Silent Hill: Origins

Silent Hill 3 went a long way in explaining the gaping plot holes of the first game.  So did we really need a prequel to explain it to even further?  No.  This game is to Silent Hill what Fire Walk With Me is to Twin Peaks: a rehashing of details we already know played out at a much slower pace.

You play as Travis Grady, a truck driver who sees a girl in the middle of the street and decides that means he has to get out of his truck (with the engine still running no less) and go follow her.  He ends up at a burning building, hearing a young girl scream inside, and anyone who has played the first game already knows what this is all about.

You'll then lead Travis through various buildings, all with 90% of the doors locked and broken.  Granted, this is a recurring theme in Silent Hill games, but it seemed worse here.  Seriously, whoever the one locksmith in town is, he needs a new vocation.

Another strange choice is that in this game, Travis can control switching between the real world and the nightmare world by touching mirrors.  In the past games, entering the nightmare world was often a reflection of what the character was going through at the time, usually gaining some piece of information they couldn't quite handle.  That element is gone completely, and now the manually switching back and forth is used to enhance the puzzle elements of the game, where you have to change things in one world and then return to the other to use them.  It's not terrible, but it does take away the fright aspect quite a bit.

Confession time.  I only played this game up to about halfway through the Sanitarium, not quite the halfway point of the game.   I ran out of health drinks and first aid kits, and in my attempt to figure out where to go, the enemies kept killing me.  Travis will arbitrarily lock on to an enemy, and when there are two or more enemies, he'll randomly switch between them.  In Silent Hill you have to stomp on an enemy after they fall down in order for them to stay dead.  I can't stomp on an enemy when Travis is already aiming at the next one.

The controls are just downright horrible. I played the PS2 version, which is a port.  The original was for the PSP, and I don't know if that was any better.  In this version you cannot control the camera, which leads you to walk in circles at times when the game randomly changes direction on you.  You can pick up lots of handheld weapons, but all of them break.  Some are one time use, like when you throw a typewriter at someone.  Others, like the wrench and hammer, will break on you randomly, usually when you're right in the middle of fighting an enemy and then you have to scramble to equip another one or use your rather meager fists.  Pretty much every enemy has the ability to grab you, and you have to do a time based button press to escape the hold or continue to get drained of life. Aren't truck drivers supposed to be tough?  He's such a lightweight.

All the other games in this series had a nicely done jump scare somewhere rather early in the game that would often make me scream in surprise.  No such luck here.  The first monster reveal, you walk up to a nurse whose back is turned.  She's jerking around a little bit, do you think she could be undead??

In order to be the completist I am, I watched a walkthrough on Youtube done by user CRGamer1.  He or she uses a special gun through the walkthrough that you can only get by beating the game and getting a special ending.  As such Travis doesn't have too difficult a time of it, and so perhaps I missed out on any legitimate scares given that the player clearly knew what to expect where.  So all I can really give you an opinion on from this point onward is the story.

It's lame.

Travis has his own story beyond the back story of the original game, but it's boring and uninteresting.  The back story is no better explained here than it was in the first game.  If you manage to get the bad ending, which you can only get the second time you play by killing a large number of enemies, it kind of/sort of attempts to explain the origins of Pyramid Head, but not really.  But who wants to go through this tedious game twice? If there's any entry in the series you can skip, it is definitely this one.

Silent Hill: Origins?  More like Bore-igins.*

*This is probably as close to seeing me act like an angry critic as you're ever going to get.  I hope you enjoyed it.

Silent Hill 4

Playing through this series has been like riding on a roller coaster of difficulty.  The first game was decent in terms of challenge.  Then I played Shattered Memories where you literally can't die except in the motion controlled sequences.  Then I played Origins and Homecoming, and their combat was far too difficult.  Playing this game right afterward, I think I know why.  This game has enemies, but they are ridiculously easy to avoid or beat.  There are also no boss battles up until the climax of the game.

In this game you play as Henry Townshend, a young man who finds himself trapped in his apartment and suffering from recurring nightmares.  You can peer out your windows and peephole, and people pass you messages under your door, but otherwise the only way out of the apartment is a strange hole that appears in the bathroom and keeps getting larger.  This hole leads to the nightmare world that we're so used to seeing in Silent Hill, though technically Henry lives in a town called Ashfield.  Every time you go through the hole, someone ends up dead and another bloody hand print appears in the hallway opposite your room.  The victims also have ascending numbers carved into their chests.

