Finding the road mysteriously closed off, James travels into town on foot, only to discover it is abandoned, covered in a layer of eerie fog, and crawling with horribly disfigured zombies. The problem is.Mary died three years ago, and James has no idea what is meant by 'our special place'. Though a sequel to Silent Hill, it's entirely self-contained: Random everyman James Sunderland arrives in the town of Silent Hill after receiving a letter from his wife, Mary, stating that she is waiting there for him in their 'special place'. Silent Hill 2's story is another reason for my initial detachment. That's information that ought not to have any applicability elsewhere in this game.

Since my ability to enjoy the game greatly increased with it deactivated, I'll contest that such an option should have been made available from the start.

(I purposefully played Shadow Man with the N64 Expansion Pak installed because I heard that some areas were dark and difficult to see without it.) Once Silent Hill 2 is completed, an option to turn off the noise layer appears in the menu. I need to be able to tell what I'm looking at to have a chance of being scared by it. Placing a layer of static over them seems like overkill, and it makes everything so hard to see (even in lighted interior areas), that it gave me eyestrain. Silent Hill 2's graphics are generally dark, foggy, and monochrome. However, there's an even easier target to pinpoint: An obnoxious 'noise' effect that makes the entire screen look fuzzy. Indeed, Silent Hill 2 often feels like it's trying harder to be weird than horrifying. Supposedly, they felt audiences may be too sensitive to handle another game as scary as Silent Hill in the current climate. Research has told me that Konami intentionally toned down the horror from the original Silent Hill in the wake of controversy over video game-related violence in the media and the terrorist attacks. Part of it is that I don't scare too easily, but I may not be entirely at fault here. We obviously did not learn anything from The Shining. I'm moving to Silent Hill for the better gas prices. Therefore, the game must rely more heavily on its atmosphere to work up a scare.which leads me to wonder where I should place the most blame for the fact that I was never truly scared by it. The crazy thing about Silent Hill 2 is that item conservation is never that big of an issue, no matter what difficulty setting you're playing on. No matter what creature comes shambling out of the mist, how frightening a dark corridor may seem, or whatever sounds go bump in the night, the biggest worry always stems from the possibility of depleting your item supply to the point where the game cannot be finished, and you'd have to start all over again. When I realized he would continue puking for the entire duration of the 2-minute video, I thought, 'This isn't scary or funny anymore, it's just stupid.' That scene is symbolic of the greater problem with Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams: It's excessive, but never where it needs to be.ДЄ staple of the Survival Horror genre is the finite number of life refills and weapon ammo that often cannot be replenished without expending some first. After a few more it ceased being empathic and now seemed funny. For the first few hurls and 'blehhhs!', I could sympathize with him for feeling sick from what he's experienced in the bizarre town of Silent Hill. There's an early cutscene in Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams in which a character vomits repeatedly into a toilet. I'm too busy sulking over television's lack of quality entertainment right now. James Sunderland begins his quest for unlocked doors: 1 down, 452 more to go.

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