The Videogame Solipsist: 32 and onward Halloween Edition

Silent Hill 3 (PS2)

Though I still think of the second entry in the series as the best, I also really liked Silent Hill 3. I know people seem to have problems with this game, largely stemming from its brevity and a somewhat irritating plot that ties in to the first game, but for my money, it's still damn good. The cold opening of the game, thrusting you into a haunted amusement park with no idea of what's going on, is pretty memorable. I played through the entire game in one day and haven't revisited it since, so I don't have much to say about it.

Silent Hill 2 (Xbox)

I went into this game in greater detail before, so I'll just link you to that. There ya go.

Resident Evil 4 (Wii)

Hate to repeat myself, but I also wrote about this game before. Here ya go.

Resident Evil 3 (Playstation)

Resident Evil 3 is kind of like the odd man out of the series, since the team who made the much loved second game went on directly to Resident Evil: Code Veronica (a game I've never played much of because it just seemed like more of the same) and another group worked on RE3, reportedly at the behest of the American arm of Capcom who saw dollar signs spin in their eyes like 1940s cartoon characters after the success of RE2. The mechanics of RE3 are a bit more action-y than the other pre-RE4 games, new additions which I never quite mastered because I could never time the 'dodge' or 'side step' correctly. The best part about this game was the Nemesis, pictured above, who followed you throughout the game, attacking you at what seemed to be random points, in the process creating a real sense of your character being hunted that no other game has given me. I think there were something like nine different times in the game you could fight him, and he represented an interesting risk vs. reward concept because you got good stuff off of him if you managed to down him. Anyway, RE3 is a good, overlooked survival horror game, and one who's more action-y gameplay inadvertantly spelled out the direction of the future of the series.

Resident Evil 2 (Playstation)

I really hope that someday the Resident Evil series gets back to the 'dual scenario' idea, because I loved the way, in RE2, you chose between two different characters who had wildly different plots through the game yet intersected at various points. Each character also had 'A' and 'B' scenarios, so if you played, say, Leon's scenario first, your actions in that playthrough would affect Claire's subsequent 'B' scenario. I must've play through RE2 at least three times fully, through each of the characters' scenarios. The only thing I don't like about this game anymore is the awkward tank controls. It's hard to go back once you've played RE4, which is admittedly designed around action and big set piece battles, and thus doesn't have the steady, deliberate tension building of RE 1 and 2. Speaking of...

Resident Evil (Gamecube)

I never got all that far in the original release of Resident Evil for Playstation, but the Gamecube remake was excellent. It's interesting to remember just how convoluted and difficult the first Resident Evil was: there's a lot of inventory juggling, backtracking, and frustrating combat to slog through. Though it is spooky and terrifying (the addition of those huge sharks in the remake was a brilliant touch), it's impossible for me to go back to RE1, remake or otherwise. Actually, it's a great game to watch playthroughs or speed runs of, mostly because it'll give you a good idea of how far the series (and survival horror) has come.

Half-Life (PC)

This one is debateable, since there are large portions of this game that are mainly shooting or puzzle solving. I would argue that there's something very survival horror-y about it nonetheless. You're in a government installation that gets invaded by cross dimensional aliens, who slowly kill everyone and make it as difficult as possible for you to escape not only them but the government forces sent in to clean up. You may not remember Half-Life 1 as a particularly scary game, but keep in mind that you're given a flashlight for a reason. Give the first few areas of the game another go and I think you might see what I mean.

Doom 3 (PC)

I'm in the minority on this, but I totally bought into the atmosphere and terror of Doom 3. I actually think it did the whole 'extradimensional creatures taking over a government lab' thing better than Half-Life, mostly because the demons are actively transforming the base rather than just showing up to kill people. I also love the Mars setting along with the whole backstory of artifacts and such on the planet, as well an extinct alien race. As with Half-Life, this one is debateable whether it's survival horror or not, though I would argue it's actually trying to be scary most of the time whereas Half-Life just happens to be by chance as much as design. Maybe the flashlight mechanic (borrowed from Half-Life??) was annoying and the constant monster closets were more 'jump' scares than anything....but I still liked Doom 3 a lot. It still belongs on a list of 'Halloween' games, y'know??

