Welcome to Silent Hill

"If you ever see this sign run very far in the opposite direction"

I suppose it was only a matter of time before a few of you who know me have come to expect me to write a post about a little game called Silent Hill. And for those of you who don't know me, if you did know me, you would've come to expect me to write a post about Silent Hill. Now, I will write a post about Silent Hill.

I love Silent Hill because personally to me, it is quite possibly the most terrifying experience in the multimedia medium. I love the horror genre and have a bit of an obsession with them (a h-obsession?! har har har!) but this game surpasses every good horror film and gets not just under your skin but also in your head, assuming you have one, which would be quite disturbing if you didn't because then you'd anatomically incorrect. Anyways, I honestly have only played through the first game in the series on the PS1 and I have played half way through 2 and 3. But unfortunately due to compatibility issues with the 2nd and 3rd one on my laptop (yes, my laptop strikes it's whiny bitch hammer onto me yet again) I never got to finish 2 or 3. But fortunately, I'm quite impatient and have the mouth burns to prove it, so I went ahead and spoiled the rest of 2 and 3 for myself with wikipedia. I'm also only going to refer to the first 3 games as they're essentially the main trilogy that are considered the strongest in the series (there is also a prequel, a 4th and a 5th).

Basically, all of the Silent Hill games revolve around a town called (you guessed it!) Silent Hill. This town has a malicious history but in the modern era has become a tourist resort town. In each game you play as a protagonist that is some how linked to the town and winds up being caught in its hellish grasp and can only leave or escape when they have revelations about their past uncovered. You see, Silent Hill is a little different from most towns, it's caught in a certain situation, and not a Mike "The Situation" sort of situation, but something a little more terrifying (just a little!).

"Yo I'm Mike "The Situation" and don' go to Silent Hill or you'll be caught in a Situation! 

Situation, situation, situ....zzzzzz"

It seems to have somehow got itself caught between here and Hell, referred to as "Otherwold" in the games. Silent Hill has itself based in 3 dimensions. The normal dimension, which is just the normal town, the 2nd dimension which is essentially when you're caught (and also screwed to say the least...) in a fog shrouded town where demons roam the street and exits from the town fall into infinite voids, and then there's the final dimension. The final dimension is the Otherworld, a hellish twisted, rotting industrialised version of the town, pitch black and filled with stuff of nightmares. And trust me when I say stuff of nightmares, they really really are. The creatures in the game are usually representation's or metaphors of some part of the protagonist's psyche or other characters' psyches in the game and as you learn more about your in game avatar the more disturbing each revelation and monster gets. The most terrifying of these creatures usually reside in "Otherworld" and sometimes bleed into the foggy second dimension of Silent hill. I can already imagine what my terrifying creature would look like:

"Noooooo not the Custard Creams!!!!"

What makes these creatures terrifying is also their appearance. You can feel the repressed violent urges of some, the dramatic pain of others and suppressed sexual connotations of several. Usually appearing as some sort of wet sheen coated, curvy (and sometimes bobacious) twitchy and rotting entity, they twitch, crawl and run towards you in a terrifying manner. Their disgustingly sexual appearances subconsciously affect us as they take most intimate human actions and twist them into a horrifying form.

I'm trying to think of the best way to describe them but it's very tough and this quite possibly is the most honest post I have ever written about something. I remember when playing through the first one I could only handle it in small doses, probably 30 mins is the most I spent playing it on my first go through. It had me on the very edge, so much so that I had to turn my phone onto silent just so it wouldn't give me a fright. But alas that plan failed miserably as the vibration of my phone on the desk as I played nearly gave me a heart attack, and subsequently I didn't play any more that day. That would've been an embarrassing funeral story!

"Engraved on my Hello Kitty Tombstone: He played, He put his phone on silent, he got a phone call and died"

However there is one of the creatures in the game that has become iconic with the series (amongst others, such as the nurses) and he appears in the second game. He goes by the name of Pyramid Head and yes, it quite literally means he has a pyramid on his head. Welded to his head in fact, he can't remove it and it constantly inflicts intense pain on him. He kind of becomes instantly burnt into the VERY FABRIC OF OUR BEING with his first appearance. For lack of better words I shall show you instead.

Yup, the first time you come across this pointy headed nightmare (apart from one brief appearance beforehand) he's having smoosh smoosh more intensely than Snooki with two other creatures. If that doesn't make sense to you, he's raping two other creatures. This is a little "unsettling" to watch one might say but sets the dread dead into stone for each encounter you have with him throughout the game. And encounters you have, from being locked into a confined space with him while he tries to give you a little nick with his blade (the size of me) to being chased down a corridor where he slaughters the only other person you find in the town like Uwe Bowl does to every film he directs. He's just a nasty piece of work and the only thing scarier than him is being caught in an infinite time loop watching the same 2 episodes of Friends (or just "flicking on E4" as I like to call it). He's the series reminder of how creative (and wonderfully twisted) the creators of the series are and how the simple concept of putting something, such as a pyramid on someone's head can produce a jarring and unsettling appearance. Each game has it's own story and unique set of monsters but they are all linked in a way to each other and they always result in a journey to/through Silent Hill.

