Post by Dachan-da (shiznit) on Oct 12, 2009 2:03:41 GMT -6
Silent Hill.
I love em, and now you have your own thread to talk about anything Silent hill related…………..
And because I’m nice here is an abundance of info for ya!!!!!!
Silent Hill
Silent Hill is a 1999 survival horror video game for the PlayStation. The first in a series about a mysterious town of the same name, Silent Hill generated a direct sequel, three indirect sequels, a prequel and a film adaptation. The game was included in Sony's Greatest Hits and Platinum range of budget titles as a result of strong sales. A reinterpretation of the game is currently under development for the Wii, PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable.
The plot focuses on Harry Mason as he searches for his daughter, Cheryl, who has disappeared following a car accident which left Harry unconscious. He finds Silent Hill to be largely abandoned, shrouded in a thick fog, snowing out of season, filled with monsters and being over taken by a hellish otherworld. As Harry scours the town, he begins learning about the history of Silent Hill and stumbles upon a cult ritual undertaken to bring a God to Earth.
Gameplay![]()
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/5d/SH1_rifle.jpg/200px-SH1_rifle.jpg [/img]
In many areas, the player character's flashlight is the sole source of illumination.
The goal of the game is to safely guide the player character, Harry Mason, through the dilapidated town of Silent Hill in search of his lost daughter, Cheryl. A major threat to Harry's survival are the hostile creatures wandering along the streets and inside buildings, and poor visibility means that Harry will almost always be surrounded by thick fog or darkness. The player will locate a pocket-size flashlight early in the game, but the light beam only illuminates for a few feet. For this reason, sound plays a large role in Silent Hill's gameplay, as the player will often be alerted to the noises enemies make, rather than the actual sight of them. As well as the flashlight, the player will also pick up a radio, which alerts Harry to the presence of creatures by emitting static when they are in proximity, allowing him to detect monsters before they can ambush him. Another obstacle to Harry's success is his own fragility; being an ordinary man with minimal experience in handling weapons, he cannot sustain many blows from enemies, and will gasp for breath when he has sprinted for a large distance.
Silent Hill is typically shown from a third-person perspective. In pre-scripted areas, the camera occasionally switches to other angles for dramatic or disorienting effect; this contrasts to older survival horror titles which used such camera angles throughout the entire game. Because Silent Hill does not feature a heads-up display, the player must check the game's menu to determine Harry's health.
In order to navigate through a given area, Harry needs to locate and collect a map, many of which are stylistically similar to a tourist map; accessible from the menu and readable when Harry has sufficient light, Harry will write places of interest directly onto the map to aid the player. Navigating through Silent Hill frequently requires finding keys or solving riddles to progress, and the player regularly faces bosses in each area. Harry defends himself against these, and other monsters infesting Silent Hill, with a number of weapons; both melee weapons and firearms may be found, and limited ammunition may also be acquired during the game, but Harry's inexperience in handling weapons means that his aim, and thus the player's targeting of enemies, is often poor.
Plot
map of "Old Silent Hill", the first area visited in the game
In 1986, Harry Mason and his daughter, Cheryl, were driving to the resort town of Silent Hill for a vacation, when Harry swerves to avoid a figure in the road. Regaining consciousness after the crash to find Cheryl missing, he sets off in search of her on the streets of Silent Hill, which are deserted, foggy, and where snow is falling out of season. Having followed a figure that looks like his daughter, he finds himself in an alleyway that transforms by the sound of an air raid siren into a hellish version of the same world, covered in blood and rust. He is ambushed and overcome by strange monsters at the end of the alleyway, but wakes once more to find himself in a cafe, with the world returned to the state it was before the air raid siren; here he talks to a police officer, Cybil Bennett, whose motorbike he saw on the side of the road before the crash. Cybil hands him a gun and leaves to find help. Harry finds a broken radio in this cafe, which blasts static as he is about to leave. The window to the cafe then shatters, and a flying monster crashes into the cafe and attempts to attack Harry. Harry defeats the monster and stares at the dead carcass, realizing the seriousness of the situation at hand. Harry then heads off to the same alleyway he saw in his dream. A sketchbook in the now normal alleyway leads Harry to the local school, where he contends with puzzles, monsters, and the school transforming to its "Otherworld" state, including a mark on the ground that he finds on the courtyard. Though he does not find his daughter, he spots a girl who vanishes before his eyes; hearing a church bell ringing, he sets out to find the source, and meets a woman named Dahlia Gillespie at the church, who gives him an unusual item, the Flauros, and cryptic warnings about what is to come.
