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Silent Hill’s HD Collection was ported from incomplete code

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Silent Hill 2 is one of the very best games ever made within the survival horror genre. This is pretty much an undisputable fact. Surprising then that the HD remaster of the game, included on the Silent Hill HD Collection was so poor. Fans weren’t too keen on the new voice acting – but there were other more egregious errors – like the complete lack of the thick, dense clouds of fog and mist that are so pivotal to the game’s atmosphere.

One of the reason for that – and it’s quite inexcusable – is that the developers were working with unfinished source code from the original game; because Konami seems to have lost it.

“We got all the source code that Konami had on file – which it turns out wasn’t the final release version of the games,” producer Tomm Hulett revealed to 1up in a feature on HD remasters. “So during debug we didn’t just have to deal with the expected ‘porting’ bugs, but also had to squash some bugs that the original team obviously removed prior to release, but we’d never seen before.”

It really is a shame – a game of that calibre not getting the HD treatment it deserves – but it could have been worse.

“A lot of assets such as textures and sound had to be taken out of the compiled game, and that brings with it a host of unique issues, especially taken on top of the tricky coding workarounds at play in the original games. We certainly had our hands full. I think at one point Heather was blue,” he added.

The game’s original producer, Masahiro Ito , wasn’t particularly chuffed with the lacklustre HD port – responding to a side by side comparison saying “It’s really a released version? Really?”

He pointed the blame at the Ps3’s architecture, saying that:

“I guess that it was a problem of PS3. PS3 has a weak point for using ‘translucent texture’,” . pointing out “But PS2 has no such a weak point, and original SH2/SH3 use so many ‘translucent texture’. Example, for fog/mist.”

Last Updated: May 28, 2012

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