Title: Silent Hill HD Collection (PS3)
Classification: Cursed Tablet
Date obtained: August 30th, 2024

Description: famously one of the most shoddy ports of all time, the Silent Hill HD Collection has a reputation. the story of why this... thing is the way that it is is a story many have heard before, but i think it's a vital part of understanding this game's deal, so i'll repeat it for anyone who doesn't know.

Konami wanted to port Silent Hill 2 and 3 to (at the time) modern consoles, and asked Hijinks Studio to handle it. Hijinks agreed, and when they asked for the source code of the game which they needed to properly port the two games, Konami pretty much said, "uhhhh, what source code?" yeah, somehow they had ended up losing the original source code for two of the most critically acclaimed horror games of all time. oops! as i'm sure you can imagine, development was a nightmare. not only did Hijinks need to port these games to a console that was already infamously hard to port things to (the PS3) they ALSO had to use a version of the game that was incomplete, which made it incredibly hard to tell which bugs were with porting, and which were because they were given an old build of the game. there were also a good handful of artistic changes that were made, and with something as artistically valued and revered as Silent Hill 2, that's never gonna go well. famously, one of the signs in the game was changed to use Comic Sans, everyone's favorite font! they also rerecorded all of the voice lines, and that ALSO did not go over very well. the vocal performances of SH2 are extremely well regarded for their intentionally awkward and stilted sound, which makes the player feel disconnected from the characters, adding to the atmosphere for some people. rerecording all of those was seen as trying to "fix" something that wasn't really broken, and sanding off all of the rough edges that made Silent Hill 2 Silent Hill 2.

so if this port is so bad, why the hell did i spend 20 bucks on it? well, i love Silent Hill a lot. but here's the thing: i also really like collecting physical media of my favorite things. like, sure, i could just pirate all of the silent hill games (which i did) but it's cool to be able to own a piece of history that you can play. unfortunately, there's just some games you'll never officially own. i would know, my favorite series of all time is the Mother games, and i'm not willing to sell my kidney to be able to afford a copy of Earthbound. Silent Hill is a series that also has obscenely high price tags on all of their games, because resellers are satan incarnate here on earth only to torment me. the Silent Hill HD Collection is probably the only official Silent Hill game i'll ever be able to afford, at least of the ones that i like. sure, i could probably afford to buy Silent Hill Homecoming and have THAT be my physical SH game, but i don't like that game. i think it's lame. i DO like Silent Hill 2 and 3 though, and even if the HD Collection isn't the best way to play the games, i still find it to be a fascinating piece of history. plus, i'm a sucker for weird and bad ports of games. i own Rayman Advance for crying outloud. so yeah, more love for SHHD.