Aliens Vs. Predator (PC)

The original Aliens Vs. Predator for PC was pants-pissingly-scary to me. While playing as the tough Predator, the Aliens are merely creepy and annoying. While playing as the weaker Colonial Marine, they are nightmare inducing. I can't tell you how scary I thought this game was, since I was and remain a huge fan of the Alien film franchise and often had dreams about the creatures without the help of a game that let me experience them in first person. So, yeah. Nightmare inducing. Oddly, whenever I tried to play as the Alien, my PC's graphics card couldn't display its alternate vision mode correctly so I couldn't get past the second or third level. I felt like it was a purposeful middle finger from the universe, letting me know that I'll always be on the receiving end of Alien claws, double jaws, and screeches that make me curl up in a ball and hope my death is a quick one.

The 7th Guest (PC)

Myst delivered a new age of PC adventure games thanks to the CD format, games which were essentially a string of difficult logic puzzles stitched together with bad 3D prerendered graphics and poor quality video/audio. The 7th Guest was that only set in a haunted house. My sister and I never got far in the game, but still remember it fondly as one creepy ass game. The ghostly clown saying "want a balloon, kiddie?!" was a running joke between us for years, and I suspect if I went back now and played it, I would giggle at how archaic it is.

Anyway, Happy Halloween!!

Shadow of the Colossus

I have this problem with videogames sometimes. I become so caught up in the carrot-on-a-string elements of a game that I don't stop to look around and experience the world I've elected to enter. Videogames become something I need to complete or finish (or even play enough of to write a review) instead of something to enjoy and appreciate. This is why I so often don't finish games, and why I initially gave up on Shadow of the Colossus: games start to feel like work, specifically homework. I feel like I have to finish a game in order to competently talk about it. I feel like I have to play certain games because everyone else is, or they games in question are beloved critical classics that didn't sell well but offer something very different and compelling from most other videogames.

So, then, let me just say this: if we really want videogames to be accepted as the new form of art, of expression, that they are, we need more games like Shadow of the Colossus. Though it has a story that could potentially be told in another medium, it couldn't be experienced/told in exactly the same way. And that's the key: the translation of this game to another artform would change it irrevocably.

I keep coming back to the argument that they had on one of the 1UPFM Backlog segments about videogames as a medium, and how the one thing that videogames can do that others can't is interactivity. I absolutely agree with Ryan O'Donnell on this point, because I truly believe videogames as an artistic medium, rather than an entertainment medium, will only continue to evolve if they focus on making the story interactive and embedded in the game world somehow. Not all videogames should do this, of course, because not all videogames are trying to tell a story, or at least are so focused on one. Narrative driven videogames, however, should, in my opinion. I felt such connection to the Shadow of the Colossus world and story because I was the one discovering it all and interacting with it. Moreover, even though there are cutscenes that help tell the story, you can always, at the very least, move the camera around.

As with Ico, I think Shadow of the Colossus quickly divides its audience into people who just want to have fun while a story is spoon fed to them and people who want to experience something and exist in an environment, exploring it, in order to get most of the story. I wouldn't consider this game fun to play, but as an interactive experience, it's one of the best the medium has to offer. Much like Silent Hill 2, I can easily forgive and overlook the shortcomings and awkwardness of the "gameplay" aspect in order to get the fulfilling environmental, atmospheric, and implicit narrative. Speaking of which: that the cutscenes in the game have interactivity, however limited, is a step in the right direction for an artform long reduced to aping other mediums to convey information.

If early RPGs, text adventures, and adventure games represented videogames borrowing from books to be art; if games with gorgeous graphics (2D graphics count, haters) represented borrowing from paintings and visual art to be art; if games like Metal Gear Solid represented borrowing from movies to be art...then games like Shadow of the Colossus represent videogames realizing their potential as an artistic medium on their own unique ground: interactivity. Note that this is not a snobbish way of saying that this automatically makes these kind of games superior. Maybe Shadow of the Colossus (or 'art' games in general) is not a game that you will enjoy. This doesn't mean you're a bad person or that you're stupid. After all, not everyone likes watching art films, reading difficult fiction, or going to museums to look at paintings. It's simply an artistic outgrowth of a form of entertainment, and it's endlessly exciting to see an artform in its infancy produce something so grand.

The two things that this game gets right, that I would argue no other game has gotten right before or since, are a sense of scale and a feeling of utter solitude. Both of these things are tied into exactly what makes Shadow of the Colossus so brilliant, so we'll examine them separately.

