Over the Hills for Trophies

Finishing Silent Hill Homecoming today seems a little less significant considering the game doesn't offer any trophy incentives. While trophy-less games like MGS4 and DMC4 compensate by recognising your in-game achievements with their own in-game ranking system Homecoming doesn't even track your gameplay statistics at the end of the game. A major blunder on Double Helix part considering every past game in the series had their feature even the Climax-developed installments.

Right now I only have four games on my trophy list but I intend to achieve Platinum on everyone of those games. The catch is not to over-do it and make trophy-hunting the primary aim of re-playing those game, I have a friend who grind many hours through Infamous on his way to his first Platinum trophy only to sell the game immediately afterwards because he was so sick of hunting for the final trophy. I certainly do not wish for the same to happen to me with my games but tendency to go all out on a trophy hunt is always there.

When Love and Hate Collide

I'm still undecided whether I like Silent Hill Homecoming or not, it's frustrating at times while being bearable for most of the time. One thing's for sure, it's not good enough of a game for me to upgrade my korean version to the region 1 version when I passed up Play-asia recent re-stock of the title.

The flashlight for the game is so bad that I sometimes have to switch it on and off using the shortcut button just to make sure it's turned on. Then again maybe the developer were trying to achieve a more realistic lighting and darkness effect like what the early Resident Evil 5 trailer promised. Maybe this is what a real cheap flashlight will look like I'm not sure. The high definition graphics is nice but by making most of the background object interactive via Havok physic, everything just end up looking crude and far bigger than they should. The meticulous art direction of Team Silent past games is never honoured, though I find Homecoming vision of the Otherworld a bit more to my disliking than the real world of Shepherd's Glen.

As for the region 1 version, I never really have that great of a Silent Hill collection to begin with anyway though I would like to add it's still better than some pathetic 'collection' put together just with copies of konami palace reprints. I guess I can live up with this korean version, I would rather put my money and effort into looking for the Silent Hill 4 The Room still missing from my collection right now.

Evil Now Has a Home

Fresh from the recent E3 announcement of a new Silent Hill, I have finally added Silent Hill: Homecoming to my collection. It was a long and initially hopeless process from the fruitless search in the US trip to Play-asia running out of stock, it didn't seem likely I would get to play the series entry to the HD generation. There was a rare sighting of the game here and there but mostly the timing and the price was just not right to commit to the purchase.

This time I happened to find the korean version of the game which I recall Play-asia was selling for as low as USD24.90 at one time but i passed it up waiting for a further price drop of the US version. Now that the US version is longer available locally, I had no choice but to settle for the Korean region 3 version and hope that the earlier reported problems with the inverted controls doesn't surface. I will admit this it's going to take some work to get this copy of the game to fit in with the rest of collection both from the aesthetic and space point of view.