Obama Yo' Mama

Furry and Otherkin misanthropy is Specieist

So your jaded but otherwise normal friend believes everyone in the world is worthless and stupid including himself; fair enough, he might even be right; god forbid asking him where he wants to go next with a philosophy like that, but still. If instead your pretentious but otherwise normal friend thinks he can excuse himself then all you're left with is to roll your eyes and look for a new friend. He's a jerk but you can't really call him out for anything besides being a jerk. Furries and Otherkin, meanwhile, have been known to take it a step further. They will not stop at misanthropy, nor at exempting themselves from misanthropic generalities. In fact they exempt themselves for a very peculiar reason: they do not identify themselves as human. From what they perceive to be a non-human vantage-point they feel more than qualified to harshly critique the human race. The best part is they usually demand to be taken seriously. So imagine what you would say to a real anthropomorph or otherwise nonhuman who would happily condemn the whole of your species to destruction and genocide for the sake of nature's fascinating but mindless automatons, and his own quaint, boring tribal existence. Or imagine you're black (if you aren't) and whitey has seen fit to remind you that ultimately your genetic predispositions inhibit you from ever being more than a subservient class. However you elect to respond to the one should be exactly suitable for the other. If you're not going to take these kind of people seriously than by all means laugh; they're hilarious... when they're powerless. But if you're going to take them seriously, take them personally; call them out for their bigotry. In the case of Otherkin and Furries you stand at least a chance of striking home, seeing as bigots and racists aren't anything those sorts of people ever suspect themselves to be. Intolerance is a famously bad word in their vocabulary, and it is of which they are eager to accuse their enemies. How they manage to ignore the blatant hypocrisy at work here, if it isn't a testament to the poo humankind is made of, certainly is evidence of our great imperfection.

Burnin' bridges

I'm not very good at keeping friends. Over the years I've lost touch with most all of the ones I had from childed, 'cause at the time I quite honestly preferred my solitude and videogames. But to lose three people I thought surely qualified as some of my best friends, over the space of just two years... well I hope I never get used to this feeling. Too fill everybody whose anybody whose reading this blarg in, for about the past four years I've been in touch with a small group of eight or so people around my age, over Skype. They're all incredible people, and it's been a privilege just to know them. They were always there for me when I was feelin' blue, like today, and they patiently put up with a lot of ungentlemanly behavior from me. But now it only feels like a few of us are left, despite the fact most of us are still around. Incredibly I don't believe this particular falling out was predominantly my fault, even if I doubtless played a big role. Even so, I'm the one whose been selfishly betrayed by the three people whose friendship I'd made the most investments in. When it came time to collect I was cheated my due, if you'll forgive such a vain parable. Friendship isn't just being there for someone when they're down and not any other time, and that's what those three forgot. For my part I've done far too much damage trying to make them see; damage that has proven to be irreparable. I'm not leaving; I still have some good friends there who I want to try harder to keep, so I guess it's not really burning bridges. Just... reducing my expectations to zero so that I'll always be pleasantly surprised by a certain few, for once.

Anyway, I wanted to let those few know that I'm sad, even if they aren't, and I still love them; really, truly, like brothers.

Sing da' song, children.

I HATE Microsoft

Windows Vista is the most unintuitive and nonsensical operating system I have ever been forced to rely on. I'm sick of having to look up instructions for everything I could ever want to do, only to find that what XP managed in a single buttonpress has become a convoluted adventure for no obvious reason. For instance, I'm a gamer. I like taking screenshots on the fly in some very fast-paced games. Doing so used to be easy: just press Home (prntscrn). But now my Vista laptop needs me to first press and hold the FN Key on the opposite end of the keyboard while simultaneously pressing Prntscrn. It's not that much slower, but those are still crucial seconds wasted in a rapidly changing game environment, and god forbid I actually need a few fingers on the actual controls meantime. Why, Microsoft? Why not just prntscrn? Did you change things around for the hell of it? It wouldn't be the only thing you arbitrarily fiddled with.