Departing, she tells Harry to visit Alchemilla Hospital, where he encounters Dr. Michael Kaufmann, a doctor who is as bewildered as Harry about their circumstances, and later, finding himself in the nightmarish Otherworld hospital, also meets Lisa Garland, a terrified nurse. Though she knows much about the town and its history, he is unable to get answers before he is transported back to the normal world, where Dahlia reappears and tells him the mark he has seen in various places must not be completed, lest the darkness devour the whole town. Meeting up with Cybil, who has seen a girl out on the lake, the pair find a hidden altar in an antiques store, but Harry disappears out of sight of Cybil, much to her confusion; Harry, meanwhile, finds himself back in the Otherworld with Lisa, who gives him directions to the lake, but also tells Harry she feels she's "not supposed to leave". On the way to the lake, the player may determine Kaufmann's fate - and the game's ending - by choosing to assist him in the resort area; soon after, the Otherworld nightmare begins to take over the town completely. Regrouping with Cybil and deciding to stop the mark's completion, Harry heads to the lighthouse and Cybil to the amusement park. As a cutscene shows Cybil attacked by an unknown assailant, Harry once more spies the apparition of the girl at the top of the lighthouse before heading to the amusement park himself. Here, Cybil appears possessed, and the player may save or kill Cybil, affecting the game's ending. With the girl appearing once more, Harry unwittingly uses the Flauros to trap her; Dahlia appears, revealing that she manipulated him into trapping her as he was the only one who would be able to get close, and that the girl is her daughter, Alessa.
With Alessa's powers out of control, Harry awakens to find himself in a distorted world resembling the hospital, simply known as "Nowhere". Here he finds Lisa, who has come to realise she is in fact dead, and begins to transform in front of a horrified Harry, who flees; her diary, left in the room, explains that she was the nurse who attended to Alessa. Continuing on, Harry views a flashback in Nowhere, and soon finds Dahlia, Cybil and Kaufmann, as well as a figure in a wheelchair, wrapped in bandages - Alessa with Cheryl standing nearby. Both the flashback and Dahlia's words explain that Dahlia sacrificed her daughter to fire seven years ago, in an attempt to nurture and bring about the birth of the cult's god that resides inside her. In so doing, Alessa's soul was split in two, and the god could not be born, so a spell was cast by Dahlia that would ultimately draw the other half of the soul back to Alessa. The other half of the soul manifested itself as Cheryl, whom Harry and his wife found and adopted in the form of a baby when they were on vacation in the area at that time. In the present, Alessa, sensing Cheryl's return through an increase in her power, manifested herself in the town to place the marks Harry has seen in an attempt to keep the god at bay. With Alessa's plan defeated and the two halves of her soul now back together, the god creature begins to manifest and kills Dahlia instantly, before turning its attention to Harry, who ultimately defeats it.
Four normal endings are available, depending on whether Harry saves Kaufmann and Cybil. The 'Bad' ending is received if neither Kaufmann nor Cybil are saved, where Alessa births the god and appears as a young woman in white robes; after Harry kills her, Cheryl's voice thanks Harry for freeing her and says goodbye. Harry falls to his knees, and the game cuts to Harry's corpse lying dead in the crashed Jeep. The 'Bad+' ending is similar, but sees Cybil walk up to him to convince him to flee the decaying Otherworld, which fails. The 'Good' ending finds Kaufmann alive; he throws Aglaophotis at Alessa to exorcise the god from her body, and it now appears as a giant, winged demon. After its defeat, Alessa transfers her soul into a new baby, giving it to Harry and opening a portal to escape. As he does so, Kaufmann tries to follow, but is dragged into the depths by Lisa. The 'Good+' sees Cybil escape with Harry and the new baby, with Kaufmann again being attacked by Lisa. Finally, the 'UFO' ending is an Easter egg, accessible if an item is used at certain points in the game, and sees Harry abducted by a fleet of UFOs. This ending has been carried over to most of the games in the series, including Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill 3, Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill Homecoming.
Silent hill 2
Silent Hill 2 is the second installment in the Silent Hill survival horror series. The game was released in late 2001 on the Sony PlayStation 2 and was ported to the Microsoft Xbox later that year and PC the following year.