Anyways I really wish I could go on about these games for ages and ages but I feel like this post is already too long as it is (I know I probably would have given up halfway through this if I didn't write it) so I leave you with a recommendation of playing these games if you can get your smelly hands on them. Thanks for the read if you made it this far and hopefully you won't have the same nightmares I did about these games!

Intense Walking - The Consumer Cycle

I realised today that I can be a really intense walker when walking alone. Moving through the throngs of consumers (there are no "people" during Christmas, only the soulless creatures that crawl out of Hells hairy arse, the Consumers) on shop street in Galway today, I couldn't help but notice my intense walking affecting the lives of others around me. This intense walking is possibly the result of a mixture of things: I'm usually quite cold so I walk fast to make myself warm, I'm quite spaced out during these moments so I contain a certain soulessness to my facial expression and finally, I usually listen to music from the Silent Hill games. For those of you that don't know, Silent Hill is a videogame revolving around a town caught in a hell that depicts an industrial pseudo-sexual nightmare. Just think of the hottest girl or guy you know, castrate them, melt off their face and remove their clothes while some how nailing a rusty railway spike (or several) through some limb or appendage while they rot and you've got something that closely resembles the game. And then imagine how the music sounds to this picture.

"Your other half from Silent Hill, say hello to Betsy... or is it Alan?"

The walking which results creates a sort of hellish, depressing, unstoppable force of me hobbling towards you with a impenetrable sense of ungodliness. Reactions have been various, but I have always had consumers move with a polite "excuse me" and a smile which feels normal to me, but by the expression of Stranger A (and B,C,D,etc.), would make me imagine I have just shat on their face. They look unsettled, which at first used to kind of worry me, but now it's as normal to me as custard cream in a biscuit. However there are moments when it does get a bit awkward and it's usually when I walk behind two consumers (usually women) that are chatting away to each other and I am unable to pass them. They usually become aware of my unintentionally malevolent presence behind them as I speed up and fall behind, speed up and fall behind like some sort of demon yo-yo, because I keep thinking I have opportunities to pass them. Every time they turn around and look at me it probably appears something like this:

Their uneasiness excretes from their pores like sweat from that fat guy at the gym, and I become disdainfully aware as I now have to not only pass them, but do so before their uneasiness infects others around them. This creates a sort of panic between both parties that fuels my demon-train walk to an uncontrollable level. At this point time has become limited edition, I don't have many options so I purposefully subdue an oncoming walker with a glare:

This prompts the oncoming victim to stop dead in their tracks as I glide by the now two silent women. For a brief moment we connect as I pass them by. It feels feral, I am a predatory ostrich at a petting zoo and they are small children, time has stopped for them as they realised they had fed the wroooooong bird. They cower out of the rest of my way and then I pass while they nearly walk into my previous victim. As I walk away I can feel the tension subsiding like a landslide crap in the toilet yet still feel the eyes of the consumer locked onto me like some sort of awkward-inducing ballistic. But soon I am out of site. Rinse and repeat this situation a few times as I walk to HMV.

Then as I walk around the 2 for 1 priced DVD section of HMV I reflect on the several times this has happened and a thought hits me like I'd hit James Blunt if I ever met him. I HAVE BECOME CONSUMER! 

Irony, you son of a bitch.

When Virtual Became My Reality

I remember when I was young the first time I played a video game. It was as clear as my first memory (which was me at the age of two, waddling down the corridor like a drunken gymnast who failed at the splits, I was after pissing myself). It all started with a program called MS DOS and a game called Sim Farm. For those of you who don't know, Sim Farm was made by Maxis, which went on to make other custard cream-like addictions such as The Sims. Now I don't know why, but even at the age of Five when I played Sim Farm I never considered myself ever to be the farmer type, it just wasn't in my blood. Yet making a 256 colour, 2-D, ever failing farm was intoxicating, I just HAD to spray more and more pesticide to keep my strawberries safe (although if this was reality, my strawberries would probably kill someone or many someone's with the insane amount of pesticide I used).

So Sim Farm was basically my introduction to the gaming world. The next step was when a little grey box that you plugged little grey boxes into Jack Bauer'ed it's way into my life. The Super Nintendo. If Sim Farm was an addiction, this would the the creation that should've made me go into video game rehab. Super Mario World dominated my life for some time, it was sort of the stem of my retarded video game flower. I couldn't get enough of going from level to level stomping, flying, eating, destroying castles, killing koopa kids, rescuing an inept princess who can't even bake a cake without a life threatening situation becoming involved:

"Actually, it's quite disturbing if you think of it realistically"

So Mario played a large part in destroying my social life at my early age. However the next part of my video  game life played (anyone see the pun here!?) a cosmological  obsession in my life that changed how I perceived dimensions in game and also what I (disturbingly, but not dangerously...I think...) drew. It was a new game for the PC and I think it's one everyone knows, it brought "doom" to my social life (I'm having so much PUN!!! writing these):

