Silent Hill 2

I don't know if you like video games. I don't know if you like zombies. But if you don't, you aren't a real American. Zombies are what made this country great, dammit. Baseball, America's national passtime, actually evolved from the Pilgrims' chief entertainment when they came to the New World, smashing zombies with boards and then running away very quickly. (It is a well-known historical fact that the East Coast was once crawling with zombies. Now, only Dick Cheney remains.) And it is this great pioneering spirit, of smashing zombies with boards and then running away very quickly, that makes Silent Hill 2 such a morally uplifting experience.

It's sort of like the people responsible decided to design the game specifically for me. There's urban desolation, an empty town, wrapped in fog...Creeping decay, the clammy hand of entropy 'pon every surface...Abandoned cars...Graveyards, suspicious characters, good old horror tropes...Strange, unidentifiable background sounds, and half-glimpsed forms moving in the shadows...The sense of paranoia it induces is intense. I love abandoned cities. And, of course, there are zombies, which you can smash with a board. It is such a while before they actually appear...You expect them around every corner...Suspecting every rustle to be the footfalls of the dead...Oppressed by a looming sense of Something come to get you...When at last I found my first, I was unarmed, defenceless, with no choice but to follow; every step was an agony. I found myself in a niche, and there it was, this grotesque parody of life, gibbering blasphemously like a Thing on H. P. Lovecraft's Doorstep! And so I smashed it with a board. Thank Providence for boards. Now I'm wandering the town, with my radio...The static builds as a zombie approaches, and I begin to see the undead in every shadow, until at last--there! It spits sawdust at me, and then I smash it with a board. But it doesn't end there! When the zombie falls to the ground, it chitters obscenely and scuttles across the earth like a great roach--scritch scritch scritch! Filled with revulsion I smash it again and again, until at last the horror is vanquished...

Have I mentioned how much I enjoy smashing zombies with a board and then running away very quickly?

It has the atmosphere of a modern-day Innsmouth...Only full of dirty, dirty zombies that need smashing. It appeals both to my aesthetic and my violent sides.

You can't go wrong with zombies.

Smash, smash!

Posted by aloysius at July 19, 2003 01:31 AM | TrackBack |