EPHEMERA: SILENT HILL 2 EDITION

We’re going from the ridiculous to the sublime at VGJunk today, because after writing about “worst game ever” contender Rhythm Beat last time out I decided to give myself a break and play through the best game ever, Silent Hill 2. Okay, okay, I know that’s subjective. It’s my favourite game ever, though, and probably always will be if even Bloodborne couldn’t shift it from its lofty perch.

I usually play through Silent Hill 2 at least once a year. Not last year, though – I played Silent Hill 4 instead for the purposes of this article, so never let it be said that I don’t suffer for my art. That just means I’m really looking forward to playing SH2 again, though, and in this article I’ll be pointing out a few of the things that caught my attention during what was my thirtieth-ish playthrough. With that in mind, this article will contain spoilers. Lots and lots of huge, end-game spoilers right from the beginning of the article, so if you’ve never played Silent Hill 2 but you’d like to one day then skip this article. Seriously, if there’s any game where spoilers should absolutely be avoided, it’s Silent Hill 2. To reiterate: watch out for spoilers. Okay? Okay. Right, let’s get started.

I’ll begin in the very first area of the game: a disgusting, piss-drenched men’s toilet! This neatly sidesteps the issue of why you never see protagonists go to the bathroom – in Silent Hill 2’s case, it because protagonist James Sunderland has thoroughly evacuated himself before embarking on his adventure. That’s not why I’m talking about the toilet, though. Instead, I’d like to draw your attention to this strange piece of graffiti on the bathroom wall. Weird bowling-pin creatures with shocked expressions make an interesting change from the usual “LEEDS UTD 4EVA” or “Dazs mum is a slag” you see scrawled on toilet walls, but I’m more interested in the writing around the graffiti man. Here’s a closer look:

That certainly looks like Hebrew writing to me. But what does it say? Sorry, but that’s where my knowledge of Hebrew ends, I’m afraid. I tried to puzzle it out on my own and didn’t get very far. A bit of internet research suggest a few other people have also tried to figure it out, with the result that the writing might be a list of names for God in Hebrew. The one just to the left of the little dude’s neck looks like it could be “Adonai,” for instance. Personally, I’m not so sure. It depends on whether this image was taken from somewhere or if it was created specifically for the game by SH2’s graphic artists. There are other instances in the game of text in different alphabets, (and we’ll get to that in a bit,) where Konami simply replaced the English letter with its closest equivalent from the Greek alphabet, so that might also be what’s happening here only with the Hebrew alphabet. You’re all welcome to have a crack at deciphering this thing, but I’m happy enough just to use it as an example of Silent Hill 2 hiding mysterious titbits that may or may not have a deeper meaning amongst the game’s graphics.

UPDATE:

A big thank you to the people in the comments below who filled in the blanks on this mysterious bit of graffiti. It turns out they are the names of God, and I even managed to find the original source image! Check out the comments for a bit more info. 

A little further in, and James encounters both the game’s first monster – which he promptly batters to death with a stick – and the franchise’s iconic radio, which emits static as a warning when monsters are nearby. However, in Silent Hill 2 the radio serves another purpose: it sends James a message from his dead wife Mary, encouraging him to hurry up and find her. Just to make one hundred per cent sure you get it, here come some enormous spoilers. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

The message you hear is garbled and patchy… but not as garbled and patchy as the game wants you to think it is. Check out the subtitles in the screenshot above – you can see there are only snippets of the message coming through, until you stop reading the subtitles and actually listen.

At about 23 seconds into the clip above, you can clearly hear James’ wife say “why did you kill me?” thus revealing Silent Hill 2’s most shocking plot twist about five minutes into the game. That’s what you call a ballsy manoeuvre, folks. The thing is, out of all the people I know in real life who’ve played Silent Hill 2 not one of them has ever noticed Mary spoiling the game. I know I didn’t, I had it pointed out to me years later. It’s pretty amazing, really. My explanation as to why so few people pick up on this is that a) you’re not expecting to be told the game’s plot twist right off the bat, b) people assume that there’s nothing to hear because they take the game’s insistence that the message is garbled as fact and c) you’re actually reading the subtitles, assuming that they’ll tell you any important information. It’s a fascinating psychological trick, honestly. Risky, but I think it pays off nicely.

Now that James has a weapon and a radio, he can spend some time wandering around the foggy streets of Silent Hill trying to figure out where to go next. Or, you can take in the town’s architecture at your leisure, because it’s not exactly difficult to avoid the monsters. That way you get so see what Silent Hill has to offer as a resort town, including a couple of cafes and bars, a restaurant that promises “humongous burritos” and whatever this place sells.

