I’m Hearing: Silent Hill 3 - Breeze in Monochrome Night

Interesting weekend. After spending several days last week looking for Silent Hill 3, I finally got it on Thursday night. After shopping that night, Brian and I went over to my parents’ house so I could help my brother set up some new hardware in his computer. Well, that didn’t go so smoothly and I ended up wasting a huge chunk of time over there. In the end, I couldn’t solve the problem there, so I took the computer and all the parts with me to my place. I played Silent Hill 3 for about an hour or so before I went to bed. When I got up the next morning I decided that fixing the computer was going to be an all day project so I took the day off of work and worked on that thing all freaking day long. XD It wasn’t really that bad, since I knew just what I was doing and what to expect (generally speaking)…it was mostly a matter of waiting for things to download and/or install. I watched several episodes of Farscape while I got his compy back in working condition. He seemed rather pleased that it was working smoothly, so it was worth all the time and effort. My family brought pizza over for supper and we ate at my place. Then later on hachi and jetfuel (Will) and Brian came over and we played some mean DDR. Will worked on “Candy” until he got a AA rating, which I happened to miss because I was in my room playing Silent Hill 3. Both Jon and Will tried out the trance vibrator for Rez, which I must admit, is rather cool. We went to IHOP at something like 3 in the morning, then went our separate ways for the day.

I slept in a bit on Saturday then started in on Silent Hill 3. I played till late afternoon, then I showered and got ready for the art show. Sometime after 7 Brian showed up, after which Will arrived, and later on, Jon. So we headed over to see my painting in the gallery. It was in a very nice location, and low enough to the ground that I could actually be photographed in front of it. :-D There were some really really amazing pieces in the show and also some pretty lame and boring, if not downright crappy ones. Ah well. The turnout was fantastic, there were tons of people there and there was free food and live entertainment. I didn’t really see anyone I knew aside from the guys I came with and my relatives, but there were a lot of pieces in the show that belonged to people I know. One thing I noticed rather consistently throughout was that some pieces had astronomically high prices on them, which judging by my taste and opinion, were not deserving of such a price. Others, however, which literally made my jaw drop, were priced far lower than I would expect. So in many cases, the pieces that I viewed as crappy had artists who were full of themselves whereas the more amazing pieces had humble artists who didn’t charge nearly what their work was worth.

There was free beer there, so I helped myself, and got a little tipsy because I hadn’t eaten yet. I got a free t-shirt on my way out the door. :-D After that, I had the guys take me home so I could change into some more comfortable clothes, and we ended up eating at Mancino’s, which was nummy. Then we went back to my apartment and disassembled my old DDR pad and began to mount it on plywood while we watched some X-Files episodes. After that the guys got really into playing Guilty Gear XX so I ended up back in my room playing more Silent Hill 3. (GGXX makes my eyes glaze over after about 10 minutes of watching…guh, so repetitive). Brian left at a reasonable time, but hachi and Will were there until somewhere around 5 am. Both guys ended up getting ticketed for having their cars out in the street, which I felt really bad about. Usually I remember to tell people to pull up into the driveway before 2 AM, but I was really caught up in that game. ^^;;;

Then Sunday…what a horrible adventure. It started off okay, but something happened in the afternoon that basically put a stop to everything I had planned. Erin and I went rollerblading in the park in the early afternoon, which felt great. I haven’t been blading for over a month, pretty much since I got DDR. Anyhow, I got back and I was starting to get some fairly nasty menstrual cramps (you men are so damned lucky you don’t have to deal with this shit). So I decided I’d try out this heat therapy pad thing that I got free with something I bought. (These are meant to soothe cramped muscles and relieve tension through chemical heating…they are these pads that get attached to the inside of your clothing and rest against your skin) The package said to allow about 30 minutes for the pad to warm, so I sat there waiting a bit. After about 10 minutes, I got extremely sick to my stomach, got really warm but had a cold sweat going, and got so lightheaded I couldn’t tell whether I was going to pass out or throw up. I immediately ran to the bathroom and took that thing off and just sat there, scared shitless. Eventually I stopped sweating and was able to get back into my bedroom to lay down. I was in pain for a good while before I was able to relax. I was supposed to stop home and get my laundry and mail, but I didn’t want to drive in that condition so I got in contact with my mom and asked her to drop that stuff off for me. So I slept for about and hour and I woke up feeling muuuuuch better. Mom and Dad showed up not too much later and took me out for frozen custard. :-) So it wasn’t too bad in the end.

I played Silent Hill 3 until about 10:30 PM, when I beat it for the first time. It took about 8 hours and 7 minutes total…which included all the wandering around and watching all the videos. I got a lightsaber and a new outfit for Heather for finishing, which are added into the new game if you start again. It’s so much fun sabering the psycho dogs…and the saber lights up the room quite well, which can be very handy in really dark areas. :-D

So, overall impressions of the game. I admit up front that I have been literally waiting months for this game to come out, and because I enjoyed the previous two games so much, I had extremely high expectations for this one. I’d been hearing so much about it since it was released in Europe a couple months ago, and my anticipation was pretty high. In general, the game exceeded every expectation I had. The storyline was very engaging, the puzzles were tricky but not impossible, and the audio and video were seamlessly interwoven and of such dark, dirty, death-infested desolation…the environments were so ghastly they were undeniably beautiful. The one thing that SH always does fantastic on is environment; I doubt you’ll ever find someone who will go against that. The monsters themselves weren’t really that scary this time for some reason. The rabid dogs and the faceless nurses made the most horrific sounds when they died that it made me cringe at times, but nothing really scared me (the way things did in the original Silent Hill anyhow). I was most scared when I nearly fell down a hole at one point! As usual, I relied on the maps like crazy (I’m just horrible with navigation!!) and of course there were some areas where there were no maps (this was the most annoying part of the game for me!) but that made it more challenging.

It had a few inside jokes that appeared because I had a Silent Hill 2 saved game on my memory card, which amused me a great deal, but I wish there had been more. The connections between the characters and locations in this game and those in the first game were excellent, and gave the storyline of both a lot more texture and depth. I genuinely believe one couldn’t fully enjoy this game unless you’d played the first two (if not the second, then definitely the first). Each game had something the others didn’t…Silent Hill was scary as hell…my heart was pounding at times. The graphics were not that great, but that made it even scarier because things were not easy to see or distinguish. Silent Hill 2 was more plot-driven and heartbreaking, and the feeling of isolation was even more present. Silent Hill 3 brought those two things together, and with its much-improved graphics, it just blew the others away in its own right. I played the game happily from beginning to end…with only a few moments of frustration and desperation, but the game wouldn’t have been as fun if it were all easy. :-) It was worth the wait….the game was bloody fantastic. I am excited to work on my second pass through the game. Also…the game came with the full soundtrack as a free bonus…YES! It took me forever to hunt down the soundracks for the first two games, so it’s a very welcome addition to my music collection.

Big Brian (roomie) watched me play for about 45 minutes before he passed out on my couch, so he missed the ending. Oh well. When Erin got home from work she and I watched Bridget Jones’s Diary which was good…better than I expected. We had to watch it with subtitles on because the British accents were almost too much to decipher that late at night.

A pretty damned full weekend, full of great, good, and not-so-wonderful things. Not too many left before school starts again.