Killer7 SINdicate

[anthony]

Yeah the cult aspect of Silent Hill is often overlooked within the West. They prefer to think of Silent Hill as a Christian Purgatory of sorts but the concept of Purgatory is Cathloic and even then the games don't even resemble Catholic Purgatory. It looks more like a David Lynch film. Dante's Inferno the videogame as edgy as it is, feels much more like Catholic purgatory to me. He's actually fighting through the depths of it and the many layers of purgatory as if it were an actual place. (Like how it's depicted in Doom 3.) SH2 fans think of purgatory as metaphorical and far more specific to psychological disorders rather than to sins. Dante's Inferno isn't even Christian canon lol.
SH's direction style is pure 90s style Gothic Industrial edge and David Lynch's movies have some of the rawest industrial sounds & imagery depicted in film.

What's ironic is that they overlook the Cult aspect because to most Westerners, when they think of cults they can only imagine Christian style doomsday cults (They do this specific style of cult in every game that has a cult. Most recent one I came across was Far Cry 5.) rather than one that functions as a small government that completely controls your entire life. The modern day SJW Woke dogma is the closest to this and it's recently came to light that the USA government actually was funding LGBT and Transgender entertainment in random 3rd world countries to further push a mindset that's not even the mainstream in the USA. USA is still a Blue Collar majority culture, it's just all of the Corpos are anti-Blue Collar and generally only push the values of the Coastal Elitist states.

It's just weird to me how SH's Cult is often ignored or viewed as a story device written for primitive minds when at the same time they like to think of SH as a Psychological horror derived from Christian purgatory.
If you notice, it's really only the Western made Silent Hill games that focus on armchair psychological philosophy.
IMO The Forbidden Siren games are basically an unofficial continuation of Silent Hill 1 and they're just as experimental as the original & have the same vibe as the original SH game.

It really makes me wonder why Konami skipped Silent Hill 1 (when SH1 is the one that sold the most) and remaked Silent Hill 2 instead but it's only fitting that SH2 remake was remade with all of its soul drained out because the internet popularity of SH2 mostly consists of people who have never played a Silent Hill game in their life. They only watch some cringe ass youtubers like Super Eyepatch Wolf or whatever and since he's a popular internet nerd, the other nerds latch on to what he says even though he constantly misunderstands (like Shenmue) most of the media that he reviews lol.

I highly doubt that Bloober team could successfully imitate the original SH anyway, which was a far more Japanese take on Western horror. They can successfully pantomime something that resembles SH2 to the naked eye or the tourist eye
because modern-day SH2 fans have never played SH2 before.

SH2 fernmake is an adaptation of the memes reputation of Silent Hill. Now correcting it into the game people wish it was all this time. Not that the actual games being something else entirely ever stopped them before. But this serves as a kind of vindication after all this time. The western fan interpretation/hallucination is now in. Something that has the Silent Hill title on the screen with the trademark and everything.

In what people always wanted SH to be you can read the aspirations and anxieties of nerds of a certain era and moment (still largely true but evolved). Wanting it to be the serious work that would vindicate video games. But an insecure and uncultured nerd's idea of what a vindicating and prestigious thing looks like, which means high school English anti-content. Presence of themes which are important. SH2 is a game in which depression, guilt, psychology are present. And that's about as far as a post Cold War education will get you. Macbeth feels guilty, Lady Macbeth feels ambition. Describe the plot while mentioning these words and you have done analysis.

As you say, Western attempts at doing 'Silent Hill' showed what we (collectively) interpreted it as being about ("armchair philosophy") while Japanese successors went off in every which direction, 2 even being radically different to 1, with the core of the experience ultimately being an aesthetic direction which westerners also generally understood and recreated very poorly. Even the stylistically different works like 3 and then 4 feel more like spiritual kin to each other than the western aspirational imitations do to any of the original games. Arguably even 2REmake to 2.

I do think a lot of the old western fans of these games on some level did get them in real or proper ways, but lacking the conceptual language to describe what they were enjoying, and insecure in a culture that didn't respect video games, defaulted to what little they had in the way of prestige concepts and language.



Note that this man, a turbofan speaking 13 years ago, can't make a case for the game being good, or articulate why any part of it might be valuable beyond allusions to underlying applied armchair psychology ("symbols", etc).

He's looking for what he's been told to look for. He's not a trained artist, he can't describe the game's visual construction or direction with any articulation. But he also doesn't have the faith in himself to just say he likes it. He has to go on the hunt for prestige symbols.