While the game is staged in the series' namesake town, it is not a direct sequel to the events and characters of the first Silent Hill game, and is staged at an undetermined date between it and the third game.[2] This entry takes insight into a new character, James Sunderland, who enters the town after receiving a letter written by his late wife Mary, saying she is waiting for him in their "special place" in Silent Hill.
The game received favorable reviews and was a commercial success.
Game play
James, set to attack, encounters a Lying Figure in the foggy streets of Silent Hill.
The game is shown from a third person perspective, with various camera angles for different areas of the map in contrast to simply always having the player view the game from behind the back of the playable character. The main screen does not feature a heads-up display, so exact information on ammunition and health can only be checked by pausing to view the item menu screen; however, limited information on James' health is conveyed in-game through increasingly frequent controller vibrations as his health becomes lower. There is also no mini-map, and consequently, maps have to be checked through a separate function. Maps must be collected throughout the game like other items, and can only be read if there is sufficient light or when the flashlight James finds is working. James will update relevant maps to reflect locked doors and obstructions, and during the labyrinth will actually draw a new map himself while the level is being navigated if the flashlight is on. James will also write down the content of all documents in a notebook for future reference. This gives the player a very simple view of the way the map is used, as the maps in Silent Hill are likely to become your closest ally.
Much of gameplay consists of navigating the town, with less focus on killing enemies and more on finding keys or other items to bypass doors or other obstructions. Occasionally puzzles will be presented, often with riddles left for the player to interpret. The difficulty levels of the enemies and the puzzles are determined independently, giving players the option of having weak enemies while being faced with extremely cryptic riddles or vice-versa.
There are two control types for the game. The default control is called 3D mode. In 3D mode, James will move in the direction he is facing when the player tilts the analog stick upwards. For instance, if James was facing the bottom of the TV screen, and the player tilted up on the analog stick, James would walk towards the bottom of the screen. The second control type is called 2D mode. In 2D mode James will walk in the direction the player tilts the analog stick.
The atmosphere of the game was presumably designed to be as grim and unsettling as possible; many of the locations that James has to navigate are places that few people would want to go: these include the burned-out shell of a bar, a bloodstained padded cell, a prison morgue full of decayed corpses, a slaughterhouse, a pantry full of spoiled food, and a succession of filthy bathrooms (at one point, he even needs to fish something out of a toilet). The unsettling atmosphere is further enhanced by occasional unidentifiable but vaguely menacing sounds in the background. There is also a rather unique option to change the color of blood in the game, the colors besides red included are green, violet, and black.
Like the original game, James keeps a radio with him which alerts him to the presence of creatures by emitting static, allowing him to detect hostiles even through the thick fog. The sound of the static will change slightly depending on how many creatures are approaching and how far away they are. There are a total of six weapons available, three melee weapons and three firearms, with another two unlocked during replays: a wooden plank obtained from a construction site, a steel pipe embedded in the hood of a car, an oversized knife wielded by Pyramid Head, a small pistol in a shopping cart in the Apartments, a shotgun found in a locker in the hospital, and a hunting rifle found in the prison; the special weapons are a chainsaw and a spray can that deals different damage to different enemies, depending on the rank the player received in the previous playthrough. While combat is not necessarily the focus of the game, there are six boss fights. Nearly all the enemies use short-range attacks save one, who is armed with a gun, and the final boss, which can launch a swarm of black moth-like creatures at James.
Plot
James in the opening cutscene.
The game follows James Sunderland, who arrives in Silent Hill after receiving a mysterious letter from his wife, Mary, who died from an illness three years ago; the letter beckons him to their "special place", although James can only assume its meaning. As James explores Silent Hill, he encounters others searching the town. Angela, whom he meets at the beginning of the game, has also just arrived to look for her mother, but in later encounters, seems to be depressed and suicidal; the slow-witted Eddie, meanwhile, seems defensive, and later tends to linger around areas with corpses, though he denies having anything to do with their deaths. Looking for their "special place," James decides to search Rosewater Park, where he meets Maria, a woman who strongly resembles Mary, but with a more provocative outfit and personality. She claims that she has never met or seen Mary and, as she is scared, James allows her to follow him. James also briefly encounters a young girl named Laura, who seems to have no knowledge of the dangers of the town, including the monsters.
James meets Maria at Rosewater Park.
