Silent Hill really needs something new, that's why I need to play Silent Hill 4 because the atmosphere and look of the apartment and the music completely blew me away. The 9-minute opening I saw was one of the most chilling things I've ever seen, so beautiful yet so disturbing in a new way. I don't care if going through the bathroom and the other world sucks, the apartment or "Room" itself intrigues me.
digi_matrix
I am alright with new things being added to Silent Hill, but like RE4, I think drastic re-architectures probably just deserve either a new or spinoff game series altogether rather than being applied to reinvent a series. I think RE4 was a great, even superior, game, but I miss the slow-paced and more cerebral experience of the original series. I would gladly have taken up RE4's banner as an off-shoot though, because it really does deserve not only to exist but to be praised as a work of art in and of itself.
The same can't be said of SH4 -- I honestly didn't care for it, and couldn't haveeven as a series unto itself. It started as a different spin-off series altogether, so it shouldn't really have been canonized in the numerical order as it has been. It also fired so many missteps and had so many blatantly annoying game mechanics (like the psychic draining that Yahtzee mentions) that it helped to reallydevalue my experience. I have tried so hard to be positive about that game, even making positive comments about its strengths from time to time in lieu of criticism, but I am just not being honest with myself when doing that sort of thing, and nothing I come up with as undeserved praise would ring of anything to those outside listening to this praise as anything other than forced and unauthentic.
When I play a game from a well-known game series, I am looking for more improvements from within the bubble of the series itself, not a reinvention. I can ALWAYS find new stuff to play -- I don't need series that are already strong to reinvent themselves. They can improve in other ways though. New ideas for the SH series are welcomed, yeah, but nothing as drastic as either SH4 or RE4. I want traditional Silent Hill first, and then maybe some new ideas can be exercised from within that framework. I thought SH0 was a good step in that direction, all but for the fact that it was a handheld game.
I think games like Phantom Hourglass demonstrate how a good series can be effectively refreshed without turning the entire formula on its head.
[spoiler] I happen to think that SH0 falls short of that level of superiority that Phantom Hourglass gave to the Zelda series, but it definitely was a step in a good direction. I guess I might be one of the few who really appreciated the fact that the users could transition between the twilight and nightmare worlds themselves. It didn't hurt the storytelling one bit, as one might think it would, and it allowed the duality of the two worlds to become not only a storytelling element, but a puzzle element as well. It's not a new concept -- it's been done in the Zelda series, Metroid Prime series, etc. many times over. But it was something that wasn't done in SH before, and it worked surprisingly well. [/spoiler]
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