The strategy of this game is really about avoiding enemies rather than killing them.  One of the most common enemies is in fact unkillable.  You can temporarily knock them down but they will always get up again, and standing near them drains your life.  There are health items around the nightmare world that give you health back, or you can just jump back into your apartment and that will regenerate your health up until a certain point in the game.  It definitely takes the survival out of the survival horror genre.

There are occasional moments when you're trapped inside your room that are truly creepy.  You view the room through the first person perspective, and that really helps.  Unfortunately these scares are few and far between.

As usual there are puzzles to solve, but I found nearly all of them ridiculously easy.  There was no real need to write down information for later use, and definitely no need for me to consult a walkthrough.  A little trial and error and I quickly found my way past it.  I really felt more like I was just watching a story unfold than I was playing an actual game. 

And how is that story?  As I mentioned in my Silent Hill 2 review, this story builds on bits and pieces you read in newspaper and magazine articles in both that game and Silent Hill 3.  I'm guessing the creators thought up this story idea back then and couldn't logically fit it into those games, but when commissioned to do another sequel figured they might as well give it a try.  The problem is it's just not that interesting.  I stopped playing this game for over a month about halfway through.  Jak lost interest in watching me play, and without him to egg me on I couldn't bring myself to complete it until the HD Collection was released and I reminded myself that I really wanted to review the whole series in as complete a fashion as possible.

I won't spoil the ending for you, because this being an incredibly easy game, you may want to try it out if you can find it cheap and want to see what this series is like.  But don't get your hopes up, because the big reveal is pretty ridiculous.  If you don't mind spoilers, I'll just say that the antagonist shares something in common with the protagonist of a certain children's book.  Seriously.

I feel a little bad that this review is so short, but honestly, with a mediocre game like this there just isn't much to say.  As is so often the case when we get this far along into sequels, the original ideas have simply become stale.  The idea of being trapped in your apartment had a lot of potential, but considering that you spend a lot of time outside of it, they mostly squandered that idea.

Silent Hill 3

Remember how I said that the ending of the original Silent Hill didn't make any sense?  Clearly I wasn't alone in that feeling.  After trying to take the series in a slightly different direction in Silent Hill 2, Konami decided to try to clear up the original story a bit in Silent Hill 3.  I'm not sure that we needed an entire game to explain these events, but regardless it's what we got.

Silent Hill 3 is notable for having the series only female protagonist.  Her name is Heather Mason, and she's  the baby that Harry carried off at the end of Silent Hill, assuming you got one of the good endings.  She's 17 now, and her mannerisms reflect that.  As I would inspect things around the room, she would frequently tell me in very wordy terms that she wasn't interested in it or that it didn't look important.  In some ways that's a nice change of pace from the more blunt messages Harry and James used to tell me, but it also got a little annoying after a while.  Fortunately you have the option to walk away after the first line of dialogue if you get tired of her ramblings.  She's also extra rude to nearly everyone she runs into in the game, whether they deserve it or not.

I played the game on normal puzzle difficulty and easy combat yet again.  I only really had trouble with monsters when multiple types would swarm at me, or when a boss had a particular trick to him that made it more of a challenge.  But one of the bosses, Leonard, was just too easy.  I knocked him over once with a shotgun blast and went over to him and started kicking him.  He flailed about but never got back up again.  It was kind of pathetic.  The puzzles on the other hand were pretty appropriately challenging.

I liked that this game relied heavily on sounds to scare you.  While a lot of the monsters don't really look all that frightening, they make horrible noises.  The sounds of them moaning and crying through the halls put me on edge and while there was a degree of desensitization, it seemed to take a lot longer than in the other games.  There are also a fair amount of enemies that you're much better off running away from than trying to kill, which adds its own unique challenge as you try to explore the hallways and avoid them at the same time.  I also noticed this game tricks you a lot, making you enter a room that has no real purpose other than that there's an enemy inside waiting to ambush you.  It's a fairly cheap trick, but it felt appropriate for a survival horror game anyway.  What didn't feel quite so appropriate was the strange mix of weapons Heather finds upon her way.  I hate to complain about the katana, which is is a much better hand to hand weapon than the pipe I'm normally forced to use, but why would one of those just be laying around in an office building for me to pick up?