While looking for Laura inside a hospital, James and Maria are ambushed by a fearsome monster called "Pyramid Head", and Maria is killed by the monster just as James slips between the closing doors of an elevator; James nonetheless resumes his task of finding Mary, and chooses to search the old Lakeview Hotel, where he and Mary spent their vacation. While en route, James inexplicably finds Maria alive, unharmed and locked in a prison cell. She greets him with a lascivious pose, claims ignorance to their previous encounter, and discusses elements of James and Mary's past that only Mary would know. Reaching the prison cell, he finds her dead once more with injuries that hint she was beaten to death.
Traveling deeper into the underground catacomb, James saves Angela from a monster whom she calls "daddy"; she confesses that her father used to molest her, whilst a newspaper article that James finds implies that Angela stabbed her father to death. Further on, James confronts a gun-wielding and insane Eddie, who admits to maiming a bully and killing his dog before fleeing to Silent Hill; James kills him in self-defense when he attacks. Mary's letter reverts to a blank piece of paper, calling into question whether or not James actually received it, or if the letter was all in his mind.
At the Lakeview Hotel, James locates an old home-made videotape, which depicts him smothering and killing his dying wife with a pillow, much to the horror of Laura, who was friends with Mary in her time at hospital. At this point in the game, the letter from Mary vanishes entirely from the envelope. In another room, a final meeting with Angela sees her giving up on life, and disappearing into the flames of a burning staircase to commit suicide, unable to cope with her guilt any longer. The two Pyramid Heads reappear, along with Maria who has been resurrected once more; as she is killed again by being stabbed with the spear, James finally realizes that the Pyramid Heads were created because he needed someone to punish him. The envelope from Mary finally disappears. Accepting this, he defeats them, and makes his way to the rooftop, finally reaching what seems to be Mary. Depending on the choices made by the player throughout the game, this may be either Maria disguised as Mary or Mary herself. After the player defeats the final boss, one of several endings play, depending on the player's actions.
Silent Hill 2 does not have a canonical ending, and official statements from Konami have kept the canonicity of the ending ambiguous, although the fourth installment of the series alludes to the idea that James disappeared when he went to Silent Hill. In the Leave, In Water, and Rebirth endings, the woman in the room is Maria once again, dressed as Mary in an attempt to trick James. James rebuffs her, however, and she transforms into a monster. After he defeats it, the Leave ending sees James have one last meeting with Mary, read Mary's full letter, as well as he and Laura leaving the town through the graveyard, while the In Water sees James drive into Toluca Lake, killing himself in despair; Rebirth, available only during a replay game, will also end with James killing Maria, but the final scene shows him in a boat with Mary's body, planning to revive her using special occult objects the player collects during the game. Konami has hinted that the "Rebirth" ending may actually be collinear with the story of the first game, in which the town has a disturbed past, and that the events of the story are not necessarily James's own imagination but actual events around him.
In contrast, the Maria ending sees Mary as the woman on the rooftop, who has not forgiven James for killing her. After her transformation into the final boss and her defeat, James dismisses her as being just another hallucination. He then discovers Maria, inexplicably resurrected again, and leaves town with her. Maria starts noticeably coughing, implying she has the same illness Mary had suffered from, and the events that drove James to murder may repeat themselves. There are also two "joke" endings available on replay games. The first called Dog ends with James discovering, beyond a normally locked door, a Shiba Inu which has apparently been controlling all the events of the game from a vision mixer, and the second, UFO, is a continuation of the UFO ending of the first game, in which James is abducted by a group of aliens with the help of the first game's protagonist, Harry Mason, who was abducted on the first game's UFO ending.
Born From a Wish
The Born From a Wish scenario is a brief side-story scenario in the special editions and re-releases of the game. In this gaiden story, the player takes control of Maria shortly before James arrives in town, before they meet at Toluca Lake. After waking up in the Heaven's Night club with a gun, and having contemplated suicide, she resolves to go out and find someone. Her wandering eventually brings her to the seemingly deserted Baldwin mansion, where she hears the voice of seemingly agoraphobic owner, Ernest Baldwin. At first Maria is relieved to have found another living human, but Ernest refuses to let Maria into the room where he is and will only talk to her through the closed door. After completing a few small tasks for him, including passing him a birthday card from his daughter Amy, Ernest warns Maria about James, whom he described as a "bad man"; Maria resolves to open the door to Ernest's room, and finds it empty. Leaving, she again contemplates her gun, as well as suicide. After pointing the gun at her head, she abruptly tosses it over a nearby wall and, after whispering James' name, walks into the fog —to Rosewater Park, to await his arrival.