Upon encountering most Colossi, your reaction will likely be “wow, how am I going to defeat this thing??” Though your sword will reveal their weak points—a trope of boss battles that have been in videogames for years—it's never immediately obvious how you can get to and assault those weak points. People have criticized Shadow of the Colossus for being “only” a series of 16 boss battles, but that is needlessly reductive. As the common saying about this game goes, the Colossi “are” the levels. Even the ones that aren't towering bipedal creatures are 'levels' in the general sense of the word. They're like a combination of a linear platformer 'level' and a puzzle game. You 'solve' each Colossus fight as much as you 'get to the end of the level.' And given the enormous scale of most of the Colossi in the game, the enormity of your task is directly proportional to how satisfying it feels when you take them down. Seeing the comparatively tiny Wander take down these huge beasts, after being initially intimidated by them, is utterly compelling even though the sneaking suspicion that what you're doing isn't totally “good” quickly becomes a walking and then a running suspicion.

The other half of Shadow of the Colossus's gameplay is getting to the various Colossi. Getting lost in most 3D games of this sort is usually a frustration, but, here, it is a kind of reward. Even discounting the fruit trees and lizards that boost Wander's life and grip meter, respectively, the unforgettable experience of traversing the game's world feels like an optional, but wholly complete, gameplay system. Fighting the Colossi may be the game's big draw, but I would argue moving through the world is equally important. From the brilliantly realistic way that Wander's horse, Agro, acts and is controlled, to the breathtaking but completely barren (note: barren meaning “nobody else is there”, not “wastelands”) scenery you see, Shadow of the Colossus contains one of the most complete and 'natural' worlds in all of videogame history. In most games, when you happen upon a cool looking chunk of architecture, or a clearing in a forest, or some such thing, you have been conditioned to expect that some tangible game reward is there. To get a bit behind the scenes on you, a programmer wouldn't take the time to detail such an area unless there is something there. It's a waste of time and money to do this. Not so for Shadow of the Colossus. As with the behavior of the Colossi themselves—which greatly vary in their aggressiveness and reactive-ness to stimuli, just like animals in real life—everything is put into the game just to be there and to feel natural. There are forests, waterfalls, beaches, and desert expanses that serve no game purpose other than to exist and be discovered.

Shadow of the Colossus is an extraordinarily lonely game on top of all this. By the time you finish the game, you'll have spent hours with just your horse, riding around the world and trying to find paths to the next Colossus. This might sound frustrating on paper, but the game is purposely designed to evoke solitude and loneliness in the player. Though dread quickly supersedes the feeling, your immediate reaction upon seeing a Colossus is one of relief: finally, another living thing!! As someone who enjoys being alone, I found this game to be surprisingly satisfying for the amount of time you go without hearing or seeing anything other than the environment and your horse. Some have compared this feeling to the Tom Hanks movie, Castaway, and I think it's pretty apt, especially when you realize you're personalizing and sympathizing with a horse, albeit probably the most realistic horse in videogame history.

I'd like to close by saying that the story of the game is one of the best the artform has to offer even though there isn't technically that much of it. But due to its minimalist style, less is indeed more. The game, like a good art film, trusts you to fill in the blanks yourself. It's also open to interpretation, as most great works of art are, and once you really start to question and think about the implications of the story line, the motivations of the characters, and the results of your actions in the world, you're left with a lot of things to chew on. If most gamers of my generation entered the artform through Mario, in which you were obviously the good guy, saving the helpless princess love interest, then Shadow of the Colossus is, arguably, the point where everything became a little more complicated, and grew up a lot. In this game, you're maybe not a good guy, doing maybe not good things, to save a girl (we're not sure if she's a princess, a priestess, or just an average person) without really knowing our motivation for doing so (she could be our love interest, or a girl we love from afar, or our sister, or something else entirely).

Well, OK, the motivation of the game is, simply, love. Love is the only thing that could cause what is ostensibly an average guy to try to take on these huge beasts, potentially losing his life in the process. Good or bad, what Wander does is for his love of this girl, and that's something that I don't think we, as the player coming to this world from the outside, need explained to us. We've all been crazy enough due to love to try the impossible. So even if we, as the player, have only a vague idea of our motivation in the game, we understand and sympathize with Wander because we've been there. After awhile, I wasn't questioning whether Wander was doing good or bad; I felt like, he's in love, and I've been in love, and good or bad doesn't come into the issue when he is trying to help the one he loves. It's very rare that a videogame can make me relate to a character on a pretty fundamentally human level while not knowing anything about him or her otherwise. And that, if nothing else, proves to me that Shadow of the Colossus is art, and is one of the best videogames ever made.

