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I'm starting this blog to introduce new gamers (and maybe old) to old games that are still great when played today. This in a vain effort to help get people to broaden their horizons in terms of video games and try something out they've never tried before. The blog will be little more than a brief description of the game, a video showcasing its gameplay, and a slightly detailed review. Before I get started let me talk a bit about myself.
Gaming Background (optional read):
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I'm a 25 year old male who has been gaming since the age of four with a gray brick Nintendo. I've owned numerous consoles in my time (NES, PC (several different PCs over the years), Sega Genesis, PSX, Gameboy (brick, color, and Advanced SP), Game Gear, PS2, PSP, Wii, PS3) and while there are tons not listed (SNES, 64, Gamecube, Dreamcast, Xbox, 360, etc) I assure you I've spent an equal amount of time playing those either with friends or trading away my playstations for their equivalents to play each others single player games (kids on a budget, ya know?). Anyway I've got literally thousands of games and hundreds of thousands of hours played, I'm pretty much an addict. Which, along with great taste in things, makes me perfect for reviewing games. Anyway that's enough about me, on to the game.
![[image loading]](http://i110.photobucket.com/albums/n99/chuiu/SilentHill.jpg)
Silent Hill is a survival horror game about a man, Harry, and his adopted daughter, Cheryl, who go to a little town called Silent Hill for vacation. The game starts with Harry getting into a car accident and getting knocked unconscious. He wakes up, finds Cheryl missing, then wanders into town to look for her. You spend much of the game solving riddles, puzzles, and trying to find Cheryl. If you've seen the 2006 movie, the movie basically rips off everything from this game and bits from 2, 3 and 4.
+ Show Spoiler [How I review games] +
My reviews will be a summary of three things. Story, which will include all things related to the story of the game including dialogue and voice acting. Gameplay, which will includes everything dealing with playing the actual game. And Design, which includes everything related to graphics, sound, music, and even menu designs and such if I deem it necessary to mention them. I rate these 1 to 3, 1 = sucks, 2 = average, 3 = great. If you're wondering how I can use such simple scoring and yet at the same time separate these games from games today which should score higher? I don't, I rate all games equally and as such they all get fair scores. Newer games really shouldn't get higher scores just because they have more polygons, bigger textures, and flashier effects.
Review:
Story:
Silent Hill, as stated before, is about a man, Harry, who searches for his daughter, Cheryl, in the town of Silent Hill. Most of the game is spent wandering around the town following clues that Cheryl has left behind for Harry to follow. You'll go all over the town and rarely ever visit the same place twice (some places are blocked off after you visit them also making it impossible to). Along the way you'll meet several people and have to endure tons of cheesy and almost repetitive dialogue (especially with Dahlia Gillespie). The overall story of the game is great, motivation behind the character is there and you feel like you have a strong purpose throughout the game. The dialogue and voice acting are terrible and reek of rushed Japanese translation. Along the way there are a couple interesting twists which I wont spoil that make the game even more interesting. And before I move onto gameplay I have to note the game has five endings. Two bad endings, two good endings, and one 'wtf were they smoking' ending (which you can't get until you've played through at least once). As far as I can tell every Silent Hill game has had the same tradition of multiple endings (with the wtf one also) and the movie appears to mix elements of bad endings and good endings and go with a bittersweet ending. To get the 'good' endings you need to go out of your way and do a bit of exploration. To make things worse there is only a small window of opportunity to do this.
Gameplay:
I have a love/hate relationships with survival horror games and its mostly because of their control schemes so before I get into this I have to say the controls do in fact suck. If you're a newer gamer this is probably going to be your biggest hurdle to getting into the game. I suggest you ignore the analog sticks and use the d-pad exclusively. Don't try to turn and walk at the same time until you've gotten the hang of it.
The gameplay is very stiff and it really makes you think about how you're going to approach and attack enemies. Earlier in the game you typically have little ammo and have to make a balance between using the gun and melee weapons you get. Throughout the game you get several melee weapons (knife, pipe, hammer) and firearms (handgun, shotgun, rifle) and I didn't list all of them. Each firearm has an appropriate use but most of the melee weapons replace each other and it feels more like 'upgrading' from one to the next. Smaller enemies its usually best to use the handgun though.
