What many fans of the critically acclaimed series have been calling the final nail in the coffin is here folks, the Silent Hill Pachislot machine has begun to roll out in Japan. It looks pretty much exactly like what you expected it to look like.
Blinding flashing lights, jarring J-rock that sounds like stock music, and of course, Silent Hill stuff thrown directly into the middle of it. Loosely based on 2001’s Silent Hill 2, follow James, Maria, Eddie, Laura and the rest o’ the gang through a few jumbled together short movies based on events from the original game, with footage from the original game mixed in as well. It feels so bizarre to see flashing numbers and extreme text plastered all over the classic footage, it feels amazingly out of place. Silent Hill 2 is fairly devoid of what anyone could call “action”, so by and large most of the footage is just of the characters talking and looking around. If you plastered the same flashing text and Hit The Lever nonsense over top of footage of Silence of the Lambs or AntiChrist I imagine the effect would be about the same. Of course, the new sequences are incredible in their sheer ridiculousness, showing James firing a bullet in slow motion like The Matrix and dodging enemy attacks while running on an endless bridge with patchi-quick time events.
The new footage itself is weird looking, especially in comparison with the old footage. The new visuals somehow look worse than that of the nearly fifteen-year-old game. The lighting and artistry that went into the original game slices through the layers of flashing lights and noise that Konami has bolted on top of it, and it just makes the whole experience even sadder. If you’re feeling masochistic, there’s an hour’s worth of footage showing off how the game is played.
If you thought that the Silent Hill HD Collection was the worst thing that could ever happen to Silent Hill 2, then I’m afraid your imagination was quite limited.
[Source, via Silent Hill Memories]