Take the layout. Now it only took me a few weeks to basically figure it out, and lot of what still buggers me is mostly phantom XP syndrome sending me every which way, but even when I'm on the ball it STILL feels like it's taking me longer to navigate to a place than I did in XP. But what was WRONG with XP's layout anyway that merited this drastic redesign? XP felt "causal", one thing led to another in a neat, intuitive progression. Navigating Vista feels a bit like hopscotch, if not teleportation. Relative to XP, nothing feels like it's really where it should be, and duplicate folders far apart from each other can cause great confusion. There are, for example, three folders called "Download" spread about, all of which are systemic. They handle different types of downloads, in a way Vista is happy to let you figure out on your own.

And I AM the administrator! I AM! I AM! I AM! There is NOBODY else using this computer. Nobody but me is registered to it! You don't need my PERMISSION to run a program, Vista! I am your master; I am ODERING you to run it; that's why I double-clicked! I know there are ways to make just about anything work on Vista the way you want; I've had to look up quite a few. But I hate people who say "Vista's great! You just need to know how to configure it/how to use it!" Screw... you... and I mean all of you, hard. You are the people who perpetuate the divide between nerds and normal people by making it necessary. The vast majority of people who use computers are NOT programmers or obsessive-compulsive freaks irresistibly drawn to research everything there is to know about anything we've ever heard of. I did NOT have to be taught how to use XP. I did NOT have to reconfigure XP. All I ever had to do was keep the viruses off, a task windows live performed admirably. What I want a nice fanboy or girl to tell me is whether theres' a make Vista good exe hidden somewhere that will reconfigure everything at once. Heck, I'd settle for a pretend to be XP button.

And there's the performance. Vista freezes more often than some clever ice metaphor. To it's credit it often recovers from its seizures, and quickly, which XP typically did not. But XP didn't typically freeze if it was taken care of. Vista freezes for a lot of things. If, for example I attempt to change the volume with the neat little touchpad adjuster while a program is running, that's almost sure to cause it to freeze. Running a program while several windows are open is very likely to cause a freeze, even if it's just windows media player. An important thing to remember when dealing with Vista freezes is that Vista has to be the one to fix them, or else. Do I ever miss the days when cntrl + alt + dlt could actually accomplish something. Now a days it feels like the operating system is fighting as much with me as it is with the paradoxes that plague it, and with its attention thus divided those errors have a much greater chance of victory. Even if you just try to exit out the frozen window (a natural user reflex) it seems like you're far more likely to worsen the problem, at least by making it last longer.

I've had two Vista laptops. One was high-end, with eight GBs of ram and the newest model GBA from ATI. I played Mirror's Edge on it, and the texturetaring was so bad that it was really bad. Conversely, my 2003 PC running XP played the game nigh perfectly, albeit with noticeably less processing power that caused it to lag a bit now and then. It took the US postal service to destroy my XP computer. My first Vista died within a week like a goldfish or something 'cause it simply couldn't handle my style. Now I've got this less-than-high-end notebook with specs that are none-the-less ABOVE that of my old PC in most respects. It can barely handle a valve title, and the texturetaring is omnipresent.

In conclusion, please developers, make games for Apple. Don't force me to try windows 7. 'Cause I will.

Playin' Silent Hill 3 again

A certain wrong "arguement"

Sometimes people who advocate for government healthcare deride private insurers and providers in like manner: "It's despicable; they're making money off sick people, you can't be allowed to make money off sick, innocent people!"

Now I know this isn't much of a post, but I just felt like pointing out that grocery stores make money off hungry people. The question then is, is feeding the hungry less important than treating the ill? You really are retarded if you say yes, but if no, and if you ever entertained the idea that profiting from treating people's ailments was immoral, then either you concede that notion was wrong, or admit you're a communist.

Celebrating two amamazering things!

Not even a week ago something phasmalogical happened, followed up yesterday by something absolutely hipsterific. The first one, almost a week ago, happened over the space of three days. On the first day I was talking with a good friend of mine, and remarked that I couldn't wait for the inevitable day when Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of The Escapist's Zero Punctuation would finally review his favorite old game and mine, Silent Hill 2. Two days later, he did. Now I'm no psychic, and this momentous day really was inevitable; I'm sure lots of people saw it coming before I did, but that's really what's so amazing. I'd never thought about it all before then, which rates it as the most astounding and incredible coincidence I have ever experienced. That his review actually touched on issues in a similar way mine did was pretty awesome too.



