Well, spent yesterday board-gaming it with a bunch of friends. We do that every monday... at around 11:00pm we started up a philosophical discussion on Batman which lasted until 2:30 in the morning.

Today saw me create a card game based on Zombie films, called City of the Damned. I'll be playtesting in the next few weeks and then printing and selling by December, with any luck. Keep an eye out for it!

Also saw 9 today. It's gotten panned by the critics, but I think it's fucking awesome. It's true, the visual effects are probably its strongest point. The dialogue is meaningless to the point of being derivative, but then I think that's how these characters are SUPPOSED to be. They are simple characters and shouldn't be engaged in deep conversation. The story, too, is a very symbolic metaphorical story and I think people just didn't catch on because they aren't well-read enough to pick up on all that.

In any case, it's a big budget indie film and I really dug it.

Came home and was excited to see that Sony released Silent Hill 1 a while back. I never played the first one, though I always wanted to. In fact, the only SH I've played was duo and I thought that was over hyped. So why did I want to play the first one? I don't know, I think it's gonna be great, though.

Funny story about Silent Hill... right before the game was announced, me and my friend Tyson Michael (a jazz drummer now in New York) came up with this idea for a new horror game. It would use RE controls except for a few sections which would be first person. It involved a man going with a friend to the vity of Ethaniel Grove. On the way, a fog rolls in and he gets in a car crash when a little girl walks in front of his vehicle. When he wakes up, his friend is missing and the town is covered in a white fog.

Walking through the town he quickly discovers that anywhere touched by the fog is bad news bears, as those areas are twisted and decaying and filled with ghosts and monsters that hunt him relentlessly and cannot be killed.

Eventually he learns the whole thing is due to the actions of a cult that used to live in the town 200 years ago. We even had a joke ending, called the "pirate ending" where if you followed the sound of a wailing jig through the fog, you'd come across a crazed pirate who claimed the whole thing was a rum-soaked dream and that they'd reach land soon.

The main thing that separated it from SH (which I remind you had not been announced or released yet!) was that you had to play the game multiple times to get the full story. The first playthrough was the longest and took you through the main character's discovery of his friend's dead body, the discovery of the cult, and the destruction of a cultish circle that allows him to leave the town.

Then there were eight subsequent and much shorter "side stories," one unlocked after completion of each story and they gave the broader picture. Somewhere I have notes on all the characters you could play, but let me see what I can remember...

Well, one playthrough was for the friend, where you find out what happens to him and how he meets his demise.

Another was for the little girl that causes your car to crash. There was another one for a school janitor, too, but I don't recall the full details of that except I think he turns into one of the boss monsters.

One of my favourites was for a man you meet throughout the first playthrough that you eventually find out is dead. This side story took him through a much younger version of the town, during the civil war and detailed the beginnings of the cult.

There was also a playthrough as two government agents (well, one specifically, but they see a lot of each other) sent into the town to investigate it that you meet in the first playthrough. If I recall, their's was the last playthrough and reveals that the government contains members of the cult who are about to start something big...

... cue sequel!

Anyways, the game was to be called Surrealistic. It was also going to incorporate a psychological/sanity aspect that I later saw used in Eternal Darkness.

Apparently I am a fucking genius. In all honesty, it was just me and a friend isolating what scared us most in games and films and saying "hey, wouldn't it be cool to see that?"

Nice of someone else to do it for us.

So anyways, I went home after the film tonight, downloaded SH1 and, instead of playing it, proceeded to watch some of the SH movie, which I own.

I really like the SH movie. But I'm in the silent minority.

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