I had a hard time picking a favourite shop name from Silent Hill 2, especially when you consider other contenders are a shop called “I Love Groovy Music” and the ultra-appropriately named “Cafe Mist” but in the end I had to go with “Magical Envelopes” because, c’mon, magical envelopes? On one level I appreciate the absurdity of it, because quite possibly the least magical thing I can think of is a manila envelope. On the other hand, Silent Hill 2 does literally start with James receiving a magical envelope, so now we know where the dark forces of Silent Hill do their stationary shopping.

Moving on to the apartment building portion of the game, and here’s something I don’t think I’ve ever seen mentioned anywhere before: this spooky picture. The one on the right. What do you mean, “it just looks like trees?” Let’s zoom in and enhance:

There are a couple of skulls on that picture, and there’s nowt more spooky than skulls. It’s perhaps a little too obviously spooky for a Silent Hill game, a series whose sense of dread usually comes from unsettling weirdness. It definitely leans towards the “lenticular Halloween decoration” end of the fear scale but again, it shows there’s always something in Silent Hill 2 worth keeping your eyes peeled for.

The apartment building is also where you meet Pyramid Head for the first time, and one of the most iconic monsters in modern videogaming gets a suitably powerful introduction. Now, I suspect that when most people think of Pyramid Head’s introduction they think of the cutscene where Pyramid Head attacks some other monsters while James hides in a wardrobe, and I can see why: it’s a disturbing, aggressive scene that quickly cements Pyramid Head as something even more dangerous than the other creatures in the game. However, I much prefer the moment you get your very first look at Pyramid Head.

For me, it’s the single most effective “scary” moment in videogaming, and all Pyramid Head does is stand there, basking in a faint red glow. James’ monster-detecting radio is going bananas so you know that this mysterious figure is a monster, but beyond that you know nothing about it as it stands there and watches you from behind the metal gate, just obscured enough that you can’t make out its exact form. The dread comes from not knowing what Pyramid Head’s intentions are – other monsters would be jerking and flailing towards James in an attempt to kill him, not calmly surveying the scene. It’s the opposite of a jump-scare, I suppose, and it’s extremely effective in instilling an extra layer of uncertainty and nervousness in the player.

Speaking of Pyramid Head, here’s the first time you have to fight him. When you “win,” Pyramid Head simply turns around and walks away, but I totally forgot that if you chase after him he will turn around and start trying to kill you again. Man, that’d be a really embarrassing way to die in Silent Hill 2, huh? Killed by a boss you’ve already beaten. What kind of sap would fall for that, he chuckled awkwardly to himself as he loaded his last save file.

Before we leave the apartment building, I’ll take this opportunity to mention (again) that there’s a message hidden around the edges of the coins used in the coin puzzle.

After trekking through the apartment building, James meets up with Maria. She’s a (more spoilers) not-real duplicate of his dead wife with a more licentious personality and Christina Aguilera’s wardrobe. James and Maria eventually make their way to the hospital, but the exertion is all too much for Maria and she has to have a little lie down.

There’s definitely humour to be found in someone laying on a bare, stained mattress in a filthy abandoned mental hospital full of monsters and saying “Mmm. So comfy...” A pitch-black kind of humour to be sure, but it’s still there. Of course, now I’m wondering whether Maria’s exaggerated assessment of the hospital’s sleeping arrangements is completely intentional and she’s trying to convince James to stay with her, maybe get on the bed with her and give up looking for his dead wife. If that’s the case, she should have probably picked a location that doesn’t look like a nightmare scene from Jacob’s Ladder.

Here’s a save point adorning the wall of one of the other hospital rooms. I love that the save points in Silent Hill 2 are just… red squares. Pieces of paper, possibly. Their very simplicity makes them mysterious, especially when James comments that it feels as though “someone’s groping around in (his) skull” when he looks at them. I think one of the reasons SH2 is so effective at unnerving the player is that it’s so close to being almost over-familiar, but then it veers away into the kind of strangeness you might not expect. This is presumably the result of a Japanese team of game developers making a game that’s hugely inspired by “Western” horror – the works of Stephen King and David Lynch, for instance – but then adding their own sensibilities to it, creating something at once familiar and alien. I mentioned this in a previous article, but take Pyramid Head’s design, for instance: the way he looks in the Silent Hill movies, with the extra greeblies on the helmet and the sheer pointiness of it all – that’s how you’d expect him to look in a Hollywood horror movie. His original game design, however, is both clearly monstrous but unnervingly abstract, and it lets you know that Pyramid Head is something other than just a monster.
Where was I? Oh yeah, save points. As well as being mysterious, their simple shape and vivid colour also makes them easy to spot while you’re traversing the town, which is nice.

