The fan-made patch and remastering of Silent Hill 2's PC port continues updating, with a recent version bringing a host of improvements. The clicking sound when audio samples were interrupted—most noticeable when you scrolled through the menu—has been removed, and 3D positional audio has been added. The map view has been adjusted for widescreen, and integrated shaders added to allow making your own adjustments to brightness, SMAA antialiasing, and color temperature. The resolution of the fog texture has been upped from 256x256 to 512x512, like the PS2 had. Bugs have been fixed, including some that were present in all prior versions of Silent Hill 2.
All in all it's a pretty definitive improvement. I might quibble with the upscaled 2D images, which look a bit too clean—especially the handwriting on notes—like something out of a hidden object game, but that's probably because I'm old. The amount of work that's gone into the enhanced edition is damn impressive.
A new interview over at Gamespot includes quotes from one of the PC port's creators, who only had five months to complete the project, as well as two of the modders, who discussed the work involved. Apparently they only discovered the memory address controlling fog recently, allowing them to get its movement at a speed more like that of the PS2 version. It's the kind of detail most players would never even notice, but the dedication behind it is commendable.
We recently spoke to the Mayor of Silent Hill to see how the town is coping in these troubled times.
