The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Silent Hill 3
In which I fall down another rabbit hole
I did not think I would be doing this,1 particularly not as one of the first posts on this blog, especially not when I spent so much time on my old blog and elsewhere talking about like, DOOM, and really my relationship with Silent Hill is more or less... it was a video game series I knew of (I knew the red pyramid creature and that was about it) that, for the reasons known only to people who were Into Video Games in the late 90s/early 00s, was set against Resident Evil. Where I was, at least, you were either a Resident Evil guy or a Silent Hill guy, and that was Just How it Was.2
I, for my part, was in fact a Resident Evil guy inasmuch as I was a survival horror guy at all - which is to say that I got the shit scared out of me by Resident Evil 2 on the Nintendo 64 and basically just never played another Resident Evil until the Gamecube remake of Resident Evil. At that point, I ended up with copies of all the Residents Evil (or at least the mainline ones) available on the Gamecube. Later, my brother and I would give them to a friend of ours in college who was way more into the series than either of us and... well, we don't really talk to him or associate with him anymore for a variety of reasons so those are gone for good.
I've gotten distracted here, which is something that happens a lot but if you are here there is a decent chance you already knew that coming in.
The point is, I mostly played Resident Evil and really didn't pay much attention to Silent Hill, apart from knowing that a lot of people seemed to think that everything made after Silent Hill 2 sucked (these people are fucking wrong and will rue their mistakes one day) and that Konami was a poor steward of the series. This was particularly true once the HD Collection released and that thing was a shitshow of frankly ridiculous proportions. Kind of fell on its ass. Kind of awful.3 I also, at one point, watched the first Silent Hill movie on a buddy's unwieldy CRT monitor, crammed in his bedroom that was way too fucking hot (mostly because he had around three or four other PCs and/or bigass electronic devices running at all times). It was, as far as these things go, inoffensive enough so as to more or less slide off my brain, although I assumed the lady cop died in the video game too as a result.4
An unexpected interest
Anyway a few years ago (or thereabouts?) the folks at Giant Bomb did a series playing through the first two games (and would have done the third, I'm sure, if not for their new corporate overlords deciding to gut their staff, including, unfortunately, the resident Silent Hill expert who was driving the series). That was enough for me to do the requisite legwork (there is not a lot of it required if we're being honest) to get a copy of Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2 running on my PC. I was particularly impressed by the Enhanced Edition of Silent Hill 2, a labor of love from some fans of the game that makes the game look frankly incredible and also fixes a bunch of the janky problems inherent in what was, unsurprisingly, a slipshod Konami PC port.
I did not spend much time with either of these games - I basically just died within like five minutes of starting Silent Hill and thought "well that's probably enough of that" and I think I did up through the first Pyramid Head "fight" in 2 before getting distracted by something else, probably Signalis. Zero time was spent even considering Silent Hill 3, because (again), my impression had more or less been that the series really only was good for two games (or really, the first was worth playing inasmuch as it started the series, and then Silent Hill 2 is the Silent Hill Game of Record). So I wasn't going to spend time either grabbing the PS2 version to emulate or investigating where and how to get the PC version (which, like the PC version of Silent Hill 2, is abandonware). It wasn't something I needed to investigate, I thought, and continued to think until a very specific point.
That point was, hilariously, randomly coming across the attract mode video for Silent Hill 3:
That song whips ass, quite simply. I'd heard it before, but sometimes these things just catch you at the right time. After that the damn thing took root somewhere in the back of my skull and I kept thinking about playing it. I tend to play games in an extremely haphazard manner, which only gets worse the older I get,5 so it might not surprise you that it took roughly two years before I actually got around to doing anything about this. There were two events which, most likely, brought me to this point:
In general, I have gotten more into horror games (and survival horror games in particular) as I've gotten older. I always liked the Resident Evil games, but when I got a Steam Deck I really started liking them, enough to play through all the remakes (except for 4, which is currently waiting patiently for me to finish it off but guess what I am close to the military base part of the game, aka the part where the game starts to Suck, so it is probably gonna take like another year - doubly so if I end up picking the game up on console the next time it goes on sale because while it runs nice enough on my PC, what if it had a more stable framerate). This is particularly true in the fall, because the fall is Spooky Season. Last fall I played through all the Alan Wake games (including absolutely devouring Alan Wake 2 when it released, a rare thing for me), the year before that it was Resident Evil 2 and 3.
Signalis, which wears its Silent Hill inspiration not just on its sleeve but maybe as its entire fucking outfit, is extremely good and it obsessed me. It took me a while to beat it - I had a save of it on the Game Pass version, then I paid for a Steam copy and started over and... once again, I point to my haphazard playing style as the excuse for why in spite of having bought it last year I only finished my first playthrough sometime last week. It's extremely fucking good - if you haven't played it, I encourage you to do so. When I finished Signalis, I was like "damn what if I played more games with This Kinda Vibe," said vibe including "female protagonist" and also "thing that you stare at and the screen goes red so you save." Really only one game off the top of my head fit that bill, so...
I grabbed the PS2 version of the game first. I'd done a little poking around about the PC version, but in the absence of an Enhanced Edition of the game I wasn't sure it would be worth the trouble.6 Armed with my (totally legitimate I swear) copy of Silent Hill 3 for the Playstation 2 gaming system, I fired it up for the first time, heard the song start playing, and was more or less hooked from the jump. It helps that I was playing with my brother watching along - horror games in general are best enjoyed with someone around to laugh at you when you get scared about some shit going down, I think - and after getting to the subway station I thought "okay, this itch has been scratched, I can move on with my life. I saw Minmo, after all, and that's the important thing."
