Eating Your Childhood

2.17.10

3:20 pm

Yesterday, on a whim (so many whims have I...mayhap they be teensy, tinesy partes of some subconscious machination built to destroy my superego??) I bought a box of Barnum's Animal Crackers.

They were just as delicious as I remembered them.

The only difference seems to be that Nabisco is trying harder with the animal shapes.

You no longer really have to guess what you're eating., it's obviously a gorilla.

Not as much fun as it used to be, but I could see today's children being more frightened than delightened by these mysterious, melty monsters they are putting in their mouths.

And they still have that gentle hint of lemon.

Love it.

Also, a few months ago, the new Silent Hill game (Shattered Memories) came out for the Wii.

I was tweaked because it was supposed to be crazy new and different, made for the Wii with the motion controller in mind.

Rather than the typical wander-around-not-knowing-what-the-fuck-you're-doing-or-where-the-fuck-you-are-and-occasionally-hitting-creepy-nightmare-monsters-with-a-board-with-a-nail-in-it-until-the-siren-sounds-and-things-get-REALLY-bad, this game starts with a first person sequence with you and a psychologist who gives you a truncated psychological evaluation .  All true or false answers, nothing too in-depth. Then you become Harry Mason who has just survived a car crash and is looking for his daughter, Cheryl. There are no enemies or weapons, just you, exploring with a flashlight and solving some puzzles (one or two of which are really great). Soon, you get a cell phone (there are phone numbers all over Silent Hill and you can ring them all, plus, the phone's ring tones are all designed to be unsettling) and after that, a call from Cheryl who tells you "you gotta run, daddy, you can't fight them...".  A moment after that, everything freezes solid, massive sheets of ice leap from the ground, swallowing everything and altering your path.  Everything goes dark except for your flashlight and a door, up ahead, outlined in blue.

Then the creatures come out.

As she said, you can't fight them.

You can only run towards the blue outlines, be they doors, walls etc.

Occasionally, you can find a flare that will hold them off for a moment, but it goes out and they continue to pursue, angrier than ever.

Then, back to the doctor's office to do some more psych stuff. 

This is the basic pattern of the game (with some trademark Silent Hill mind fuckery thrown in for fun), but the big difference about this Silent Hill game is that every answer to every question and exercise is collated by the game and then the game alters itself to be more psychologically effective for you.

Sometimes the changes are subtle (the same dialogue but with a totally different intonation) and sometimes the changes are overt (the same female character goes from looking like Francis McDermott to January Jones).

They also alter the forms of the enemies too.

The game ended up being released for the PS2 sans motion controls, obviously, and the game is less effective because of it, but I'm a huge Silent Hill fan and was just happy to get a chance to play it, Wii remote or not.

I've played through it twice now (it's only about six hours) and had a whole slew of differences.

Not sure how "psychologically effective" it's been (haven't had any Silent Hill dreams or nocturnal emissions), but it's been good.

I hope they utilize some of these changes for the next full Silent Hill release, because that series is juuust about stale.

Phil and Grace came up this weekend and hung for a bit.

LIC restaurants were molested, 80's night at Pyramid with Special Guests Jim and Jen, a massive music swap with Phil and the repeated playing of both "I Believe" by Simian Mobile Disco and THIS COMMERCIAL.

Probably more the commercial than the song.

But, seriously, I dare you to watch this only once.

Punk.