I love em, and now you have your own thread to talk about anything Silent hill related…………..
And because I’m nice here is an abundance of info for ya!!!!!!
Silent Hill
Silent Hill is a 1999 survival horror video game for the PlayStation. The first in a series about a mysterious town of the same name, Silent Hill generated a direct sequel, three indirect sequels, a prequel and a film adaptation. The game was included in Sony's Greatest Hits and Platinum range of budget titles as a result of strong sales. A reinterpretation of the game is currently under development for the Wii, PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable.
The plot focuses on Harry Mason as he searches for his daughter, Cheryl, who has disappeared following a car accident which left Harry unconscious. He finds Silent Hill to be largely abandoned, shrouded in a thick fog, snowing out of season, filled with monsters and being over taken by a hellish otherworld. As Harry scours the town, he begins learning about the history of Silent Hill and stumbles upon a cult ritual undertaken to bring a God to Earth.
Gameplay
In many areas, the player character's flashlight is the sole source of illumination.
The goal of the game is to safely guide the player character, Harry Mason, through the dilapidated town of Silent Hill in search of his lost daughter, Cheryl. A major threat to Harry's survival are the hostile creatures wandering along the streets and inside buildings, and poor visibility means that Harry will almost always be surrounded by thick fog or darkness. The player will locate a pocket-size flashlight early in the game, but the light beam only illuminates for a few feet. For this reason, sound plays a large role in Silent Hill's gameplay, as the player will often be alerted to the noises enemies make, rather than the actual sight of them. As well as the flashlight, the player will also pick up a radio, which alerts Harry to the presence of creatures by emitting static when they are in proximity, allowing him to detect monsters before they can ambush him. Another obstacle to Harry's success is his own fragility; being an ordinary man with minimal experience in handling weapons, he cannot sustain many blows from enemies, and will gasp for breath when he has sprinted for a large distance.
Silent Hill is typically shown from a third-person perspective. In pre-scripted areas, the camera occasionally switches to other angles for dramatic or disorienting effect; this contrasts to older survival horror titles which used such camera angles throughout the entire game. Because Silent Hill does not feature a heads-up display, the player must check the game's menu to determine Harry's health.
In order to navigate through a given area, Harry needs to locate and collect a map, many of which are stylistically similar to a tourist map; accessible from the menu and readable when Harry has sufficient light, Harry will write places of interest directly onto the map to aid the player. Navigating through Silent Hill frequently requires finding keys or solving riddles to progress, and the player regularly faces bosses in each area. Harry defends himself against these, and other monsters infesting Silent Hill, with a number of weapons; both melee weapons and firearms may be found, and limited ammunition may also be acquired during the game, but Harry's inexperience in handling weapons means that his aim, and thus the player's targeting of enemies, is often poor.
Plot
map of "Old Silent Hill", the first area visited in the game In 1986, Harry Mason and his daughter, Cheryl, were driving to the resort town of Silent Hill for a vacation, when Harry swerves to avoid a figure in the road. Regaining consciousness after the crash to find Cheryl missing, he sets off in search of her on the streets of Silent Hill, which are deserted, foggy, and where snow is falling out of season. Having followed a figure that looks like his daughter, he finds himself in an alleyway that transforms by the sound of an air raid siren into a hellish version of the same world, covered in blood and rust. He is ambushed and overcome by strange monsters at the end of the alleyway, but wakes once more to find himself in a cafe, with the world returned to the state it was before the air raid siren; here he talks to a police officer, Cybil Bennett, whose motorbike he saw on the side of the road before the crash. Cybil hands him a gun and leaves to find help. Harry finds a broken radio in this cafe, which blasts static as he is about to leave. The window to the cafe then shatters, and a flying monster crashes into the cafe and attempts to attack Harry. Harry defeats the monster and stares at the dead carcass, realizing the seriousness of the situation at hand. Harry then heads off to the same alleyway he saw in his dream. A sketchbook in the now normal alleyway leads Harry to the local school, where he contends with puzzles, monsters, and the school transforming to its "Otherworld" state, including a mark on the ground that he finds on the courtyard. Though he does not find his daughter, he spots a girl who vanishes before his eyes; hearing a church bell ringing, he sets out to find the source, and meets a woman named Dahlia Gillespie at the church, who gives him an unusual item, the Flauros, and cryptic warnings about what is to come.