Killer7

Killer7 is definitely a game that I would not consider 'fun', but one that demonstrates the potential of videogames as a storytelling medium. You could tell this story as a movie, manga, novel, etc. but it wouldn't be quite the same narrative as it was in this game. The various tools the game uses--the cell shaded graphics, the inspired/unique sound design (the acoustic guitar strum when items appear; the mechanical voice saying "bullet"), the intentionally awkward controls (at first I hated them, but after awhile they seem very deliberate), the mix of anime and CG cutscenes, the interactions in the 'save rooms' (the TV channel idea is charmingly bizarre)--could never be done in any other medium.
I know people are starting to apply the auteur theory to videogame designers, but this is a case where I feel it truly applies. You couldn't get a game like this out of any designer other than Suda51. As the game is a surreal, complex mess that I'm still trying to unravel after the ending, it reminds me a lot of a David Lynch film, open ended meanings and "leave it up to each viewer/player to decide for themselves" and all. In a similar fashion to how you always get the impression Lynch had a hand in everything in his films from the sound scoring to the camera angles to the production design to the dialogue, you get the sense that Killer7 was entirely Suda's vision brought to life.

This isn't to say that Killer7 is a flawless masterpiece. There's a big difference between an 'art' game and a great 'art' game. Just as I've never seen a movie quite like Lost Highway but don't consider it a great movie, I've never played a game like Killer7 but don't consider it a great game. This raises a whole 'nother side debate of why I play certain games, and what I hope to get out of them. Killer7 is a unique, inspired, and utterly memorable experience (experience being the key word here) but playing it is often a frustrating chore. Even though you effectively can't lose because of the Garcian character, who can instantly revive dead characters by recovering their bodies, Killer7 is still a difficult-for-the-wrong reasons gameplay experience. Enemies that can instantly kill you, or that can get off cheap hits on you because you just came through a door, are something the entire medium needs to leave behind if we want more people to stick with 'art' games like this. I don't mean that such games need to be stupidly easy, but they should at least make getting through the narrative as easy as possible.
As it's a mix of a rail shooter, survival horror, and an adventure game, Killer7 doesn't do any of these pieces particularly well, but as a combined package, it's frequently brilliant. This especially comes to a head with the boss battles, which range from unique spins on the tried and true "expose/shoot the weakpoint" to a High Noon-esque duel with a dove as the timer to a predetermined, fighting game-style tournament that you play but have no direct effect on to a "final" boss fight in which you win by letting all your characters die. Kind of.

All the while, the game is playing with the conventions of the above genres, and videogames as a whole. Just as Earthbound could be taken as a parody of RPGs, Killer7 constantly undermines your idea of what a game can be and what's supposed to happen during a plot. Much as Lost Highway starts off as a mystery about the disappearance of a musician's wife before things quickly take a turn for the surreal, Killer7 starts off about a team of assassins assigned to stop a terrorist group before quickly going off the deep end. It is absolutely post-modern, and skirts dangerously close to being a meta-game at certain points. Though it may not make a whole lot of sense to you, but you'll never forget it. The levels you go through--particularly the school and the Japanese-style mansion/house--have a surreal, dream-like atmosphere that matches the ghostly characters who talk to you with their distorted, robotic voices, creepy monologues out of which you can occasionally catch a intelligible word or two.
If you approach Killer7 like you would any other game, trying to overcome the enemies and power your way through to the end, you're missing the point. Even if it is ostensibly a shooter, it's one of those games--like Silent Hill 2, Earthbound, and Shadow of the Colossus--which you're tempted, indeed encouraged, to think about when you're done playing, and to go back to over the years to catch new details. To take your time with the game, linger in its environments, and puzzle at the complicated story (and backstory) as well as the series of endings, is to fully understand what the game was trying to do. To put it succinctly, Killer7 is a game you don't play, it's a game you experience. It has its flaws (after all, it's one of those titles that the same reasons I give for loving it, other people give for hating it) but as an experience it remains one of the best the medium has to offer.

