Silent Hill: The Bad Place
“In my restless dreams, I see that town.” I miss Silent Hill. The games are still around, of course, and perhaps I ought to replay them – but you can’t really go back, and any replay is going to be…
Tag Silent Hill
Living in Fear
A week or two ago I was watching someone play through the first Silent Hill game, and I was thinking about the role that combat plays in horror games. In many cases, the entire idea of combat has been phased…
Simple Appeal
Sometimes it’s embarrassing how simple our tastes really are. You know, we can write essays about why we love what we love, what works and doesn’t, about the delicate structure of ideas that play against each other in this particular…
Tragedy Minus Time
There’s a smarmy and not particularly accurate saying: “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.” This is only true for some very specific forms of comedy, and those mostly not the funniest sort, but there’s still an element of truth there. Old…
Thoughts About The Binding of Isaac
There are probably some spoilers here if you care about such things. It’s incredible the symbolic weight we can lay upon the simplest of stories. Each such story extends beyond itself like tree roots and tangles into matted carpets of…
Drive Failure
“For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn” Ernest Hemingway (maybe) I’d guess maybe fifteen years ago we were driving along on some sort of road trip or camping trip, my dad and my brother and me. I was riding in the…
Within Beauty
There’s been a great deal of debate out there as to whether or not games are art. Well, it’s a very silly debate, since it mostly ends up with a bunch of people who have one definition of art arguing…