| Zim said: It really is kinda crazy to think that Silent Hill games used to be some of the best around. 1 and 2 were both staggering for the time and 3 was still pretty fantastic from what I hear. I do wonder if Konami even really care about the series anymore or are simply happy to throw the game to new developers constantly and happy that it will sell to the loyal fans. Gotta say as well that graphically the game is pretty shocking for what is an entry into a major franchise. Sometimes it looks okay but at other times it looks a bit like an Xbox game simply put in HD. Specifically the scenes with fog, comparing them to the fog in Alan Wake makes them look awful. |
Well, see, the fog was always meant to allow the devs to make a really good looking area by removing the drawdistance. So long as they didn't have to show the length of the street, the game would look really great for its time and run really well.
At the same time, it leant a mystery to the game that was great for atmosphere.
The move to the newer games is two-fold.
One, they lost a lot of the fog. This results in the atmosphere being 'not quite as claustrophobically scary, as well as it forces the devs to lower the graphic level so that the game can appear capable of rendering larger areas.
Two, the developers are too modern, and too task oriented. What I mean by this, is that fog was a very 'creative' way of dealing with the hardware bottlenecks. They couldn't render a whole city, so they introduced a fog that allowed them to circumvent it altogether while at the same time contributing to atmosphere. This is the kind of creativity that provided for really interesting monster development; monsters that really fit the main character. SH2's narrative revolved around a guy with sexual problems, thereby all the monsters were sexy nurses, and pyramid head is a sure phallic symbol, etc etc etc.
Put together, you can just see how fog is a symbol for talent. As time has gone on in SH, there has been less and less fog. SH is now only a self reference to itself and nothing more. Sexy nurses show up now simply because people like sexy nurses...nothing to do with the character.