There’s also this scene right near the end of the game, where the developers made damn sure you knew it was time to save your progress while simultaneously making you dread whatever’s coming up next. It’s something so horrible it requires nine goddamn save points! Good job on making even such a basic mechanical element as saving your game a vehicle for horror, Team Silent.

In the hospital’s shower room, there’s a trail of fluorescent green goop running down the drain. Given that this is Silent Hill, this fluid could be all manner of unpleasant substances, but I’m going to assume that it’s a reference to the undead resurrecting serum from the Re-Animator movies. Do I have any evidence to support this claim? No, I do not. I just like Re-Animator, and I especially like the idea of Herbert West pitching up in Silent Hill. He’d probably love it in Silent Hill. There’s a regular supply of dead bodies to re-animate and enough mysterious disappearances that it’ll be ages before anyone even suspects him. Presumably Herbert West would inhabit the regular, non-nightmarish Silent Hill, though. The haunted, psychological-torture version of the town only seems to ensnare those with deeply repressed guilt, and Herbert West has never felt guilty about anything in his life.

After the hospital, James heads to the Silent Hill Historical Society. Open Friday-to-Monday, kids under five go free, ask us about the town’s history of evil religious cults and lake tragedies. There are a few notable relics of Silent Hill’s past in the Historical Society, mostly in the form of paintings. The most famous is that huge painting of Pyramid Head that dominates one wall, but some of the others are interesting, too.

For instance, this fairly unremarkable picture actually depicts the room where you fight the game’s final boss, a nice little piece of foreshadowing.

There’s also this one, called “Crimson and White Banquet for the Gods.” It’s a little hard to see here, but that’s okay, I’ve got a close-up.

As you can see, it shows some people participating in a ceremony, including someone wearing robes and a big, red, triangular hood. Hmm. I’ve always been partial to the theory that on James’ first visit to Silent Hill – back before he killed his wife and descended into a nightmarish psychological hellscape – he saw this picture on a trip to the Historical Society and it stuck with him, later informing the appearance that Pyramid Head takes as it is manifested from James’ mind. The chap in the red hood, one Jimmy Stone, also pops up in Silent Hill 4 as one of the ghosts, because one of the big themes in Silent Hill 4 is taking minor world-building elements from Silent Hill 2 and making them more “important.”

Via the expedient method of jumping down some seemingly bottomless pits, James finds himself in a prison for the next portion of the game. One great thing about the prison is that it shows how much you can get out of playing through Silent Hill 2 multiple times. On your first playthrough, the prison seems appropriate because it could represent how trapped James is feeling by his situation, his inability to protect Maria and his reluctance to accept his wife’s death. On later playthroughs, however, and especially if you got the ending that explains James killed his sick wife for selfish reasons, you’ve got an extra layer of meaning as you realise that prison might be where James belongs.

There are a few moments that hammer this home, some of them less subtle than other. James briefly gets trapped in a cell, and there’s a scene where he pulls down a noose so that it frames his head, that kind of thing. The moment pictured above is one I’ve never really thought about before, though, showing James on the “wrong” side of the visitor’s booth while the camera – that is, the player – views him through the security glass. It’s a wonderfully crafted little scene, and a pleasing reminder that even after playing SH2 dozens of times I’m still finding new ways to enjoy it.

On a lighter note, there’s a gallows in the prison. No, wait, bear with me. You see, you can climb up the gallows, and you can also fall off them.

James’ weird falling animation and comically heavy thud as he hits the ground provide a welcome moment of levity in a game of such unrelenting horror, and as such I chuck myself off this platform a few times every time I play through the game. Well, they do say nothing relieves a stressful situation like a little gallows humour. Oh, cool, that was the joke that finally killed my soul.

Also, the prison has some surprisingly cheerful signage on its bathroom doors.

The final area of the game is the hotel, and just outside there’s a fountain that’s making me question my conception of what a bird looks like. I always assumed it was supposed to be a fish, perhaps one that sprays water out of its mouth. You know, one of those sculptural fish you sometimes see that look like medieval drawings of dolphins. But no, James says it’s a bird and he’s looking right at it. Who am I to question his taxonomical skills? I can see it as maybe a stretched goose, I suppose, although rather than a fish or a bird it reminds me most of a sandworm from Beetlejuice.

Finally for today, it’s the moment just before you face the final boss. Visually, it’s a beautifully composed image: stark and plain, which I’ve always taken to represent James letting go of the delusions he’s been labouring under for the rest of the game. All that’s left is to confront “Mary” and bring it all to an end, whatever end that might be. One touch I really like is the quietness of the scene: as you approach this final encounter, there’s no music and the only sounds are James’ footsteps and a light rain. You get here by climbing up a huge metal staircase, and when you enter the room the staircase falls away beneath you to show that there’s no going back – but it does so silently, without the sound of crashing metal you might expect. I don’t know whether this was intentional or not, but it works out well because if there was a sudden loud noise it would really detract from the scene.

