SILENT HILL 2
What Made it Great?
As James Sunderland wanders around the open streets of Silent Hill, the sounds of radio static, monsters, and an overwhelming fog creates an unnerving sense of claustrophobia. This is what made Silent Hill 2 stand above the rest; its atmosphere. Akira Yamaoka’s score is incredible with a moody and muffled detachment that leads to a game all about getting to the center of a man’s psyche realize the haunting experience the plot makes it out to be. Everything in the town is rotten and covered in washed out colors. The monsters animate like they’re not really alive, with movements and behavior that makes them seem more like wind-up toys. Add all this with a great story acted out by amateur actors whose dialogue is always subtly off, and we are left with an experience that feels haunting and where you feel unease even when safe. It is a psychological horror yet to be matched in video games. Almost all aspects of it are perfect.
What Made it Suck Ass?
What wasn’t perfect was the gameplay. The camera in the game is dog shit and never seems to manually find an angle that feels comfortable to play in. Not in a way that helps with the horror either, with the exception of a few sections. To make the camera more palatable you have to hold the left trigger down for as long as you want the camera to suck less. When the left trigger gets held down the camera swings wildly to the back of the player. Combat is a bit clunky as well, but that can be excused more. The player character’s attacks are awkward and a lot of times just don’t do what you want. There’s a difference between the usual tank controls of the games like it that add to a sense of vulnerability but Silent Hill 2 pushes it a little far. While it makes sense in context why the player character isn’t proficient in armed combat, his attacks could have more impact nonetheless.
Who is Developing it?
Bloober Team loudly proclaimed that they will take on the task of remaking Silent Hill 2 and also proclaimed that they’d like to be considered the frontrunner for modern horror games. What hurts that statement is that Bloober Team has made five horror games in the past decade. While opinions range, rarely is a game rated above an 8/10 and usually averages around a 6/10. So not bad but certainly not memorable and they’ve garnered a reputation for making some laughable horror games with viral clips of bugs from Layers of Fear, and mockery directed at their adaption of The Blair Witch Project. Taking on the most famed psychological horror game of all time, after failing to be the name in horror makes it come across as a desperate attempt to nab the title. Some people who worked on Silent Hill 2, like composer Akira Yamaoka, worked with them on some previous works and those creatives are coming back to oversee production on this remake. While that does bode well, those creatives simply being back to do some old stuff doesn’t guarantee quality. Even worse, nobody quite knows what Konami is like since they dissolved all their game developing divisions and now seek just to pay people to do shit with their IP. How much are they supervising? Is that good if they are? No idea. There’s a lot to be worried about here with Bloober Team and Konami’s spotty at best track record.
What to Look Out For.
Silent Hill 2’s tone is very specific and it is very easy in re-doing it to fail in capturing the same experience. In trying to make an old game seem new it's possible to create more detail, a cleaner look, and more expressiveness that the original benefited from a lack of. Take when the main character realizes what’s actually happening when he witnesses another character die. In the original, he slowly falls to his knees and says in a somber tone “I know why I needed you.” In the trailer for the remake, he falls quickly screaming his head off and pounding the floor with his fists. In 2023 and in Unreal Engine 5 you can create that explosive reaction, but is it an improvement?
What if it Sucks?
Two years ago, the GTA Trilogy got remasters that were generally regarded as buggy and ugly to look at. Knowing this, Rockstar delisted the originals from Steam so no one could just go back to play the older and superior versions. Assuming that 2023 Silent Hill 2 comes out and the 2001 release is still better, how can you play the original now? Silent Hill 2 has no official ways of purchase. You could always emulate it and there is a fan mod pack for the 2001 PC release that you can spend an afternoon on recompiling so it can run and look great. Otherwise you’re gonna have to drop around two hundred dollars for a good copy of the game on PS2 (or Xbox) and the console you want it on. There is a PS3 release I wouldn’t recommend because it is buggy with numerous audio glitches and, famously, all the in-game text font replaced with comic sans. Unless you’re a pirate or are the son of an oil baron, you are shit out of luck with playing the original experience.
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RESIDENT EVIL 4
What Made it Great?
