Revisiting Silent Hill

I just watched the movie Silent Hill. The film seems to contain bits and pieces from all the video games in the Silent Hill series. It is a good horror movie but I was not scared at all. It is good because it brings back some interesting memories of my “Silent Hill” gaming experience.

I started my Silent Hill experience with Silent Hill 2 at the beginning of 2003. When SARS was causing panic around the globe, I played as James Sunderland in the twisted town of Silent Hill, searching for Mary, James' wife, who died of some type of respiratory disease that constantly reminded me of SARS.

These Silent Hill games are very very scary. For most of the other games I've played, I wanted to be IN the game world, I wanted to forget the fact that it's just a game. The more realistic, the better. But while playing Silent Hill series, at some points I was so scared that I had to remind myself, “This is not real, this is just a game!”.

However these uncomfortable feelings did not stop me from playing until all the endings were revealed. I think I was attracted to Silent Hill because of the mysterious stories behind the games. These stories are all about the twisted minds in extreme cases of mental illness and cult frantic.

I played all the Silent Hill games that are available for PC. Too bad Silent Hill 1 is not available for PC. Each newer game in the series gets harder to finish. Starting from Silent Hill 3, I had to use cheat tools to locate and manipulate the health and ammo values to finish. It was a great fun to crack the games to make myself invincible in this devilish town of Silent Hill. Surely I was less scared this way. And I'm looking forward to playing the next Silent Hill game. Hopefully I will also become invincible to face the new horrors when revisiting this twisted town named Silent Hill.