You may have heard about the problems that plagued the Silent Hill HD Collection . Unresponsive controls, framerate drops, hitching, fog and grain effects completely missing. It was a complete mess that somehow left the games in a worse condition than the original releases. We now have a reason for that.
Senior Associate Producer of the Silent Hill series, Tomm Hulett, explains.
"We got all the source code that Konami had on file -- which it turns out wasn't the final release version of the games! D'oh!
"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. 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.
"Ten years ago, a lot of game companies assumed the games were 'done' once development finished, and that they wouldn't need to use that data ever again. Now it's clear that having all that data in an easy-to-manage format is important. Many consumers don't realize you can't just buy a copy of SH2 and then open up its code in a usable state.
I can't imagine how hellish the process of porting these games was. Considering what they had to work with, it's a miracle the game is in the state it is. But how did other HD collections turn out so well while this one turned out so poorly? To find the answer, we'll look at Bluepoint Games.
Bluepoint Games is the company responsible for HD collections such as the God of War Collection, Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, and ICO & Shadow of the Colossus Collection, arguably the best HD collections on the market.
Andy O'Neil, president of Bluepoint Games, explained their process of HD-ifying old PS2 games.
"We don't use archive data. We take retail discs of the game and reverse engineer them. That way we can be 100% sure we have all the final retail data and that it matches up. That takes a lot time. Then to get it working, we basically have to go in and change every single piece of data. We get the code and we use that to build a PC version of the game. It's not something meant to ship, so a lot things don't work. It doesn't have sound for example. The engine though is the same, the data layout is the same, so we get that working first. If you have a lot of stuff coming through the VU assembler, you need to do lot of super detailed work to convert it all. We don't emulate any of this stuff, we hand convert it."
There you have it. Konami really should have hired Bluepoint Games to take care of the Silent Hill HD Collection as they seem to have it down to a science at this point. Instead, we're left with a buggy, unfinished mess.
g1 DISCUSSIONS
autisticgamer
Since Bluepoint Games reverse engineer old games into it's HD glory, then why not Sega contact these guys to get Panzer Dragoon Saga on XBLA and PSN?
superhuffy
According to Sega they lost the original code. I'm not an expert on this subject but I'd think that there has to be some way to work around that issue but knowing Sega I doubt they'll bother when then could just take that money and make another terrible business decision. The Saturn is notoriously difficult to work with and is supposedly unlike any other system out there architecture-wise so I think they're just lazy. I'd love to see a full-blown remake of PDS but we know that's never going to happen.
autisticgamer
Good Point.
REVULSIVE
Bluepoint Games doesn't use the original code, which I believe was his point. The rest of your point still stands though. It would be interesting to see if they could somehow pull it off.
ZigTheHunter
This is just incredibly sloppy, unbelievably sloppy; I find it incredibly hard to imagine Companies just abandoning the finished source code back then, and the fact they released the games in the state they were in was unacceptable, they clearly needed more time and I doubt waiting a little longer would have done much harm to anyone, except costing them a little more, still less then the money they lost from the poor reception it's been getting.
Screwy1
I feel kinda bad for the silent hill series & it's fans, it seems like it's on the same track as the sonic series, there's always a wrench thrown into the works. They just can't catch a break eh? I wonder if they'll find a way to fix the issues.
REVULSIVE
The biggest issue with new Silent Hill games is no one understands what made them great. They were the epitome of horror games; minimalistic UI, fantastic sound design, great monster designs, and a complex story that plays around with some interesting ideas. They were immersive and psychologically scary. More often than not you were scaring yourself.
Some would argue that Shattered Memories is the exception, and while it does do some interesting things with the psychology parts of the game, it's not that scary because the parts in which you're being chased by monsters is very defined, so you're never scared when you're just exploring the town or the school or whatever. It has some merits, and damn if it doesn't try, but it doesn't hold a candle to the old games.
ZigTheHunter
the Sonic series is doing much better now compared to Silent Hill, sure there was Free Riders, but besides that the reception of all the recent Sonic Games has ranged from decent to great, while Silent Hill hasn't had really anything generally accepted as good in a long time with possibly Shattered Memories being an exception, but its more love it or hate it from the fans.
Board_games_r_evil
i thought the xbox version was relatively okay while the PS3 version was a complete disaster, regardless it's nice to know how konami fucked up, now explain to me why it was released with a price sticker on it
REVULSIVE
Yep, the 360 version was noticeably better than the PS3 version. Still had missing fog and grain effects though... but hey, at least it's playable.