Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy User Manual
Page 118
Trigger Happy
120
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