Caltrops - Gamerasutra - Re: U.S. Release bump

Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

by curst 08/13/2003, 10:47pm PDT

Yeah, those are in the US release. At least you now know how to avoid triggering them, although I can't deny that it was a really stupid bit of design in a series that normally does a good job of avoiding the "unavoidable death combined with save point that was way too far away" pitfall.

The Silent Hill series is forming a pattern - each new game will shore up a weakness in its predecessor, then go ahead and completely screw something else up. With SH3, the combat is actually decent, which alone makes me like it a lot more than SH2's, which was incredibly boring. But the story isn't nearly as compelling or well-written. I really liked the idea behind SH2 that Silent Hill calls out to sinners and makes them suffer for their wrongdoings and perhaps lets them find redemption throughout their ordeal - SH3 completely ditches that and has some decidedly non-creepy woman spewing a bunch of droning bullshit about "you will bring us to paradise with blood-stained hands" and "there's a reason to fill your heart with hatred" and other fairly Jedi-ish sounding crap.

Finally, I really wish the developers would get over their 9/11 hangup. Read [url="http://www.quartertothree.com/early/silent_hill_2/SH2_1.shtml"]Tom Chick's bitter first impressions of SH2[/url] for details, particularly the final paragraph - knowing that Konami watered down the franchise because of the terrorist attacks really boggles my mind in a "Freedom Fries!" way. I disagree with Chick about SH2 not being compelling in its own way, but the game definitely was not as scary as the original, and so far SH3 isn't either. And that is a shame since, in a genre that has "horror" in the name, SH1 was the first such game that actually scared me. In fact, SH3 is arguably worse than SH2 because I can't find the eerie symbolism that you could sort of see in SH2's menagerie of enemies. I'm just not connecting with it in the same way. And there's no Pyramid Head to keep you looking over your shoulder at all times in a constant state of trepidation.

But SH3 is still decent, and that's really been my impression of the entire series so on balance I'm not disappointed. I'm just not a fan of the genre by default.