The second thing, the hipsterific thing from yesterday, was that I actually got Silent Hill 2 to work on this puny office laptop running godawfullVista. SH2 PC is a notoriously glitchy game, but the internet is sprinkled with wisdom, and some of it is devoted to helping people like you and me play Silent Hill 2. From what I've heard it breaks in different ways for different people, but to celebrate my good fortune I'm gonna' tell you what at least helped me. Perhaps I'll be able to make this kind of information just a little bit easier for people to find, abundant though it already is. The key for me was to get it running on only one core processor. Before I did so it would frequently crash no matter what graphics or compatibility settings I used, especially after cutscenes and when I was using the flashlight.

First, start the game. Then reduce it to an icon. Start windows taskmanager. Look at the bottom left of the window and click "Show processes from all users". Click "Applications" in the top left of the window. Right click the Silent Hill 2 application and click "Go to process". Right click the process and select "Set affinity". You will be shown a small window with the names of all your core processors and a tick mark for each. Unselect all but one of them. This won't affect the rest of your computer.

Regardless of whether this helps your specific problem you'll probably still have to do it eventually, based on what I found out. Sadly you'll have to do it every time you start the game. But it has definitely worked for me. I've even been playing at full graphics, which are very good. I should also add that you should probably run the game as administrator or it might not let you save, and a compatibility with windows 2000 may or may not help, but doesn't seem to hurt. And get both patches.





James used Canned Juice.
It's super effective.

An extra thought

Hey. Just wanted to add something for all the people who think free trade is anything that needs to be imposed on countries one to another, and is therefor immoral. In fact there is no "New World Order" required; no two or more free peoples can avoid becoming dependent on one another perfectly naturally over the longterm as each assumes its ideal economic roles and concedes to the other work its citizens are less suited to perform. Freedom does not need to be imposed on anybody. Neither does every nation need to embrace freedom for an interdpendance scenario to work. Even if only two nations allow their economies to become completely (or even just significantly) free and unregulated, those two economies will more than likely merge in short order, irrespective of the distance between them. Citizens of each will not find many other better places to do business. If they've got natural resources or else valuable, they may not find any place better at all. They will invest primarily in each other and become richer together. They will also inevitably attract investments from less free countries whose eantrepanuers feel stifled.

Subsidies and tariffs and other forms of protectionism may persist in many other countries, and these will inevitably both tempt capital away (subsidies) and make trade somewhat difficult (tariffs) for any economically free country, but only at literally everyone's expense. Subsidies and tariffs distort the entire world market and make that entire market less efficient for everybody, including the nation engaging in this protectionism. It makes no sense, therefor, to answer protectionism with more protectionism like countries presently do. It's only going to make things worse.

And of course economic freedom shouldn't be imposed by any government on its own subjects, either. I do not think property is an inalienable right, myself. I used to, but have come to respect the idea more because it works than because it is moral. Or better, it's moral because it works. If anyone thinks it doesn't, they should be able to rally votes to elect a non-capitalist economy if that's what the people want. But democracy and social/political freedom works too, and I don't believe any country is justified dispensing with them, no matter how unpopular they may be. It is not any more reightous to impose socialism than capitalism, and citizens of either must be free to speak their mind and organize peaceful counter-movements. And if these prove unsuccessful, they must be allowed to leave the country with minimal difficulty if they are physically able. I would not lightly forgive a country where these freedoms are absent. Humans seem to be instinctually afraid of economic freedom, so we can forgive its nearly universal absence if we agree it's a good thing.