By the time James Sunderland is wandering around being sad, Leon Kennedy has suplexed some dumb mother fucker into the pavement after shooting his kneecaps off and going on about bingo or whatever. Resident Evil 4 is incredible for the exact opposite reason as Silent Hill 2. After numerous installments of weird dialogue and a dumb story, Capcom said fuck it, and intentionally made a game with a horror B-Movie edge. RE4 is filled with dumb but fun one-liners, hyper violence, big monsters, and a plot to save the president’s daughter that makes little sense. While you may hesitate to call it a horror game, its sense of horror comes from moments of pure relentlessness. Being chased around a village by ten guys with pitchforks, and one extremely angry guy with a chainsaw makes you feel panicked and tense when you have the controller in your hand. That said, RE4 knows when to take a moment to calm down and uses quiet time to enhance the pacing. What elevated this game’s profile was that it was one of the first 3rd person action games with a free camera. Game historians have put it alongside innovative titles that inspired generations of games and developers alike such as Super Mario 64, Half-Life, Doom, and Super Metroid. Without, Resident Evil 4 video games just wouldn’t be where they are now.
What Made it Suck
Resident Evil 4’s main campaign is the longest out of any other Resident Evil game. Maybe a bit too long. By the time you enter the island section the game has more or less shown you its full hand and goes on for another few hours. Every Resident Evil game starts to lose steam when you enter the lab at the end of every game and Resident Evil 4 is no exception. Although Resident Evil 4 certainly suffers a little bit less than other games in the series. Additionally, the game is not great to look at for most of it. The sections in the castle fare better, especially in the fan remastered texture pack, but most of the game’s visuals feel washed out and covered in brown and gray hues. Not saying everything has to be colorful, but I wouldn’t call it a game that’s visually pleasing in the slightest even in a horror aesthetic. This is especially true of the low resolution textures in all official releases.
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Who is Developing It?
Capcom, and to an extent, the RE team have been doing pretty well. The remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3, as well as the new releases; 7 & 8, have all been well received and were included in GOTY lists when they were released. There’s not really any expectation that Capcom will make a bad video game. However, they may not make a great Resident Evil 4. Resident Evil 3 was heavily criticized for not being a good remake of the original game and lesser critiques were leveled at its prequel. Despite them both being good games they may not have a lot of the stuff anybody liked about the original. At least you can pretty much ensure it will still be a good video game though.
What to Look Out For
Resident Evil 4 is considered revolutionary and you can’t exactly revolutionize an industry by doing the same shit twice. By default the RE4make, as fans have dubbed it, will be popular but wont set the world of video games ablaze with grand new ideas. Thus inherently making it inferior to the original in terms of significance. The recent Resident Evil remakes have gone with a more serious tone and that threatens to remove the fun of Resident Evil 4. For example, in the 2005 release, the player can save a dog stuck in a bear trap. If they do, hours later the dog will jump in to assist in killing a boss with the main character exclaiming “hey… it’s that dog from earlier!” In the 2023 release, the dog has already died when you come across it in the bear trap so that fun moment is removed. Take out the lava rooms, giant statues, and weird bouts of Leon Kennedy and the villains roasting each other and you just have a blander time. And if there’s one thing modern games don’t need more of; its being fucking bland.
What if it Sucks?
Luckily for us, Resident Evil 4 is on every console known to man seemingly. You can play a pretty good fan remaster on PC, but if you can’t be bothered to indulge the work of passionate fans you could always play it on your GameCube, PlayStation 2, PC, Wii, iPhone, Zeebo, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Android, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, or Oculus Quest 2 if you’re that kind of guy. If you want to play the revolutionary game as god intended, or even with motion controls and/or VR support, you have tons of options that are inexpensive at your disposal. It's on sale all the time too, so you can play it for five dollars if you wait for one of the sales to come around.
CONCLUSION
It appears neither game will have the side campaigns that came out in later releases of both titles, or at least you’ll have to pay extra for them as DLC you nice little consumer. Asides from that your best bet for a better game will be Resident Evil 4, despite the fun tone perhaps being lost. Silent Hill 2 is certainly going to be the most interesting to come back to when it releases because it has the most at risk. I will revisit these games and discuss them later in the year. Until then I shall play this year's Metroid Prime and Dead Space. Two other mid 2000s games with 2023 remakes. Man, everybody really is out of ideas.
