Silent Hill 2 Review

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Silent Hill 2

By CerebusJuly 2002

When I was about ten years old, I had recently moved to Iowa City, Iowa, where, as many kids do when they want to make a little bit of money on top of their paltry allowance, I had a newspaper route.  Every day of the week, regardless of the weather (okay, occasionally my mom would drive me when it was truly yucky outside, but I digress) I’d leave the house at about 4:15 a.m. to go pick up my papers a few blocks from my house, and spend a good hour and a half delivering them—twenty-three papers on weekdays, and about eighty on Sundays.  On this particular weekday morning, as it often was in Iowa early in the morning, it was foggy—very foggy, in fact. I followed my normal route through the neighborhood, and halfway through my route, as usual, I cut through the empty lot next to my house to save some time. Since it was foggy, I wasn’t wearing my glasses—they would have hurt my clarity of vision (I’m nearsighted) more than they would have helped. As I strolled across the lot, it was absolutely quiet, with only the rumble of trucks on the highway about ten miles away echoing across the rolling hills.

It was at this moment that I stumbled across something that looked like a human skull.

Granted, with my bad eyesight, it was probably a rock, but as any ten-year-old would, I got close enough to get myself utterly terrified, and then took off running, heading directly for the nearest streetlight, and didn’t stop until I had reached the apartment building at the bottom of the hill, which was completely out of my normal route.  It took a good ten minutes before I could venture outside again. 

Why am I relating this story? Well, it’s simple—since that morning, I’ve been fairly difficult to scare. Perhaps it’s the dulling effect that television has on a person after years of exposure, or maybe the simple inevitable act of growing up nearly removes that emotion from the human suite of emotions. Regardless, the simple fact is that playing Silent Hill 2 came closer to scaring me than anything in the intervening twenty years. The combination of eerie ambient sound effects with the most maddeningly realistic fog I’ve seen in a video game brought me all the way back to that morning in Iowa—that’s not to say that Silent Hill 2 is a perfect game, because it’s not. It does, however, get under your skin, and truly brings into question the sanity of the game designers.

“Hello, My Name Is James, and I’ll Be Your Protagonist this Evening.”

You begin the game as James Sunderland, a sad fellow whose wife passed away three years before from a long illness. He’s wandered aimlessly since her passing, until a letter—from his dead wife—arrives in the mail, beckoning him to Silent Hill, where she’s apparently waiting for him. James hardly believes that it’s possible that his wife sent him the letter, but he’s curious enough to jump in the car and head for the small lakefront town. Once he arrives at the outskirts of Silent Hill, he finds the road blocked off, and he must venture into the area on foot—which is where you begin.  You goal is to attempt to find the person who wrote you the letter, and determine if your beloved was responsible for it.

I wasn’t as captivated by the plot as I expected to be—it seemed to be secondary to the gameplay, or more likely, secondary to the technical presentation of the game. I didn’t care that he’d lost his wife—all I knew was that he had to go through a ghostly town, solve puzzles, kill bad guys, and progress from one point to another. I still don’t know why there were all sorts of creepy creatures lurking around the streets, but perhaps I just didn’t understand the conclusion of the game. The plot in the original Silent Hill was far more engrossing than that of this game—I’m pulling for a return to a better story in the recently announced Silent Hill 3.

“Let’s See What’s Behind Door Number Two …”

As far as gameplay goes, SH2 is pretty much right on. Your controls are simple—move with the left analog stick, use the right stick as a camera in first-person mode, and your essential maneuvers are assigned buttons. There are two character motion options a la Grim Fandango; one mode is based on screen directions (up = forward, left = left, etc.), and the other is based on what direction your character is facing (left = turn left, forward = move character in direction he’s facing, etc.). I can’t stand the second option (the default) so I switched it right away. This only causes a few problems when the camera angle changes dramatically in between rooms, so I recommend using whatever option you find most intuitive.

Silent Hill 2, like Silent Hill, is not a game of killing everything that moves—it’s a game of running away from things that might likely kill you. The reason I didn’t like the original game was because I couldn’t get into that mentality. Now that I’m older and wiser, running seems a more likely option, especially for the main character—James is an amateur fighter. He’s not a very good shot, so close range is about all he can handle. He’s also a bit slow—he’s no Jesse Owens, that’s for sure. Still, the fact that he is such a … well … wuss, makes the game that much more frightening to play. You have to run away from some enemies.

There aren’t very many inventory puzzles in SH2, so I won’t reveal any of them in detail. I will say that simply navigating through a building with locked doors and stairwells, trying to reach that floor that you know exists but you can’t find your way—I enjoy that sort of spatial exploration puzzle. There are some maze-like areas that make very little sense, but they are short-lived, and your character draws a map as he’s exploring. (In fact, the auto-mapping that was introduced in the original SH returns in this game, as one of the star attractions.) Other than exploration, there’s on the order of five run-of-the-mill adventure game puzzles (no Zork Nemesis severed heads, sorry), none of which were very difficult to solve.

