Games

The TV is a 768/720p plasma so maybe I can get away rendering games at a lower resolution too. Not sure if there's any effective super sampling happening here when they're rendering at 1080p.

Finished Silent Hill Origins this week, which was surprisingly decent although still flawed. Preferred it to SHf anyway. It felt like a clunky pastiche but at least they were trying to copy something great and succeeded some of the time (enemy designs, location designs, general atmosphere). There's an enemy in a mental hospital/sanitarium that's like a floating rusty neck brace/cage and then a twisted humanoid shadow extending from it but it's not rendered the same as usual shadows are and it definitely sparks the same primitive mental associations SH games would do. It reminded me of what a person in the night illuminated by headlights might look like maybe Travis hit and killed someone previously or worries about it as a truck driver, but it also looks like a bird cage because the residents at the facility feel trapped and invisible. Stuff like that really appeals to me. Like, I saw someone mention a personal theory in SH2 about how the boss relating to Angela has these pistons in the walls that also looks like cigarette rolling devices with the cylindrical filter going in and out of the device at the end and maybe Angela's dad rolled his own cigarettes and could tie into the flames she sees - you also get a lighter as a puzzle item in this location - (on top of the more likely interpretation of them being SA and arson representations) and it reminds how good that style of psychological horror is. Probably why it works for so many internationally since the building blocks it works with are so primitive and near-universal.