Silent Hill 2

Trev posted on survival horror classic Silent Hill 2 two years ago, claiming that the game really only did one thing right- it gives you a very creepy atmosphere, as you enter into an abandoned town enveloped with fog on a search for your potentially dead wife. For him, this was the only positive as the game was bogged down by messy controls and a story-line that is completely ridiculous. While I can't exactly defend the latter, at this point I've really got no problem with tank controls anymore. Admittedly the first game I played with tank controls (where you control your character more like a car than a human) was Resident Evil Archives: Resident Evil and I had a lot of trouble getting used to the controls there, but shortly after that I found things got pretty easy. Sure, you might run into a wall every now and then, but I dunno. I think that style of control gets more heat than it deserves, even though I've dumped on it in the past. Other than that the gameplay is very standard fare compared to other horror games, with lots of monster killing and puzzle solving. One noteworthy implementation was the 'puzzle difficulty level', where in addition to making combat harder you can make puzzles more difficult as well. This often came in the form of having the same puzzles, but making the hints harder to discern; no matter what difficulty level you're on you'll get the full effect of the game. Finally we come to the ridiculous story, but again I think that's kinda what I've come to expect from these games. The dialog is cheesy as all hell and nothing in the story makes any sense. Trev made the comparison to Metal Gear Solid 2, but I at least give MGS2 credit for trying too hard and simply throwing too much info out in a way that was tough to digest. With Silent Hill 2, I don't feel like I missed any subtleties or anything- the bizarre twists and turns in protagonist James Sunderland's journey to find his wife don't seem to represent anything other than a poor attempt to keep the player interested. Still though, despite all the backhanded compliments I did enjoy my time with Silent Hill 2. I think I'm just addicted to the very formulaic way these games work, as long as they manage to give me a couple good scares. Either way by the fourth game or so this series supposedly gets bad in a hurry, so we'll see how far I go with it.