Twenty-two years later and I find myself back playing this almost like it was new again. I had given up on any revival of Silent Hill over a decade ago after some bad entries and one (disclaimer: my hot take) misunderstood decent game. (I had a long draft made up for my old blog on Silent Hill Shattered Memories, maybe I’ll finally finish it.) I had been lore obsessed back in the day scouring forums, talking with people who felt they needed to determine exactly when each game took place, and peeking through game files to find secrets. A friend, who has since passed away, and I would talk about all the references we caught while playing and trade ripped sound files of hidden tracks over AIM.

This game followed me through a lot of my young adult life in ways I didn’t expect and, like a few other works of art, became important to me. I met my college advisor when a Francis Bacon show came to town and we bonded over Lost Memories and discussed how the medium was moving forward with ideas more complicated than were there in say the 70s or 80s. That was when he was last paying attention. A lot of teachers and professors during my time in school certainly shied away from the darker aspects of the art world. Joe (Piccillo) did not. We spent an entire semester going over art movements of the early to mid 20th century and how they tried and failed to influence the world in a way that, amongst other things, would prevent violence and war. See Dadaism, maybe compare it to our current era. There may be parallels there. You could also check out Hans Bellmer and watch the video series he showed us, The Shock of the New.

When Bloober team was announced as the developer I was skeptical. I remember liking Layers of Fear but not the sequel. Medium was an attempt at something that never really clicked for me. Layers of Fear 2 had an interesting concept with a not great execution was carried by the voice work of the late Tony Todd (Candyman, etc.) Of course they ended up really nailing this remake and declared that they won’t make anymore ‘shitty games.’ Good for them.

The story is what you’d expect with a remake: mostly the same. Some additions, some removals but nothing daring. Dialogue is a lot less otherworldly or strange than the original. It made James less off putting but I’m not sure he needed to be a more sympathetic character. Guy Cihi (OG James) was a weird dude and that weirdness did add a lot to the atmosphere of the original. (He was also totally right about getting paid for the PS3 remake, pay your artists and creatives.) There’s also some little polaroids you can pick up that reference the original games puzzles that were changed or removed in the remake that pull you out of the story more than add anything to it. Maybe someone can mod them out.

Combat is, however, a space where the game deviates greatly from the original. Tank controls in survival horror made you feel slow and awkward like you were really playing an average guy whose day job was sitting at a desk. In the remake you still feel vulnerable and if you’re too aggressive (remember to dodge) you will get got but James’ attacks feel much more visceral. This is a man with some anger and fire in him. Also whatever is in those syringes he picks up off the ground and injects himself with. It’s weird to just drink some off brand Vitamin Water you find sitting around in an abandoned dive bar but the needles? He just does it, no regerts.

Now those boss fights, those are good. All of the ones from the original like your first bout with Pyramid Head in the Apartments and the ‘Flesh Lip’ in Brookhaven are expanded and intense. I never thought of the boss encounters in the original as challenging but I was feeling the tension this time.

I find myself agreeing that there were too many Mannequins and this is the part of the remake where Bloober needed more confidence in changing things up. I would’ve been glad to see a new monster or similar to what they did with the Mandarin and really expand what it could do. There’s plenty of other horrors that James could manifest after killing his wife that could stalk him around town.

The endings from the original are all here plus some new ones that, again, don’t deviate but expand. You have your normal In Water ending where James drives into the lake but you also have a new ending where he talks to his wife before doing the same. There’s the one where he’s going to bring her back from the dead which I hope also cures her terminal illness because otherwise we’re just going in circles. I’ve always liked the Leave ending myself showing our boy has forgiven himself for a murder and somehow also is now taking care of a child. Did anyone from that care home call the police when Mary went missing? We know from Silent Hill 4 that he never makes it back to see his father, so, it’s probably not that ending that’s capital C canon.

I say that you should play the original at some point if you haven’t but the remake is a solid game on its own. (There are guides out if you search for ‘Silent Hill 2 Enhanced Edition’ about how to do that.) I really can’t overstate how good the atmosphere and art direction are for the environments especially in the Prison and the Labyrinth. Here’s hoping they release a ‘Born from a Wish’ expansion sometime in the future.

It took me four years to finish this game. I’ve been watching the Sam Barlow (and Tom Hulett) redemption arc for awhile and I just don’t get it. His work was fine in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories just not up to the level of the previous entries. SH:SM was a game that pissed off a lot of the fan base largely because it just should not have been a remake of the first Silent Hill. His writing consistently falls short of being engaging and his characters are both flat and, somehow, insufferable.

