The Good
HD visuals reveal extra detail
New, well-done voice acting for Silent Hill 2
Both games are as freaky as ever.

The Bad
Performance dips in crowded environments.

Both games look great. The high-definition visuals let you pick up on small details, such as shop signs and the deformities of a monster’s face, that were easy to miss in the original games. Fog remains prevalent but has been pushed back to reveal more of the scenery. The lighting effects have also been improved. Previously, darkness was darkness: black, oppressive, and nearly impossible to see through without the intense beam of your flashlight. Now the darkness isn’t as thick, and the light sources have been softened to make everything easier on the eyes.

Silent Hill 3 doesn’t include any audio annoyances, but what it does have is frame-rate lag. This typically occurs in large, open areas with lots of enemies. Everything eases into slow motion until you either kill the monsters or duck into a new area. This problem isn’t exclusive to Silent Hill 3, but since Silent Hill 2 has more claustrophobic environments with fewer enemies, it doesn’t occur as often in James’ neck of the woods. By no measure do these performance dips render either game unplayable, but they are noticeable.

Reviews
A triumphant port that still doesn’t fix a flawed game.
By Justin Haywald 01/15/2010
It’s been a little over a month since Silent Hill: Shattered Memories came out for the Wii, but Konami has soon followed it up with ports to the PSP and PlayStation 2. While that’s given me the opportunity to mull over the game and play through a few more times, my basic opinions haven’t changed: There weren’t any major changes to the game itself, so I still have the same gripes as before. However, that doesn’t mean these aren’t excellent, carefully-crafted ports. As a rendition of the game on much less powerful pieces of hardware, it’s a technical triumph.

For one, they retain the same wonderful voice acting. The scaled-down graphics, while nowhere near as good as on the Wii, still look stupendous. And even without the excellent, intuitive Wii controls, getting around the world is easy whether you’re using the PS2’s dual sticks or the PSP’s one. I still enjoy the narrative-heavy idea of the game, and exploring the Silent Hill in Harry’s mind, even if it’s not a particularly scary place.

But Shattered Memories also suffers from the same problems as on the Wii. The “run away from danger” mechanic sounds terrifying: a game that leaves you powerless and vulnerable against relentless, dark creatures. However, it becomes a rote series of trial-and-error missteps to find the path the game wants you to take through icy, samey labyrinths. Throwing off your oppressors is easier with a controller (you just tap the button corresponding to the direction they attack you from), but you still take damage quickly no matter how quickly you toss your enemies aside. And using the map in these situations is just as clunky and useless as before: You’re given an endpoint, and that’s it — it’s up to you to locate the dead ends and navigate the circuitous road to safety. That’s not frightening or stressful; it’s annoying, and that’s still the feeling that sticks with me every time I play the game.

While the emphasis in Shattered Memories seems to be more on the game’s often sexual story than on survival action, I don’t feel any more impressed now than I did after my first playthrough. I’ve finished the game a total of five times across all these iterations, but it’s just disappointing that I don’t get anything different or deeper out of those trips. Sure, the game itself changes, and your psychological profiles affect how characters react to you, but I personally don’t want a different story each time I play. In a game like this, on my second or third playthrough, I want to understand things more deeply. Instead, you just reset at the beginning each time.

Regardless, Shattered Memories gives you something to think about, even if you don’t feel like you have direct control over how events transpire — a result of the game’s non-binary, open-ended decisions, both in how you play the game and in the “psychological profiles” you undergo. That’s not bad, but it makes it difficult to understand how exactly your actions change the story’s progession. It’s not the worst Silent Hill game by a long shot, but the unavoidable action sequences still sour this excursion to Silent Hill for me.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Hands-On
By Giancarlo Varanini, GameSpotPosted Jan 13, 2010 1:14 pm PT

We take a trip through the PSP version of the latest Silent Hill game.

The Wii version of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories received widespread praise for its reimagining of the original Silent Hill, as well as its new take on the Silent Hill formula, particularly the way characters confront the town’s ghoulish denizens. Instead of whacking enemies over the head or pumping them full of holes with any sort of firearm, Harry Mason (the game’s main character who’s looking for his missing daughter) can only hope to evade them–either by running in a different direction or throwing various objects to the floor while running away–or throw them off his back by gesturing in various directions with the Wii Remote. The motion controls also come into play during puzzles as you grab cans and tip them on their sides to retrieve keys or as you move various objects into position to find a secret number used to open a locked door. And, of course, you can also use the Wii Remote to move Harry’s flashlight around much as you would an actual flashlight.

Of course, the PSP has no such technology; thus, it has to make do with its single analog nub, face buttons, and shoulder buttons. Surprisingly, the controls seem like they’ve been adapted pretty well. When enemies cling to Harry, he can simply throw them off by pressing one of the designated face buttons that’s prompted at the bottom of the screen. As for moving the flashlight around, you can’t do it while Harry is walking (as you can in the Wii version). So, instead, the PSP version lets you hit the right-shoulder button, which takes you into a first-person view that gives you a closer, first-person view you can manipulate with the analog nub without moving Harry around. As for puzzles that require grabbing objects and rotating (or moving) them around, you can solve them by grabbing the object with one of the PSP’s face buttons then rotate it using the left- or right-shoulder buttons.

Naturally, other concessions had to be made to accommodate the PSP’s hardware, but one aspect of the game that hasn’t changed much at all is the visuals. The PSP version of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories looks nearly identical to its Wii counterpart, but there are some slight differences. It seems like you can’t see quite as far into the distance in some scenes. There are also some textures and areas that aren’t clear as those found in the Wii version. The PSP version of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is scheduled for release on January 19.