Much of your time playing this game will be wandering the streets and buildings, looking for things. You will run into creatures, many of them quite disgusting (although there are only about six types—a bit of a disappointment there). You will have to either run away or beat them/shoot them/slice them into submission. Although it makes little mention of this in the game’s manual, apparently the “attack” action button makes use of the analog PS2 button feature—I never noticed. If you have an option to hit something scary hard, harder, or hardest, which will you choose?  Hardest every time! (An undocumented “feature” when fighting—oftentimes, your opponent will be knocked unconscious on the ground. You must finish him off, but your stick with nails, for some reason, can’t hit the ground. Hit the attack button without readying your weapon with the shoulder button to stomp its head and kill the beast. Nice image, eh?) I should mention here that upon starting the game, you have three choices for puzzle difficulty and three choices for enemy difficulty. Adventure purists can actually turn off the combat, leaving James to simply wander the streets, looking for things to do—but that gets very boring very fast.

I’ll say one fairly negative thing about the gameplay. It just doesn’t make sense much of the time. There’s a series of holes later in the game that you have to jump into, even though you can’t see the bottom. Could anyone really do this? Four times in a row? Without breaking his legs? And while I’m asking questions, who left all of this ammo and health scattered about town? You don’t have to ask these questions, but again, the story seems secondary to the technical experience of playing it.

“Look at this Beauty, Folks—Can You See Yourselves in It?”

Silent Hill 2 may not have the most compelling gameplay among PS2 games, but I can easily say that the presentation of the game is absolutely superb. This was my first PS2 game, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from the platform at all—based on my experiences with PC games and older consoles, I knew that many of these adventures started with a somewhat long rendered movie, detailing the backgrounds of the characters and their predicaments. I expected the same from SH2, and so I sat, watching as James walked into a roadside rest stop, looking into a mirror and rubbing his eyes and face, asking himself what he was doing here in Silent Hill. Then, nothing. Just James looking into a mirror. I started to panic—what if the system was broken already? I hadn’t even had it a day, and it wasn’t working right. I picked up the controller to try to reset the game, and James moved away from the sink as I moved the analog stick. The realization that “this was the game” took a few minutes to sink in, and I’ve been impressed ever since.

There’s a lot of fog in SH2. A lot. But this fog is so real, swirling into eddies of mysterious shadows, filling nooks and crannies—it’s a pleasure to “walk” through.  Of course, it does serve the purpose of preventing any sort of distance clipping when exploring the environment, but that aside, it’s a great way to build suspense. When you hear something that has got to be dangerous, just outside of your fog-inhibited vision, it gets very creepy very fast. I played this game with headphones on, and the sound effects were tremendous. Wandering through an abandoned hospital with creepy things following you, listening for their footsteps, the only light coming from your flashlight—classic horror gaming. The entire town was meticulously designed, with signs, construction sites, abandoned vehicles, houses, apartment complexes—everything you’d expect to find in a town like this but wouldn’t expect to be rendered in a game, regardless of platform. In fact, the experience of playing this game was extraordinary, with the following exceptions.

Exception A: Voice acting. These folks can act, and they perform well—but every time you hear them speak, it’s as if they’re in exactly the same room. No echo, no nothing. If I talk to you in a carpeted room, and then talk to you later in a jail cell, I’ll sound quite different. It’s as if they recorded all of the dialogue in a single session, in one studio, and decided not to enhance it with effects depending on the characters’ location. I’m nitpicking here, but it did seem inconsistent.

Exception B: Prerendered movies. The movements of the characters in the real-time rendered scenes was quite good—so good that I don’t know why they bothered prerendering movies with higher resolution and better anti-aliasing. The characters in those cutscenes don’t move quite right, and it interrupts the experience to switch to a different mode. Sometimes it was only for a second or two, and then back to real-time rendering. Again, nitpicking, but it bugged me.

“Here’s My Business Card—Call Me If You’re in the Market in the Future.”

Overall, the Silent Hill 2 experience is worth having, if just for the freak-out value. It’s not that compelling a story, and the puzzles aren’t too difficult, but it’s gorgeous to look at and listen to. I finished SH2 in a depressing ten hours, and got a rating of 9/10 upon completion (I was quite the swordsman with my nail-ridden plank!), but there were at least two additional endings that I could play through again to see, if this was the only game on my list to play—but it’s not, and until companies realize that very few games are worth replaying, console adventure games will remain somewhat short and uninspired. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Konami Publisher: Konami Release Date: September 2001

Available for: PlayStation 2 Xbox

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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