So that was a bunch of words about Silent Hill 2, huh? Yeah, it didn’t really fall into the usual Ephemera article style, but sometimes you’ve just got to write about what makes you happy and rambling on about SH2 does make me happy. Now I’ve just got to decide between playing through Silent Hill 2 again or moving on to Silent Hill 3.
 

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EPHEMERA: BLOODBORNE EDITION

It’s time for a brief break from retro games today, because I’ve been playing From Software’s Playstation 4 masterpiece Bloodborne again recently and now I want to talk about it. That’s one of the perks of having a videogame website, I can ramble on about Bloodborne without having to see the glassy stares and hear the disinterested “uh huh”-ing of people who have never played it and never will, once again proving that the internet is vastly superior to real-world human contact. So, it’s another edition of the Ephemera series, I suppose, although I’m gonna make a mockery of that name by talking about major game mechanics as well as small details. Of course, this article’s going to contain lots of spoilers for Bloodborne and its DLC, so if you want to experience it all for yourself then look away now, and if you're planning to play Bloodborne at some point I strongly suggest you do just that. Also, I hope you’re not squeamish about eyeballs.

Scenic Views

First up, something simple. I thought about what my favourite view in the game was. Now, Bloodborne is a beautiful-looking game packed with sinister, detailed-soaked architecture in a style I can only describe as Ultra-Gothic, and thus almost every location is worthy of praise. I’m especially fond of the haunted-village-meets-organ-farm feel of Hemwick Charnel Lane and the Research Hall’s towering maze. In the end, though, I settled on this.

This is the entrance to the Upper Cathedral Ward, and it’s just beautiful. The quasi-Victorian ironworks of the metal railings and the streetlights, looming towers, a fog-shrouded bridge that leads towards a mysterious building glowing faintly with a light that may seem almost welcoming but probably illuminates something that wants to use your spine as dental floss. There are many reasons why Bloodborne is an excellent game, but this aesthetic, this world, is what makes it a game that feels almost as thought it was designed specifically for me.

Also, I hope you appreciate that I took the time to nudge these two corpses into the corner so I could take the first screenshot without their mangled bodies making the place look untidy.

Selfies with Friends

As I’m sure many of you know, Bloodborne is a spin-off of the Dark Souls franchise, and in a lot of ways it’s a Dark Souls game in all but name (plus a change of setting from “medieval” fantasy to 19th Century horror themes.) One thing it took wholesale from the Souls games are the “gestures” - short canned animations that you can use to make your character point at things, wave hello, bow in greeting, that kind of thing. They’re mostly used for communicating with other players during online multiplayer. Pointing out traps, using the “slow clap” gesture when your co-operator walks into said trap, gestures are very helpful. Well, in Bloodborne there’s a gesture called Make Contact, where you stick one arm up and one arm out at ninety degrees. You pick this gesture up from a mummified corpse, who is standing in said pose, and it’s a prime opportunity for some photography.

Just look at the camaraderie on display here, my character’s arm draped across the shoulder of the corpse like they’re two lads staggering from bar to bar during a cheap holiday in Magaluf.

It wasn’t until I went through my Bloodborne screenshots in preparation for this article that I realised I’d posed with this corpse every single time I encountered it, and I’ve played through the game five or six times.

I started a tradition without even realising it. It’s nice that this evolved organically. You know, the, erm, corpse photoshoot. Nice might not be the word I’m looking for. Please tell me someone else has done this. It’s okay to be a weirdo, but not a lone weirdo.

Gun-Kata

The Dark Souls games are famed for being difficult, and so too is Bloodborne. A lot of this difficulty comes from the fact that almost everything in these games wants to make your innards outards, and will take any opportunity to kill you violently and with single-minded dedication. In the Dark Souls games, two of the ways you can defend yourself are by a) hiding behind a shield or b) parrying attacks by deflecting them with a shield and then getting a free attack while the enemy is stunned. However, there are no shields in Bloodborne. Well, okay, there’s one in the base game but it’s essentially useless and is basically included to tell you not to bother with shields (which is pretty great in itself). Instead, you can parry attacks by shooting the monsters in the face.

