The Dumbest Thing I Ever Did

 

If you play games long enough your bound to have done something stupid at some point.  Some kind of dire mis-play in an online game or some stupid decision in a single player one, it happens to the best of us.  One of my favorite Braindead Gamer Moments can be found on Game Center CX where Shinya Arino, the host, is playing Bonks Adventure.  He enters a bonus stage, jumps off the ledge to the first platform and immediately overshoots it and eats shit, ending the stage and getting nothing for his trouble, hilarious.

That's just a silly mistake though, my personal dumbest gaming moment I feel is far worse because it was influenced by an advert and entirely self inflicted.  The picture at the top of this post is an advert for Playstation 1 memory cards.  Just in case some zoomer stumbles on this post, the PS1 didn't have an internal memory so if you didn't have a card, you couldn't save your game.  You may notice that at the bottom of the image it says "Try beating Final Fantasy VII without it!".  This of course is because FF7 is a big ass game and the idea of beating it in one go without a card is unthinkable to most.  I however, was quite young and instead of being sold the idea of going out and buying a memory card I instead took it as a challenge.  "Fuck you, reverse side of the manual, I'll fukken show you", I thought. So for years I would play Final Fantasy 7 without ever saving.  I would sit and play and then at the end of a session I would turn off the PS1 and then start from the beginning every time I came back.  What made this even dumber was that I owned 2 fuckin memory cards for my PS1.  It wasn't like I didn't have a card and couldn't just give up the idea of finishing in one go, I was just to stupid to realize how long a 3 disc game was and too stubborn to ever give up and so it took me an embarassingly long time to beat Final Fantasy 7 for the first time.

What made this worse was that this mindset extended into other games.  Another title that took me an embarassingly long time to finish was Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  Even though that DID have internal memory I was so pressed by the challenge at the bottom of that FF7 advert that every time I came back to OoT I would delete my file and start over.  I think the furthest I ever got for a long, LONG time was the end of the Forest Temple.

If my memory serves then the tipping point for me breaking this habit was when Final Fantasy 9 came out.  I think that was around the time I wised up and though "yeah you right, I can't beat it without one" and started saving like a normal human being.  I spent an embarassingly long amount of time not beating many games because I refused to save because I wanted to show a marketing team whos boss.

Ironically, in my adult years I have taken up speedrunning and there are now many games I can finish in one sitting.  Hell, even big  RPGs like Panzer Dragoon Saga on the Sega Saturn I am now capable of finishing in a single sitting but that doesn't change the fact that child me refusing to use saves was probably the dumbest gaming releated thing I have ever done

Black Summer: How not to do a Zombie show

 

Since becoming a father I have spent a great deal of time doing laps of my living room while rocking the baby for naps and the like.  During that time, since I can't play games quite as much as I'd like, I've been catching up with my watch list on Netflix and Amazon and I've seen some good shit.  Better Call Saul, Peaky Blinders (except season 6 that shit was anus), Everything Everywhere All At Once, Juni Ito: Maniac, all in all it's been a pretty good time.  But then I decided to fire up a zombie series called Black Summer and holy moly, this isn't just the worst thing I've watched while on baby duty, it's maybe one of the worst things I've seen just in general.

First broadcast via Netflix in 2019 and apparently some kind of spinoff of some other crap sounding show called Z Nation, Black Summer follows a bunch of characters as they try to survive their way through a zombie apocolypse in order to get to some kind of sports stadium where apparently it's safe.  I'm currently half way through the first season of the show and it's pissing me off to such a degree that I can't help but come here to complain about it.

The premise is you're average zombie survival affair.  Survivors and zombies and assholes for your standard issue "are you humans the real monsters after all?!" nonsense that comes with most zombie media but that's fine, I was pretty much expecting it to be that way going in.  What I wasn't expecting is for the writing of the show to be THIS fucking horrendous on all fronts.  You could legitimately use this show in a course for aspiring film students on what not to do when making a horror show.

Each episode consists of your standard zombie fare where characters go to a place, get fucked somehow and then try to survive but the problem with Black Summer is that the characters seem to be sometimes just willfully fucking themselves or just opting to be immensely fucking stupid at all times.  For example there's one part where they end up in a school which has been overrun by murderous teenagers.  That setup in itself is kind of stupid but there is a scene where a standoff happens, one guy has a gun train on a group of kids, they have a gun pointed back at them and a hostage.  The hostage in question is deaf so there's a bit of an exchange and they agree to let him go in exchange for their gun.  The leader of the teens passes his gun to a small boy and says "shoot him if he moves" while they make the change but the hostage in question is deaf, so he starts to walk where the small boy just blasts him in the back, killing him.  At this point the boys start to flee and they just let them fucking go.  The characters were going on in the previous episode about how they needed weapons and these kids clearly have weapons and just killed your friend and instead of gunning them down and taking their shit they just let them go.  This is then proceeded by the dumbest zombie chase of all time where characters just opt to leave doors wide open for the rage zombie to chase them through and make the shittest attempts I have ever seen in this type of media to block his path.  These are fast rage zombies by the way and their ability to tank bullets seems to be based on how  "tense" the scene needs to be rather than having any sort of consistent rules. 