I also think I understand why Silent Hill 2 and 3 were included together in the HD Collection, beyond them being the first two PS2 releases.  The layout of the town is identical, as is the look of the hospital and the night club.  In the original release of Silent Hill 3, if you had a save state for Silent Hill 2 on your memory card, it would unlock short FMVs that were references to that game.  Those are also included on this disc,  though I'm not sure if a save state for SH2 is required or not.  But it was funny to see Heather refuse to stick her hand inside a stopped up toilet asking "Who would ever do that?" when I knew the answer was James Sunderland.  It was also nice to see a few locations from the first game presented with updated graphics.

People have complained that the HD Collection has it's problems, and I encountered some myself during the final level of the game.  It locked up on me twice.  Once was right after a save point, but the other wasted a good ten to fifteen minutes of gameplay.  And I'm playing the PS3 version; from what I've heard the 360 version is worse.  Just something to be aware of if you're debating on what version to purchase.

As far as the story of the game, I think it does a good job finishing up what was established in the first one.  I found myself really wondering just how it was going to end, not sure if Heather could truly come out of this okay given the position she was in. It's a decent ending and also one of the grossest things I've ever seen happen in a video game. The final boss is very creepy looking too. After my experience with the previous games, I was also waiting to see what kind of choices would be available that would dictate my ending.  There was only one choice that I'm aware of, and it turns out it is completely irrelevant on your first playthrough.  I suppose the reason they changed this is so that a player will always see the canon ending even if they only play it once, but personally there just wasn't enough here to make me play it again, even though they gave me a new costume and two new weapons when I was finished.  It's not a bad game by any means, but it does pale in comparison to the first two games.

Silent Hill 2

Silent Hill 2 was pretty much the whole reason I wanted to play these games, and with the continually delayed release of the HD Collection, I had to really wait for it.  I think it's hard not to judge games in a series based on your experiences with the others you've played, so I think it's fair to mention that as I started this game, I had already played Silent Hill 4 through Homecoming and only had 3 and Downpour remaining.  That said, I had heard that this game was largely considered the best in the series and I was looking forward to it.

That largely led me to expect a lot of scares, and so I was initially disappointed.  While our first glimpse of Pyramid Head is certainly very creepy, before then there really isn't much.  I played on Easy enemy difficulty and Normal puzzle difficulty, so there may have been even less enemies than normal, and it certainly made them ridiculously easy to kill, but the game mostly relies on lulling you into safety as you continually search abandoned hallways and rooms in your long meandering search to find your wife Mary, who has sent you a letter asking you to meet her in Silent Hill, despite the fact that she died three years ago.  You run into other characters along the way, all suffering with their own burdens. 

Because of that slow pace, darkness, and mostly silence for long periods of the games, it does set you on edge the moment you hear the music kick in.  And it's almost always haunting and creepy.  As I continued through the game, I found myself needing to take a break for a while because I was starting to feel too tense and needed some relief.

There are a few decent jump scares, and there are two or three moments where you hear creepy whispering as you explore environments.  Menacing sounding voices that you can't quite make out what they are saying, but these people are clearly mad at you and man you hope you don't run into them.  It's really just beautifully done.  And while part of me wants to complain about the slower parts of the game, the fact is that if this game was set at a faster pace, you probably wouldn't be as scared anymore.  I also can't complain about the ridiculously easy setting, because I'd much rather be able to defeat enemies and move on with the story than be stuck at parts.

This game went a long way in expanding the mythology behind Silent Hill.  Harry Mason and his daughter are nowhere to be found, though the town's history with the occult is obviously still present.  What I also found interesting was that I ran into a newspaper clipping which didn't really tie into this story at all, but was related to the major plot of Silent Hill 4.  That's a level of detail you really have to appreciate.