Dark Souls’s shield parry system is fine, but gun parries are much better for several reasons. For starters, it’s way cooler. Brushing aside an armoured knight’s blows with a shield is cool, sure, but not nearly as cool as stopping a werewolf in its tracks using a blunderbuss. I’ll admit that might be personal bias talking, though, and anyway I wouldn’t want to make such a claim of superiority without some gameplay evidence to back it up. So here it is: in Dark Souls, if you miss a parry you will to find out what it’s like to receive an impromptu root canal from a broadsword. This can discourage those of us with poor reactions, leading us to cower behind our shields and not even attempt to parry attacks. In Bloodborne, though, even if you don’t land the parry your gunfire will usually make the enemy flinch and interrupt their attack, so you miss the chance for a powerful visceral attack but you also don’t get torn to ribbons. This means you’re far more likely to attempt gun-parrying in the first place, and the fact that you can only carry a limited supply of ammunition means it’s not (entirely) feasible to simply hammer the fire button and hope for the best, retaining a suitable level of challenge.
Plus, you seem to be able to parry a higher percentage of enemy attacks in Bloodborne than in the Souls games. This is great, because part of my problem with parrying in Souls games is that you have to learn what attacks you can and can’t parry through trial, error and repeated death. In Bloodborne it all feels a bit more obvious, making for faster-paced combat where a well-timed gunshot can turn the flow of a fight.

As a bonus, here’s a clip of me parrying a boss so hard that he tried to flee back to his home planet.

The Rocks That I’ve Got

One of the items you can collect in Bloodborne are pebbles. That’s not a cutesy nickname or anything, they’re just small rocks. You can throw them at enemies, and they’re best used to get the attention of a single enemy in a group so they’ll run towards you, letting you fight them one-on-one. Then there’s the pebbles’ item description, which contains some of the densest, thickest sarcasm I’ve ever seen in a videogame.

“Quite thrilling” makes me chuckle every time I read it, possibly because I always imagine it being said by a stuffy English professor from the 1930s. The thing is, when you are throwing pebble at a half-transformed man-beast and you do get its attention, that is actually quite thrilling. There are thrills to be had as the ravenous beast realises you’re there and tries to eviscerate you, that’s for sure.

The pebbles also do a teeny tiny bit of damage when they hit an enemy, so if you’re feeling particularly bold – or you forget what item you have equipped and accidentally chuck a pebble rather than the molotov cocktail you were trying to throw, ahem ahem – then you can even take out enemies by flicking bits of gravel at them. That might seem like a terrible idea, but wait: the damage dealt by the pebbles actually increases as you raise your Strength stat! Skipping rocks at the beginning of the game might only cause one or two points of damage, but if you levelled up and invest heavily in Strength then by the end of the game you can be dishing out five or six points of damage with every pebble!

“Speyeders” Would Be The Obvious Pun

While blood is the central theme and driving force of Bloodborne’s plot, eyeballs run it a close second. Yes, eyeballs are very important in the world of Bloodborne, particularly in that certain groups attempt to “see” the true mysteries of the universe by growing more eyeballs. This is an effective strategy, apparently, even though you wouldn’t think it would work. If I want to run faster, growing seventeen more legs is not going to help, you know? Fresh eyeballs are also needed to perform certain blasphemous rituals, to the extent that you can be attacked by enemies with a special tool designed solely for gouging out eyeballs. Have another look at the pebble pictured above, and you’ll see it looks like an eyeball, and so on. Eyeballs are everywhere in Bloodborne, something which is literally true when you reach the Nightmare of Mensis area.

They’re coming, as the late, great Bill Paxton once said, out of the goddamn walls. Here in this alternate universe, the books and magazines browse you! Personally, these eyes are all the more unnerving for the fact they don’t really do anything. They’re simply there, unmoving and silent, possibly dead but also possibly seeing all kinds of things beyond the ken of man.

Then you’ve got these things. Eyeball spiders, I guess you’d call them. The legs imply that they were once mobile, and I think we can all agree that replacing a spider’s body with an eyeball significantly increases the creepiness of said spider, so I hope this image doesn’t give you eye-rachnophobia. Ha ha! Ha…
I’m sorry.
Anyway, these things are wonderful. They’re pure decoration, a mood enhancer, an unsettling thing to see out of the corner of your eye, and one of the reasons they're so great is that they’re not explained at all. You can infer how they came into being from the place you find them and what was going on there, but you’re never told what they are or why they seem to be pinned to the floor with weird organic needles. This is an example of one of Bloodborne’s greatest strengths – it’s a game that takes inspiration from Lovecraft and other cosmic horror, but it never makes the mistake of over-explaining itself. It gives you enough info to get an idea – a startling, horrifying idea – of what’s going on, but many of the specifics are never filled in, giving you the chance to ponder these secrets and develop your own theories. This is true of all the Souls games, as you can see by the large cottage industry of internet videomakers and message boards dedicated to analysing the lore of these games, but for my money Bloodborne is the game where the tension between mystery and fact is most finely balanced.

The Host With the Most

In the same area as the eyeball spiders, you’ll find a boss called Micolash, Host of the Nightmare. I think that means “host” in the sense that one hosts a party, because Micolash certainly seems like he’s having a good time.

