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vCheats.com - Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams
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List Price: $19.99
Our Price: $54.90
Your Save: $ ( % )
Average Customer Rating:  
Availability:
Manufacturer: SVG Distribution
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Amazon Maximum Age: 17
Amazon Minimum Age: 204
Binding: Video Game
Brand: SVG Distribution
EAN: 0083717300038
ESRB Age Rating: Mature
Feature: ESRB Rating: Mature (17 and older)
Label: SVG Distribution
Manufacturer: SVG Distribution
Number Of Items: 1
Platform: Xbox
Publisher: SVG Distribution
Studio: SVG Distribution
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Features
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ESRB Rating: Mature (17 and older)
Genre: Horror/Survival
Mission: withstand formidable foes, plenty of puzzles, and bone-chilling game play
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Fun Exploration, Weak Combat
Comment: Silent Hill 2- Restless Dreams
Restless Dreams is almost the exact same game as the Playstation version of the game. The only difference is there is an added scenario you can play through. The storytelling is very dark and disturbing. The graphics shift from dark and weird, to demonic and disgusting. The sound in the game is amazing. The problem with the game lies in the repetitive gameplay. I love this game, but I will admit that it has an extreme flaw.
Graphics- 9.5/10
The graphics don't exactly look realistic, but they are done in a cinematic way that will leave you breathless. The cut scenes are often short, but run seamlessly into the normal gameplay graphics. The picture often has a fuzzy, dark look to it that reminds me of an old horror movie. The cut scenes are done amazingly and you will find yourself immersed in the world they have created.
Environments are designed well, and will even change as you go through the gameplay. One time you might be walking through a spooky hallway, but after a major point in the story that same hallway has blood all over it. There is a considerable amount of fog in the game, but it is not to hide graphical failures. You know this because later in the game the fog is gone and replaced by darkness.
The dark in this game is creatively done too. If it is too dark, your character won't be able to investigate items or his map. You get a flashlight early in the game, but there are points where you will just not be able to use it and will have to figure out what to do. At the same time though, your flashlight alerts enemies of your presence.
The enemies in the game, despite not having many of them, look great. Some stand like mannequins and only move when you get close enough. Others with stumble around until you take them down, then they will crawl across the floor. There are only about 6-7 different enemy types in the game though.
Story- 9/10
You are James Saunderland. You have been a broken man since the tragic death of your wife, Mary, three years ago. One day you receive a letter from your thought dead wife. She asks him to meet her in Silent Hill at their "special place." James is unsure of what is going on, but he has to check it out.
Along your trek through Silent Hill, you will meet many troubled people. Speaking to them will bring chills down your spine. Important characters you meet will be Laura, an 8-year old girl, and Maria, a striking Mary look-alike. These characters all evolve over the course of the story.
The story is excellent. It does have a few problems though. One, the story is very complex and you really have to think about it if you want to understand it. You might even have to talk to a few other players to even understand it. The story is left open like that. Another problem is that the monsters that you face off with throughout the game seem to be an after thought. They are not truly explained until the very end of the game. I felt that it was too late by then.
Sound- 9.5/10
The sound in this game is almost perfect. Early in the game you get a radio. The radio only plays static, and only when an enemy is close. This is a good way to create suspense. Sometimes the radio will actually play words they you should pay attention to.
The voice acting is mostly good. I felt that James felt too calm, but everyone else I liked. The monsters all sound disturbing. Gun and melee weapon noises are decent. Sometimes the addition of random disturbing sounds really creates a great atmosphere in this game. Great sound overall.
Gameplay- 7/10
You start on the outskirts of Silent Hill. All you have is a map, the letter, and a photo of Mary. You make your way into town to try to figure out if Mary is there. You discover a town full of monsters and closed to the public in almost everyway. Mary keeps sending you clues, and you follow them like a dog...because usually every other way is closed off. The game is like a mystery adventure game with some monsters along the way.
This game plays out very similar to Resident Evil. I have always liked Resident Evil, so I thought this would be a good thing. It is not though. The monsters in this game are lacking, and never really pose much of a threat. They are disturbing, but you can just walk right past them. In Resident Evil, a zombie or a hunter always had a chance to injure you. In this game there is almost not chance you will get hurt by the monsters. When they do hit you, it lacks the suspense. The monsters are just not a big enough deal for you to care about them.
The rest of the gameplay has you following Mary's clues. They lead you to Apartments, Museums, and Hospitals. The concept involves you entering a building and trying every door until you find one that works. Most of the doors are broken and you'll never get in them. Every single building, it is the same thing. Once you find a key or something, you go back and unlock a door. However, this never gets tedious. I enjoyed exploring the various building and find out the secrets of Silent Hill.