Perhaps my biggest complaint is that once again, the story is not particularly well explained.  When I finished the game, I turned to Jak and asked "So who is Maria?" because while the character is introduced and plays a large role in the game, we never quite know where she came from or why she's here, at least not in the ending I received.  I love the fact that there's so much going on here.  While we follow James Sunderland on his journey, we see that two other characters, Angela and Eddie, are also experiencing their own personal hells within this place, and that's what Silent Hill is largely meant to be.  But Maria's story is left hanging, largely because your choices in the game change the ending, and she's one of the things that can change.  I'm aware that there's bonus content they added to later editions to fill in the gaps (and for some reason is absent from the HD collection) but it's a flaw, in my opinion, that they had to add this later to explain it.

However, it's a fairly minor complaint.  Silent Hill has a dreamy quality to it, and it's natural that there are going to be elements to a dream that don't always entirely make sense.  James' story is complex and difficult and his journey is an emotional one.  No spoilers here because if there's any in this series that I can recommend, it's this one.  Beyond its original PS2 release and  the PS3 HD Collection I own, it was released for the Xbox and PC, so if you stumble upon a copy you really owe it to yourself to give it a try.

Speaking of the HD Collection, I feel that's a little bit of a misnomer.  I wouldn't call these HD quality graphics, either in the gameplay or the FMV segments.  They also recorded new voice acting for this game, which I chose after being burned by the silly voice acting in the first game. It was definitely an improvement over the first game's recording,  but I haven't heard the original one for this game to make a comparison there.

Castle Rock Companion - The Rage: Carrie 2

It's a little later than I expected this to go up, but once you hit play and watch a few minutes I think you'll understand what made this video take a little longer. :)













Huge thanks to Noel for joining me in this review, doing the editing, and for being willing to cover all those sequels!

Silent Hill

It's almost Halloween, so it's time for another marathon!  Each day until October 31st I will be covering my experiences with the Silent Hill video game series.

Survival horror games have always seemed very intriguing to me, but I was also a bit scared to play them too.  Now that I've been watching more horror films, I thought I might be ready for them.  When the Silent Hill HD Collection was announced, I wanted to start with the very first game in the series to see if I could handle it.  The game was made in 1999 for the original Playstation.  The graphics are downright horrible in places.  Surely it wouldn't scare me, right?

Wrong.

The game starts out fairly mild, as the lead character Harry gets in a car accident with his daughter, but then she disappears from the car.  You're tasked with finding her in the fog covered town of Silent Hill.  This world frequently switches between a deserted but otherwise normal town to a freakish nightmare world.  Even the normal world isn't safe though, as it's inhabited by skinless dogs and large birds.  The nightmare world features ultra-creepy faceless children, zombie-like doctors and nurses, and faceless corpses looking to hump you.  No, really.

The first major task of the game is to go to the abandoned elementary school, and this is where things start to get scary.  While the graphics are outdated, the sound more than makes up for it.  The children giggle and whisper, there are random slams and bangs to make you jump out of your seat, and the music builds as you enter certain areas of the building.  I found myself really scared to open doors, uncertain of what I might find on the other side.

It's a really great feeling you simply can't get from watching a horror film.  When you watch a movie, you might want a character to not go in the house, but they are going to regardless.  With these video games, you and only you are responsible for making it happen.  You can delay as much as you want, but if you have any intention of getting through this game, you're going to have to do it.

Unfortunately, the further the game goes on, the more you get used to its methods of scaring you.  Each enemy you run into initially can be quite creepy, but after awhile the effect wears off.  You go from "Die you creepy little kid!" to "Just shut up already!"  Even the music starts to wear off after awhile, as I found myself telling it "Yes, yes, you're very scary.  I'm proud of you."  You can only hear ominous music build so many times and find nothing on the other side of the door until it just doesn't have an effect on you.

I'm willing to forgive the diminishing returns because when the game does get you, it gets you good.  What I'm not so willing to forgive is the complete mess of a story.  The dialogue is absolutely terrible.  It's clear that someone did a perfunctory translation of the Japanese and then seemed to ask the voice actors to record their dialogue one line at a time.  Honestly, that last part is probably related to disc memory and such, but it makes everything come off sounding really stilted.  It's also just really stupid in parts.

Harry: "This time was different.  Instead of just shifting from the normal world to the nightmare world, it felt like the normal world became the nightmare world."

Thank you, Mr. Exposition.

Harry: "It's an altar.  I wonder what they worshipped?"

You've seen corpses hanging on walls and blood splattered all over the floor, and only now you are starting to wonder what kind of religion this is?  Seriously, he says this at the climax of the game.