Departing, she tells Harry to visit Alchemilla Hospital, where he encounters Dr. Michael Kaufmann, a doctor who is as bewildered as Harry about their circumstances, and later, finding himself in the nightmarish Otherworld hospital, also meets Lisa Garland, a terrified nurse. Though she knows much about the town and its history, he is unable to get answers before he is transported back to the normal world, where Dahlia reappears and tells him the mark he has seen in various places must not be completed, lest the darkness devour the whole town. Meeting up with Cybil, who has seen a girl out on the lake, the pair find a hidden altar in an antiques store, but Harry disappears out of sight of Cybil, much to her confusion; Harry, meanwhile, finds himself back in the Otherworld with Lisa, who gives him directions to the lake, but also tells Harry she feels she's "not supposed to leave". On the way to the lake, the player may determine Kaufmann's fate - and the game's ending - by choosing to assist him in the resort area; soon after, the Otherworld nightmare begins to take over the town completely. Regrouping with Cybil and deciding to stop the mark's completion, Harry heads to the lighthouse and Cybil to the amusement park. As a cutscene shows Cybil attacked by an unknown assailant, Harry once more spies the apparition of the girl at the top of the lighthouse before heading to the amusement park himself. Here, Cybil appears possessed, and the player may save or kill Cybil, affecting the game's ending. With the girl appearing once more, Harry unwittingly uses the Flauros to trap her; Dahlia appears, revealing that she manipulated him into trapping her as he was the only one who would be able to get close, and that the girl is her daughter, Alessa.
With Alessa's powers out of control, Harry awakens to find himself in a distorted world resembling the hospital, simply known as "Nowhere". Here he finds Lisa, who has come to realise she is in fact dead, and begins to transform in front of a horrified Harry, who flees; her diary, left in the room, explains that she was the nurse who attended to Alessa. Continuing on, Harry views a flashback in Nowhere, and soon finds Dahlia, Cybil and Kaufmann, as well as a figure in a wheelchair, wrapped in bandages - Alessa with Cheryl standing nearby. Both the flashback and Dahlia's words explain that Dahlia sacrificed her daughter to fire seven years ago, in an attempt to nurture and bring about the birth of the cult's god that resides inside her. In so doing, Alessa's soul was split in two, and the god could not be born, so a spell was cast by Dahlia that would ultimately draw the other half of the soul back to Alessa. The other half of the soul manifested itself as Cheryl, whom Harry and his wife found and adopted in the form of a baby when they were on vacation in the area at that time. In the present, Alessa, sensing Cheryl's return through an increase in her power, manifested herself in the town to place the marks Harry has seen in an attempt to keep the god at bay. With Alessa's plan defeated and the two halves of her soul now back together, the god creature begins to manifest and kills Dahlia instantly, before turning its attention to Harry, who ultimately defeats it.
Four normal endings are available, depending on whether Harry saves Kaufmann and Cybil. The 'Bad' ending is received if neither Kaufmann nor Cybil are saved, where Alessa births the god and appears as a young woman in white robes; after Harry kills her, Cheryl's voice thanks Harry for freeing her and says goodbye. Harry falls to his knees, and the game cuts to Harry's corpse lying dead in the crashed Jeep. The 'Bad+' ending is similar, but sees Cybil walk up to him to convince him to flee the decaying Otherworld, which fails. The 'Good' ending finds Kaufmann alive; he throws Aglaophotis at Alessa to exorcise the god from her body, and it now appears as a giant, winged demon. After its defeat, Alessa transfers her soul into a new baby, giving it to Harry and opening a portal to escape. As he does so, Kaufmann tries to follow, but is dragged into the depths by Lisa. The 'Good+' sees Cybil escape with Harry and the new baby, with Kaufmann again being attacked by Lisa. Finally, the 'UFO' ending is an Easter egg, accessible if an item is used at certain points in the game, and sees Harry abducted by a fleet of UFOs. This ending has been carried over to most of the games in the series, including Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill 3, Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill Homecoming.
Silent hill 2
Silent Hill 2 is the second installment in the Silent Hill survival horror series. The game was released in late 2001 on the Sony PlayStation 2 and was ported to the Microsoft Xbox later that year and PC the following year.