A few thoughts on Outsourcing

At the bottom of this page is a banner that suggests the heart of American opposition to outsourcing is closet racism. Indeed, for many people I have spoken to this has seemed to be the case. Somehow foreigners just don't deserve the same jobs Americans work. For some reason employers are evil when they choose to fire an American and hire someone else in another country to do the exact same job, especially if it's to pay him less for it than the American would get--which seems to add insult to injury... somehow. But of course it really isn't that simple. A touch of racism or nationalism may be behind some or even most people's opposition to outsourcing, but what really drives them are a few misconceptions.

The most important thing to remember when discussing outsourcing is that the economies of the world are neither fully globalized or fully isolated. Outsourcing is not a myth that you can discredit by simply pointing out the global economy and saying: "Nobody complains when jobs go from Florida to Ohio except in Florida." There is a global economy, but there are still national economies too, and these national economies do still compete with one another for everything under the sun. When jobs go from Florida to Ohio or wherever in the United States it's not a net loss of jobs for the United States economy. When jobs go from the United States to China, or any other country, it really is a net loss for one and a net gain for the other. The reason is because those economies are separate. They do depend on one another. Each has products, resources and markets the other does not, and the resulting trade conducted between them knits them both into the global economy. But the global economy itself is just a patchwork quilt of national economies, instead of person A and B, and company A and B, trading with whomever and wherever like it's often depicted. This depiction is like saying you can get on a commercial plane and fly from any airport straight to any other airport with no detours. In reality there is a hub and spoke system in place which often requires travelers take huge detours, sometimes even passing their final destination before reaching it.

The economic version of hub and spoke results from tariffs, customs and all obstacles to free trade and free movement inter and intra the national economies. Some of these deliberately isolate the economies from one another, while most simply cause them to function differently from one another, which does the same thing. What this means is that people have a legitimate reason to fear outsourcing from their country. It doesn't just threaten your job, it threatens the economy you depend on with a net loss of jobs and capital. So what should we do about it? Do we wall our business in? Do we outlaw banks from investing abroad? Maybe we should first ask the folks who applied this philosophy to its extreme to fight a different kind of outsourcing. At times during the history of the Soviet bloc, citizens of the Soviet Union and her satellites fleeing life under Communism represented a huge net loss of productivity in the Soviet economy and may have contributed to their low standard of living. Yet history doesn't look back on these refugees with malice, because history remembers the Soviet standard of living was pretty low to begin with. The Soviets and allies were a technocracy who depended on specialists and educated people to plan and manage their huge economy. Yet despite how important these people were, and despite how much honors and favors they were given, and despite how much of a blow it was for the economy to lose even one of them, these were the people most eager to flee and seek their fortunes in the West. No matter how better off they were than most other people in their country, they were still worse off than they knew they could be in many other countries with freer markets, where they could sell their knowledge and skill for a profit. And they risked torture, barricades and death to do it.

Nobody would have ever fled the Soviet bloc if they didn't think life would be better on the other side of the iron curtain, and we don't think ill of them for it because we know it is not immoral to seek a better life. Maybe it was at the expense of others, but those others were not innocent. So now do you see? It's not that every economy suffering from outsourcing is trying to emulate the Soviet Union, but that for one reason or another people are being chased out or lured away. It might have nothing to do with policy, but could simply be an unfortunate reality like a plant resource running dry or becoming obsolete. More often than not however, it is policy, just like in the Soviet Union. And just like in the Soviet Union, the policy usually involves limitations on economic freedom. Even if less severe, nobody in their right mind wants a small injury any more than a big one. They'd rather not be injured at all, and if they have the option of avoiding injury they will probably take it. It is not just to demand anyone hold still and take one for the team, at least not under any normal human circumstance.

Well now I've rambled for a bit too long. Gotta' conclude. Abolish the national economies. Not the nations themselves, oh no; those haven't failed us yet. But the national economies are now effectively obsolete. The only reason they're even still around is because we still want them; because we're afraid of life without them; because we still entertain the idea of a self-sufficient country that produces as much of what it needs and wants as it can. We're afraid to fully merge with the global economy because we believe this would threaten our autonomy and sovereignty. We want them in case of war, to be able to provide for ourselves in wartime, but in reality the national economy is what makes war possible, and the global economy what could make it almost impossible to be an aggressor. Even when the global economy was much less stronger than it is today powerful aggressor nations were defeated after being cut off from it long enough. Imagine if every nation was absolutely dependent on every other? It Is kind of scary when you think about it, but in reality we all, and have always, "depended on the cooperation of strangers".