The Darkness That Lurks In Our Mind

Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams (Xbox)

Playing Silent Hill 2 does something to me that I've never been able to fully explain. It's the sort of experience that defies me to put it into words without being reductionist or overlooking something. To put it as best I can, Silent Hill 2 terrifies, fascinates, confuses, and engages me in a way that even the rest of the games in the same series don't.

If I were to compile a list of games that proved videogames were art, Silent Hill 2 would be on my list. The atmosphere of the game--the environments, the sound design, the music--is probably the single most memorable and affecting in recent memory, and is every bit as good as the material that influenced it. That is to say, David Lynch movies (particularly Blue Velvet), David Cronenberg movies, J-Horror, Jacob's Ladder, and many psychological philosophies and texts. Wandering through the first 20 minutes of the game, you are making your way into the town itself--fog and snow obstruct your vision, but you keep thinking you see things in the distance or in the very fog itself. You hear odd noises that never repeat or make another appearance. You meet a woman in a cemetery who seems far more afraid of you than the bizarre world around her. And from there, the game just gets more frightening, mind bending, and surreal as it goes.

Jaywalking is punished with...unique methods in Silent Hill

It would ruin the plot to discuss almost anything, but suffice it to say that Silent Hill 2 has one of the most complex, multi-layered, and ultimately ambiguous stories in any game I've played and yet still feels satisfying even if all your questions about James, his wife Mary, the character Maria, and the town/monsters themselves are not fully explained. This is the sort of videogame you will be thinking about as you play it, between sessions of playing it, and after you're done playing it. The sights and sounds--oh, the sounds!!--will stay with you, from the first appearance of Pyramid Head that mirrors a scene from Blue Velvet to the subtle and terrifying ambient noise to the brilliant and always appropriate music by Akira Yamaoka to the various endings you can get which each offer a unique ending to the story.

Employees shouldn't bother to wash their hands

The problem I have with the game is this: it's not that much fun to play. This may sound odd coming from someone who absolutely adores it, but hear me out. The experience, in sum total, of Silent Hill 2 is one of the greatest videogames have to offer. But that said, it's not that much fun to play. The combat isn't the focus of the game, but it does make it "not fun." It's clunky and awkward, and just doesn't feel right. Also, depending on the difficulty you play on, it can feel baby easy or pointlessly hard--the only difference between the two extremes seems to be an increase in the number of enemies, how much damage they take before they die, and how much ammo/health restoring items you get. All of this is, ultimately, poor game design because there are ways to make a game more or less challenging beyond "you can die more easily because enemies take more hits and you have less firepower." However--and this is a big however--it doesn't ruin the game. That's because you don't, and shouldn't, play Silent Hill games to have fun. It's the equivalent of an art film or a horror film versus a summer action flick. Criticizing Silent Hill games for bad combat kind of misses the point, really, since it's like criticizing, I don't know, Taxi Driver for having poor taxi driving scenes.

No, this little girl isn't supposed to be scary, and yet...

There are other minor quibbles one could make about Silent Hill 2 with more than half a decade behind it, such as the uncanny-valley-creepy looking cutscene character models, but for the period it came out, the game looked amazing. Anyway, this also misses the point, because it has looks where it counts--art design and aesthetics. Silent Hill games have a very unique look and feel all their own that transcends the console generation each is from. By today's standards, the "graphics" aren't impressive, but the way the town and monsters look and behave is still genius. You really do become engrossed in the game to the point where you don't sit there thinking critically about everything. I have always hated the idea that a videogame is just the sum of its parts, and if certain things are off or bad--it's too short, too difficult, has technical problems, and so on--then it is automatically a lesser game for it. Silent Hill 2 has its flaws, but they're easy to overlook and forget about when one sits down to play.

"There was a hole here. It's gone now."

Some videogames you play for fun or as entertaining escapism--the Marios and Halos and World of Warcrafts of the world. But some games really do try something new and succeed, and show you things, make you feel things, make you think things, just like any other piece of art can, like an album, a book, a movie, or a painting. Judging such games by the "is it fun or not, and why" standard of criticism misses the whole point entirely. Silent Hill 2 is a game you'll return to over time, discussing it with friends, seeing new angles on it each playthrough.

Nurses: not always hot