I’d heard that there were problems with the recently released Silent Hill HD Collection, but I didn’t follow the complaints closely. The collection contains Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3, and is supposed to be a high definition remastering of those games. I heard a bit about about the fog being broken and the voices re-recorded for these titles, and that was enough to make me avoid the release.
After seeing this video I am glad that I did. The video (and, amazingly, the follow-up) explore the problems with Silent Hill HD Collection in extreme detail, clocking in at over two hours of complaints (I’ve skipped the first 20 minutes in the links above, but it’s worth watching to the end of the first video at least). The problems are numerous: visual effects are broken or missing, sounds have been modified, removed, or completely replaced, and changes to the presentation (such as camera position and blur effects) reveal key information in the games that was supposed to be obscured. Not only that, the ports appear to be full of bugs!
The other fascinating thing about this video is that there are numerous comparisons between the Silent Hill HD Collection that came out this year and the Silent Hill 2 and 3 releases for PC that came out a decade ago. The PC releases look better in every scene!
Look, I’m not a rabid Silent Hill fanboy, but these are genre-defining games. Konami picked these titles ostensibly to please fans of the series, but the ports are so low quality that no fan is going to be satisfied; most will be enraged. Do yourself a favor and avoid the Silent Hill HD Collection at all costs.
I picked these up when they came out so I could play on the PS3 and see it in HD.
It has been a while since I played it so I can’t remember all of the problems I had with it, but there were quite a few.
Luckily, they put in the option to use the original voice tracks. But if I remember correctly, There were even issues with that.. I think the subtitles were way out of sync, among other things.
I thought it was at least neat to play it in HD (despite the obvious graphical problems), but it even looks like the PC version looks better.
I remember Konami saying over and over again that they were releasing patches to fix issues with it, but I don’t believe that any amount of patching could make this release whole.
I’m glad I bought the collection before I saw the reviews – I picked it up for PS3 and haven’t had any problems with it at all. As for the voice acting, I’m not sure why that bothered people…the series hasn’t been known for good voice acting anyways, so what does it matter? I actually prefer the newly recorded dialogue better than the original releases.
Unfortunatly, I bought it day one and it felt like I wasted my money.
I had every problem described in those videos. (PS3 version) Hell, before the patch Silent Hill 3 was unplayable due to the slowdown and the freezing. And to be honest, I thought the new voice acting was worse than the original. All the voices reminded me of badly dubbed anime.
It made me sad to see two of my favorite games reduced to broken, glitchy messes.
I’ve bought other HD collections in the past such as ICO and God of War and was hoping for the same great quality, but no such luck.
Yeah luckily I avoided checking n these. From what I read, the biggest reason this was a HD failure was that the new releases were based off alpha builds of the old games that were well before the actual game release. So all the debugging, fixes, tweaking and polish that the final ps2 games got wasn’t even in their starting code. The localization team that worked on this had a HELL of an uphill battle to pull this off and it seems like despite their efforts.. it was a terrible failure.
I’ll have to check those video’s though. Will be interesting to see just how much went wrong. :
hmmm…i have the ps3 version and i hadn’t noticed any of the more radical visual stuff the video shows. it makes me want to play through them again and look more closely.
the originals
stop hate on the hd
Wow. SO i went and checked out the 2 videos in full, then went and checked out a large part of their other lengthy video series, “The Real Silent Hill Experience”. fascinating stuff. I also see where they got a lot of hate from other SH fans and both love (from team silent hill) and hate(from the newer dev’s of the games).
Whereas I don’t entirely agree with everything they gripe about, they do detail a lot of stuff that I was unaware of, both with the final games, the lore, and the whole sh*tstorm that was surrounding the original silent hill’s sequels after Team Silent Hill stepped away from the series.
On an off note.. Since you did mention branching into PC games a bit I wanted to toss you this as a possible one to check into if you never did. It is an odd one but.. might be worth looking at for it’s strange tone and atmosphere (as compared to most survival horror)
http://www.amazon.com/Devil-Inside-Pc/dp/B00004ZB7C/
I had lost my previous copy of Silent Hill 2, and after buying SH1 on the PlayStation Store and replaying it, I badly wanted to return to Silent Hill 2. I knew there were problems, but I had no idea how bad it was until I saw these videos. I was glad when they announced that I could choose SH2’s voices over the new ones (SH3 unfortunately didn’t have the option for the original voices, but I only really wanted SH2 anyway). Now that I know how bad it really is, I’m sorry I bought the HD collection.
What really bothered me is the idea that the guy in charge apparently wanted to make even more changes because he deemed the original game unfit. It’s one thing to make changes, it’s another to pull a George Lucas and keep people from experiencing the original version.
There is a lesson here and that is don’t work from earlier code if you can help it. More details at: http://www.1up.com/features/the-problem-with-preservation, the article covers remastering video games in general but basically the SH HD team worked with the beta code which was still filled with all the bugs before the release of the original ports.
Even though Project Zero 2: Wii edition is SD, it still seems to look far better than this. Such a half-hearted effort.
Although it’s expensive, just do what I do: buy the originals on eBay or Amazon. At least you’re not getting something that wasn’t made properly.