This week I’m at the Climax offices in England. It’s pretty cool here – the hallway outside their offices displays a lot of things from the various games they’ve worked on, including three Raw Shock faces just outside their main entrance. Yikes! It made me jump more than once today. They also have some portrait-style art of the characters scattered about, including a quite stately Dr. K in the corner.

It is good to be here sitting amongst the team with everyone hard at work on Silent Hill (and Rocket Knight!). I get to see a lot of the inner workings type stuff that I normally don’t get to see so far from the developer. Most of you don’t know this, but there are a lot of blocky, grid-like, wire frame style visualizations that are invisible to the end user of a video game. Even though you can’t see them, they’re all at work behind the scenes. The stuff you actually see isn’t really the bulk of what constitutes a “game,” and it’s always interesting to me to walk to glance at a computer screen and see these types of things.

I also have a nice view of the Solent River. That’s right, if you hardcore SH fans were so inclined you could refer to Climax as “Team Solent.”

Traveling really is a unique experience. I’m not that affected by jet lag, but there’s still that hazy “travel” feeling where time doesn’t feel QUITE right, and everything seems just a bit off from normal. It was 10pm tonight and I swear it only seemed like 6. Then there’s “normal” American franchise restaurants scattered amongst local places I’ve never heard of before, so even something as simple as grabbing lunch feels familiar but alien (especially when you walk in somewhere that should be familiar, but the menu is entirely different). Even though everyone here speaks English, it’s still intimidating to be in a different country and worry about coming across wrong or embarrassing yourself. Now, I have been to Climax several times before, so I KIND of know the area. But even still, it’s hard to only see a place once every few months. That’s a whole lot of stuff happening that you miss out on, and you never were very connected to to begin with.

I guess it’s a feeling not unlike how Harry Mason must feel in Shattered Memories. Here’s this place he (apparently?) lives, yet everything is strange and foreign to him. In the trailers, we’ve seen that there are people living in his (?) house. Of course things do get even stranger. Otherwise we’d have called it Silent Hill: It’s kind of like going on a Business Trip. But anyone who’s felt that “slightly out of it” or “anxious about things that should be normal” will connect easily to Harry’s plight. Where it goes from there, though, is for you to find out. For the time being, I’ll see about finding myself a proper fish and chips.

Silent Hill is a mysterious place; maybe all of this will make sense in a mo.

Cheers!

-Tomm

source: SHSM Blog – Greetings from the United Kingdom | 11/14/2009