Such a bad game indeed!

Actually.....it's such a bad game that I owned it for less than 24 hours before selling it and taking a $5 hit on it. I mean, who DOESN"T let people invert the damn camera? $5 PSN games have these options! I kept running into the damn walls and aiming at the roof/floor.

Silent Hill elitists are the worst kind. They think everything has to be a master-piece and have such a sense of superiority to anything else.

I thought it was 2nd only to Silent Hill 2. It's nice that you can speak for everyone, though, Mr. Sterling.

Personally, I felt Origins would have made for a better console SH release than Homecoming did.

The bosses were pretty decent, design-wise, but the actual game was like the skin that collects on top of cold gravy - it doesn't look appetizing at all, so you just stir it in back into the mix, and try to forget it was ever there in the first place. Mmm, roast dinner. What?

I never played the game but EdgyDude does have a point... seems the more respectable writers on here (cause lets face it Jim, your just here for the "shock value") game the game a 9 and an editor's choice here.

Got to say I actually liked this one. Yes the game had bugs and problems but overall I left the game feeling rather happy with what I played. I do agree that the main hero was very capable but that didn't bug me too much. Not going to lie, I think this one was better than the 3rd Silent Hill although obviously not the best one.

Jim, you gotta learn about facts and opinions. There's a difference between "Homecoming was bloody awful" and "I thought Homecoming was bloody awful" because the general consensus was that Double Helix didn't do that bad of a job in making it.

Homecoming had pretty good combat I thought, but other than that it was pretty weak.

even if it's a bad Silent Hill game it was still an above-average game.

I like both The Room and Homecoming well enough. Actually, I quite enjoyed how The Room was more psychologically driven like 2 was. Yes, it had little to do with the town of Silent Hill, but send you complaints to whatever department of Konami decided it had to relabeled a Silent Hill game. Me, I don't mind. The tie-ins weren't cheesy and, while it probably shouldn't have been referred to as the 4th game, it works perfectly well as a side story in the SH universe.

Homecoming was... a far less earnest work I admit. I don't think Japan is really missing out either. Still, I enjoyed a lot of the Otherworld designs (especially the weird hospital/refinery otherworld) and Scarlet was a damned awesome and creepy boss. So while it wasn't a waste of time, it was the first Silent Hill game I played that truly left me feeling unsatisfied (didn't play Origins).

Jim is 100% right, Homecoming was indeed bloody awful

For the most part i play Silent Hill games for the atmosphere. And despite being skeptical of Double Helix, i thought they did a pretty good job at recreating that atmosphere. And i thought the game as a whole, was far from awful. Apparently i was wrong. All that time i spent enjoying the game was a lie! It was awful and i had no idea!

Aw, come on, why does everyone rag on "The Room"? To answer my own question: it deviated too much from a tried and true formula...

But it was still an awesome game.

And Silent Hill will never be good again....not as long as it's being developed by anyone other than Team Silent. Especially not if it's being done by a WESTERN developer. J-Horror, even J-horror aiming to be western, has never, will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, blahblahblah be good in the hands of someone not from the east. It's not racist. It's a theory that just keeps becoming more of a fact with each iteration.

Heck, I tried to enjoy Origins. I was put off from the beginning by the lack of the traditional theme song (hey, those first four games had incredibly moving opening tracks). Next up was the obviously different character design. I had fallen in love with the style of the series, and this...wasn't Silent Hill anymore.

Onto the gameplay...the combat was -too- easy, the power ups only appearing when you needed them was annoying. The monsters themselves seemed more like bad mutations than something meant to terrify me. And then...and then came the Pyramid Head clone.

The Pyramid Head clone killed it for me. I haven't touched the game since seeing him. None of the other games copied each other up to that point, sure there were similiar monsters (well, the nurses in 3 being the same as 2 was kind of annoying, but forgivable). This was the first time the series blatently ripped itself off, and in the most uninspiring way.

When I heard of another Silent Hill coming out, I started feeling better, but then I found out it wasn't being made in it's country of origin. Konami had whored out it's IP to yet another Western Game team. Already, I pretty much stopped caring, a bitter taste still left over from my brief stumblings through SHOrigins (wth is it with most americans needing to have everything explained to them, anyway? Why come up with SH's origins? Part of the charm was not knowing what the f was going on).

The nurses being carbon-copied from the movie sealed that deal. If I end up accidently paying 50 cents for it, like I did Gun for the PS2 (heheh...cashier rang up the stick of gum TWICE), I might try it. There are other things that will keep me from playing it (the emphasis on combat...that's what God Of War's for, dur.), but I'm not interested in playing something that's just more fanfiction.

Sorry for the rant. I hate what Konami's done to the only game series that's ever sucked me in completely.

What the--! Man, why did that double post x_X

Silent Hill 2 was awful. Way too much James whining, not enough Harry kicking ass and taking names. It was still better than Origins though.

Homecoming was a great game. It wasn't as creepy as the first Silent Hill, but NONE of the SH sequels has been as creepy, so I hardly count that against it. The gameplay balance was well done, and they really played up the "survival" aspect of the game, something that's been sorely missing from most "Survival/Horror" games lately. Overall, the only thing really -bad- about Homecoming was their blatant misuse of the Pyramid Head character, but I never thought he was anything special anyway so honestly I didn't care that much.

Well, honestly, what was so great about it? There's tons of itesm everywhere so it's not a very good survival game, the enemies are all ridiculously easy to kill and the only thing they ever react to is light, and since the game is so bright you can do everything without the flashlight on, making it so enemies hardly ever attack you unless you're right in the faces. The game isn't scary, there's nothing tense about the situation, and all the characters do is stand around and whine. What part of that made a good game? The other SH games are so much better it's not even funny.

Djnx:
Well put...makes me feel like even more of an arse for posting such a long rant, having my point summed up in a couple of sentences C_C