Bullshit #9: The Silent Hill HD Collection

Today we have something SO extremely bullshit, that it's caused free game Friday to be cancelled, so if you were expecting a free game this week, go tell Konami about it!

Now I've talked about some shit on this blog, but this takes the 2012 award for most bullshit thing to happen all year.  Now before we get into it, the bullshit about this game comes on 3 levels.  The first level of bullshit is the "this sucks now but it may be sorted one day" bullshit.  The second level is the "I can't believe you fucking did that" bullshit.  The most bullshit level of bullshit is the "I want to stab you in the brain with an icepick" level of bullshit, so let's address each one, one at a time.

So bullshit level 1 (a.k.a. Sucks now but it may be sorted level), is the number of technical bugs that are involved in this game.  The game glitches, freezes, slows down and stuff bugs out all over the place.  The sound doesn't work properly, when you fire guns, the sound just glitches all over the place and the the shell casings play twice or even 8 or 9 times in quick succession.  Even worse than that is  the fog, oh god is it FUCKING AWFUL.

There is a picture that was shown to Masahiro Ito (the art guy) before the game came out, and it still looked like that after release, you can see the goddamn floating bit of rope because they were using fog to make up for any limitations like that.  A google search or a youtube search can get you all the other weird fog glitches, and the fucking fog was one of the most important parts of the games look and feel, if you can't get that right WHY IN THE FUCK would you even bother to release.  That's not even all the problems as well, I've not even mentioned the mixed up eye texture (google that one to have your mind blown on just how bad this remake job was)

But you know what? These problems are all technical and can be sorted with patches.  In fact, there was a patch that helped with a few of these problems, but I think there are still a shitton of issues.  So even if you set aside the game not working properly, lets move on to the deeper layers of bullshit.

So level 2 (a.k.a. I can't believe you fucking did that) is the changes to the voice acting and general design of the game.

The changes to the design of the town are pretty bad.  One thing that really helped the atmosphere of the game was just how dirty everything looked, even when you weren't in a nightmare, but for some reason, probably for the purpose of making it all "HD" and shit, it just looks boring and uninteresting.  But apart from the art being changed, the voices were changed and THIS is the biggest offender.  It's not that the voice acting is bad on its own, they gave solid performances, but when you put those performances into a Silent Hill game, they are fucking muffgabage.  Team Silent carefully picked its team of actors to give the characters a certain feel, and the new performances just shat all over that.  Finally, the way they up scaled the scenes is fucking stupid.  They put these weird borders on everything, most notably the scene in the hotel where you watch the tape of Jame's wife, where they put this really stupid fucking TV border round the whole thing and it crops out half the fucking video.  Whoever decided that is a wanker and I want to beat him with a bag of frozen bread until he gets a concussion.

The final level of bullshit (a.k.a Stab you in the brain with an icepick) comes entirely from this man.

This is Tomm Hulett, he works for Konami as what I think is the guy in charge of Silent Hill nowadays, and is the grand master of missing the point.  I don't like this man, he is a stain on the gaming industry and his bravado is offensive to basically anyone who has to listen to it.  He claims that nobody loves Silent Hill as much as he does, and has said other things like the gameplay in the old games being shit, or the voice acting being bad etc.

Basically, his very existence in Konami is a giant middle finger to the original Team Silent.  This man remade Silent Hill 2 and 3, not because he wanted to bring these great games to a new age, but because he thought he could "improve" them and get rich and famous off the back of someone else's  work.  The funny thing is, the "improvements" this scumbag made to these games has just enraged fans and to be quite honest, the fact he felt like he needed to make improvements at all is really offensive to the original Japanese team and the only real way for him to apologise for this "remake" is to get on his knees and cut his own stomach open.

Fuck this remake
Fuck Tomm Hulett (Book of Origins looks shit too by the way)
and fuck everything that western developers like him have done to this series

God. Damnit.

Note
I'm linking to a really good channel on youtube called TwinPerfect.  These 3 guys did a series on Silent Hill called The Real Silent Hill Experience, and I recommend that you watch it, if you're a fan or even just to learn about what you're missing out on.
http://www.youtube.com/user/TwinPerfectChannel