System Shock Remake

I never got far in the 1994 or remastered version so this was a new one for me. For most of the game I felt lost and hunted and then at some point I realized I had memorized huge parts of the station and as a survival horror hoarder I had a lot of ammo. The gradual change from helpless to competent to overpowered is something that I remember being far more common in the past, even if I just remember it that way.

Then something happened during a Cortex Reaver fight and I realized that this game felt so slow on a 60hz display it seemed like I couldn’t respond fast enough. I’ve never had that experience in a game before and after changing over to my ‘gaming display’ and getting consistently over 100fps I was fine. This remaster could’ve done with some shortening of levels and by the end I was very ready to be done. The final boss fight was goofy. Would recommend.

Back in 2013 I was hired to design and implement a summer film making project for Squeaky Wheel. I was given about one month to create everything from scratch, minus a small program I did at Canisius High School earlier in the year, plan out (almost) down to the day, and help recruit students. I ended up creating a small book for the students as well.

Our focus was on the revitalized West Side of Buffalo and specifically organizations and businesses that were important to the area. We had representatives come in from PUSH Buffalo, Journey’s End, Preservation Buffalo Niagara and others. We ended up with sixteen students from various parts of the Buffalo/Niagara area (and some who were initially nervous about being in the super-scary West Side.)

One of the goals I had for this program was to make sure that students were going to be gradually ramped up to expertise. I gave them a vague idea of what they were going to do but never so much as to make them panic. The idea was simple: get the students working with the cameras, and as a team, as quickly as possible and most importantly teach them to plan. They wouldn’t even notice that they were moving at a very fast pace because we started out that fast from day one. They had the support they needed from each other and myself to make sure problems could be quickly tackled. I’ve seen some glacially slow film classes run in high schools and, honestly, I don’t think taking a year to do what we did in two months gives the students any benefits. For a group of students like the one we had here a class like that would probably drive the interest right out of them.

On the first day the students worked with the cameras and lighting equipment, I gave them a rough outline of a zombie movie (don’t worry, there was no blood, it was more like a game of undead tag) and some simple instructions: you can organize these scenes in any order you like and develop them however you’d like but they all must be included. In teams of about four students each they developed their ideas, planned out their filming schedules, and worked with the other groups to make sure there was no conflict in who was where and when. At this stage I was there for support but let them handle as much as possible which they took to.

Part of the goal of this exercise was to teach them to plan their shooting by telling them there would be no editing in post. Film scenes sequentially, when a scene goes wrong delete it and do another take, and make sure it all makes sense when we view it in camera at the end. It was a silly arbitrary requirement but it gave them a logistical problem to solve. They’d have plenty of those in the weeks to come.

Finally, I wanted to find a balance between making this a fun experience but keeping it serious enough to give the students as much knowledge and skill as possible. I had to push a bit to get some of the theory and criticism parts of the program in because there was a belief that “kids don’t really want to spend their summer making documentaries.” Apparently my students were just going be bored out of their minds and we had to practically bribe them to come in. (This is not what happened.)

Thankfully, the discussions between students on these more abstract topics proved they were willing and able to tackle film theory and criticism along with social issues faced by people on the West Side. We had a long discussion about a film named “Nickel City Smiler”, for example, which for most of my students was their first exposure to the community of refugees living in the city. Later topics would include poverty, women’s rights, literacy, and even gentrification. We also spent a lot (a lot) of our time analyzing shots and takes, how people try to portray authority or authenticity in documentaries, and how to keep pacing consistent in their films.

Month 1

One morning during a screening one of the students came up to me and said they had an interview today. I had instructed the students to let me know first thing in the morning if they had scheduled something so I could make sure I had one of the interns around. I asked him when his interview was planning on making a trip later in the day. “In about ten minutes.” We made it with no time to spare.

The youngest student in the program was easily one of the most impressive. He had a knack for film making and animation which seemed years ahead of his decade or so on the planet. One day while working on animation segments with his team he picks up a guitar and starts playing. He only knew the one song but, man, way to make me reassess what I did with my last two decades.

One of the good and bad aspects of running this program was that for most of the morning we had the entire place to ourselves. At some points I was the one stumbling into the dark, dank basement and opening everything up. I always like a creepy atmosphere and with the leaking (and collapsing) ceilings I was rarely disappointed.

Month 2

Remember when I mentioned planning? We really only had two strict deadlines in the program, one at the beginning of August to be done with filming (except maybe reshoots) and one at the end to be done with editing. This was an interesting challenge because some of the students were ahead of the game and others had gone on vacations and fallen behind. One of our best documentaries ended up making it in about an hour before the screening took place. I was glad to see the film make it in but could’ve lived without the anxiety.