What a cheerful chap! Micolash is an interesting boss, because unlike all the other bosses in the game he doesn’t immediately set about trying to kill you when the fight begins. Instead, you have to chase him through a maze, avoiding the skeletal puppet monsters littering the corridors and tracking Micolash down when he teleports around by jumping into various mirrors. Eventually you’ll corner him and you can have a proper scrap, but this completely different style of boss battle seems to upset a lot of people. Many will claim that Micolash is the worst boss fight in the game, which I don’t think it is, but hey, that’s your opinion and I’ll concede that it might not be as exciting as doing battle with enormous were-beasts. Some people also insist that Micolash is the worst boss in the entire Souls series, but in that case they’re objectively wrong, having seemingly forgotten about the intense dullness of the Dragonrider in Dark Souls II, or the utter fun vacuum /  bullshit generator that was Dark Souls’ Bed of Chaos.

Consider this my defence of Micolash, then, because I think this boss battle is really good. It’s a nice change of pace for starters, completely different to every other boss fight in the game, and it’s good to mix things up. The best thing about it is the atmosphere, though. As Micolash runs around he’s constantly jabbering away, spouting a mixture of interesting lore details, mockery and the howling of a madman, as befits someone who performed an arcane ritual that drove him insane and sent him to another dimension. His voice acting is fantastic, too, his dialogue dripping with the conviction that comes from being totally bonkers, coupled with just a hint of pure comedy. You get the impression that Micolash, despite clearly being nuttier than a bag of trail mix, does genuinely have a deeper understanding of the universe than the player does, which fits in perfectly with Bloodborne’s themes of being thrust into world of forces beyond your comprehension. I’ll admit that mechanically the fight has some problems, especially if you die near the end and have to chase Micolash right through the maze again, but for sheer ambience alone it remains one of my favourite parts of the game.

Millinery

You may have noticed that Micolash appears to have his head stuck in an oversized bird feeder. That’s called the Mensis Cage, and one of your rewards for defeating him is that you can take the cage for yourself. Oh yes, just like the other games in the Souls series, Bloodborne is not afraid to give the player a selection of goofy hats to wear. Here are my top three favourite goofy hats in Bloodborne.

Number three is the Mensis Cage itself. Supposedly acting as an antenna to facilitate contact with the god-like beings known as the Great Ones, it also allows the wearer to experience life as a pet canary. Good for headbutting contests, bad for wearing during thunderstorms.

Number two is the One-Eyed Iron Helm (or the Master’s Iron Helm, depending how you acquire it), which is a bucket with one eye hole drilled into it. That’s it. It’s as though Ned Kelly got distracted halfway through making it. The helmet’s description says it only has one eye hole because the original owner likely only had one eye, but that’s no bloody good to me, is it? It’s hard enough to kill all these beasts without having to squint like Popeye the whole time. There are multiple places in Bloodborne called “workshops,” and you’re telling me none of them had a suitable drill for making a new eye-hole? The One-Eyed Iron Helm is completely ridiculous, and that’s why I love it.

My absolute favourite is the majestic shining traffic cone that is the Gold Ardeo. If Pyramid Head had the wealth and taste of a Premier League footballer, this is what he’s look like. No eye-holes is even more ridiculous and thus more appealing than one eye-hole, and the first time I played through Bloodborne I never took this helmet off once I’d bought it. It even wobbles around when you run, as you’d expect a cone perched on someone’s head would. How perfect. All I can say in defence of its design is that it’s the helmet of the Executioners, who did battle with a group of pseudo-vampires led by a charismatic queen. Maybe they wore these helmets to prevent themselves being captivated by the vampire’s bewitching stares. Then again, rather than using swords and guns the Executioners killed all the vampires with massive wooden wagon wheels, so perhaps practicality is not their strongest suit.

Nightmare Pork

Going back to eyeballs for a moment, and one of the enemies you encounter now and again in Bloodborne are giant pigs. There’s one in the first area, a few more in the woods, and you can find them in the optional Chalice Dungeons. Apart from being taller than a man and unpleasantly bloated even by pig standards, they’re just pigs.

See? There’s one now. It’s a pig, but larger. This is one of the final areas of the game, and when I reached this point during my first playthrough I was more than confident about my ability to defeat the same old oversized pig. So I ran up to it, hoping to land a critical blow while its back was turned…

At which point it turned around, revealing that its face was a mass of writhing eyeballs. I was so shocked by this – shocked enough to let out an audible gasp – that the pig was able to trample me to death while I was distracted. Good job, From Software. You totally got me.