Not only would a truly global economy abolish outsourcing, at the same time it would abolish every economic incentive to make war, and create many incentives to preserve peace and order. When investments and people can freely and easily go wherever they like with minimal obstacles and risks, then they will go wherever and do whatever they can to be the most useful. A whole nation may find it largely produces grains, while another fruits, and another industrial appliances; none of which either could survive on if denied the others. Many might do it all and then some, but not in sufficient quantity to provide for their entire population; a little bit of each, but not enough of any except for a few. Still others might produce virtually nothing, but maintain safe ports to shelter and organize trade. The possibilities are endless, and the planet Earth is so rich in geographic, demographic, and resource diversity as to make autarchy impossible without conquering the whole globe. And why steal resources or labor when they can be so much more easily bought?

Of course outsourcing would be gone for the same reason it isn't there in a national economy. Jobs might go from Hong Kong to Mexico city, but this is not a net loss of jobs for planet Earth. And even Hong Kong isn't worse off for it; their labor and resources would be freed up to do something the global consumer deems more important; something more fit for Hong Kongians to do. If it wasn't otherwise, they simply wouldn't have lost the work.

I found this

So I was doing a google search for "Furry Misanthropy", you know, in the hope of maybe finding something, because who doesn't like to justify one's prejudices, right? Instead I found this unique and wonderfull gem of internet wisdom, from the keyboard of a furry, straight to your heart:

"I get incredibly down on people all the time. They do terrible, revolting things to each other (and furries are not exempt from my definition of people, here) and sometimes I just want to say, fuck it, fuck you all, let hate take over, burn itself out, and leave me with nothing but the purity of selfishness to live by.

It's incredibly attractive, when I'm fighting that, to put myself into some special category above and beyond other people, to draw in those I care about, and shut out the rest of the world. Problem solved, because - as has been touched upon quite a bit - the driving force here is to separate myself from the bad things other people do, bad things that I'm also capable of. I don't want that knowledge, that compassion.

The way I combat it is to remember that I already am separate. I make different choices. I am a different person. My human nature is not a problem, it is a fact without, as far as I can tell, positive or negative connotation. People don't do bad things because it's human nature (or furry nature, or Christian nature, or however you want to cut our delicious cake), they do them because they are individually selfish or cruel or on rare occasion what I call evil. And they're that way not because people have some random chance operator, unique to us as a species, that makes them flawed but because we have a gift, perhaps not quite a unique one but by far the most radiant and wonderful and powerful example, and that's sentience.

Sentience is complex and incredible and overwhelming, and it allows for intellect to conflict with instinct, for logic for duke it out with emotion, for a dozen other opposing forces to crash against each other, and in that kind of situation, things inevitably break. I don't think there's any species in existence you could point at and say, well if they had sentience, they could handle it. I think, in point of fact, that anything remotely animal-related will never escape the dangers of sentience: only machines, without fight, flight, or feeling, could truly become a race apart.

And wouldn't that be fucking boring?

I understand why misanthropy happens. It's because nobody wants to be part of a flawed system, and especially not to BE a flawed system. The impulse, dare I say the HUMAN impulse, is to escape it, to seek perfection in some form to be a part of. But it's the flaws that make art and love and, ohai, furries. We're NOT machines, and our bugs aren't always bad, and when they are, we can fix them. I wonder if it's possible misanthropists are just healers who haven't quite worked out the right way to look at things yet?"

No, I have no idea what that last sentance means. He's a furry. Probably some newage, pump rock, spiritbomb, shamantype deal. The important thing is he's a genius.

Two great Hitchhiker's Guide mistakes

Okay, so, this has been on my chest for at least three years now, and by God does it need to come off. Do pardon the spelling: it's Microsoft, don't you know.