Speaking of inconsistent rules, in the same episode there is another character who is running away from a zombie, again in the dumbest way imaginable who has a very clearly fucked up right hand.  It's covered in blood and after escaping the zombie he tries to start a car and has to clumsily reach over to the ignition with his left hand because his right is unusable.  These scene ends with him finding a mostly untouched supermarket after escaping the zombie where it then shows a title card and then he's walking around the store completely fucking healed.  I would have been willing to accept that he found some medical supplies either in a back room or in the asiles of the store and patched himself up off camera but there's no bandage or any evidence of that kind of thing at all.  It's like the entire sequence of him getting injured was written way after the fact OR, and given how stupid the show is I'm assuming this to be the case, they fucking forgot.  The lack of attention to any kind of detail or consistency just makes the entire production feel lazy. 

What's worse is that zombie features are such a well trodden road that the rules are basically written for you and barely any effort has to be put in for this kind of thing.  Hell, even games like Resident Evil were getting this shit right in 1996.  In RE1 the characters split up because they don't know what they are getting into and they are trained soldiers, in RE2 they get split up by unfortunate circumstance and in Black Summer they split up as if that idiot gas from Cabin in the Woods is just part of the air in that region of America.  When you're show can be compared to original Resident Evil and RE comes out on top as being the more intelligently put together piece of media, you have a BIG problem.

It's the exact issue I had with that stupid fucking movie called A Quiet Place.  Where all the "tension" of the show is generated by characters being stupid rather than any kind of clever scenario writing.  Despite pissing me off greatly I'm going to finish both seasons and if it magically gets better I'll come back and write a big apology to it but I imagine that it's only going to get worse from here.  It got cancelled after 2 seasons anyway so the chance of it getting any better is 0%

I Hate What Silent Hill Has Become

 

Silent Hill Ascension released recently to pretty unfavorable reviews which bodes extremely badly for the current batch of upcoming Silent Hill games because if you can't even get the extremly easily impressed gaming press on side, then the fuckups must be pretty colossal .

When I say I hate what Silent Hill has become though I'm not talking about the games themselves.  Silent Hills 1-4 are still extremely good horror classics but anything after that hot trash.  Silent Hill Origins probably being the most forgivable since even though it's a steaming pile of wank you can at least tell its heart was in the right place but once you get past that game it's all downhill from there.  The series hit peak shittiness with Book of Memories that probably still hasn't been outdone even with the recent ascension but the series, even in the current day is still in freefall in terms of quality.  

The new batch doesn't seem any better either.  Ascension is already being shit on, there's some other one called Townfall and I'm not even sure what that is, there's Silent Hill F which seems to be having an identity crisis and looks more like Fatal Frame than anything else and then finally there's that fucking stupid piece of shit remake of Silent Hill 2 being made with the inept and creatively bankrupt folks over at Bloober Team.  I could write an essay on why Silent Hill 2 being developed by Bloober is terrible on its own but thankfully I don't have to because YouTube user Bobsvids did a great job of outlining why they are so terrible, so I'll just let him tell you why that project has absolutely no hope whatsoever 

 

But like I said, I'm not talking about the games themselves, per se but what Silent Hill has become conceptually.  In Silent Hill 1 you aren't going through a spooky town being hunted by manifestations of your own guilt in order to punish you for something, you're going through a town beset by a cult and the nightmare is coming from another person, not really for the sake of punishment but because she is being used to birth a demon which you end up actually fighting if you get one of the games good endings.  Silent Hill 3 continued this plot with the influence of an unborn demon God causing the nightmare to manifest outside of Silent Hill but again, not for the sake of punishment.  Heather Mason is not being punished for anything by the nightmare.  Silent Hill 2 was an offshoot of this occult story as a sort of aftermath tale where the events of the first game have sort of caused the nightmare effect to spread to anyone who enters.  James gets plagued by manifestations of his own guilt but he's the only bloke in the original set  of games cast to go through that experience (side characters not included of course, shut the fuck up)

But after Silent Hill 4, due to the popularity of Silent Hill 2 over 1 and 3, Silent Hill is now ONLY a place where you go to "fight your innner demons" or get punished for some kind of misdeed you performed in the past.  The worst example of this is in Downpour where thanks to a bunch of talentless hacks trying to write a story that's "open to interpretation" you end up with a game where, in the best ending, the main character is being punished by manifestations of his guilt for something he didn't even fucking do.

The problem is that Silent Hill was originally interesting because it was a gripping story about a cult, a demon god and a families struggle against that cult.  2 was an interesting exploration of the effects of that cult on the town as well as a cool story about 1 guy inparticular and 4 expanded the scope of that a bit more.  But in the current day, Silent Hill is now just this weird therepist town you go to when you've done something wrong so twitchy monsters covered in raw bacon can spook you into not feeling so bad about it. So sure, the modern games have fucked Silent Hill on a mechanical level sure, but over time and thanks to the efforts of a bunch of very low skill people who aren't the original Team Silent the CONCEPT of the entire series is completly fucked and ensures that anything that gets pumped out from this point onwards is doomed to be awful garbage that entirely misses the point of what made the first set of games interesting in the first place

At this point I would probably say something like "If you're going to do Silent Hill again, bring back the cult and drop this pseudo-therapy shit" but what really needs to be done is the series needs to be killed.  Stop making them, let it die and find another group of talented people to make a new horror new series with new ideas.

Fuck Silent Hill