Yeek.
Somehow makes the games (the second one in particular) more plausible.
Video Games To Build And Retain A TV Audiencegamasutra.com
.
Ambition and Compulsory Design in Animal Crossinggamecareerguide.com.
Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part Two: Brick-A-Breakgame set watch.
Filling the Void Between Casual And Mainstream Gamesgamasutra.com.
Emotiv Knows What You're Thinkinggamasutra.com.
Compelling a Complete Performancediygamer.
Wagging Your Arms Behind You… Love+ [Review]diygamer.
Hearts of Iron IIIparadox.
The Nuance of Uncharted Character Designgamasutra.com.
The News Game: Using Neverwinter Nights To Teach Journalismgamasutra.com.
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Asbury Park? Of Sinatra fame? Incredible.
Interestingly enough, I spent the holidays wandering an abandoned insane asylum (the same one featured in the movie Session 9. Silent Hill immediately came to mind. It’s incredible that there are indeed plausible locales for such outrageous accounts of fiction to take place.
I’ve befriended you. I suppose it was about time, as I read your journal regularly.
I remember finding some pictures of an abandoned asylum that really reminded me of the schoolhouse in the first game.
Dont have the link right now, of course…
Leela: “Who would’ve thought hell would really exist? And that it would be in New Jersey?”
Fry: “Actually…”
Wow.
I always wonder about the abandoned warehouses that litter every Hollywood action movie ever made. With the price and value that people put to land, it’s hard to imagine that even city blocks, far less a whole town, can go essentially wild again. The concept is more like something out of my childhood, out of my fascination for dead civilizations, where things are forgotten, are lost, than from the world I’ve lived in for the last fifteen years or so.
A whole, modern town — left to rot, for no particular reason except corrupt management. Just, Jesus.
Forces me to shift a few things around in my head.
Maybe Skunk can talk to you about that?
Spelled backwards, that’s “Wow”.
I REMEMBER THAT.
Maybe!
…but since I’m home now:
http://www.oboylephoto.com/ruins/index.htm
I believe it’s “.woW”, actually.
Yeah, there seem to be lots of forgotten little places like that. Maybe even a whole lakeside town…
By the by, loved that SH4 review. I sort of came across the same conclusions, only sort of backwards (I found the first half of the game excruciatingly scary and the second half not so much).
To Shep I dug this up in my yard today. I don't really know what to make of it, so I thought you would like it. From Glippo!Well!
The big turning point for me, I think, was the bunny.
You know. The bunny.
There are some artsy photos in here. It’s good.
New York must be great for this kind of thing, with all of the underground junk. I mean, it’s not just abandoned buildings — it’s abandoned catacombs, of various sorts. There’s a tunnel system under Columbia, that apparently, in time, winds its way into the underground portions of an abandoned asylum from the turn of the 18th century (when uptown Manhattan was still mostly swamp and forest). I did a bunch of research on it once. What was it called? Urrg. Bloomingdale.
Wow wow.
A boss I had a couple years ago said that one of his hobbies was reading about real-life hidden passages and secret rooms in mansions and castles across the world. He added that on the Internet, with its wealth of descriptions of similar videogame scenarios, it is exceptionally difficult to construct a web search (on google, I presume, but I can’t remember specifically) that filters out a reasonable amount of the imagined stuff and actually returns useful results about the real things that are out there.
I plan to travel this summer — probably Europe. I think looking at ruins and catacombs and that sort of thing will be what I find most fascinating.
I mean, the idea of places that people were, but are no longer — that just seems oddly incredible to me. My experience, growing up, has been of either cities that are both alive and new enough that there’s people everywhere, or of rural areas just past the fringes of suburban sprawl, where the land is a mix of older farms, relatively new houses, and somewhat swampy forests in which nothing has ever been developed. The closest things to ruins we have would be old, flooded quarries — anything better, and it’s a tourist attraction; anything less significant and there’s nothing there to see.
But Europe … reading about places like the British isles and France, I’m struck by the thought that people have been living everywhere for millennia, and how all sorts of things have sort of slipped between the cracks in the slight shifts between old and new locations. This is a good example of what I’m thinking — not even the story so much as the idea that you can just wander back across some fields and through woods and find something interesting yet oddly isolated.
If I ever become ridiculously wealthy and have a gazillion dollars to spare — or, heck, even just eighty billion — then I hope I’d also be eccentric enough to find a suitable plot of land and have the castle from Ico constructed on it. Man, that would rock.
&hearts
Very interesting. Is this the place that that city in the movie “City By the Sea” is based on?
I hope that made sense.