In the very first Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radiodrama (and possibly the corresponding book; I don't quite remember) Douglas Adams walks us down at least two paths of reasoning concerns two specific subjects, which on examination are clearly false but which I have never heard of refuted (though I havn't really thought where to look). One of these subjects is somewhat important to the plot, the other merely part of some comic relief that Adams nonetheless appears to take quite seriously.

I'll start with the one that makes me least uncomfortable. It occurs during a brief and whimsical disertation on the universe, with statistics and "some information to help you live in it." Area: infinite. Rainfall: none, because in an infinite area there is no up and down through which rain may fall. Imports: none, for in an infinite area there is no outside from which to import. Exports: (see imports). It's all very clever and clearly a joke, or it would be where it not for the narrator's comments on population which for me always served to break the immersion. Population: none. "We know that there are an infinite number of planets, but that not all of them are habitable. Therefore there must be a finite number of habitable planets." Any finite number divided by infinity is basicaly zero, he says, making anyone you happen to meet in your travels merely "the products of a deranged imagination." But WHY? Why in the context of infinity should ANYTHING be finite apart from localy? Nothing is infinite in a single galaxy, but in an infinite universe there are infinite galaxies, and in their aggregate an infinity of all possibilities being realized at once for now and ever. There may be a constraint at work preventing habitable worlds from making up a higher "percentag" of this infinity, but that doesn't mean they aren't just as infinite as everything else. You'll bump into them less frequently, but you'll never stop bumping into them.


Now for something that's actualy kept me up at night once or twice. It concerns a remote fictional planet called Magrathea whose inhabitants once pioneered the industry of planet-making. That is, when a phazmagoricaly rich denizen of the galaxy grew disatisfied with the planets nature had provided for him to live on he would pay the Magratheans to build him a new one made exactly to his specifications. The story goes that this venture became so succesfull that Magrathea grew to be the richest planet in the galaxy while everyone else became impoverished. But... WHY? I mean, you can sort of rationalize it and say these superich became so infatuated and lustfull over these perfect "dream planets" they spent themselves all into pauperhood, but when has anything like that ever happened in a real economy? To my knowledge, never. Furthermore, when have economies ever been so dependant on their super-rich as opposed to the (on aggregate) greater wealth of their middle and poor classes? The rich own and maintain large companies, the loss of which can be temporarily devestating to an economy, but these are swiftly replaced in a market swarming with would-be competitors. The fact of the matter is that even all the most wealthy people, even when put together, probably do not spend more than all the less wealthy people put together. That is, on products and services. Presumbly they've bought their share of politicans. Indeed, advancing causes or corruption in the political sphere is probably the most a very rich person can do to affect society as a whole. Otherwise he's just a big fish in a very big sea.

But you know I doubt anything like this was running through Adams's mind. I'm thinking he was just parroting the conventional wisdom that economics is a zero sum game that must have as many losers as winners; in the which I nor anybody may prosper but at the expense of another. This runs into great contrast with reality where no two parties ever engage in a voluntary trade unless both believe it will do them at least some good. Otherwise, why trade? Why do so many people engage in it willingly if at least one party involved is destined to lose out? The answer to these questions should present themselves, so what the heck, Dougy? Was it a joke? Could you maybe have tried to make it funny?

Hmmmm...