This dialogue also results in the actual plot of the game not being explained very well.  I felt a lot like I was watching Akira or playing the original Final Fantasy in that there was definitely a story going on underneath the surface but the translation just was not giving me all I needed.

The other frustrating thing about the game was that it is exceedingly easy to get lost.  While wandering the hospital, I never found a map of the place.  Being given no clear direction on where I was supposed to go, this resulted in me losing out on picking up a few key items that would have allowed me to get the best ending.  Later, following the directions the game told me,  I very nearly ended up stuck with the worst ending.  The only reason I avoided it was because Jak had previous experience with the game and told me I had missed something. I ended up having to redo a half hour worth of gameplay, but I'm just glad I had kept an alternate save point from earlier that allowed me to even do that.

While not a perfect game by any means, I consider this a great introduction to the survival horror genre that made me want to dig deeper.


Here's a really silly video Jak and I made after sitting through the mind numbing dialogue in this game.  

Castle Rock Companion - Carrie

There is technically one more film to be covered that is related to Carrie.. but you'll have to wait a few days to see that video!

Castle Rock Companion - Graveyard Shift

New collaborative projects and blogs

So things over here are getting fairly quiet, or at least not updating anywhere near as much as they used to.  But that doesn't mean I haven't been working!

For whatever reason, in July I found myself really wanting to do some new things.  Strangers from the Internet was/is still on hiatus, and the marathon movie posts I had been doing left me rather fatigued.  So I essentially went back to the wells and found a way to try to make this all fun again.  Because if writing and reviewing isn't fun for you, you're doing it for the wrong reasons!

One thing was the switch to more video reviews, which you've seen here already.  My Castle Rock Companion series and any other video reviews I do will still be linked here.  It's not entirely impossible that I'll be doing written reviews here too, though they will mostly be unplanned as the moment strikes me.  I do have a marathon scheduled for Halloween that's been in the works for a while.

But a lot of my written reviews are now appearing elsewhere.  Made of Fail runs a fun recap/review blog called Second Time Around, where anyone and everyone is invited to pick a series they are familiar with - be it television, books, comics, video games, whatever, and review them step by step.  I thought it sounded like a really fun idea, so after picking my brain a bit I decided to choose the Age of Apocalypse crossover from the X-men comics.  Those reviews are similar in the style to the comic reviews I've done here, so if you liked them I'd recommend checking them out.  Other folks are also doing their own reviews there, on things such as Stephen King's The Stand, The Prisoner television series, and anime series Ouran High School Host Club.  Check them out!

The other place my written reviews will begin appearing is The Monthly Midnight Movie Exchange.  Every month Tony, Noel, and I will take turns picking a film and then we review and discuss.  As the title suggests, these will be movies outside of the mainstream, those odd little films you might find flipping through the channels that you've never heard of before but have enough wacky charm for you to appreciate them.  Given how much I enjoy The Mike's From Midnight With Love blog, there was no way I was going to pass up the chance to review these kinds of movies when it was offered to me.  Our first pick is Enter the Ninja, and I am so looking forward to doing my pick next month of The Calamari Wrestler!

That's an awful lot of stuff and a lot of different websites to remember, isn't it?  Well, in an effort to make it a little easier for others (and also to help me keep track of them all in one place), I've set up a blog on my main website that will post links to all of these various projects as they go live.  You can subscribe to that RSS feed rather than ten million little ones if you prefer.  And of course I always post links on my Twitter account to all these projects, but Twitter posts have a way of disappearing under a sea of tweets about food and spoilers so I thought something a little more organized might be better.

Now that that's all out of the way, expect a new Castle Rock Companion here later this month, and with any luck an additional non-Stephen King video review if all this hurricane business calms down long enough for me to get some work done.

Castle Rock Companion - Misery

Introducing a new video series!  I had originally planned to do this as a marathon for October, a special lead in to Halloween.  But then inspiration struck - instead of killing myself trying to read all those books and short stories in one year, I could make it a series and give each one the proper attention it deserves.  There are so many adaptations out there and even more in development that this series should be going for a long time.  I hope you enjoy it!





If you missed the Harry Potter entries I mention in the video, they can be viewed through my Harry Potter tag.