This Message I Saw One Time

Immature? Yes. Did I laugh out loud? Yes. Did I rate the message as a “fine note”? Of course I did, I’m only human. I’d like to believe that whoever left this note was in the middle of a difficult boss battle when I gave their message a positive rating, and that the resulting health refill they got saved their life. Rescued from death by a joke about butts, what a wonderful concept.

Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom

And finally for this article – the Boom Hammer weapon’s jumping attack.

For the most part, Bloodborne is a game of subtlety and precision, but sometimes you just want to leap into a crowd of enemies and smash them with a massive fiery hammer. You can do that too. “No mercy for beasts” indeed.

So, that’s a bunch of words about Bloodborne. If you read them all, thank you very much. I had fun writing them. Almost as much fun as I get out of playing Bloodborne, in fact – but not quite, so now I’m going to head back into the Chalice Dungeons for a while. If you summon a collaborator called Slab Beefbroth who’s carrying a circular saw on a stick, be sure to use a friendly Make Contact gesture.

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EPHEMERA, VOLUME 10

Back once again – three small words guaranteed to get “Renegade Master” stuck in my head – with a fresh set of five miniature moments from a variety of games, it’s the return of the VGJunk Ephemera series! Yes, it’s another selection of inconsequential bits of game that make me say “nice” whenever I see them, or at least they would if I was in the habit of talking out loud to myself as I play videogames in my lonely shame-zone.

No-lem

When I wrote about the summons of Final Fantasy V, I mentioned that I’m fond of the Golem summon whenever he pops up, and I particularly like his appearance in Final Fantasy Tactics.

Here is the FFT version of Golem, looking like The Thing going through an awkward teenage phase. Even for something made of rocks, this Golem really looks like he’s made of rocks, as though the rabbi (or whatever the Ivalice equivalent of a rabbi is) who created this particular Golem was distracted half-way through the carving process. Just because he's taken the form of a fossilised mound of chicken nuggets doesn’t make him bad at his job, mind you, and when you summon the Golem your characters are still placed under his protection. This means that when a physical attack comes your way, the Golem’s hand appears and blocks it, and it looks like this.

It’s specifically this animation that makes FFT’s Golem my favourite. The satisfaction of your enemy’s attack being casually rebuffed is nice, but it’s the way you see them actually hit Golem and rebound from the impact that makes me like it enough to write about. I appreciate the surreality of the entire thing, too. There was no way that ninja was expecting, when he started swinging his blade, that a huge stone hand posed in the universal gesture for “no” would appear and take the hit.  Presumably the sudden jarring impact also dislocated the ninja’s shoulder, and the fact that the ninja doesn’t take any damage is a rare flaw in an otherwise excellent game.

An Abdominal Workout

Sticking with animations but moving on to Nintendo’s classic wet-slalom-em-up Wave Race 64, which is one of my favourite games on the Nintendo 64 and is still a lot of fun to play even now thanks to its sunny atmosphere and excellent water physics. One thing that Wave Race 64 lets the more confident / arrogant (delete as applicable) player do is perform tricks while they’re jet-skiing around the game’s courses, and my favourite of these stunts is flopping around in a circle on your stomach.

With the possible exception of some other straight sports games like Tennis, Wave Race 64 might be the most “realistic” game Nintendo have ever produced, and that’s why I love this animation so much – having played Nintendo’s other racing games, you might expect this spin to be flashier, to put the “buoyant” in flamboyant, but no. This looks exactly like a slippery person attempting an ill-judged trick in choppy seas, and there’s something about it that’s terribly charming to me. Maybe it’s the way the rider doesn’t react when they land and the jet-ski slams into their midriff, grimacing through the pain in an effort to look as cool as a person in a life vest can look. Who knows for sure? The heart truly is a mystery, but one thing is clear: the first thing I’ll be doing after I finish this article is playing Wave Race 64 and making my character spin around in an undignified as manner as possible.

Red-Hot Tag Team Action

Goldeneye was unarguably the king of multiplayer shooters on the Nintendo 64, and its reputation as host of the best four-player murder-fests only seems to grow with every passing year. It’s a position I can’t really argue against, not when I played so much Goldeneye multiplayer that I’m surprised every time I see Pierce Brosnan and his head isn’t shaped like an improperly-stored cereal box. However, one overlooked N64 shooter that I had a lot of fun with as a young person was Acclaim’s Turok: Rage Wars, a multiplayer-focused take on the “time-travelling Native American fights dinosaurs” franchise. It had a solid core married to some fun weapons and interesting game modes, like the one where players randomly turn into monkeys. Still, that wasn’t quite enough to keep me and my friends hooked, so in an example of what is now called “metagaming” but was known back then as “pissing about,” we came up with our own game mode.