This game implements melee and gun combat. Both are horribly done. All melee weapons in this game are imprecise and often get you hurt before you can hit an enemy. The auto-aim feature in this game is horrible. You often think you have aimed, but instead you will hit the wall or something. There are very few weapons even in this game to start with, and none of them excite you to wield them.
Difficulty- 6/10 (Note- This is how much I like the difficulty)
Difficulty is very well done in this game. You can adjust puzzle difficulty and monster difficulty separately. This allows for you to adjust the two key features of this game for your playing style. This is very innovative in a video game, as games usually just have a couple difficulty settings that change everything. This game allows you to customize different aspects of the gameplay.
Why did I give this category such a low score then? No matter what difficulty you put this game on the monsters will be too easy. They serve almost no purpose, so it's not fun killing them. Also, the exploration in the game is based on luck. You stumble onto things that help you. In the beginning, you aren't even told where to go. You just have to search the huge town until you find something. There are not a lot of suggestions as to where you need to go.
Overall- 7.5/10
I like this game a lot. I really do. I just can't give it that great of a score considering the weak gameplay and luck-based exploration. Sound, graphics, and the story are great, but not enough to pull this one up more. I still suggest buying this one if you are looking to enter a very disturbing world, but don't expect the best gameplay.
Customer Rating:
Summary: WAY TOO HARD AND CLUNKY 6 OUT OF 10
Comment: Silent Hill 2 : Restless Dreams succeeds at giving off the series trademark creepy vibe and filling you full of despair while scaring the s*** out of you. Unfortunately, issues mar this game from reaching its true potential. First off the game is way too hard for people who are not familiar with this series. Your objectives are not explained well which will leave you confused and wondering where you're supposed to go and what to find. You'll find yourself constantly looking at your map to locate streets and specific locations which will slow you down. Second, is the controls. The combat in this game is extremely clunky and unreliable and I found myself asking; "Why do I have to press two buttons to attack an enemy? And why is his reponse time slow? Why does my camera change views for me?" I liked the really creepy vibe in this game but it's so hard to control and solve clues. I am hoping since a new developer is working on Silent Hill 5 that it will function properly and be easier to work with. But this game is for Silent Hill fans only.
Customer Rating:
Summary: x-box version has more!
Comment: This game is different from the playstation2 version! It has an extra side mission where you can play as Maria. The only way to get this on the ps2 is to get the "greatest hits" version.
This game has 4 standard endings, and two strange out-there endings so replay value is relatively high.
Keep in mind the game was made years ago, so the scares aren't as extreme as Fatal Frame for example, but it gets better towards the end.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Action Thriller Chiller
Comment: This game chilled me to the bone all the way until the end. I literally had to have my roomate stay in the living room and watch me play the game, because I was afraid to play alone. This game so far is the scariest game I've ever played!
Now for the downsides: Camera angles are choppy, boss fights (or any fight) is clumsy, and the storyline is cryptic (much like most Japanese storylines)
But overall: Worth the play.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hauntingly detailed, mentally unsettling, but just a bit too short...
Comment: My initial fears that this was just an overhyped Resident Evil clone were quickly put to rest - although the two games share a genre and pieces of a control scheme, their personalities couldn't be further apart. Where the first three Resident Evils focused on the cheesier, blood-n-guts style with a hint of puzzle solving in the name of variety, Silent Hill 2 concentrates much more on the unknown, the unexplained and the psychologically disturbing. Where Resident Evil 2 is horror in the vein of Dawn of the Dead, Silent Hill 2 is more along the lines of The Ring or The Shining.
It's that establishment of potential horror, not the actual moments of battle where the monster lies revealed, that are most successful in Silent Hill and, honestly, in most of the better films within the genre. To say that this game is lacking in real scary moments would be both unfair and untrue... I jumped more times than I'm comfortable to admit while playing through this one in the dark... but it properly uses such moments as an accent, rather than a crutch. It's been said that the most horrific monster in the world can never be captured on film, because it resides within the collective imaginations of the audience. Hollywood can never frighten you as badly as you can frighten yourself. It's this kind of mentality that I see reflected in Silent Hill 2 from the very get-go. Sure, they do eventually show you the monsters, and they're significantly horrific on their own, but they're all little more than pawns in this scheme, even the bosses. They're just around to nudge your mind in the right direction, so that the little shadows you'll catch darting around at the edge of your field of vision can be more effective and more relative to the story.
