Monday, February 23, 2009

Silent Hill: Homecoming First Impressions

I suppose it's time to accept that my Playstation 3 is faulty. I bought it on eBay because I just had to have a 60gb for its backward compatibility, so I'm screwed as far as warranty goes. I bought it, along with LittleBigPlanet, back in November. LittleBigPlanet has periodically frozen during gameplay ever since. But I played a DVD, a PSN game and a PS2 game with no problems, so I assumed it was the game and got a replacement from GameStop. I bought Silent Hill: Homecoming on this same trip and it's frozen during a few loading times between scenes. I removed the information bar, deleted game data, and disabled the internet connection, as suggested by some people on a game forum (and had already done a System Restore when I was first having the problem). That seemed to help, but it froze again after 2 hours or so of gameplay. It's something I'm thinking, for now, I can live with, but I can see it happening in the future right after beating a really hard boss or something and that's a big fat Do Not Want. I'll probably roll over and pay the damn $150 for Sony to fix it eventually.

I figured something like this would happen, which is why I wanted a Wii from the very beginning, but I'm stuck with Sony if I want to play the games I actually like cannot live without (Silent Hill, Final Fantasy, Fumito Ueda's eventual third game).

Speaking of Silent Hill. I'm finally in the middle of Homecoming, the game I spent so much time looking forward to; the game I remained so hopeful about for so long; the game I defended against the many fatalistic fans complaining that Pyramid Head was renamed Bogeyman and that the presence of a creepy child was played-out (what, it wasn't tired by the third time Team Silent did it?). There was a lot of fear that Double Helix understood the appearance of Silent Hill but not the emotional gears; sadly, I find that fear pretty much realized. There are a lot of "clues" in Homecoming that seem present simply to announce to us that they've at least seen the other games in the series– look, here's a TV with white noise! Here's the protagonist sticking his arm in a dubious hole! Here's a mannequin! Forcing rotten Easter eggs down our throats is not going to convince us that the game is anywhere near as good as the game being not-so-subtly recollected.

According to what little I've read, mostly by accident, I haven't even gotten to the bad part yet.

Apologies for the bad, early-stage screencap– apparently there aren't any good ones yet!But I won't completely dismiss this game yet. Months ago, I came to terms with the fact that there never was and never will be another Silent Hill 2; after that, it was much easier to embrace Homecoming, and I believe I've been able to really appreciate the things it did right. There are some great things in it, namely the details and settings. The embers drifting up from the floor grating during the opening Otherworld scene? Brilliant touch. The sounds? As tense, uncomfortable, and downright nerve-wracking as any previous Silent Hill's has been. I'm not going to pretend this game hasn't successfully creeped me out so far. The environments, even if the things inside them aren't spectacular, are interesting. I'll take the Homecoming graveyard over the Silent Hill 4 graveyard any day. And Alex's house is successfully depressing– bleak, foreboding, eerie, and a general emotional drag to explore (yes, that's a good thing!). The set-up of the first encounter with a Smog monster is horrifying, even if the actual design of the Smogs is a bit ridiculous, excluding the fact that they seem to be sizzling, which was a great idea.

There's also the fact that I'm way more inclined to play Homecoming than LittleBigPlanet, which has enjoyed much better critical reception (LittleBigPlanet has been a LittleBig let-down so far– more on that later). So that has to mean something.

It's too bad we have to leave...At this stage in the game, I've decided that Homecoming was a great opportunity for Double Helix, and evidence enough for me that they could create their own really good original horror game. In many ways, the addition to a cult classic series was an even bigger undertaking that setting their own rules– they couldn't be too much like older games, because then fans would call them uninspired. And they couldn't be too different, because then everyone would complain that it "wasn't Silent Hill." I believe, if even Team Silent wasn't able to live up to the crescendo of the Silent Hill series, perhaps no one else should bother trying. I'm as reluctant as anybody else to see it go, and I can't say I don't want more, because it's become a twisted little town of nostalgia for me. Even if Silent Hill: 0rigins, for example, wasn't as wonderful as SH2, it was good enough that I got my Silent Hill "fix" from it. But I guess I would rather see creative people looking for what's beyond Silent Hill. It's too bad we have to leave...



(Then again, surely there are enough creative people in the industry that I can have both, right? Maybe, one day?).

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Some quick, unorganized thoughts on Rapelay

If you haven't heard already, there's been a lot of controversy surrounding Amazon.com's decision to ban the Japanese hentai-game Rapelay from their site.

My initial gut reaction? Good for them. I've been dreading the day that Japan's gruesomely sexist porn games* find a market over here, and the farther away that day seems to be, the better.

I ran across a thread about it on 1Up and opinions were pretty divided. Most people who supported the existence of games like this are in the slippery-slope camp whose slogan is, "If we start banning child-rape, what's next?! They'll be taking our GTA!" I think these people are as ridiculous as conservatives who believe that legalizing gay marriage will lead to people marrying farm animals. I don't believe it has to be so black and white– that you either ban all illegal activities in any game, or you ban none. I don't think it's wrong to draw the line somewhere.

Of course, that gets you into the debate of "Which is worse? Rape or murder?"

When people say "rape," they often get accused of being an uptight American with prudish attitudes toward sex. I really wanted to respond to that with a bold, all-caps post saying RAPE =/= SEX.

And then there is the argument that, since Japan has low rape statistics (lower than American's, anyway), the saturation of their porn market with non-consensual scenarios must be a good thing. I'm, of course, more than willing to acknowledge that watching rehearsed or animated rape scenes is better than actually raping someone. I'm less willing to agree that throwing rape porn at latent rapists is the secret answer to the problem, especially if the implication is that Western porn should be more depraved and sexist, when it's already so hard to find porn in which women play a positive role.

From what I've seen, there are a lot of misogynistic elements to Japanese culture and Japanese porn. A lot of people brush this off as a cultural difference that we must ignore and tolerate. The fact that the less willing the female is, the "sexier" she is; the expectation of a meekly beseeching "No" from a woman even if she really wants to have sex with you; all of this is cultural and therefore above criticism.

Fuck that.

Do you expect, in a culture where modesty and chastity is considered sexually attractive (as opposed to Western culture where a virginal woman is "marryable" but not sexy), that women will report rape and sexual assault as often as they do in a country where women actually organized a movement to empower one another?

Japan is a country that had to segregate women from men on subways because sexual assault had become such a big problem. Somehow I'm not convinced that the more bizarrely sexist the porn is, the lower the rape count.

I wanted to articulate my arguments about this, but I knew I couldn't do it on 1Up forums (or perhaps any other gaming forum). I'm still trying to work out my feelings about game censorship and hentai games. I don't support censorship in general, but I know that I do not look forward to the day when Japan's more depraved porn products start crawling into our markets. Perhaps I'm an alarmist. Perhaps it has to do with being a woman and being afraid so often of sex crimes just because of my gender.

Either way, the arguments I've seen for Rapelay remain unconvincing and often sexist at heart. One guy on 1Up even said that we view Rapelay as worse than Call of Duty because of sexism against men– something about how women are less expendable because they can give birth. Give me a break. If that's the case, how come most sex crimes are committed by men against women?


* Note that the porn aspect of these games is not what I have a problem with. If we lived in a culture in which a Porn genre of games could exist without becoming a bunch of misogynistic bullshit, I'd be more happy than is probably "proper."