Except to my surprise, I couldn't stop playing it. Alone, even! In the dark, even! Real sicko behavior! I got charmed by Heather's running commentary, mostly delivered by text but occasionally delivered by voice acting that I think is pretty fucking good! It keeps the weird, stilted delivery of the previous games but in a way that feels more like a stylistic choice and less like "look we went with the people we had." Both can be charming, but in different ways, and it works well for me.
In which I fail to be normal
Ah, but my brain is broken in a specific way, which is that it is possessed of curiosity. Was I getting the best possible Silent Hill 3 experience? I didn't get the joke about only sickos putting their hands in toilets when I did the mall sequence, so could I really be satisfied with this? Also the game was in 4:3 and I have a 1440p PC monitor, what if I got it running in 16:9 and also really just jacked up all the settings?
What if I investigated the PC version after all?
A little more googling revealed that in the couple years since the last time I looked into things, it turns out there is a consensus about the best way to go about playing Silent Hill 3 on PC. A way that gives you a comparable (but not quite equivalent, alas!) experience to the Enhanced Edition mod for Silent Hill 2. There is - and I include this here for future generations to find - a pretty solid guide on Reddit which will walk you through everything you need to know (for all the extant Silent Hill games, no less). It made it easy enough for me to go find the stuff I wanted and leave out the stuff I wasn't as interested in (I did not bother with the improved sound mod, for example). Then I fired it up and realized, with a sinking feeling, that now I have to play the first four hours or so of Silent Hill 3 again on PC, because it turns out being able to play in 16:9, with some additional graphical tools, really does make Silent Hill 3 look pretty goddamn good.
When I say "pretty goddamn good" I mean "you can turn this stuff on in a PS2 emulator too but honestly the 16:9 aspect ratio is the real prize for me." It is crisp and clear and grimy when it needs to be grimy. Plus since it is not the god-awful HD Collection version it runs smooth as silk. Just be sure to enable the setting which makes the mirror room run at 30fps because otherwise the effects break, apparently. The big mod patch (aka the only one you really need) for Silent Hill 3 has all the instructions in there, it's pretty straightforward).
So anyway
It is always kind of a delight for me, personally, when I discover (or re-discover) a game or (even better) series that I can sink my teeth into and learn a bunch of stuff about. This is probably true for like, everyone alive, but it bears repeating all the same. I'm not sure what exactly it is about Silent Hill 3 that has hooked into my brain so strongly, but it's been a real delight to experience. Plus in this case it hasn't really cost me any money - abandonware is abandonware, baby, so go to it.
Silent Hill fans have a sort of reputation as being the longest of the long suffering - the franchise has been bouncing between "buried forever" and "exhumed to sell NFTs" for a long time, and Konami's recent recommitment to actually making Silent Hill games has included some nice surprises (I thought The Short Message was pretty solid for what it was) and also some real dogshit (I only watched bits and pieces of Ascension and boy howdy what a fucking mess, but in an entertaining way). Looming over everything like a beefy guy with a red pyramid on his head is the Silent Hill 2 remake, which might be good and also might be fucking awful. Bloober Team being in charge gives it a 50-50 chance here. It is possible they manage to treat the darker parts of Silent Hill 2 with the same care that the original did, but I've played The Medium so I'm inclined to doubt it (unless, of course, Konami made them stick to the original script).
Either way, it would be nice - I think it would rule, actually - if we managed to get remakes of Silent Hill 1 and Silent Hill 3 as a result. Heather's too good of a character to leave languishing in a shoddy HD Collection and abandonware (and I guess Dead by Daylight, but I don't fucking play Dead by Daylight). Konami has done a terrible job as custodians of their own history, but the Metal Gear Solid collections give me hope that maybe we'll get something similar for Silent Hill one of these days. Either way, I'll just be over here waiting for an Enhanced Edition of Silent Hill 3 (which the Silent Hill 2 Enhanced Edition folks have talked about doing, apparently).
I don't know if I will end up beating the other Silent Hill games - I'll probably mess around with 1 and 2 off and on just because I have those set up to run easily, and 4 is super-easy to get running but I haven't bought a copy of that - but since it is the Spooky Season now, who knows? Maybe I'll even end up with the Silent Hill 2 remake.
Until then I'll just keep chilling out to these 00s-ass indie guitar sounds.
Writing about Silent Hill - particularly not on a new blog before I've even written about DOOM. That said, DOOM II's 30th birthday is coming soon and I haven't even written anything about that (though look, I did a whole Ranking of DOOMs elsewhere - this link is to the complete list, which helpfully links to each entry.↩
I do not need to tell you how extremely fucking stupid this is, you know how extremely stupid it is and so do I. Let's all move on from the dumb motherfuckers we were when we were like 13-16. Or really let's just move on from the dumb motherfucker I was when I was like... 13-38. Now that I'm 39, I figure I will just give myself the benefit of the doubt that now I have it all figured out. When I turn 40 next year, we will disregard this.↩
Do you want to know more about this? Well, I'm too lazy to put a ton of effort into this, but there's a Let's Play from Jess "Voidburger" O'Brien on Youtube which goes into some of the stuff. She also does a Let's Play of Silent Hill 3 which is in fact probably the reason I kept thinking about playing Silent Hill 3. So good job, Voidburger, and I'm sorry if I spelled your last name wrong.↩
I mean she can die in the first Silent Hill game, but it is more "she gets possessed and you shoot her" and less "Pyramid Head rips her skin off and tosses her aside."↩
There is a longer post to make about how I will put games down for like years - the record holder is an entire decade - before circling back and beating them, so like who even knows if I will actually finish Silent Hill 3 any time soon, but odds are at least "solid" for now that I might.↩
You can start laughing at me now.↩