52 Reviews liked by themiguelps2


it's actually called "Super Mario Bros. 2" in japan

Of course you have blue hair and pronouns.

"wot if u were a boy with no personality but two hot babes fell in love with you because you were nice to them on the most basic level possible and also the hot babes were part of a marginalised group considered your property but it's ok it's not weird we promise they actually like that you are Their Master it's ok :)"

You should all be ashamed of yourselves.

Parkour across buildings
Feels like sex
Grappling hook
Feels like cumming
But I bust no nuts
Only heads

I feel bad for those who don't like this game because it will literally never die. it will never go away. you can't escape melee

"Ready? Go!"
sounds of sporadic plastic clacking
"Game!"
loud sound of plastic thudding against wall
grown men screaming out of anger

We face the demons of our own creation. Wandering. And wallowing. Eventually we will all find ourselves at our own version of Silent Hill, and how we each walk away from it, if at all, is our choice.

Insane that we got one of the most empathetic and compassionate series of games towards people suffering from mental illness in the early 2000s and outside of indie games, nothing has come close since.

It'd be really funny that if Konami brought it back they'd hire the studio with games that are the complete opposite of that.

EDIT (Oct 20th 2022): if only you knew how bad things really were.

Content Warning for Attempted Suicide, Terminal Illness, Death, and Chronic Illness

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It’s September 2011 and I’m seventeen years old when I try to kill myself. There are two ponds near my parent’s house. It’s like 4 AM. I like to be out this early. Nobody else is awake, and they won’t be for a while. It’s like the whole world belongs to me. I wander around between the neighborhoods, along the roads, and in the fields. In ten years these will be fresh real estate properties but today they’re still farmland. This hour and a half is the only time the anxiety quells. The real world never knows peace. There’s a dread that accompanies every action and every moment; living in that house, going to school, hanging out with my friends (are they my friends? They are but I won’t be able to understand that until I’m healthier). I’ll always have to go back home. I’ll never be able to articulate what’s happening to me. The pressure is too intense. I don’t plan it, but, the pond is right there, and it’s deep enough, and early enough that no one will hear me. Not having a plan is what saves my life. Turns out impromptu self-drownings are difficult to pull off when the water is still and not THAT deep. So, it doesn’t work, and I’m soaked, and grateful to get home and hide the evidence before my parents wake up, but I don’t feel BETTER. I feel despair, still. There’s no way out. I wish I could just climb up the stairwell, out of this. I wish I had the clarity to understand what was wrong with me.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What do you even say about Silent Hill 2? To say that it’s one of the best video games ever made feels simultaneously obvious and like I’m underselling it, right? Fuckin, uhhhh, Resident Evil 2 is one of the best video games ever made. Ace Attorney 3 is one of the best games ever made. Come on! When we see people talk about old games that they like they’ll so often say stuff like “it holds up really well for its age” or some similar comment that implies that progress is the same as quality. This is, of course, nonsense. I wouldn’t say video games are better as a medium in 2021 than they were in 2001; on the whole and in the mainstream I would say they’re demonstrably worse in almost every way – how they look, how they sound, how they feel. Silent Hill 2 was a AAA game. What do we get now instead? Far Cry 6? The fuckin, THE MEDIUM? We’ve lost everything in pursuit of bad lighting and looking like a mediocre episode of whatever was popular on HBO three years ago. Silent Hill 2 looks great and sounds great and fuck you it plays great too it feels good and even the puzzles are MOSTLY FINE. MOSTLY. Listen I’m saying this is the all time best video game I’m not saying it fuckin ended world hunger.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It’s October 2012, I’m nineteen and I’m sitting in a business communications class when I get the text confirmation that Sam’s brain tumor is back, again. It’s not the first time, and I know that there’s nothing left to do, he’s going to die. It’s fast, untreated. He’s one of my best friends, and the only person I know from home who went to the same college as me, but we live really far apart on a big urban campus and I haven’t seen him as much as I’d have liked to. Now he’s gonna spend the rest of his time with his family back home. When I see him next it’s at a hometown charity event for his family in December. He’s unrecognizable physically, and he can’t speak. The event is at our old catholic elementary school, in the gym, where in the years since we graduated they’ve painted a giant tiger on the wall. It’s the school mascot. I feel incredibly awkward around him and spend most of the time away with our other friends. I only speak to him briefly, and when I do it’s a stupid joke about the tiger mural. These will be my last words to him. I do know this will be the case, I think. Later that month I’ll be one of his pallbearers. I spend a lot of time angry and ashamed of myself for not being better to him, not knowing how to act or what to say. I’m about to drop out of school for reasons financial and related to my mental health.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So what DO you say about Silent Hill 2? That it’s a masterpiece? That it’s the most well-conceived and executed video game ever made? That every detail of it dovetails into every other in a legitimately perfect cocktail story, presentation, and play? That the performances, cinematography, soundscape, all of it are untouchably top of their class? That when Mary reads the letter at the end I WEEP because it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever heard? That if I ever meet Troy Baker it’s ON SIGHT? These things are all true. We all know it. Everybody knows this. It’s Silent Hill 2.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It’s August 2019, I’m twenty-five and I’ve just managed to graduate college in time to move to a new city with my partner as she enters her third year of medical school. That’s the year they kick you out of the classroom and you start going to the hospitals to do your real hands-on training month to month. I’m job hunting unsuccessfully and we’re living exclusively off her loans, when what seems at first like a pulled lower back muscle becomes a fruitless early morning ER trip (five hours, no results, not seen by a doctor) becomes an inability to get out of bed becomes a forced leave of absence. Without a diagnosis she can’t get disability accommodations. While on a leave of absence we can’t have her loans, and in fact we have to pay them back. We’re getting desperate, thousands of dollars in debt, and I take the first soul sucking job I can find. It takes almost a full year of visits to increasingly specialized physicians but eventually my partner is diagnosed with non radiographic axial spondyloarthritis, an extremely rare condition that culminates in the fusion of the spinal column. We can treat the pain, sort of, but it’s only a matter of time until it’s likely to evolve into a more serious condition, she’ll never have the strength or stamina she had before, and the treatment options are expensive and difficult. Her diagnosis doesn’t even officially exist as a recognized condition that people can have until September 2020.

