Trigger Happy
and decor drawn from popular cinema. Hideo Kojima, the brilliant designer of Metal Gear Solid, who comes on like a twenty-first-century Beck, dressing up for interviews in garish PVC outfits and tinted shades, has joked that whereas most people are 70 percent water, he is 70 percent movies. Konami’s publicity for Silent Hill, meanwhile, claimed “cinematic quality” as a virtue, noting that its developers cited David Cronenberg, Stephen King and David Lynch as aesthetic influences.
So what in fact makes Silent Hill like a film? Well, it has an impressive introductory video sequence, prerendered with high-quality computer graphics workstations, which tells the story of how your character suffers a car crash and wakes up in the ghostly small town with his daughter missing. This sequence is indeed very filmic, with fast cutting and weird camera angles. However, it’s not part of the game, even though one entertainment magazine that featured a piece on Silent Hill clearly based its judgment of the game’s “filmic” quality entirely on this video sequence.
During the game itself, the part you actually get to play, the graphics are of a far inferior quality, and occasional scenes of scripted dialogue between
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