[insane_cobra]

I played the first Silent Hill game only about six months ago so that might explain why it failed to impress me. It just felt clunky in so many respects and I didn't find it very scary. Extremly weird, yes, but not that scary. I did like the way the story was told, with many things just being hinted at, but overall, it didn't justify its reputation in my eyes.

The second one was a big improvement. Some truly disturbing monster designs there, including one of the greatest monsters of all time - the Pyramid Head, of course. I also think it's scarier than SH, with that endless jumping down the holes in the ground, the creepy prison level and confusing final sections. Too bad the gameplay was still substandard, with a bad camera and many long corridors of indentical doors to go through. The whole premise was very interesting, but I feel the delivery fell flat. It was too heavy-handed for my taste, way too pathetic, and I could never really relate to James who made some very strange, even plain stupid decisions during the course of the game. Yes, video game characters are not exactly known for their believeability, but SH2's ambitious and intimate story made such a shortcoming all that more obvious. So a miss in that regard, but I applaud it for its courage and for what it might have been.

Silent Hill 3's plot was cheap in comparison and it ruined the original's story quite a bit, but it did have its moments. That rather obvious, but still quite powerfull "They look like monsters to you?" line is probably my favorite in the whole series. What I really liked about SH3 was its gameplay, the least painful out of all SH games I played, and the theme of dread emanating out of the known, out of the ordinary. That's one of the running themes in the series, probably taken to the extreme in SH4, but SH3's selection of locations just made the biggest impact on me and I can still remember them clearly - possibly because I played the hell out of it to unlock the Sexy Beam. In addition to that, Heather is a pretty believeable teenager, more defined than Harry and a lot less annoying than James. Monsters were more of a dangerous than scary kind and returning to Silent Hill, especially the Lake Side Amusement Park, wasn't as effective as it could've been, but overall, I suppose Silent Hill 3 is my favorite.

I only played the demo of SH4 and I found the implementation of the first person perspective so atrociously bad that I didn't even bother getting to the third person perspective part. I'll still buy it if I manage to find it really, really cheap.