Suddenly I am a caretaker and everything is different now. Obviously our mood is stressed from the financial dangers, but she’s in pain, terrible pain, constantly for months. She can’t sleep, she can’t eat. There’s nothing I can do. It’s exhausting to live like that. She’s depressed. On good days we try to walk outside but good days are few and far between, and grow fewer over time, and her body makes her pay for the walks. She’s on drugs, a lot of them. Do they help? It’s unclear. They don’t make her feel BETTER. Nobody knows what’s wrong with her. Her school thinks she’s faking, they’re trying to concoct ways to get her kicked out. She wants to die. It breaks my heart. She’s everything to me, all that there is. She has literally saved my life. And I can’t help her. But it’s exhausting for me too. I don’t want to admit this, not even privately, to myself. It is hard to be the person who is leaned on, especially when the person you love can’t give anything back. I’m tired. I’m not angry, and I don’t think I’m resentful. But I’m tired. I feel shame for thinking about it, for acknowledging it. I know it’s silly to feel the shame but it’s there. I do find a job eventually, thankfully, but it’s still a long time before we get a diagnosis, much less an effective treatment. Even after things settle somewhat, it’s a hard year. And there are hard times to come.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ever since I first played it as a teen, Silent Hill 2 is a game that has haunted me through life, like a memory. It struck a deep chord with me when I was too young for that to be fair, too young to identify why I could relate to these people and their ghosts. I used to think this was a special relationship that I had with the game, the way you kind of want to think you have these when you’re younger, but the older I get the more I recognize this as part of growing up. Silent Hill 2 doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve encountered situations in life that closely mirror that of the protagonist. I mean, Angela’s story resonates deeply with me despite little overlap in the specifics of our family traumas. Silent Hill 2 touches me – and most of us – so deeply, because it has such a keen understanding of what it feels like to be Going Through It. It is a game that knows what it is to grieve, to despair, to soak in the fog, and also, maybe, to feel a catharsis, if you’re lucky, and you do the work.

I’ve been Angela, parts of her. I’ve been Laura too. I’ve had more James in me than I would prefer. I suspect all of us have these people, these feelings in us, to some degree or another. We collect them as we get older. That’s just part of it. Silent Hill 2 isn’t a happy game, but it’s one that Gets It, and lets us explore those spaces in a safe and cathartic way. It does this about as well as any piece of media I’ve encountered, on top of being so excellent at all the cinematic and video game stuff. But that’s really what makes it what it is. The empathy, and the honesty. I think it’s beautiful.

I never really gave the Silent Hill franchise a chance until now. I had been made to believe that it was a series about a spooky, foggy town with some spooky monsters inhabiting it and our hero trying to survive. Little did I know that it was much, much more than that. Silent Hill 2 is a horrifying, yet beautiful tale about trauma, regret, suffering, and how we deal with those feelings.

