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

Don't Fight The Warriors

The Warriors (Xbox)

I've got this problem with The Warriors that will sound ridiculous until I explain it. That problem is this: it's not simple enough.

Much has been said about how the beat-em-up genre is effectively dead in the water, for any number of reasons. But if I think back to the games I did like, one thing becomes clear: they were just complex enough to have more depth than Double Dragon, but weren't trying to be anything more than a dumb, fun game.

The Warriors has its share of problems, but the main one to me is that it tries to do too many things. Frankly my problem with every Rockstar game is that it's far more fun to run around the world doing whatever you want than it is to do their 'story missions' or mini-games that give you better weapons, items, skills, stats, or whatever the case may be. The Warriors is no different. The story missions quickly become a frustrating mess which range from too difficult to needlessly complicated. One mission saw me trying to protect three different stores from gang attacks, but even with the commands you can give to your AI teammates, there is no option to post one or two of them at each store to make this easier. At the same time, one mission forces you to complete graffiti tags before other teams of gang members do--this wouldn't be a problem except that the spray can mechanics in the game are needlessly finicky and sensitive. What's more, the exercise mini-games you do to power up your characters amount to the boring "mash a button over and over" or "push the buttons to on-screen commands" types.

I like mashing buttons as much as the next guy, but only when I'm fighting someone or something

All of this detracts from the main gameplay, which is an old fashioned beat-em-up. The parts of the game that do focus on fights are fun, but they still don't feel quite right. The controls, especially for running and jumping, are a bit wonky, while the various combos you can pull off while fighting are rendered worthless because they are so difficult to connect with such that you're better off hammering A or X over and over. The large variety of weapons you can use is worth noting but other than aesthetic differences I never felt like using a brick was any more or less effective than, say, a knife.

I also have a fundamental problem with the boss fights you sometimes find yourself in because even in the world the game creates they seem absurd. Often these boss characters cannot be knocked down, so your only recourse is to either go toe-to-toe and hope your health and supply of life giving Flash drugs don't run out before you wear the enemy down OR to use scattered weapons in hit-and-run attacks, which is both boring and frustrating. This is because the manual aiming mode is awkward (basically, you hold a button and stand still while you use the stick to aim an arrow at whatever you want to hit) and the automatic aiming is just as likely to hit things you don't want to as it is to hit your desired target.

There are side missions and 'flashback' missions to do, but they ultimately amount to the usual Rockstar game design of doing things within a certain time limit ("go mug people to earn $120 in 5 minutes", say) or playing a section with irritating button press mini-games as put to better use in God of War or Resident Evil 4.

The only highlight of the game to me is the sound design, which feels absolutely true to the movie. They got almost all of the characters from the movie to do voicework for the game, which gives everything an "authentic" feel. And I especially love the smooth female radio announcer, who mocks you when you die, and can be heard talking as you're walking around your hangout between missions. That said, I can't decide if the swearing is appropriate given the source material or overdone. At a certain point, I had played the game so long that it started to affect the way I thought and acted in it. I began to mug and assault random characters just because I could, not to mention I started to think like the characters do. I was chasing some scrawny Latino guy who owed The Warriors money, and he kept getting away and causing me to fight more enemies instead of pounding his face in. I actually found myself getting angry at the game because once I finally did catch up to him, I had no satisfying conclusion because he fell off a building. "Shit, I wanted to stomp that fuck's head in!!" I shouted to no one. Anyway, at least the slang feels natural and not overused.

Fucking up some fucker who tried to fuck with the fucking Warriors (fuck yeah!!)

In the end, the failure of the game rests on the fact that it's too much like a GTA with beat-em-up mechanics rather than a beat-em-up with some ideas borrowed from the advances and innovations in game design since the early-to-mid 90s golden age of the genre. If you're a fan of the film, the game may provide some added backstory and time with these characters that you've always wanted, but even then, it's too much frivolous gameplay and not nearly enough handing out beatings.