In terms of atmosphere, there's very little that this game does wrong. It's learned all the right lessons from the progression and evolution of cinematic horror and applied them to the incomparably personal experience of a quality video game. It's established a unique style, a great cluster of settings, and a wonderful premise (the lead character, James, receives a letter from his wife three years after her death, pleading with him to visit the town of Silent Hill) but the actual follow-through of the story and the accompanying character interactions are lacking. This reminds me of Eternal Darkness in a way, in that a lot of the strange occurrences and developments seem completely random and are never connected to the story itself. Almost universally, the cast is detached from reality, lacking in personality and in emotion, which works within the confines of the plot but results in the player never being fully drawn into the game's world.
I came away from this game feeling as though I'd read a short story that had been padded out and enlongated thanks to the inclusion of a dozen different unrelated asides. It's a fifty page story stretched over the course of a three hundred page novel. You'll meet five non-playable centric characters around the city, but only two of them have a real bearing on the plot, which is itself little more than a series of vague insinuations. It's a real shame, too, because all of the pieces have been set in the right place to accommodate for a much more striking, intriguing tale.
Controlling James as he explores the city is fairly easy, if not entirely ideal. Several elements of the Resident Evil control scheme have surfaced with Silent Hill 2's configuration, most notably the "boat steering" movement controls. If you didn't like standing in one place, pivoting and then running directly forward or backward in Capcom's zombie-fest, you aren't going to like it here. Personally, I've grown used to it and the steering doesn't seem to get in my way any more, but I can certainly see why some players would have developed a bitter hatred for it. One thing that differs from Resident Evil's traditional setup, however, is a fully polygonal environment and a free-roaming camera. What that means is less cheap scares and monsters hiding in plain sight, and a much more interactive experience.
I'll come right out and admit to savoring every last bit of the visual direction and graphical representations of Silent Hill 2. If there's one area that this game absolutely nails, it's this: everything from the character designs to the environments to the simple, yet undeniably successful, film grain texture that overlays every moment of gameplay... it's all an unbridled success. This is among the most thought-out, fully realized visual productions I've ever seen in a game, and even the hardware limitations of the original Xbox are addressed in a concise, effective manner that works within the confines of the big picture. The dreamlike state of your visit to the town explains away the boundaries around the playable area... you don't run into an invisible wall, there are just mysterious tarps or bottomless pits sealing off certain parts of town. You'll accept it at face value because, hey, you just fired three rounds into a set of animated mannequin legs.
Another noteworthy visual innovation is the complete lack of any kind of heads-up display or on-screen indicator. With the multitude of potential actions and inventory items that seem to have completely overtaken the industry, it's a nice change of pace to see a game with just a character and an environment on the screen at any given time. It not only keeps the playing field open for some of the more subtle effects, but also makes the experience even more akin to that of watching a movie.
The appearance of the monsters remains among the most successfully frightening I've ever seen. It's easy to throw sharp teeth, bumpy skin and red eyes onto something, call it an enemy and commence with the cheap scares. What's not so easy is introducing a baddie that's horrifying if just because you have no idea what in the living hell it really is. The bad guys of SH2 are, obviously, the latter. They don't always look so much like they're attacking you out of anger, so much as they're lashing out because they're constantly in pain and see anything that moves as a possible cause. I almost felt pity for these things, their existence is so pitiful, so filled with tragedy.
I can't rightfully discuss the visuals of this game without giving some love to the incredible lighting effects, either. I'd truthfully rank this game ahead of the original Splinter Cell in that category, and Sam Fisher's first romp was released almost specifically to show off everything the Xbox could do in that respect. In Silent Hill 2, you travel the entire city with just a flashlight, which (needless to say) is handled magnificently. Everywhere you go, that single light source is playing with your surroundings to cast all sorts of bizarre, frightening, downright malicious shadows throughout the room
I adored the majority of my experience with Silent Hill 2. The story, while thin at times, is generally workable and never really insultingly self-indulgent. The length of the game bothered me a bit, as the main game map is quite elaborate and seemed to have a lot of unrealized potential, but that goes back to the weakness of the basic plot and the lack of any major side stories of consequence. If you've got a weekend to kill and want to be emotionally shaken, this is exactly the game for you. It features one of the best all-around identities in the history of the industry, takes dozens of hints from the lessons learned by its predecessors in film, and is truly horrifying on several levels. If the story had been a little thicker and the cast had been fleshed out a little further, this would've been close to perfect.
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