Now culture has kind of realised this problem and moved beyond it, but in the worst way possible. The monkey's paw has curled on us. The slightly aware status-anxious gamer of today will boldly tell you that they "just fuck with the vibes" of a thing. Of course, this is another trick to assuage status anxiety rather than a path to actually better appreciating a thing. It doesn't mean anything. And the carefree embrace of immediate pleasure is a posture. You will only see the most neurotic and calculating people on the planet talking like this. Most of them are probably on track to cut their penises off and/or get AIDS.

But on which principle was SH2 remade? As far as I can tell it was lagging culturally and was done by people who thought it would be a worthy subject for a high school book report. Armchair psychology, trauma, and mental health taking front and centre. All women having their faces ape-ified to make sure that nobody accidentally enjoys anything.

The game did not get the RE2make numbers it was obviously pursuing. In fact it seems to have made no impact at all. I believe they chased outdated trends. If they made this game "i fuck with the vibes" core, made things more colourful, painted somebody's nails black, this thing might have shit money. It also would have been absolutely horrific, but whatever. Better makes it clear what's happening in that case. This REmake feels oddly academic I almost want to say.

Modern day Resident Evil is a result of that but it's one of the more successful cases because the change to a more serious gritty tone fully alligns with how serious millennials view themselves. It's always been something that I found amusing about fans of video game horror. They seem to always portray horror as if it were meant to be an intellectual genre of fiction so they'll often say shit that makes no sense to horror fans, such as "How can I take a horror seriously if half the women are naked?" I see this comment a lot within gaming horror fanbases, most notably reddit & youtube.
It makes no sense to me because the fans of horror movies are much less full of themselves and are self aware that horror is trashy irreverent entertainment.
Although I have noticed that even horror movies have started to censor themselves to appease the so-called internet masses (are they really the masses when internet only shows you the opinions of Reddit & Youtube nerds? They almost always think the exact opposite of what real life normal people think.)

I think Resident Evil was always oddly good at making this work. Very clearly a calculating and professional endeavour, but they did a great job of accurately reading the pulse of American sentiments, but giving it their own touches and making it theirs. RE5 and 6 probably function as better cultural time-capsule pieces than any American games attempting to channel the same aesthetic direction because they're just so much better realised. That and the stylisation makes them more memorable. Those games are a surreal, breathless spin-up of 24, Daniel Craig James Bond, Jason Bourne, Michael Bay, BIG stuff Americans took SERIOUSLY and largely FORGOT ABOUT by now despite that (or maybe because of, stupid vapid things stick easily for a moment). Cars exploding in streets, helicopter crashes, insane scale, noise, moral outrage, indignant confrontations, slick, elite villains in suits who talk down to the interloper. If you want to get what people were into in the early-mid Obama years, these games are accurate. They're just trying their best to make it far cooler by injecting new aesthetically oriented ideas and directions. Obamathrillers but cool.

The eternal Japan-pessimist loves to call this stuff signs of creative bankrupty, or petty artistic corruption, but I take it as an obvious sign of strength that they can read these changes so well and respond to them successfully. While also making things that are better than and show up the sources that are informing them. RE5 and 6 have all of the character of Obamajunk, but none of the rot or spiritual emptiness. They're just cool things wearing the veneer as a style.

Now I still haven't played 7 and 8 yet, will have to get back to you on those. I've seen some odd looking details. We'll see what it comes to.

I was once thinking of doing a novel trilogy route until I was made aware that modern books are just as sanitized & censored as film & gaming are. Even Boardgames are extremely censored these days and each game seems to have a token tranny (Dead of Winter expansion pack. https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/p ... of-winter/ ) or Black gay couple in a medieval fantasy setting (Aeon's End https://indieboardsandcards.com/our-games/aeons-end/) now. Which is fucking bizarre to me. It's a damn boardgame. You'd be thinking that at least boardgames would be devoid of the modern era Open Society bullshit which exists to destroy a country's local culture by assimilating it into a Universalist ideology. Not unlike Christianity prior, which is also a universalist ideology, but one that is approved by right wingers while the woke dogma is a left wing universalism approach.

Although reading further in to this ancient post you wrote, it seems that you already pointed that out lol.

(...)

I'm just reaffirming that the cultural mindrot has a much larger influence than we think. It's everywhere now although it's been recently discovered that USAID was actually funding this shit on a worldwide level lol.

(...)

