@solarisdeschain: Interesting. Maybe I never got the hang of the combat in Homecoming, I always felt like it was absolutely broken. I think it was the scythe head type monsters in the police station (I think? my memory is really hazy) where I became infuriated with them. I also never really cared to. I'll give you that the controls worked fine besides the combat and I actually think the graphics look better than Downpour in a lot of ways. But I feel while the graphics and lighting may have looked better it lacked a lot of detail in its environments, or I guess I should say interesting details. Most of it was bland. The transformations in Homecoming looked incredible though. That's the other thing, I hated the underground type parts in that game, they were so linear and ugly compared to the regular town stuff and I felt like the split between otherworldy stuff and good old Silent Hill was a bad balance. The story never connected with me either but I don't think much of that matters. I remember the junkyard and what little I saw of that town was pretty cool. I've said it multiple times, Silent Hill for me is mostly environment and atmosphere and Homecoming dropped the ball for me. I love me some locked doors.
I can't argue with your points about Origins, for me it was just a really fun way to get some Silent Hill atmosphere into my PSP and it looked damn good. Plus I remember the puzzles being pretty good too. All in all I think Origins is a pretty good Silent Hill game as far as the game part goes. Exploration, backtracking, puzzle solving, it has all the staples of the series. But it's severely lacking in the story department and like you said Travis is a pretty poor main character. Although now that I think of it, that game had some pretty cool moments at the end in that hotel or apartment or whatever it was. I remember being in between a whole bunch of rooms and looking through holes in the wall, crazy stuff.
@allworkandlowpay said:
Silent Hill lives in a weird nebulous void of unwarranted fandom and nostalgia. SH1-3 the controls sucked, the camera control was miserable, the actor was horrendous, the combat was broken, the graphics were sub-par and the stories were poorly translated and often laughably obtuse.
And yet it's everybodies favorite staple horror series.
I take it you're not a fan then huh? I can see where you're coming from, I absolutely can but it's kind of obvious I tend to disagree.
I for one don't think those original games had issues with the combat and there's a very specific reason why. They didn't have to have a better combat system. All those first games are filled with slow plodding enemies, they didn't require fast responsive combat. The combat was exactly what it needed to be at the bare minimum without causing frustration. I never had any issues with the combat in those games and I never played those on easy, normal or even hard was fine. In downpour and some other games though you don't have that. They have fast moving monsters but the combat remains slow and unresponsive, that's where we run into some problems.
The camera issue is an interesting one. In 1-3 you really just have to surrender yourself to the camera when you're doing the playing of the game and use the look button to check out your surroundings every so often. Other than that though, the camera angles were designed for specific situations, causing claustrophobia or sometimes centering your vision around a particularly dark void. The camera angles were very deliberate in those early games and proved to create a great sense of dread and tension, something you don't really see anymore. If you always have to be in control I could get where you're coming from but the "poor" camera control is not without its reasons. I can't say I have any complaints with it. But I also have the ability to wrap my head around the apparently insane complexity of the other survival horror games... Resident Evil.
It's funny, I tried to get my cousin into those original RE and SH games when he was younger but he could not get himself past the controls and camera angles. I just told him to put himself into the shoes of the character on screen you know, take into account where he's facing, his left corresponds to left on the controller etc.. After a bit it's just second nature, especially when you realize you can just slide along walls hahah, I think that's pretty key to traversing those games. He just could not get the hang of it and thought I was crazy. Cut to about 8 years later and he all of a sudden along with a friend of his decided to pick up all those games again. Don't know what it did it but he is a freaking enormous Silent Hill and Resident Evil fan now. In particular Silent Hill 2, easy to understand why. I wonder what changed for him to have such an abrupt new feeling on the games. I feel like he must have developed an appreciation for what they were trying to achieve instead of trying to fight the games for control that would have potentially ruined an immersion and tension that the developers were aiming for.
I love the absolutely strange voice acting in these games. In another other game the voice acting would be awful, but in many ways, it so perfectly sets the tone for these games. Just hearing these people speak is eerie, like Angela...
The graphics though I just have to completely disagree with you on. Silent Hill 2 was way ahead of its time. It always cracked me up when people made a big deal about dynamic lighting and shadows in Doom 3. Silent Hill 2 was doing that on a home console 3 years before that PC game! All the games had great textures and detailed environments too. Made partially possible by the short draw distance what with both fog and darkness.
The story is something difficult to defend, they're more about what you take away from them than anything else. You're right, a lot of times they could definitely be described as overly cryptic, but that just lends itself to the mystery of Silent Hill. I'm not really in search of answers with this series...
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