Everything in SH2 is purposeful. The environments, the various NPCs you meet, and the even the enemy designs reflect the mental state of James and his past. Is it all real? Or is it all in his head? That is up to the player's interpretation, but either way, everything is designed around James.

The ending system in this game is pure perfection from a narrative standpoint. How the player treats James and NPCs affect the ending given. All of the endings are intriguing and share different messages to the player. Besides the obvious joke endings, each one reflects how one deals with trauma and regret in a beautiful and meaningful way.

The gameplay itself hasn't aged the best, admittedly. It is still perfectly playable in 2022 (especially with the amazing fan-made Enhanced Edition for PC), but you definitely feel like you are playing a game from 2001. Regardless, it is still incredibly engaging. Puzzles are fairly simple but still require some brain power to solve. This is also the perfect opportunity to praise this games' puzzle difficulty settings. I have legitimately never seen a game do this and I am baffled that this didn't take off more in more games, as not only does it tailor the experience to whatever the player wants from the puzzles, but also gives the player a new experience even on subsequent playthroughs.

Overall, this game is a work of art. Yes, it's scary. But its also very thought provoking and meaningful. It is the type of substance that you never really receive in modern day horror games. It is really a shame that Silent Hill has been so dormant as of late, especially when considering the absolute amazing heights that this entry provided. Consider me a Silent Hill fan from now on.

Silent Hill 2 junta completamente em sua essência algo que seu antecessor iniciou e executa com maestria elevando a ambientação, trilha sonora, narrativa, construção de personagens e diversos outros aspectos em níveis maravilhosos tornando assim Silent Hill 2 o pico narrativo que a franquia iria alcançar até então e muito provavelmente esse titulo deve se manter até os dias atuais sem muitas dificuldades.

HISTORIA

Silent Hill 2 como muito elogiado por seus jogadores possui uma narrativa espetacular que é desenvolvida com perfeição a cada hora jogada na bizarra cidade de Silent Hill, e diferente de seu antecessor SL 2 desenvolve sua trama totalmente em volta de seu protagonista James Sunderland tornando assim a historia muito mais envolvente e emocionante por ser acompanhada em primeira mão, tendo também subtramas em sua estrutura que também acabam sendo muito cativantes e bem construídas tornando assim os personagens secundários dessa obra de arte do PlayStation 2 mais do que simples NPC'S que você acaba por interagir simplesmente por seguir com a gameplay.

GAMEPLAY

Silent Hill 2 como um bom survival horror clássico possui em sua essência a utilização bem executada de puzzles e a clássica exploração incorporada em sua gameplay, trazendo aqui uma ótima adição de níveis de dificuldades tanto em gameplay geral como também uma separada exclusivamente para seus puzzles presentes no decorrer do jogo facilitando assim o jogo para os mais diversos gostos, uma para aqueles que preferem uma gameplay focada inteiramente na dificuldade do combate ou uma focada completamente em resolver os quebra-cabeças presentes aqui.

PONTOS NEGATIVOS GERAIS

Parando um pouco de elogiar a narrativa e gameplay que já esta mais que evidente e clara a qualidade e competência Silent Hill 2 também possui seus pontos que eu gostaria mais de chamar de "pontos menos favoráveis" do que "pontos ruins" realmente.
Jogando Silent Hill 2 eu senti que dentro das construções principais presentes no game muita delas são bem lineares o que limita a exploração algo que considero essencial no gênero, optando então por cenários mais grandes porem mais limitados algo que particularmente me desagradou.
Particularmente prefiro cenários menores porem com mais diversidades de exploração do que cenários gigantes onde 40% de sua estrutura é inacessível, mas também vindo como contra ponto a ser analisado e também como apontado por meu amigo as salas disponíveis para exploração acabam sendo mais marcantes que seu antecessor criando assim menos diversidade, porém dando a luz a um nicho mais marcante.
Outro ponto é a posição da câmera em alguns momentos do jogo tornando ela o inimigo mais difícil de se lidar durante a gameplay criando diversos pontos cegos desnecessários que podem te render algumas dores de cabeça, mas relevando sua época de lançamento o salto da qualidade da câmera em comparação com Silent Hill 1 é bem agradável.

VISÃO GERAL

No geral Silent Hill 2 é com certeza um dos melhores lançamentos de seu console e certamente um dos melhores de sua época merecendo toda sua fama e gloria que é lembrada até os dias atuais com grande carinho pôs foi aqui graças a esse jogo que a franquia Silent Hill entrou facilmente no meu top 5 franquias gerais dando a luz a diversos inimigos e cenários icônicos que seriam lembrados por toda a eternidade.

a licensed spongebob game which gets the humor of the show spot fucking on. incredible shit.