D&D isn't meant to be literature. It's just a series of rulesets that you build a story around, using the world building that they provided for you. The story is supposed to be created as a joint effort between the dungeon master & the players.
That's why Neverwinter Nights was considered good back in the day, because it was one of the truest depictions of the relationship between the dungeon master & the player in the form of modules which were created to continue the ongoing adventures of your created character.

I agree with your point but D&D was never meant to be The Hyperborean Age of Conan. D&D intentionally has no story because that story is whatever the DM & players came up with based off of the rules of the game & the roll of the dice.
Although I'm making it sound gayer than it is, D&D is basically just a dungeon crawler that can have story and most of the retards online only care about the story part of D&D which is why modern D&D has also been nuetured. They don't even have races now ayy lmao. I always roleplayed as a Half-Elf because it's basically what I am in real life. Someone who somewhat has similar values as Whites, but different enough to the point where I'm in my own genre or culture.
Now I can't even roleplay as myself because I have to pretend that I'm completely elf or human or completely asian or white when I'm neither. I represent something completely different but I do align myself with the values of both with the jap side having more of an influence since I actually lived in the country before. Weird though, because transgenders get to have their own identity which I argue isn't even as common, nor is it rarely grassroots. Western troon culture is almost always pushed from the top down by Corpos)

You can't even have edgy settings in D&D anymore like Ravenloft because it offends women or some shit. Funny how women never said anything back then, and it's really just fat nerdy women (or possibly most likely troons) doing all of the whining.

D&D was made as a tool, but setting-writing obviously comes with a lot of character and conclusions. If it didn't, then The Woke would feel no need to mess with it so much. As you say, no more edgy settings. You can use tabletop to largely hand people a story, even beyond the implications of the world. A friend of mine put together a pretty interesting writeup on both the history of D&D, and leading that into a look at the work of James Edward Raggi IV. Creator of the 'Lamentations of the Flame Princess' RPG system.

You're welcome to join us on our forum where we talk about this, your contributions to the discussion would be very welcome, but no pressure of course.

The case we kind of go into in that thread is the character of creators informing their constructions. D&D was made by guys who fought in Vietnam, read uncensored Lovecraft, generally had a far more grounded and hardened view of the world. As you say, nu-writers, who are now in charge of these projects, think conflict is when someone says something unwoke on reddit and has to be banned.

In the broad aesthetic impressions and intentions behind old D&D there is something akin to the Robert E. Howard drive. The picture of reality that emerges. And in nu-D&D, there's fucked up woke reddit impressions all over. Point made in the thread is largely backed up by accompanying imagery made for different modules and eras. Clearly different spirits at work.

Videogames have rendered obsolete most of genre fiction in literature, as they have rendered action movies obsolete.

80s action movies sure, but I'd still much rather watch a John Woo or John Wick movie. John Wick 3 & 4 feel as if I'm watching through a hardest difficulty longplay of an action game but there are no modern action games that resemble the insanity that goes on in Wick films because modern action games are basically just brain dead Call of Duty shooters or Action rpgs like Soulslikes.
Max Payne 3 & Resident Evil 6 came the closest to being like Wick but ironically they're both rejected by modern gaming audiences and a lot of Zoomers honestly believe that Resident Evil 6 nearly killed the RE franchise (when for the longest time it was one of the best selling REs.) because none of them are old enough to remember how dead RE was during the original RE3 and the wait for RE4. The future of Resident Evil was looking to go the way of Code Veronica, a series of games that still sells due to a loyal fanbase but is no longer a trend setter.

Obviously a really serious problem is that most people making action games aren't very good at thinking of the whole aesthetic impression their work creates. They're just lately manic for this fantasy of being a cool grognard toy and imagining an insane "cracked" neckbeard wavedashing and bhopping through their creation. Which looks fucking lame and retarded. Max Payne 3 incorporates video editing, cuts, time scaling, and even graphic design (elaborate death graphics) into creating a more elaborate production which looks and feels cool all over. They have a specific impression in mind which is a far more total audio-visual work. With mechanics working pretty well for it too. Where it betrays itself is on its writing, which is just kind of limp and pointless. Doesn't go far enough. Doesn't take Max anywhere. But the game looks and sounds fantastic in action and was built to be that specifically so it's pretty awesome. 'HOME' blasting while Max hurls himself around blowing guys away, with the camera cutting to follow your last bullet of a fight as it flies towards a guy's head. Amazing.

