Now, the first Silent Hill game for PS1 is one game I just can't play because I find it too scary. I gave up somewhere that must actually be fairly near the start in real terms - running around in the fog looking for a little girl, armed with barely anything... dying so often... it's partly the poor visibility making me peer closer, partly the alarming visuals when something does come along, partly the fact I feel utterly powerless, partly the feeling of being in an unknown place, partly the very small amount of sound used... but on top of that there must be some craftsmanship that makes the atmosphere just that little bit more terrifying than every other game I've played. The graphics are so dated now, I tried to convince myself "it's just some red pixels on screen! It's really blocky! They're just squares, come on, that can't really be scary!", but that didn't work. My imagination made it scarier than anything I could see.
The later games... I haven't tried. I just don't feel right playing a later game in a series where I couldn't play the first.
But I saw this machine and decided that I should give it a go, since it seemed the newest machine there and was a strange franchise to convert into an arcade machine.
It's a lightgun game. You put your money in, and you're in Silent Hill, it's very foggy and zombies and dogs etc come towards you so you shoot them. It's on rails so you aren't exploring, so there's no fear factor associated with peering closely at the environment to see where to head next. You're probably playing this while standing in a noisy arcade and besides, the game provides noisy voiceovers (with bad acting) from NPCs shouting at you all the time so there's no atmospheric silence to scare you. You have unlimited bullets, shoot offscreen to reload - same as any modern lightgun game, and there's nothing you can't kill by shooting it a few times, so there's no feeling of defenselessness. Graphically, everything seems rather plastic and harmless.
It's not in the slightest bit scary. It's more "House Of The Dead" than Silent Hill. Except that... it's slow. Really slow. I think someone must have thought slow = atmospheric? I don't know. I spent a lot of time waiting around for enemies to turn up.
Overall, it's not very good. The scariest thing about it is that the tacky obviously-cut-to-look-ragged cloth surrounding the cabinet is harbouring some disease you might catch. The second scariest thing is that this is what happened to the Silent Hill franchise. As a lightgun game it's fairly dreary. If it ever heads for a home console... well, I paid £1 for my go on this, and that's enough for me. I'd say that ought to be a price guide for what the game is worth to a player.
(I know, I would not normally judge a game by 10 minutes of gameplay, but that's all I was prepared to put into the machine, so that's all the attention it gets from me)