One of the weapons in Rage Wars is a napalm launcher. I know it looks like a poor first draft of a robot caterpillar, but it’s actually a gun capable of firing sticky napalm bombs that can be detonated at the push of a button, like so.

With the power of the napalm gel in hand, we devised a new four-player game mode. One team of two has the napalm launchers, and covers each other in explosive gel. Their goal is to kill the other team of two as many times as possible, but only using the splash damage of the exploding napalm. Thus, Team Napalm has to get as close as possible to the other team, gradually whittling down their health with repeated detonations, while their targets try to stay out of their way. A lot of Rage Wars’ stages are quite small and constricted, so that’s easier said than done, and when you add in the frantic bickering of Team Napalm as they demand that their team-mates blow them up right this instant, c’mon, he’s trapped in a corner, it makes for a frantic experience. Each kill earns a point, the teams switch roles at the end of the game and whoever scores the most points after x amounts of matches is the winner. In this way, I think it’s safe to say we extracted maximum value from Turok: Rage Wars.
On a related note, I tried playing some of the game to capture the GIF above. The default control scheme is that the analog stick is for looking around and the C-buttons move your character, and years of playing more modern shooters meant my brain simply could not handle the functions of each stick being on opposite sides of the pad to what I’m used to. It would only be slightly hyperbolic to say that it threw me into a dimension of pure confusion where the laws that govern our human world held no dominion.

Bagsy Brazil

As strange as it might sound, there are some games you can play that don’t involve computers or consoles. Who knew, right? One such game is Subbuteo, the much-beloved tabletop recreation of football where the exciting soccer action is controlled by flicking plastic players with rounded bases around on a green blanket. I mean flicking in the literal, with your fingertips, sense. A cherished part of many a young football fan’s childhood, my own included, Subbuteo’s popularity meant that a computerised version was a certainty and so it came to pass in 1990 when Goliath Game released Subbuteo: The Computer Game on a variety of formats. While it loses the pleasure that the tactile nature of real Subbuteo offers, a computer game version does make some sense. You might not be able to find a willing Subbuteo parter, and if you did there’s a fifty-fifty chance they’re the kind of uncultured barbarian who ignores the rules and does nothing but blast shots towards goal from all over the pitch. There is a clearly marked shooting zone for a reason, you idiot. Playing Subbuteo on your computer also has the advantage that you know none of your players are going to be broken: the ankles of the plastic figures are notoriously fragile and, much like the ankles of West Ham striker Andy Carroll, will snap if so much as a gentle breeze caresses them. This isn’t about the game itself, though, but specifically the screen where you select the colour of your team’s kit.

As seen here in the Atari ST version of the game, your players are presented as though they were a box of real, physical Subbuteo figures, complete with styrofoam packaging and a goalkeeper on a stick who looks like he’s in the process of being robbed at gunpoint. For comparison, here’s what a real box of Subbuteo players looks like.

Without wanting to slip too deeply into wistful “when I were a lad” territory, there was always something slightly magical about seeing a Subbuteo team all boxed up like this, especially if it was some exotic and ultra-obscure team like Red Boys Differdange, or when you realised that Arsenal would make a perfectly good stand-in for Rotherham United. Looking at this kit-changing screen, I’m certain that whoever designed it felt exactly the same way.

Mocking Laughter

Finally for today, a musical interlude courtesy of Squaresoft’s SNES masterpiece Chrono Trigger. It’s got one of the best soundtracks on the system - one of the best soundtracks period, even – and here’s one tiny thing about it that’s hardly vital to its success but which I’m still very glad of. At one stage in the game, our plucky heroes engage in battle with grumpy wizard and potential party member Magus, and the fight gets its own special musical theme. The whole track is great, but I’m here for the laughter sound effect that plays during the song. You can hear it at about 1:02 in this video:

I don’t have anything insightful or clever to say about it, I just think it’s super neat. I know some people hear it as baleful sobbing, but it will always be laughter to me. My only question is who’s laughing? It’s got a certain dopey quality to it, so I doubt it’s Magus. I can’t imagine him haw-haw-hawing like a drunken hillbilly. Although, Magus does say “if my fate is to die, then I must simply laugh!” at one point, so maybe he’s secretly a much more chucklesome fellow than his dour demeanour suggests.
One of the reason that I think it’s laughter rather than weeping is that I’ve listened to the Brink of Time album, a collection of acid jazz Chrono Trigger remixes. Magus’ battle theme is covered on the album, complete with laughter.

You can hear it at about 47 seconds in, and while it’s (rather impressively) played on a guitar now that’s definitely a laugh. There you go then. Case closed. Chrono Trigger is a game that laughs at those who play it. That’s fine by me, frankly. I’ve had so many happy hours playing Chrono Trigger that it could steal my girlfriend and slap my mother and I’d still love it.

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