I’ve seen this in person. It’s disturbingly eerie. That’s a patient’s painting. Connecticut Valley Hospital, opened 1886. This is actually a separate asylum from the one I visited recently, but no less creepy. I spent the summer with some friends a few years ago and they gave me a guided tour. At dusk
You’d think we would find beer cans, graffiti, et al in the facility. We found surprisingly little. I wasn’t surprised. It took quite a bit of self control to keep from fleeing in terror. As we left, the facility’s silhouette recalled its…perverse past.
Somehow, Silent Hill didn’t seem so far-fetched.
No that’s where they shot “City By the Sea” the actual city by the sea is the LBC. Long Beach, New York. Everyone was really pissed that they shot that movie in Jersey rather than here, especially with De Niro’s attitude about Tribeca. Stupid rich hypocrites.
I was in Asbury Park once but I was heavily medicated.
Hospital X reminds distinctly of both Silent Hill 2 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Side-note, Cuckoo’s nest was filmed in an actual, functioning asylum, where the actors lived for several weeks along with mental patients before filming ever began.
Powerful film, that one.
Make sure to take a whip with you if you’re going to explore those catacombs!
Phew, and because I don’t like cut and pasting notifications, and worked through my old friends list in reverse alphabetical order, I think you’re the last person I need to notify of my LJ change. Given that, I’m re-adding you since, well, I have no reason not to, and that’s a bigger compliment than it sounds.
Also, I did decide on New York over San Francisco, if that was the sort of thing to keep you up at night. At least for now. I just like the image of the guy that moves from New York out to the west coast after a while. You just don’t hear as many cool stories of people moving from the west coast to New York. And Miamians go to New York, not out west. Not that I’m trying to stick with the status quo, but if a certain combination of moving yeilds the coolest stories, who am I to argue with what works? I figure the money combination is from Miami back to New York, out to San Francisco, maybe then futher south on the west coast (although LA reminds me too much of Miami, and I’d hate to do the same thing twice), then catching a reasonably priced international flight to go overseas.
I’ll just stick to sleeping on couches in the mean time. Feel free to cue me in on any of those you know of as well.
Thats one thing I’ve always found interesting about America and Americans in general, the lack of history. There are so many things in this country that I just take for granted. Theres an artificial lake near where I live. It was built after the coal mining industry colllapsed. Under the lake are a couple of mining villages. That was the solution, rather than try and bring new industry or tourism, you submerge the whole area. Not more than 5 minutes walk form the lake there some Roman baths. They’ve been there for over a millenia. Its astonishing.
There is so much history in Europe. It was something that I really missed going to America. Lanarkshire used to be a forest, the Scottish monarchy used it as a hunting ground. So there was a huge country house built here, one of the finest in Europe. However, its not there any more. The last Lord of the manor leased the land to miners on the condition that they don’t mine near the house. Some years down the line the coal stocks are depleted. The richest seam is under the manor, a mile down, so it shouldn’t matter. The manor sank into the ground and all thats left is the hunting lodge. (modelled after a French Chateau, to show them who’s boss. http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/scotgaz/features/featurefirst6724.html)
Thers also New Lanark which was a Victorian workers paradise. The Falls Of Clyde are there, Wordsworth wrote some poetry there I believe.
Finally theres this Bothwell Castle (http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/bothwell/bothwellcastle/) which is about a 15 minute walk from my house.
I’m not sure which i find more intriguing, the lack of hitory you have or the fact that we pretty much ignore ours.
I find it depressing. Like this whole land is an existential vacuum.
San Francisco does have some history, in a realtive sense. It’s only a couple of hundred years’ worth, but hell. Could be worse. The cable cars still run. Much of the architecture is as original as it gets, after the 1908 deal. There’s the F-line, full of historical trollies (trams, if you like) from all over the world. And there’s culture.
The Northeast is even better, since that’s where everything is founded. You can wander around Boston and see three hundred years in a single city block. Although New York doesn’t care too much about history, and loves to tear things down, there are still so many layers, if you choose to explore them. Literally, too: all of the underground work — it’s like Paris.
It’s only on the coasts, though. And the coasts, perhaps not coincidentally, are the most liberal and European-minded portions of the country. I say it’s because there’s a sense of context, missing in the land where the sun rises and sets on America.
But what do I know.
Ah!
Or at least make sure you are the reincarnation of Dracula, and thereby have inherent control over the souls of any dark beings you might encounter.
There was life before history.
There were eggs before chickens.
Join us?
Actually in the South you can find places like this fairly often. There are a lot of failed ideas in the south. A famous for my friends and I(till they got caught) was a hotel in Biloxi, Mississippi called the Tivoli.
There’s a lot there. Broken Elevator shafts are the things of dreams.