Silent Hill’s HD Collection is a Mess, Artist Responds

Masahiro Ito was shown images from the recently released Silent Hill: HD Collection on Twitter (His Twitter background is NSFW) and was surprised by how underwhelming the port was. He was specifically show this picture, in which the HD Collection is missing the dense fog that permeated Silent Hill 2, exposing its short draw distances and ruining the atmosphere of the game.

He described the HD translation as “poor” and was surprised it was released in that state. The disappointment wasn’t let up when he was shown what the water also looked like in the SH2 HD re-release. When pressed for his idea of what the problem might be, he suggest it could be the PS3′s weak use of “translucent texture”, something which the PS2 apparently was quite good at.

This isn’t exactly recent, either. Ito has been criticizing the HD releases for weeks now, as shown in this Twitter exchange where he denounces the new textures.

That doesn’t explain the cleaned up look of the textures in the games, though. There’s a huge thread over on NeoGAF comparing the HD re-release to the originals and it seems to just get worse and worse. The differences extend over to Silent Hill 3 as well. As a bonus, it’s got some framerate and control issues.

There’s also some rumbling about censoring the infamous Pyramid Head intro, but it’s more than likely a loading time glitch that caused the black load screen to extend over the cutsene since it’s untouched in the Xbox 360 version of the game.

IGN has a video comparison on Youtube so you can see the washed out colors and soulless textures for yourself.