I think I like Glenn Beck. I'm not always sure why, but I'm pretty sure I do. I saw a clip with him on youtube the other day where he had on... this guy... who had apparently written some book... and anyway he said something that made a lot of sense to me and gave me the idea that I should maybe update my journal here a bit more frequently. He talked about how everyone is so angry these days; so eager to call for revolution and rectification. But he said that maybe what we really need to is calm down a bit and get back in touch with our reason and our values; family, interdependence, responsibility, spirituality, etc, because if we don't we're really not likely to make the correct decisions, and really we'd be revolting for all the wrong reasons and create an even worse political situation. He talked about it as a comparison between the American revolution and the French revolution. I don't remember all that much, and maybe they didn't even really go into it, but it made me think. At least in popular culture these revolutions were very different. The French revolution was really much more fueled by hatred, paranoia and class warfare than anything, wasn't it? It makes sense that sentiments like that would give rise to unambitious and cowardly populist mentality of the modern day French, doesn't it? But the American revolution is at least depicted very differently than this. I think the fact that it was nation exploiting nation as opposed to class against class that there wasn't the same level of bitterness present. It was a lot more gentlemanly. It didn't start until after representatives from the colonists had tried for years to have the injustice of the taxation rescinded. The Boston tea-party didn't physically hurt anyone, even if it did destroy property. The the rioters are depicted as cheerful, laughing even, and orderly. It was a violent but not an unrestrained protest. Or even if it wasn't, shouldn't it have been? Shouldn't the ideal revolution be waged like that? Calmly? Rationally? Isn't the best way to prepare for it to practice what we preach? To set an example? To really love what and whom we stand for, as opposed to hating those who do not? That's just what I took it all to mean. It seemed like a lesson I need to learn, and I though that maybe talking about what's on my mind more often could help. Maybe someone else will want to talk about some of it. I hope so.

Silent Hill 2 & 3

Silent Hill is an awkward series to begin a stint at game reviewing for its sheer depth. I’ve found it difficult to come up with a particularly long list of things I like or dislike about it because it almost all seems to run together, necessitating what I guess is a more holistic approach… or a shorter than normal review. This is one of the many ways I think these two games diverge with traditional gaming, and in a typically good way. For example in Bioshock I find myself critiquing each new element in the game as soon as it was introduced, going ‘ooh, I like this’ or ‘ooh, I don’t like that’. The mental list I’ve been assembling in that game is already quite long and I’ll be lucky to actually remember most of it by the time I finish. What I’ve learned by heart is that even something interesting can detract from the quality of a game if it spoils the immersion, items of which Bioshock has plenty, to say nothing of the more ludicrous and flow-breaking elements (which are obviously worse). I am very pleased to say that neither Silent Hill 2 nor 3 have much of either, which apart from the compelling and original stories has to be one of my absolute favorite things about them. Immersion is virtually never sacrificed. I may have stopped and wondered more than once how on earth little Heather could be carrying around that 12th century mace tucked in her pocket, or how she could possibly even know how to operate that submachine gun, but this never actually troubled me too much ingame, and was only ever really a thorn in my side when I was feeling frustrated with the combat and needed something extra to justify a good rant.

I was introduced to the survival horror genre with Echo Night: Beyond, a brilliantly innovative ghost-story set in a haunted moonbase, where the contrast between the sterile/artificial and the spectral, coupled with sense of isolation and helplessness created a feeling of immersion that was almost too thick… before it got totally predictable. I was ultimately disappointed, but I finished having tasted of the adrenalin provided by just the right does of fear, and I wanted more. Silent Hill the movie was my first proper introduction to the franchise, and it still rates as one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, right up there with Bladerunner (The Director’s Cut) and Princess Mononoke (in English). What I liked most about it at first was that it seemed to be very consistent with the games, which I had yet only studied a little bit, and maybe watched a few youtube clips. I’ve since come to realize my mistake; Silent Hill the movie only really succeeds in capturing the atmosphere of the games. The story is not only divergent from canon but delivered in a decidedly different and shallower way. Silent Hill 2 in particular is likewise far more pedestrian than the movie (and to a disappointingly large degree more than the third installment as well); you encounter NPCs, for example, who have little or no relevance to the main character James, except perhaps that they help him develop. These are people who have their own reasons for what they do and why they’re around; we’re left in the dark about Angela’s fate at the end of Silent Hill 2, but if that’s a loose end one must remember that real life is full of loose ends, and this isn’t Angela’s story. It isn’t Eddie’s story either. It’s James’ story, in which those others just happen to be.

