Oh I forgot to mention Sanitarium. That was fricking creepy.
Stinkpalm, I can relate to your frustration/embarassment- its kind of like Occam’s Razor. You’re looking so hard for the solution for something you don’t see whats smack in front your face 
This happened to me in Zelda II: Link’s Awakening. I was stuck on the 8th dungeon. To progress to the end of the dungeon (which is a tower) you have to use this ball to collapse 4 pillars. But getting this ball to the pillars is a pain in the ass, and if you lose it, you have to hike all the way back to where you orignally found it (it comes back). I was playing that game for a YEAR, and knew very well that was the only thing stopping me from beating it. My friend plays it, and finds the solution almost immediately- turns out there was a place where you had to throw the ball OVER a pit. It was there all along, staring me in the face, it just was the ONLY thing I never tried! I was kind of pissed that he figured it out so easily but got the last laugh when he couldn’t figure out how to kill the final form of the last boss, I did and got to see the ending before him 
I would absolutely LOVE to read this. If there is one thing I enjoy discussing it is the whys and wherefores behind the story of that game. Two I thought was much more straightforward than one, but I played the XBox version with the Maria story and that helped a lot. Ever read the President Evil thoughts at GameFAQs? If you haven’t don’t do it until you’ve finished, if you have, then yay.
::Shudder:: One time I was standing down the end of the main hall in the the normal school, the one where the book is with all the clues you’ll need for the normal school? And so there I am, and eventually as you return to this hallway again and again some evil children will show up in the hall. Well I was standing a bit away from one, just barely in the light of my flashlight, watching it. I was overcome with a sense of pity that I would have to kill it, then some creep started settling in as I watched the way it moved and all of a sudden I noticed it was coming after me while I had been sitting there just staring at it, LOL. Good gods.
SH1 “trick”! If you have a club weapon you can squirt out infinite blood from monsters. Holding the attack button down causes an overhead swing; if you keep it depressed you will keep swinging. Well, drop a (for example) kid all the way at the end of one hall with you facing towards the rest of it (say the door is behind you) and hold that button down. Even though it is dead it should still make the sickeningly wet sound each swing, and blood should come out. If you hold it down for a real long time you will notice that the pool around it grows, and sometimes you cause the body to move forward a little bit. You can create a huge blood smear all the way down the hall with this. The katana also works great for this, but if you are not perfectly centered with the beastie then you’ll eventually miss.
SPOOFE, it is hard to argue about something like this. The hospitol in 2 definitely creeped the shit out of me, good lord it did. But I think the school was overall longer and more scary because of the whole world-shifting going on, whereas the world-shifting never “really” went on in 2. I can’t remember which floor in the 2 hospitol specifically gave me problems, but one of them I remember intense dread, no doubt. But I can’t play 1 through in a single sitting because I have to stop once at the school and I have to take a break before Nowhere (also quite terrifying for me).
Scariest SH1 or 2 moment for me was also in 1. Remember the little black see-through creatures? Well, I had played 1 through on “normal” the first time through and they never hurt you. My first encounter with them in the school was a scream, literally. I shouted “WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT” and knew it was time for a break. Later on in Nowhere you see black baby teddy bears (the bear-like things with claws you find in the end of the sewers on the way to the amusement park). Anyway, on “hard” the things come after you and can actually hurt you. The moment of dread I felt when I realized this being surrounded by I think five of them was too much for words. My mouth turned to paste, my hands soaked with sweat. Dear god that was terrible.
I just got thru that part. That “puzzle” beats the garbage chute “puzzle” for sheer retardedness. It is by far the silliest thing I have ever had to “figure out” in a game.
I really did like SH1 and had high hopes for this one. Even though alot of SH1 was nonsensical like this one, at least SH1 was creepy. Why they don’t have the shifting worlds in this one is beyond me. That was the coolest part of the first one. Reminded me of Hellraiser 2.
I should go and open up a locksmith shop in Silent Hill. I would make a killing.
Just wondering… you guys didn’t think it was kinda’ creepy that some guy in a psych ward was so obsessive about protecting a thread of his daughter’s hair that he kept it in a ridiculously over-protected box? Did you catch that the patient the box belonged to blamed himself for his daughter’s death, and had to be kept on constant suicide watch? And that it was that same guy who wrote the combination to the last lock in blood on the wall of his padded room so he couldn’t forget it? That box didn’t have a hair in it just because you happened to need one, y’know–it was actually part of the story.
Incidentally, I don’t see what’s so weird about the garbage chute puzzle… I always assumed the chute was clogged further down than James could reach, so you had to drop something heavy to knock what was in there down. Makes sense to me.