Movies do still largely have an edge on games because it's more taken for granted there that one can exercise vision and control to create a certain total impression during "action". Gamers get caught up on mechanical play and neurotic fantasies of being hardcore which are actually just lame and puerile (the Quake3 fantasy which enslaves every "indie" "fps" dev).

I haven't seen John Wick 3 and 4 beyond one action scene, and I get what you'd find appealing. Sort of like Hotline Miami (an aesthetically oriented action game, like Max Payne 3) it aspires to be maximalist but also readable. You can tell what's going on and how John Wick is winning. I think that gimmick gets old, but it's something. And more than most video game action sequences have unfortunately.

And RE6 I'd say could be reappraised as Max Payne 3 compromised a bit on director production tricks to work better as a game. And to their credit, it's a fantastic game. I don't think an "arcade" mode of Max Payne 3 would be that fun. But it's incredible in RE6. And my aesthetic rule for good action design is fulfilled, that playing the game better looks cooler. You don't use lame cheats and gimmicks to win. You have to become John Wick. Dive around kicking heads off and throwing yourself from explosions to turn around and shoot from the ground. The game is so amazingly overdesigned beyond what it needed to be. Gamers were accepting the most boring Gears of War ripoff garbage that generation. All they needed to do was get a "duck behind cover" button and a spread of basic guns to headshot with all games. And instead they made the diving gun-fu arcade God Hand with Guns system.

They succeeded, but I remember the powerfully negative online-nerd reaction to that game. People hated it. For nonsense meme reasons of course. Quicktime events. Story doesn't make sense. etc.

RE is an interesting series, because it's an obvious Corpo design by committee creation that somehow always has its finger on the pulse (Even RE 6, that game was well loved during its era so long as you ignored the raging internet nerds) and will completely change its identity to fit in with the kids of its era. People my age (I'm turning 42 in a few weeks.) love Resident Evil 4 and RE 5 and at least like RE6's Mercenary mode. Younger people, including the younger people who played the original Resident Evil games as 5 year olds (I was 13 when it first came out.) aren't as into RE4, because they're too young to remember the days back when games revolved around mechanics. The younger people seem to think of gaming as more akin to movies. People in my age group, we grew up with crazy ass action movies like John Woo so when late 1990s (The Matrix) & early 2000s media consisted of nothing but John Woo like action that was during the height of influence of my age group. Younger people are more boring, they want everything to be gritty, realistic & down to earth to match how boring and devoid of personality they are (LOL! It's a generalization but it's mostly true. You don't see anyone like me amongst the Zoomers or younger Millennials.)
so Resident Evil got rid of its Conspiracy Techno-Thriller focus that it had since RE2 and replaced it with a more grounded Walking Dead inspired grittiness that's all the rage with the kids during the mid-2010s & 2020 era.
The irony of it all is that it was Resident Evil 2 remake that spearheaded RE's current identity when it was RE2 classic which originally had the John Woo influence that modern audiences hate because most of them were too young to see his Chow Yun Fat movies.
Although John Wick is like a much more insane & crazy version of Woo.

I remember being shown a picture of how Chris Redfield looked in a RE7 DLC, a kind of realistic midwestern american SWAT guy. He looked emaciated compared to RE6 and 8, and they seem to have completely retconned this. Again, I haven't played them yet, but it seems like RE7 was something people could ultimately only stomach so much of, and 8 steered us back onto extremity and action. But rather than Woo and Techno-thriller informed we're on a kind of self-referential memes and fandom driven direction. Stuff like the tall lady opening act made to be meme fodder, Chris Redfield re-beefcaked in a way that struck me as distinctly Fujo. No other way to put it, he simply looks baramaxxed to hell and back. Pecs like that under that specific top they have him in. That's how east-asian gay porn artists draw buff guys.

Like Yakuza I think Resident Evil is probably getting very self-referential and fan-service oriented. But the light I see on the horizon is Silent Hill F. The way they announced that game struck me as a very deliberate "we are our own culture and set of sensibilities, and when you buy our things it is your duty to meet us, not our duty to meet you" to the collective West. The content warning on F contains no apologies. Rather it suggests you as a Westerner may not be fit to appreciate what you are about to see. Which I think is perfect.

I imagine that after several West-oriented failures we may have passed the high-tide of Western influence and orientation in big Japanese gaming. They may have picked up that our industry is tainted on the production and reception end by ideologues to the point we cannot be trusted as a creative influence or customer base. Which is correct. I hope that Silent Hill f serves as a reorienting point and that RE8 bara-Chris and le tall lady are a high point of weird quirky meme-shit in Resident Evil writing.