I knew that some of the students wanted to pursue film as a career in the future and wanted to get some outside expertise from people with experience in the field. A friend of mine, Joe Wachowski, (Link) had made a number of short films and had put together a small festival/showing at Buffalo State so naturally I wanted to bring him in. The students spent a few hours picking his brain and it went over so well we brought Joe back to do critiques of the their films.

We were also lucky enough to have a writer/producer from both The Office and Parks & Recreation come talk to the students. Mary Wall is currently working on a documentary about Buffalo Sabres fans and had been interviewing my (then soon-to-be) wife for the project. We actually attracted most of the staff of Squeaky Wheel for this talk. Mary explained what life was like working on the show, how she was integral in having Jim and Pam get married in Niagara Falls, and even put up with a barrage of student questions.

As I mentioned in the beginning we had some ‘sheltered’ students who were nervous about being in the West side and being around downtown. Thankfully, this wasn’t true for most of our students and by the end it seemed like everyone was comfortable being out of the suburbs.

The End

For me, seeing the students works screened at the Burchfield Penney was the highlight of this workshop. We had been written about in the Buffalo News, Artvoice, and even ended up on Channel 7 but, letting the community see what my students had accomplished was more satisfying. Not that I mind some press.

I think if (or more likely, when) I do something like this again I’d like to dedicate days to taking my potential future students out as a group to some of the locations the others were focusing on. Like field trips! I also didn’t figure while planning that having professional film makers come in would motivate the students like it did. I thought they’d get some helpful advice but having Mary and Joe’s involvement gave them a little more pride in what they were working on.

Some of the discussions we had toward the end about documentary filmmakers’ ability to help both shine a light on potential dangers to the community and success stories makes me hope that my students will go on to greater things. I know a few of the older ones are currently film students and are already working on bigger and better things.

Links to Student Videos:

Sweetness_7
Guercio and Sons
The Coalition
The Local Side

If you google “BYMI 2013” you can find the rest of them.

These photos were all taken with my trusty old Powershot G2. Old as in it’s from 2001.

When we first set foot inside the Dussault Foundry in Lockport we had no idea what the place was or why there was box just inside the door labelled U-473. Most of the machinery that had once run the foundry had been removed and parts of the place had clearly seen fires. We even found evidence that someone was living there and had set up a tiny ‘apartment’ of sorts in one of the rooms. I learned later that this place has an interesting history linked to old 20th century industry and a bad habit of catching on fire.

From what little I was able to find about this location we learned that it was built in 1906 just a year after a state program to enlarge the Erie Canal in the area was funded. (History!)

After that, there’s not much to say about the place until 1946 when it burned down for the first time. You can read a scanned copy of the Lockport Union Sun Journal from the day after here. Come for the foundry fire, stay for the article on Communist military advances in China.

The site was abandoned in 1995 and the EPA began looking at cleanup efforts there back in the year 2000 which were mostly finished by 2003.

In 2007 another fire broke out that was believed to be arson caused by some teenagers running around the property at night. Oh, kids.

Our trip through was less eventful. Some parts of the foundry had been flooded and most of it was entirely empty.

The burned out sections towards the back of the property raised some questions, that were later answered as you can see up there, and provided some more of that urbex atmosphere we enjoy so much.

In October of 2011, the remains of the foundry were finally demolished. I haven’t been back to see what’s left but I assume it would just be some flattened rubble.

I have some video, in addition to these photos, that I plan on editing together into a short sometime soon. In the meantime, here are some videos from our other trips.

You can follow me @markjamesdos on twitter or check out my gallery here.

Concrete Central is a quarter-mile long monster of a grain elevator which sits perpendicular to the Cargill Superior elevator. Both elevators are currently owned by the city. You might think that’s a sort of strange thing to point out but private owners are usually a little less happy about people poking around than a city who probably wishes these money sinks would disappear.

When you come down the dirt and gravel service road to the elevators the first one you’ll see is Cargill Superior. It’s not as large as Concrete Central but it’s a lot less worked over by graffiti and paintballs.

Inside Cargill the building is divided into two sections one of which looks and smells like it’s been rotting for decades. There’s a hallway of broken fuse boxes, with plenty of broken fuses still lodged in their sockets, and the doors have been pulled off their hinges.

Since it’s impossible to post a smell or a tactile feel on a blog (awful garbage.smell.plugin) let me stop our photo narrative and give you an impression of the smell inside this place. Cargill has a smell like a combination of an uncleaned mall bathroom and a rusting, musty junkyard. I’m sure it sees a lot of animal traffic. I know many urban exploration sites like to show you only the best and prettiest parts of urban decay, and I know I do this, but nothing take the romantic notions out of a trip like a rotting deer carcass or a pool of stagnant water filled with toxic waste. Concrete Central being more open to the elements is far less nauseating to walk through.

