Silent Hill HD Collection

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"Silent Hill 2" and "Silent Hill 3" are gems of the survival horror genre. These games showed us how smart, creepy, disturbing, and insightful games can be. I really cherish them.

Because of this it's too bad that "Silent Hill HD Collection" is a broken product.

First, there are numerous audio problems. Sound effects pop in and out during gameplay. Lip syncing and sound effects are also often very delayed during cutscenes.

Second is the frame rate issues. Both games are pretty bad, but SH3 is far worse than SH2. Expect the game to look like it's moving in slow motion in environments with more than one monster, that are larger than a closet, have running water, or fog... yes... fog! There was one boss fight in a sewer like place (I won't mention the name of the boss for spoiler reasons) that was moving so slowly that all challenge was removed.

Lastly, are the graphical problems. SH2 looks worse than it did on PS2. This is mostly due to that lack of translucent fog. In SH2 on PS2 the fog became more dense as its distance from you increased until you couldn't see anything past a certain point. Now there is just an almost solid wall of fog that looks horrible. The worst part about it is that you can now see unfinished areas of the game that the fog was meant to cover up. Nothing like seeing water that just disappears after a few feet or a telephone wire that isn't connected to anything. They have also screwed up the contrast of the game. When you set up the brightness you can now do it so the lighting looks good either outdoors or indoors, but not both like the original. This means you'll most likely be dealing with very dark and washed out exteriors.

The very worst example of how much uglier SH2 is now is in the boat section. The water texture is missing completely making it look like you're rowing across foil or something and the lack of the translucent fog mentioned earlier means that the guiding light now looks like a crayon drawing.

There are two pluses to the collection though. The first is that SH3 looks fantastic. SH2 may look terrible, but for the most part SH3 looks great. However, this doesn't matter because the game runs so slow that you'd rather just have the original SD copy. Second, is that most of the new voice actors of SH3 are better than the original. However, Heather's voice is far worse. She is no longer an authentic teenage girl like in the original. Even though the rest of the SH3 cast may sound better, the main character is far less believable and that's the one that really counts.

The new voices for SH2 are all terrible, but there is an option to use the original so that doesn't really matter.

To fix these problems Konami a released a 200+mb 1.1 patch (that's after the inexplicable 4gb install), but it didn't actually fix anything. Even if you reinstall everything after the patch it doesn't do any good.

There is simply NO EXCUSE for releasing PS2 games for the PS3 and have them be plagued with performance issues. Konami and anyone involved in the creation of the HD Collection should be ashamed of themselves.

Such a huge disappointment. If you have yet to experience these games pick them up for the PS2. They're well worth it.

POST PATCH UPDATE:

Months after the retail release of Silent Hill HD Collection there has finally been a patch released that actually addresses most of the issues. Both audio and visual problems as well as the frame rate issues have been corrected. The game now looks and sounds as good as it should have in the first place. There are still a few problems, but I would now highly recommend picking up a copy.

Click Here to Read More Reviews >>

Silent Hill has garnered a massive fanbase from lovers of Survival Horror games, and with good reason.

The games are extremely dark and atmospheric, with lots of fog and very little light to get by with.

Strange creatures and bumps in the night can be heard constantly, no matter where you are. Every moment

is fraught with tension. The stories are character-driven, the music is sublime and emotional, yet appropriate,

and the graphics are clean, especially when they're dirty as a bloody mop in a rusted toilet stall.

The reviews are in, and they have been for the last 6-10 years. Silent Hill 2 and 3 are the core of the

Silent Hill experience.

What Konami has given us here is unacceptable. There are lag, framerate and audio loop issues that were

present in the original version of Silent Hill 2. The framerate on the PS3 is actually worse than it

ever was on the PC. My PC could handle it when it came out so there was no framerate issue,

(but there was still that audio loop). I have hardly played either of these two titles and I am already

disgusted at the level of disrespect Konami has for its own titles, as well as its fan base. Cut-scenes are

out of sync with audio by over five to six seconds to the point your mind thinks the game itself has crashed.

