team, and it's always a tense situation whenever the Sharks get into the playoffs because they're the best team in the league generally, during the season, but during the playoffs they just suck for some reason. Now, we're playing against a team that just is't that good. If you don't know how the playoffs brackets work, the top team plays the 8th best team in the first round, the second best plays the seventh best, et cetera. So we're playing Colorado. The first game both teams were still working on their sea legs. Playing in the playoffs is a huge change from season play, because that's when all that work begins to culminate into tangible reward (aside from the millions and millions of dollars hockey players get paid each year). So not much happens. no one scores a goal until Colorado in the third period. No bi deal, they were both playing mega sloppy, we lost game 1. Not even unfeasible to win the stanley cup from that position. The second game, first period looks kind of bad, lots of goals being scored though as opposed to the nothing that happened first game. This time it's the goalies that need to get their sea legs. They were still playing season hockey before, maybe it just takes them longer to adjust or something. In any case, during the second period of that game, the sharks kicked into gear and started really playing. It was clutch but we did score the game winning goal in the last fifteen seconds of game two (out of seven). We're bright eyed and bushy tailed coming into game three and we dominate them all three periods. Their only talented player (milan hejduk) gets steamrolled right off the bat and he's out for the rest of the game. now he can only look on in horror as the rest of the game is essentially San Jose playing alone. The shot total was something like 53-15 in SJ's favour and their goalie Craig Anderson somehow blocked every single shot. He was a god on the ice, and the avalanche are a blessed team to have him at this stage of the game. But we dominated them the entire time. We play all three regulation periods totaling an hour's of game time and still no score, so we go into overtime.
Not one minute into overtime, Dan Boyle attempts to play the puck from our end and puts it past our goalie off the backhand, losing the game for us. In the interview with him shortly after the game, he looked as though he had just caused the death of three innocent families. "I don't know what happened," he opines, while trying to wipe the guilt and shame off of his face. The emotion laid bare on his face eroded my personal bubble.
We were at my friend's house enjoying the game, he has a large HDTV and a nice tri tip barbecue. We generally watch the game there, as it has the best amenities. For example, a $20,000 upright piano. Now, seeing that I'd just played through the latter half of Silent Hill 2, and being that I am very musically inclined, I attempted to try my hand at playing some songs. Now I'll be the first to admit that I am completely terrible at piano, but I do know some things about music theory, so I can sort of improvise, sometimes, but not with any fluidity. I have a decent ear for notes too, so I can sometimes pick out a melody simply by hearing it, so a few youtube videos later I'm one knuckle deep into a very creative rendition of the Promise reprise (leave this playing as you continue to read the piece). Now, if you're at all familiar with Akira Yamaoka, then you already know exactly what I'm going to say. This man is a genius. He was the composer, sound designer, and audio director for the entire Silent Hill series, and the game fairly drips with his handiwork. Yamaoka cites Angelo Badalamenti, Metallica, and Depeche mode as his chief influences. Coming together with his own vision he manages to so expertly craft a bed upon which every one of your nightmares is brought rise.
Silent hill is a game about death. It is about nothing else. The seemingly terminally absentminded protagonist wanders around a surreal, hostile town while sporadic encounters with other folks exploring the town struggle by themselves in order to unravel the mystery of Silent Hill. While with the ending I got it is unclear that anyone did that, or even managed to live through their ordeal, you are gently goaded into realizing the true nature of he inhospitable town.
Spoilers ahead: The ending that I got (the game tells you after you beat the game that there are 4, but there are actually 7) entailed James leaving Silent Hill. The entire reason James is in Silent Hill to begin with is because he killed his wife. It was both a mercy killing and a resentment killing. The death of suffering. And in the ending James experiences the death of regret, and the death of resentment. Mary's illness had consumed her and thereby their relationship. She lashed out. She made life miserable for them and didn't realize it until it was far, far too late. So, in the throws of limitless regret, Mary writes a letter to James to be delivered posthumously. James then travels through the town which is undeniably neither real nor imaginary. It at once contains all the mundane trappings of real life and the insane, clouded gropings of a shattered mind. The game is deliberately nebulous. Itself embodies the death of meaning. It isn't important anyway, the frame of the game clearly outlines (eventually) a man's inner struggle between his guilt and his hatred in killing his ill wife.
Pyramid head hunts you for most of the game. He first appears in a dilapidated apartment complex and you chance upon him raping some kind of torsoless leg-ridden mannequin creature. He approaches you as you hide in the closet during a cutscene but you unload a clip of handgun ammo into him. He seems nonplussed by the trauma, but leaves nonetheless. Just as the human mind is its own worst enemy, Pyramid head seems to manipulate the town to his whims as you stumble about Silent Hill, eking a path toward the ultimate mystery. You encounter him several times during the game, and in all its metaphorical beauty, during the game not only does he drop his old weapon which happens to be a man-sized butcher knife for a spear which he's much more effective with. He takes this offensive approach to the next level by becoming two whole pyramid heads with more than capable spears. You end up getting the great knife late in the game, but as the game's point becomes more honed, so do you. Ideally, the imagery of using the antagonist's own weapon against him isn't lost, especially in a game this psychologically involving. But after all's said and done, the downfall and the beauty of this game is that even after you learn everything there is to learn you can still but guess at what anything in the game is supposed to be about. Like the main character, Silent Hill is all in the mind of the adventurer. A significant portion of the game is spent in the Rosewater Historical Society, which deigns to be a museum until our intrepid psychonaut finds a hole which he doesn't hesitate to jump in. Thus begins our descent. During this portion of the game, you can expect to continue descending in various manners, and after you've reached the very bottom of this surreal sequence, you find yourself at the docks, a mere fifteen feet away from where we began that part. At this point you row a dinghy through impenetrable fog towards the only identifying feature in sight. The game let me know that I'd rowed just over ten minutes after I finished it. I'll never know why.
James Sunderland is led to Silent Hill by a letter from his dead wife. The game begins with death, and ends (if you're unlucky) with death. And all through the middle of the game, you're coming across death, and despite the fact that you're killing anonymous demons throughout the game, each and every one of them eventually takes on meaning. The other inhabitants are explained. Every conceivable concept depicted in the game is tied to death. Even the music itself is intrusive and terminal. And when you fully digest this game, you experience a death all its own.