Another important difference between the movie and the games is the role played by the monsters and environments, and how these relate to the characters. Every incarnation of the hill is famous for its grotesque monster inhabitants. But the monsters in Silent Hill 2 and 3 have a bit more to do besides being grotesque. In both games they are each a manifestation of what is most likely troubling the main character, or on occasion an NPC. This is upfront enough to be obvious, yet abstract enough to be delightful, and even compelling. Heather in Silent Hill 3 is confused and afraid, particularly concerning something in her distant past she may have forgotten. Part of her is curious, yet another is just as insistent she’d be better off not knowing. This uncertainty and dread manifest in the very surreal, awkward, and a terrifying shapes of “her” monsters. James of Silent Hill 2 meanwhile is wrapped in what would seem to be tortuously superfluous guilt (repressed memories involved here too), while even his sanity and masculinity is called into serious question. Almost every monster he encounters, and particularly the infamous Red Pyramid, seems to be trying to remind him of something very poignant about himself he would rather not think about.

In essence Silent Hill game characters are fighting (or more likely fleeing) their inner demons. How frightening these are to the player is much less important than the feelings they evoke in the character, which ultimately affects the player in a much more subtle way. Silent Hill the movie merely borrows monsters from the games arbitrarily and seems to imply they are simply avatars of the tainted town itself. They seem to act in concert, like creatures connected to a hivemind, where as in the games they are almost all clearly mindless automatons driven by very base instincts, which makes it frightening how articulate some of them can be. Likewise, in the Silent Hill games, the different paralleled realities associated with the town often manifest themselves differently for different people, for the same reason as do the monsters, something not explored in the movie.

Now I should talk a little about gameplay, but as it’s all been done before I won’t linger. As many have noted the controls can be frustrating because virtually all the camera angles are fixed, and when they change it is usually unexpected. This wouldn’t be a problem if the controls weren’t affected, but they are, meaning you have to change what you’re doing on the gamepad or keyboard if you don’t want to end up totally backtracking, usually right back towards the monster you were fleeing from. Note however that this is much worse an issue on Silent Hill 2 than 3, the latter being more finely polished and less cinematic. The reason for the fixed camera is to create a dramatic cinematic effect, which it succeeds to do surprisingly well, especially in Silent Hill 2. This is one of the many reasons I don’t like to think of these games as RPGs as opposed to very interactive stories. You will sometimes even be confronted with shots that reveal virtually nothing of what the character can actually see, with maybe a monster or two blubbering just off-screen. This makes it a good idea to finger the ready button now and then, which will make the main character turn to directly face any enemy in front of her, and level a gun if she has one. Little pretense is made for role-playing in a style of play like this, but as with the NPCs this never detracts from the quality of the game. Again, one must remember this is the character’s story, not anyone else’s and not the player’s.

Of course the controls fail in other ways too, particularly in Silent Hill 3 where the auto-aimer is very dodgy, to the point where when the story cinematics stopped working on my used PS2 copy I honestly couldn’t bring myself to finish the game. There are these disgusting humanoids that crawl along the floor and sometimes attack Heather in groups large enough to make running away very difficult. I wanted to use the katana she found to deal with them, but I was surprised to learn it was impossible; she would only attack targets at chest level. It was the same with the submachinegun; she would shoot right over them. That was it for me; combat and locomotion as tedious as found in a Silent Hill game simply isn’t worth it minus the story. This is something many outsiders to the series could perhaps fail to grasp, assuming it’s the monster-bashing that keeps people playing, when in reality it’s almost always better to run or sneak by, and save ammo and health for when you can’t. It’s also why I don’t feel too tempted to play the games a second time (though I am now working on finishing Silent Hill 3 properly, on my pc).

One of the very best things I can say about the atmosphere of the games is how well their scores fit. They are easily the best I have ever encountered in any game, creatively written and masterfully performed, each song timed perfectly to sync with events ingame. Anyone who has watched Silent Hill the movie has already experienced a decent cross-section of songs from Silent Hill 2 and 3, from which most of the movie soundtrack was taken.

In conclusion, these are the ideal games if you’re someone like me who prefers to spend time on a game as opposed to killing it. I would consider playing them as nearly a wholesome and life-fulfilling experience as reading a good novel, and never made me regret that I could be doing something else. I try to only play games like this, but rarely am I ever this satisfied. I look forward to trying the original game, as well as the last sequel made by the Silent Hill team: Silent Hill 4: The Room.