I am studying to be a game developer and designer and I am sickened by this business practice of milking a series without

putting in the hard (simple) work of properly coding a title to run on the console. If you can't be sure

you can make it run with old code, get into the code and fix the problem, or better yet, just don't make

any announcements. Come on.

There are three good things about this release. The cover art is very sensual and erotic. There is a beautiful

cover song during their "credits" on the front screen, and the new audio recordings are surprisingly good. The James

character feels very natural and as if he could have done the original voice. But unless these things are just absolute

"must-haves" for a collector, my advice is to just play the old games on the computer at a fraction of the cost

and render them at their highest settings.

Please don't support this product if you are a fan or thinking about becoming a fan. You don't deserve this,

Konami doesn't deserve your money, and Silent Hill itself sure as hell doesn't deserve this treatment.

EDIT: There has been a recent update for Silent Hill Collections and now I fully recommend playing both these amazing games through multiple times! Please enjoy! I take back 90% of what I said, but I still believe Konami owes it to their customers not to release broken products at the time of release.

Extended Edit: I've changed the score at the request of someone who read this review. These games are fantastic--some of the best, the finest of survival horror. Do not miss these games. They will chill you, touch you, or at the very least, take you to another world where you will ponder the nature of your existence.

Buy Silent Hill HD Collection Now

The Silent Hill HD Collection should have been a love letter to fans, but instead, it turned out to be a technical disaster on many levels. Missing textures and crackling audio was just the tip of the iceberg. What went wrong?

Senior associate producer on the project, Tomm Hulett, has revealed to 1UP that Konami's porting crew had to work off a beta build of the original source code. Apparently, Konami couldn't find the source code belonging to the original gold master. Whoops.

"We got all the source code that Konami had on file -which it turns out wasn't the final release version of the games," noted Hulett.

He added, "So during debug we didn't just have to deal with the expected `porting' bugs, but also had to squash some bugs that the original team obviously removed prior to release, but we'd never seen before."

On top of fixing bugs and other oddities in the pre-release code, the beta build wasn't complete asset-wise, either. Hulett says Konami had to rip textures and sound straight from the original discs and import them in. While it's an unfortunate situation, it's still no excuse for the crippled state the HD Collection was released in, we think. Konami should have bit the bullet and issued a delay, or canned the project altogether.

Read Best Reviews of Silent Hill HD Collection Here

The PS3 version of this game is completely broken.

In the two hours I have played the game I have encountered these issues

* The game struggles to keep a solid framerate. It constantly chugs and freezes for several seconds in a row, I thought the game had froze several times but it was just the awful framerate. This happens on both games.

* The sound is completely broken on both games, audio is constantly out of sync and half the time the audio cues simply do not work.

*The controller often seizes up on Silent Hill 2 and stops working until I let go of the control stick and let it reset. I can not walk in a straight line for more than 10 seconds because of this.

* The Textures constantly flicker and in a few cases failed to load at all.

* Silent Hill 3 has froze on me twice during a cutscene

This is simply unacceptable because they delayed the game several times and still had the gall to release it in a completely broken state. It is obvious that Konami does not care about the fans.

I did some internet research and this seems to be happening to many other people who have this game on PS3.

UPDATE :

March 22nd, 2012.

I downloaded the update and then re-installed the game and I am still experiencing every single issue I originally encountered without the update. The update does not seem to have changed anything at all.

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I'm a huge Silent Hill fan so it really hurts to give out one star to this long-awaited HD collection, it just makes me wonder: "What went wrong"? I already finished SH2 and I'm halfway through SH3, I'm actually trying to ignore the stuttering, sound glitches and ridiculously slow frame rate because I just love the early games of the series, but I feel like an idiot standing by this abomination when I can pop up my still working SH3 copy on my still working PS2 and blaze through the same areas where my PS3 is having such difficulties to render, why does it have to run so slow on a more powerful machine, why on Earth does it have to install 4GB's of data and what was that useless patch for? None of my other HD collections install data and they work fine, seriously Konami, you should consider bringing back Team Silent before you can even consider another franchise release, it's a punch in the nuts for all of us fans everytime you release a stinking pile of garbage like this with the Silent Hill brand on it.