While the game is staged in the series' namesake town, it is not a direct sequel to the events and characters of the first Silent Hill game, and is staged at an undetermined date between it and the third game.[2] This entry takes insight into a new character, James Sunderland, who enters the town after receiving a letter written by his late wife Mary, saying she is waiting for him in their "special place" in Silent Hill.
The game received favorable reviews and was a commercial success.
Game play
James, set to attack, encounters a Lying Figure in the foggy streets of Silent Hill.
The game is shown from a third person perspective, with various camera angles for different areas of the map in contrast to simply always having the player view the game from behind the back of the playable character. The main screen does not feature a heads-up display, so exact information on ammunition and health can only be checked by pausing to view the item menu screen; however, limited information on James' health is conveyed in-game through increasingly frequent controller vibrations as his health becomes lower. There is also no mini-map, and consequently, maps have to be checked through a separate function. Maps must be collected throughout the game like other items, and can only be read if there is sufficient light or when the flashlight James finds is working. James will update relevant maps to reflect locked doors and obstructions, and during the labyrinth will actually draw a new map himself while the level is being navigated if the flashlight is on. James will also write down the content of all documents in a notebook for future reference. This gives the player a very simple view of the way the map is used, as the maps in Silent Hill are likely to become your closest ally.
Much of gameplay consists of navigating the town, with less focus on killing enemies and more on finding keys or other items to bypass doors or other obstructions. Occasionally puzzles will be presented, often with riddles left for the player to interpret. The difficulty levels of the enemies and the puzzles are determined independently, giving players the option of having weak enemies while being faced with extremely cryptic riddles or vice-versa.
There are two control types for the game. The default control is called 3D mode. In 3D mode, James will move in the direction he is facing when the player tilts the analog stick upwards. For instance, if James was facing the bottom of the TV screen, and the player tilted up on the analog stick, James would walk towards the bottom of the screen. The second control type is called 2D mode. In 2D mode James will walk in the direction the player tilts the analog stick.
The atmosphere of the game was presumably designed to be as grim and unsettling as possible; many of the locations that James has to navigate are places that few people would want to go: these include the burned-out shell of a bar, a bloodstained padded cell, a prison morgue full of decayed corpses, a slaughterhouse, a pantry full of spoiled food, and a succession of filthy bathrooms (at one point, he even needs to fish something out of a toilet). The unsettling atmosphere is further enhanced by occasional unidentifiable but vaguely menacing sounds in the background. There is also a rather unique option to change the color of blood in the game, the colors besides red included are green, violet, and black.
Like the original game, James keeps a radio with him which alerts him to the presence of creatures by emitting static, allowing him to detect hostiles even through the thick fog. The sound of the static will change slightly depending on how many creatures are approaching and how far away they are. There are a total of six weapons available, three melee weapons and three firearms, with another two unlocked during replays: a wooden plank obtained from a construction site, a steel pipe embedded in the hood of a car, an oversized knife wielded by Pyramid Head, a small pistol in a shopping cart in the Apartments, a shotgun found in a locker in the hospital, and a hunting rifle found in the prison; the special weapons are a chainsaw and a spray can that deals different damage to different enemies, depending on the rank the player received in the previous playthrough. While combat is not necessarily the focus of the game, there are six boss fights. Nearly all the enemies use short-range attacks save one, who is armed with a gun, and the final boss, which can launch a swarm of black moth-like creatures at James.
Plot
James in the opening cutscene.
The game follows James Sunderland, who arrives in Silent Hill after receiving a mysterious letter from his wife, Mary, who died from an illness three years ago; the letter beckons him to their "special place", although James can only assume its meaning. As James explores Silent Hill, he encounters others searching the town. Angela, whom he meets at the beginning of the game, has also just arrived to look for her mother, but in later encounters, seems to be depressed and suicidal; the slow-witted Eddie, meanwhile, seems defensive, and later tends to linger around areas with corpses, though he denies having anything to do with their deaths. Looking for their "special place," James decides to search Rosewater Park, where he meets Maria, a woman who strongly resembles Mary, but with a more provocative outfit and personality. She claims that she has never met or seen Mary and, as she is scared, James allows her to follow him. James also briefly encounters a young girl named Laura, who seems to have no knowledge of the dangers of the town, including the monsters.
James meets Maria at Rosewater Park.