There’s a broken stairwell towards the West side of the building with the tabs from cut out stairs the only thing left to climb on. I’ve seen photos of people on the top of this building, some wearing flip-flops, so it is possible to get up there. It’s probably not a good idea, however. Actually, let me be clear on that one: it’s a really stupid idea. Not only are sandals more likely to make you slip, or slip off your feet, you’re walking on rusted metal with uncovered feet which is an excellent way to end up with deep cuts on your feet.

I will not stop until I have ruined all your fun.

The other half has the bins which still have writing on them from when they were in use. If you look carefully you’ll find signatures in pencil from workers dating back to the 1940s. I assume they’re real since most of the modern signing going on in these places is tagging.

Down the road, and behind a meadow, is Concrete Central.

This is probably the most popular and well travelled urban exploration site in Western New York and it shows. Almost every inch of this place is covered in a layer of graffiti that is constantly being rewritten. Much it comes from the people who play paintball here or the occasional Team Fortress 2 fan. Some if it shows talent but, we’re certainly not host to a local Banksy here. Why? Bcuz.

We’ve run into all sorts of people here including lovestruck teens, other urban explorers, the coast guard, and confused city workers. The coast guard boat spotted us and tried to have a conversation over megaphone in which we had no idea what they said while we waved politely and they waved back. Seriously, the audio quality on those things is terrible.

So I’ve made a few references to the paintball players who run around here. The first time we came across them was on TV when back in the mid-2000s one of those ‘educational networks’ started a series on urban exploration. They had a scene right in front of Concrete Central where a few people decked out in paintball gear came out from the tall plants and ‘scared’ the hosts of the show. If I remember correctly, they didn’t even bother to go inside the place and went on to Bethlehem Steel or something.

Generally when we saw the paintball players we just went to the other side of the site until they finished and left. I’d like to clarify that this isn’t just a small number of players who infrequently visit the place. If you were driving by, and you learned to recognize the white Escalades and Cadillacs, they were there in large numbers every week. If you expect a moral judgement after all that, you won’t get one. I honestly have no idea if the destruction they cause inside there is any worse than being exposed the elements for decades and it’s not as if anyone has come up with a use for this place. Is it dangerous to run (literally) around an abandoned structure with sharp metal and poor lighting? Yes.  Are they ruining a historic building for future generations? Eh.

If you’ve been to the Tift Farms visitor center you can find an aerial photo of Concrete Central back when it was still in use. That whole front yard was train tracks instead of meadow and it’s kind of interesting to see how fast nature retook this place.

My second time here my friend and I drove through the field in the middle of the summer. There was so much pollen from the plants that the truck had turned yellow. We spent about ten minutes there before he started having trouble breathing.

On another trip we went up one flight of the cut out stairs to see what was up above us. There wasn’t much. We found a blank notebook which gave me this idea to write something scary and leave it there to potentially unnerve future explorers. Then I thought maybe we could make MarbleHornets style tapes and leave them behind! I decided not to waste my tapes.

No text this time, instead a video with narration.

I know there’s like two minutes of nothing after the video ends, it’s not in the original video, so I guess YouTube is encouraging me to talk more.

Nature can retake man made structures and spaces very quickly. In the span a few short years sites can be buried and overgrown enough that no one remembers it was there. If you’ve ever been on the bike path by Tops on Grant St. you’ve passed by a place like this probably without even noticing it was there.

Tee to Green was a driving range, with a mini golf section in the back, that closed in the early 2000’s. It’s president was charged with fraud, which he eventually pleaded guilty to, and the site now sits empty.

I’m not the first to stumble across this place, in 2008 Buffalo Rising wrote a short piece on re-purposing it as a skate park. It’s been used for other, less family friendly purposes, as my friend has found on certain flash video sites which I won’t link you to.

We found it the same way most people do; by spotting a mysterious opening in the fence by the bike path.

The pictures really say it all, it’s an empty mini-golf course. There’s some graffiti around, not all of good. The recesses make for good artificial ponds which the local wildlife makes use of. We spotted a lot of dragonflies buzzing around.

I agree with the Rising article that this site should be reused for something. It would be nice to see it turned in to some sort of park or really anything other than a plaza. While they’re at they can tear down that burned out husk behind it.

Ideally, you’d leave and go find somewhere else to explore. If you decided “Well I’d climb over/cut a hole in the fence” you have chosen poorly. This is the article about not getting caught.