"Black Friday at Walmart"

If you didn't get it from the pun you're pretty stupid. Anyways, Doom brought violence in video games into my life. Unlike Mario which did it in a subtle way, Doom literally let you blow up creatures into giblets right in front of you, it was an orgy of violence that filled an insatiable pit and left you wanting more. It sounds so sadistic (maybe this game is what made me sadistic) but every time you came across a new enemy you always wondered what it would like after firing a rocket into their face, which often resulted in variations of half-eaten gone off hamburgers from McDonald's. And it was in 3-D, something I had never seen before (well.... apart from reality). So it was just totally Oreo Cookie in my life (it means awesome). However there was one more game that would solidify the very moment when I began wishing video game was reality. You could say it was a "Legend of" a game. And it totally "Zelda"'d my life (ok maybe that wasn't a good one.... nor did it make sense).

"Nintendo: Buy now and exchange €50 for your soul!"

The Goddam Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Renowned world over as the greatest video game ever created, it could make me breakfast it was so amazing (although, it never did :( ). This game shattered my barrier of video game reality and  actual reality, it absorbed me like Brian Cowen absorbs debt. It was my new reality. Any time I stopped playing, it would be like my world was The Sims, I'd eat, I'd talk some sort of gibberish to the neighbours, I'd pee on the floor and cry, I'd develop some sort of ability to accidentally create fires all the time, until I hit pause and went back to reality in Hyrule.

Of course there's many games in between all of those and after, but these were the asteroid hits to my brain and have left large impact craters. But good impact craters, not like the one that got rid of Velociraptors. They have left me with memories more fond than a snack box after a night out and more real than Michael Jackson's nose (although, that's not really hard to achieve), video games are just Oreo Cookie.

Master of Boredom

People have many skills in life. And when you develop skills, you keep going further and further with them until you reach a certain point in your life where you feel you have mastered that or those skills. Like any used-to-be-a-monkey being on this planet I too have some skills contained in my husk of a body (lacking a SOUL). Some skills, such as drawing which I proudly admit I am decent at, have been with me for life. Others are more recent, such as the apparent ability to imitate an ostrich, chicken, pigeon and Velociraptor (maybe I hatched from an egg when I was born?).

"Name: Seán O'Beirn
Age: 1
Soul Status: Non-Existent "

But I would never say I have mastered any of these skills, but I'm continuing to develop them. One skill I have mastered however, is something I face everyday. In fact, many of you, like me, have most likely mastered this skill too but I'm calling the throne on this one because I'm writing about it. I have mastered Boredom. Now I know you're probably thinking "Duuuuuh! But Seán, boredom isn't a skill, hyuck!" which is true, it's almost as wrong as saying that Brian Cowen is pretty.


"Our Taoiseach isn't too photogenic... or any-genic for that matter"

It's a state of mind really, but challenging boredom with even the simplest of things you eventually find ways to always, and I mean ALWAYS (facebook stalking anyone?), escape boredom . So I like to call boredom a skill in the sense we do little things to eventually master our boredom. It's like a portal to developing other skills. I know it sounds a little silly to say "I have mastered my skill of Boredom". However, I think it sounds a little better than "I have mastered the skill of entertaining myself" so I think I'll stick with the previous.

When we're bored we usually begin to experiment with things around us. We will do anything to beat our boredom, which ends up literally letting our mind unhinge. This is the first phase, or as I like to call it "The Stupid Phase". I think I can honestly say, this video pretty much sums it up:



We basically go a little "Sarah Palin" crazy and release all of our energy in extremely odd and stupid ways while no one is around (no, that shelf isn't climbable...). This ends and we go into the second phase, which is "The Routine Phase". In the Routine Phase we begin to walk around the house finding things to clean or laundry to do (I for one, like to listen to the Inception soundtrack while doing this, it makes laundry time undeniably EPIC). We eat tea, we drink custard cream biscuits and we stare at something in the room that's partially covered and wonder what it is for 5 mins. This phase varies in length for everyone (depending on how many custard cream biscuits you might have) but when it ends we reach the final stage.


"The Routine Phase may last a while..."

In the final stage we reach the "Productive Stage". In this stage we find something grabs our attention longer than that of Mel Gibson trying not to be racist. This can be a skill we're good at, like cooking, or taking up something entirely new such as, in my case, writing on this very blog. It's usually something that we enjoy or have become interested in recently and we begin to build on our knowledge of it and how we use this skill. It's kind of like Angelina Jolie, she got bored one day and decided that she wanted to get into adopting, an boy oh boy, has she been refining that skill since!


"Angelina Jolie: Soon... Soon you will ALL be MINE!"

I think that the first two stages can swap around for different people but the final stage always stays put as the final stage. Eventually as each stage plays out more frequently (ala, because you're on the dole) you become quicker at adapting to boredom and soon enough, like pterodactyl on speed, you're flying it, pun intended (har har har). In the end, the moment you feel bored, you'll know when you've mastered the skill of boredom when you find something worth doing straight away instead of phases 1 to 3.

Now... begin stage 1 my pretties....