While looking for Laura inside a hospital, James and Maria are ambushed by a fearsome monster called "Pyramid Head", and Maria is killed by the monster just as James slips between the closing doors of an elevator; James nonetheless resumes his task of finding Mary, and chooses to search the old Lakeview Hotel, where he and Mary spent their vacation. While en route, James inexplicably finds Maria alive, unharmed and locked in a prison cell. She greets him with a lascivious pose, claims ignorance to their previous encounter, and discusses elements of James and Mary's past that only Mary would know. Reaching the prison cell, he finds her dead once more with injuries that hint she was beaten to death.
Traveling deeper into the underground catacomb, James saves Angela from a monster whom she calls "daddy"; she confesses that her father used to molest her, whilst a newspaper article that James finds implies that Angela stabbed her father to death. Further on, James confronts a gun-wielding and insane Eddie, who admits to maiming a bully and killing his dog before fleeing to Silent Hill; James kills him in self-defense when he attacks. Mary's letter reverts to a blank piece of paper, calling into question whether or not James actually received it, or if the letter was all in his mind.
At the Lakeview Hotel, James locates an old home-made videotape, which depicts him smothering and killing his dying wife with a pillow, much to the horror of Laura, who was friends with Mary in her time at hospital. At this point in the game, the letter from Mary vanishes entirely from the envelope. In another room, a final meeting with Angela sees her giving up on life, and disappearing into the flames of a burning staircase to commit suicide, unable to cope with her guilt any longer. The two Pyramid Heads reappear, along with Maria who has been resurrected once more; as she is killed again by being stabbed with the spear, James finally realizes that the Pyramid Heads were created because he needed someone to punish him. The envelope from Mary finally disappears. Accepting this, he defeats them, and makes his way to the rooftop, finally reaching what seems to be Mary. Depending on the choices made by the player throughout the game, this may be either Maria disguised as Mary or Mary herself. After the player defeats the final boss, one of several endings play, depending on the player's actions.
Silent Hill 2 does not have a canonical ending, and official statements from Konami have kept the canonicity of the ending ambiguous, although the fourth installment of the series alludes to the idea that James disappeared when he went to Silent Hill. In the Leave, In Water, and Rebirth endings, the woman in the room is Maria once again, dressed as Mary in an attempt to trick James. James rebuffs her, however, and she transforms into a monster. After he defeats it, the Leave ending sees James have one last meeting with Mary, read Mary's full letter, as well as he and Laura leaving the town through the graveyard, while the In Water sees James drive into Toluca Lake, killing himself in despair; Rebirth, available only during a replay game, will also end with James killing Maria, but the final scene shows him in a boat with Mary's body, planning to revive her using special occult objects the player collects during the game. Konami has hinted that the "Rebirth" ending may actually be collinear with the story of the first game, in which the town has a disturbed past, and that the events of the story are not necessarily James's own imagination but actual events around him.
In contrast, the Maria ending sees Mary as the woman on the rooftop, who has not forgiven James for killing her. After her transformation into the final boss and her defeat, James dismisses her as being just another hallucination. He then discovers Maria, inexplicably resurrected again, and leaves town with her. Maria starts noticeably coughing, implying she has the same illness Mary had suffered from, and the events that drove James to murder may repeat themselves. There are also two "joke" endings available on replay games. The first called Dog ends with James discovering, beyond a normally locked door, a Shiba Inu which has apparently been controlling all the events of the game from a vision mixer, and the second, UFO, is a continuation of the UFO ending of the first game, in which James is abducted by a group of aliens with the help of the first game's protagonist, Harry Mason, who was abducted on the first game's UFO ending.
Born From a Wish
The Born From a Wish scenario is a brief side-story scenario in the special editions and re-releases of the game. In this gaiden story, the player takes control of Maria shortly before James arrives in town, before they meet at Toluca Lake. After waking up in the Heaven's Night club with a gun, and having contemplated suicide, she resolves to go out and find someone. Her wandering eventually brings her to the seemingly deserted Baldwin mansion, where she hears the voice of seemingly agoraphobic owner, Ernest Baldwin. At first Maria is relieved to have found another living human, but Ernest refuses to let Maria into the room where he is and will only talk to her through the closed door. After completing a few small tasks for him, including passing him a birthday card from his daughter Amy, Ernest warns Maria about James, whom he described as a "bad man"; Maria resolves to open the door to Ernest's room, and finds it empty. Leaving, she again contemplates her gun, as well as suicide. After pointing the gun at her head, she abruptly tosses it over a nearby wall and, after whispering James' name, walks into the fog —to Rosewater Park, to await his arrival.
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