Run for the Hills Silent Hill 2 - 03

Teleporting Maria is kinda creepy

Jan loves to lay some pipe on these nurses, but is very scared of Maria. Probably the right call.

Hurray for more Silent Hill with Jan and Jess :)

I think Jess directed Jan's ending to the best/good ending in Silent Hill 1 because the worst endings are the ones with the least amount of explanation for an already pretty confusing and opaque story. Meanwhile in Silent Hill 2, the endings are definitely from worst to best, but there's more nuance in those bad endings because you always get more or less a full explanation of what happened wrt the main plot, unlike SH1. In every ending of SH2, you understand why James is there and what happened to Mary--so it doesn't matter what ending Jan gets, it's actually amazing that this game can make the worst endings feel canonical to the people who got those ends originally because of how they played the game.

Jan speaks of Gold Club's buffet.

Is the gun not as effective as the pipe? I guess you have to run over to stomp them if you're using a ranged weapon which might be more of a hassle than just beating on them with a stick.

@beartaco: I think Jan is just being conservative with ammo! I'm also very guilty of doing this when I play SH games, tbh.

I'm just here to post Baby Rorie talking about the Silent Hill movie.

I played some of Silent Hill 2 a few years after it came out, and really didn't appreciate it much. But watching this playthrough, even with the dated voice acting, is sort of giving me more of an appreciation of what it's doing really well.

I really love this series, thank you Jess and Jan for another great episode!

It always creeped me out that every character seemed to have the same face in this game.

It's Maria! Touch her. See, she's real.

Hey (hey), you (you), I look like your girlfriend!

Awesome series! looking forward to the next one. I do hope Jan figures out how to do a quick turn (tap both shoulder buttons) helps a lot with the tank controls..

A few non-spoilery things to expound on stuff around the PC port and Enhanced Edition:

Some of the few positives about the vanilla PC port is the per-pixel flashlight as opposed to vertex-based (nice round light cast by the flashlight as opposed to blocky on PS2) and that some textures were less compressed than the console versions, namely the textures on some character models like James and Maria. Most of them are the same though. The real problem with the presentation in the PC version came from a lack of post-processing and environmental effects, as well as only mono sound for many sound effects where they were previously stereo. Missing effects included way less fog compared to consoles, no depth-of-field in cutscenes, improper lighting, more compressed audio, hard stencil shadows as opposed to soft realistic shadows that were on PS2, the list goes on and on.

The Enhanced Edition mod fixes toooooons of these issues, even going as far as to restore the positional audio of many sound effects. It's still being updated as well, with a level editor being in the works!

Last note on textures: by default, the Enhanced Edition includes AI up-res'd versions of textures for the map, inventory items, and puzzle backgrounds only. That's why stuff like the picture of Mary looks so clear. But in-game textures are untouched. Hope you didn't mind my gushing about this here, but the Enhanced Edition team has just done such good work.

That's super cool. I love that these playthroughs are giving me flashbacks to old SH forums of the early 2000s and bringing up little details like this.

@breadmustache said:

It's funny you say that, I didn't get the chance to experience these games until way after the fact! But I'm glad someone enjoyed these little factoids haha.

Hey jess, if you read this.

You're cool.

I'm really enjoying this series! I remember reading through a screenshot LP of Silent Hill 2 that used to be on the LP Archive, but otherwise I haven't experienced the game. It's great to hear Jess's expertise and see Jan's reactions to it.

On the topic of Resident Evil and liking odd games... I really like Resident Evil 6. I often feel like I'm one of the few people who does, and for good reason, considering all the problems that game has. But it's so over-the-top and ridiculous, and I love the idea of having four campaigns that intersect. For some reason, I really enjoy in video games when every playable character has their own unique melee moves and finishers, and RE6 actually does that aspect well (even if it's a clunky game to play, to put it kindly). I've played through it three times now (twice in co-op with friends), and I've always had a blast with it. I think it's good Resident Evil changed direction after it (RE2: Remake is my favorite RE game), but I do kinda wish they'd make another game like it with better controls.

This continues to be my current favorite feature on the site.

Jess is begging Jan to play Silent Hill with her after the sun goes down. Unlike Ben, breakfast is not her preferred gaming time it seems.

When do we get our Jess after dark horror streams?

“You can make Maria dance on the stripper pole” being a big gamer rumor in the mid-2000s is so on brand for that era, it’s scary.

Boo! It's Maria.

Resident Evil 5 is a fun game. Especially to go through with someone else.

The story is not all that great and i don't think the very early encounter in a semi-open environment gets matched in the rest of the game. But it's a fun thing and the shooting feels great. I love locational damage and feel like the RPG-ization of everything has diminished the amount of impactful locational damage we get nowadays.

This series is wonderful