See, generally I’m on the side of the urban explorer. There’s an open site with no “No Trespassing” signs around and you’re just there to take pictures. From what I’ve encountered and have heard you’re usually good if you aren’t stealing and have a camera with you.

Some people, copper thieves for example, ruin sites. I had the opportunity to talk to the justifiably miffed Friends of JN Adams group recently. I wanted to interview some of their members but I get the feeling they don’t want to be in the spotlight. (I mean, the spotlight of my tiny blog. It’s small but intense. Like a laser really.) I spoke to a woman who described to me a team of thieves who came storming in with trucks and managed to strip out not only some copper pipes, but all of the gutters as well. No gutters means no drainage, which means the place starts to rot and, boy, has it rotted. The state has told them that it’s in such bad shape they aren’t even interested in selling it.

The men were caught and charged but the damage was done. Since then many people have been arrested by the local police for going there. Most recently fourteen teenagers (not the honor society I’d guess) were arrested for going there all at once.

There’s two points to that tale and one is don’t look like a copper thief. Don’t take things from these places. The second is that someone is always watching these places even if you don’t see them. Do a google search and see if a site is associated with news articles about people getting charged for going there.

If it is, and you really want to go there, call up the state or organization that manages the site and ask them. They might still say no but at least you didn’t have to appear in court. It’s actually a good idea to get permission whenever you can. You can be assured that you won’t be chased out and they might know some things about the place.

However, if you run into someone who tries to lord their access (or job position) over you, drop them like a ton of bricks. Go somewhere else. That sort of person is trouble and you don’t want to be involved with them. You’ll know one when you’ve got off the phone with that slimy feeling lingering.

As I’ve (hopefully) mentioned before going anywhere near these sites with a large group of people is a bad idea. For one thing, it draws too much attention to you. For another, it seems to everyone that either you’re there to have some sort of party (woo!) or to steal stuff. I don’t generally recommend going in groups larger than three.

It’s also a good idea to always be aware of your surroundings and to keep an eye out for other people. I have a feeling copper thieves aren’t exactly easy-going people so you don’t want to tangle with them. Sometimes it’s also a matter of courtesy; don’t get in the middle of someone’s paintball game, come back another day.

Obviously there’s other things you should avoid, like being too easy to see in a busy area, but that’s what that Infiltration book I linked in the very first post is for.

If any of this rubs you the wrong way and you’re saying “I do what I want” then that’s fine, just make sure you get pictures of the holding center for us.

(All pictures are screen grabs from a video made on ZR900)

Over on the East Side of Buffalo, close to the Science Museum and the former site of the Orphanage, was a fully stocked and completely abandoned store and warehouse. At different points there had been among other things there a TV repair shop, which looks like it also dealt in 70’s era computer terminals, and an office supply store.

We had been clued in to this site by a certain city planner who told us to get there fast because they were going to tear it down. Of course it had been sitting there with an order to be torn down for over a year so who knew exactly when it would happen.

It was a cold December morning, and there was almost no one around which was perfect for us. We parked not too far away from the building and went looking for a way in. Thankfully someone had torn out a large double door frame and we had no problem finding that.

Inside this place was a disaster. It looked like whoever owned it just closed up business as usual one day and then didn’t return for ten years. The floor was covered in retail junk in various states of decay. We found stacks upon stacks of assorted TV repair parts and the stairs to the basement were so filled with junk you couldn’t even see down there.

When I say full of junk I mean this is a special episode of Hoarders sort of affair. Wherever you walked you were on garbage and the piles of it were often taller than we were. It made the place unique, usually when we get somewhere it’s already been cleared out and gutted.

Each floor had interesting surprises on it, and the higher we went the less junk was strewn about. Occasionally we could see the ground. On one floor we found a bunch of office supplies printed with a company name that my mother had worked at back in the 80’s. It was odd mostly because that company was a defense contractor. So what was this stuff doing here?

On another floor, we found these old Wang terminals. Kind of like the ones you’d see in Fallout or corny old movies about cold war computers taking over.

Large parts of the top most floor were damaged from exposure to the weather, so we had to be careful where we stepped. I also opened the door on a pigeon hiding out in a bathroom and scared both of us.

When we decided to leave we thought that it would be better to leave via an exit we saw that led to a side street, away from any traffic that might be passing by. We were also concerned because we heard a car pull up next to the building and thought we heard talking. We slipped down the back staircase, out the window, and landed next to some poor older lady unloading her groceries. Whoops, sorry for the scare.

We waved once while we walked back to the car.