There is no hud and your health is a very simple three color scheme (green, orange, red). Btw, I want to take a quick break from the review to say that I love games with no huds, it keeps you immersed in the game on a level higher than most other games. Unfortunately for this game the lack of a hud is a bit punishing as you need to go into your inventory to see just where you stand on health. Fortunately the rumble feature is implemented to persistently rumble when your health is in the orange or red. If you're on PSX or PS2 great, if you're on PS3 then watch your battery life! You get two ways of healing: health drink and medpack. Health drinks heal roughly one 'color' of badness, medpacks heal you to full. There is also a drug you can take which will temporarily bring you to full health, its sort of a temporary god mode.
Light and sound play huge roles in this game and you find yourself paying more attention to them than any other game has every challenged you to. You quickly get a flashlight for the darker areas of the game, you need the flashlight for three things: aiming, seeing in the dark, and viewing your map. However the flashlight also lets the enemies clearly see you which means many of them will be heading strait for your throat. Turning off the flashlight in many areas of the game makes it extremely hard to see, prevents you from viewing your map, and killing any accuracy with a gun, but it keeps most enemies that aren't right next to you from bothering you. If you're going to play the game, remember that, it can be extremely useful information. Sound plays a huge role because the only sound in the game (besides ambiance and background sounds) are the different sounds coming from your radio which has essentially become an 'enemy detector'. Which is fucking fantastic when you consider you can't see more than five feet in front of you. I suggest you keep your radio on at all times but if you feel like you can play without it you'll get to enjoy some of the more creative ambient soundtracks to a game I've ever heard (creepy mixed with awesome, they took sounds strait from this game and put them into the movie), I'll talk about more in design.
Riddles and puzzles are found all over and I highly suggest you try to solve them on your own even when they get the most frustrating because they feel like a lot of time and effort were put into them and its a really rewarding experience to finally solve the harder ones. Some riddles tell you where to go and others tell you how to solve puzzles.
Again the gameplay is very stiff but with the right positioning and weapon usage you'll find the game plays very well.
Design:
This game has very little actual music and relies heavily on ambient music and other creepy 'belongs in a horror film' type of music. Specifically one of my favorites when you get to the dock/resort area of the game...
This may not seem much just listening to it but when you put it in the context of playing the game with everything else you're experiencing its simply amazing. A lot of the music in the game is like this, and while most of it is very minimal it leaves a huge impact on anyone playing. In short, the music is great.
The sound effects are all what you would expect, creepy monster sounds for creepy monsters, gun sounds and hitting sounds are all there. Everything pretty much average when it comes to sound fx, gotta try pretty hard to fuck that up in a video game though. Remember this is an older game so some sounds are going to be a bit rough on the edges, but with a little imagination (key part of being a gamer: having some imagination) they sound perfectly fine.
The graphics are ... well its hard to really explain. This was back in a time when rendering a lot of things on screen was very difficult and unheard of. A lot of games had to use a sort of 'cloud' in the further areas of the game (and is still used today) to keep frame rates high. For Silent Hill, that 'cloud' is a ten foot bubble around you, five foot bubble in front of you during night. Everything in the game looks as it should and none of the graphics in the game interfere with each other. In doors its slightly different and you can sometimes see further. Sometimes, you'll see why if you play it.
As far as graphics goes I really don't care if I can see every fucking hair follicle on a guys face. Sure its amazing and all, but for gaming simple often gets the job done a lot better than flashy does. Especially if your game is highly dependent on graphics showing you anything important (ie: Starcraft).
Ok that about wraps it up, if you feel I left something important out of my review or description drop me a PM.
Story: 2 (cheesy dialog and bad voice acting really hurt this game)
Gameplay: 3 (even though its very stiff the game is fair and elements within it properly balanced)
Design: 3
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Overall: 3
Great game, definitely worth playing. You can find it for sale at used game stores or on PSN for $6. Can't beat that price for this game.
One last note about this game. I just played it for the very fist time a month ago. If I can go from modern day PC, PS3, and 360 games and enjoy this playstation relic, I'm sure anyone can. Also, I realize there is already a blog post that's roughly equivalent of this one about the same game, but I wanted to start off my series of blog posts with a game I recently played that left an impact on me. Silent Hill was the best choice.