It would almost make some sense if
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He wasnt carrying a 4 foot board to push the garbage
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You couldn’t see the garbage sticking up from the chute when you entered the room. When you walk in there you can see the top of the garbage before you even look in the chute
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Why the heck would anyone ever want to unclog GARBAGE FROM A GARBAGE CHUTE? I could see if it was a treasure chest, or a body, or something, but a trash bag? And a case of orange juice was the answer?
LMFAO! No doubt…that has got to be the single most frustrating thing about the game.
Thanks for the info Calredic. When I get a spare moment, I will try it out.
Hey, just be glad it’s not Resident Evil–you would’ve needed to find nine crests representing the planets of the solar system and place them in nine indentations in the wall to magically activate some unseen mechanism to make the garabage chute unclog itself. (I still want to know how Umbrella’s employees get any work done, having to deal with all the crazy-ass on-site security measures their damn company is so obsessed with.)
It definitely speaks of a disturbed mind, but I’m thinking the mind in question belongs to the games puzzle designer 
I fully recognize that there was a point to the hair being there and having uncover the story to find it and all. My point is only that it’s a completely inane way to get the key out of the drain.
As to the garbage “puzzle”, it just defies logic. Who, in their right mind, would be wandering about an abandoned asylum whose walls are caked with padlock combinations scrawled in blood, whose halls bear wandering zombies, and which contains a freaky little girl running about on her own, unmolested by the zombies; and come across some who knows how old bag garbage and feel it necessary to push the putrid package down to the dumpster?
I just personally prefer that the puzzles be based on logic rather than advancing some side story that the game designers thought eerie and cool.
I guess you didn’t knock on the door of the locked bathroom stall in the prison. That scared the crap out of me.
Yep, they’re making it. Should be out in the next few months. The protagonist is a female this time, and from the looks of the preview movie (do a Google search, it’s floating around out there), she gets a machine gun of some sort at some point. Saw an interview with the designer on Extended Play, and they say they’ve improved the controls, which is my biggest complaint with SH2. It’s a fine balance, though, because they want their protagonists to be like regular people, with no special experience or military training about them.
I can’t wait to see that amusement park…
You can find a really in-depth plot analysis thingie for Silent Hill 1 here:
http://db.gamefaqs.com/console/psx/file/silent_hill_plot.txt
I found this incredibly interesting, and even those of you that haven’t played SH1 might like it… though I don’t know most of the horror/scifi references, it brings up some interesting concepts.
If by lack of control you mean how utterly crappy at movement and combat your guy was, I found it very appropriate. Harry is not some crack commando with control over his every move; he’s an average Joe who may or not be very athletic, has no skill with weapons (hence his horrible aim), etc… although apparently he has endless stamina because you can make him run for hours and hours.
As for SH2, I found it vaguely creepy, though not nearly as much as it’s predecessor… which just goes to show that higher-end graphics, sound, etc. don’t necessarily make for a better sequel. The plot wasn’t nearly as creepy (though I still found it interesting, as more of a twisted love-story-gone-wrong-gone-right, depending on which ending you get), but it was still an interesting run. The puzzles could stand to be a little less irritating, though. I was mostly disappointed because I had read that the staff of the game had been given more artistic freedom for the sequel (ie. they could be as disturbing/gory/what-have-you as they liked), which I thought would result in more creepiness, but that’s not quite what happened. 
I hope to see SH3 go the way of 1 and be more of a fairly difficult mind-bendingly disturbing game, but if it centers around a lady with a machinegun, I sense that it’s going to go the way of RE3 and turn into an action game.
Nevermind, I stand corrected. I just read through the link that Max Torque posted and I feel much better about the sequel now, although whether I feel the same way when the game is actually released will have to wait…
Yeah, I think Konami knows what they’re doing. I think of Silent Hill like Buffy episodes. A crappy SH is a diamond in the rough compared to what else is out there.
Or what about when you plug in the three squares on the gallows? Some random scream emanating from nowhere? Shit, I had to put the controller down for five minutes after that.
And Stinkpalm… neener neener neener! (Said in good fun, of course, mate. :))
Dude, that “moo shoo” guy in the prison gave me serious heebie jeebies. ::shudder::
What the heck was supposed to happen in that bathroom? I knocked on the stall door and it just said that no on ewas in there.
Did I miss something?
SH1 and 2 are filled with environmental effects that are not guaranteed to happen.
I didn’t like the story in SH2 at all, and didn’t understand most of it until reading about it on GameFAQs. However, I did love the sound in that game. It used some proprietary technology that made surround sound out of only 2 speakers, and it worked great. A couple of times, I swore some noises were coming from outside my room.
Oh, you’re there already? Well…
You knock on the door, and no one is there. When you walk away, you hear a very loud, sudden THUMP from that stall. To my ears, it sounded like someone being thrown against the door.