Silent Hill 2
Released in 2001, Silent Hill 2 was published by Konami for the Playstation 2 and developed by Team Silent, the story follows James Sunderland as he travels to the town of Silent Hill, intent on finding his wife (Whom he had believed to be dead for many years) after receiving a letter from her, it is there were he encounters other troubled individuals as well as hostile creatures that inhabit the town inside and out.
Team Silent was a development group within Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo that was responsible for the first four games in the Silent Hill franchise. According to video game music composer Akira Yamaoka, Team Silent consisted of staff members that had failed at other projects and originally intended to leave the company, before learning that the very first Silent Hill game would be a huge success, history was made.
It was said by an artist of Silent Hill 5, that the team was later disbanded by Konami itself, as they had wanted Western developers to make the future installments from then on (Up to this day, fans continue to curse the western companies that took over and sorrowfully beg for the return of Team Silent).
Various members from the disbanded team are now working on separate projects,, some of the original members went onto the create the Siren series (As mentioned in the previous blog post), Akira Yamaoka continued composing music up until Silent Hill Shattered Memories before leaving Konami in 2009 and joining Grasshopper Manufacture (Another game development company that is quickly growing in popularity). I am just happy to see that most key members of the team are still continuing work on other projects instead of disappearing completely…
Interestingly enough the team did not resort to motion capture for the facial animation, believing that expressions then would be quite limited, more possibilities of more interesting and absurd expressions could be created manually instead.
When working on the character designs, the team sketched human faces and various expressions, so to gain a better sense of the characters' facial structures, they drew the characters' profiles from various angles, before creating wire-frame models, each consisting of six thousand polygons, they then finish off the models with textures.
Body sequences were however still motion captured with the Autodesk Softimage program, an application known for producing 3D computer graphics, 3D modeling and computer animation, it known for being used in the film, video game and advertising industries for creating characters, objects and environments.
Silent Hill 3
It would only be two years before the next installment came out, it would also be the direct sequel to the very first Silent Hill (Unlike Silent Hill 2), set seventeen years after the events of the first game, Silent Hill 3 focuses on Heather Mason, a teenage girl raised by Harry Mason (The protagonist of Silent Hill 1), one day she discovers that the cult of Silent Hill plans to use her to birth their god, and becomes caught in a conflict with them.
Development began right after the release of Silent Hill 2 in September 2001 (As well as the development of another title that would later on become Silent Hill 4: The Room), the development team for this installment however would be smaller as compared to the previous game. Aside from an improvement in graphics, the same methods were used in producing this game.
While Silent Hill 2 focused on a more quiet, psychological form of horror, the obvious changes made in Silent Hill 3 were its more shocking game visuals (Such as bleeding walls, or walls made completely of burning flesh) and far more hair-raising sound effects, and of course the more bloody color scheme. The graphics made another pretty big jump since its predecessor too, as cutscenes and in-games graphics finally looked really close to one another as compared to Silent Hill 2.
I also adore the acting done for this game, particularly Heather Mason (The main character of the game), while the voice acting might seem over the top to others, I found the original voices so much better as compared to the new voices in the HD collection later on.
Silent Hill 3 is still one of the scariest horror games I have ever played, and is still one of my most favorite games I keep close to my heart. I am also one of those idiots that considers Silent Hill: Revelations to be a guilty pleasure watch (Since Heather is in it).
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