I'm tempted by this cause I've never played them. To my understanding, the xbox version is the abomination cause it didn't get the latest patches. What's the story for the ps3 version? Anyone have first hand experience with it
They fixed a lot of the complaints people had with it. Fog is better. Slowdown is a lot better. I actually finished it before-patch and then played through SH2 again and most of SH3 post-patch.
SH2 was actually solid pre-patch with few technical issues for me aside from slowdown in one area and in the bonus content, and it was pretty much the same post-patch with the one slowdown being a bit better and fog being thicker. SH3 is a lot better post-patch (pre-patch, there were times where turning on your flashlight would drop the game to half speed, and there were a lot of audio/animation sync issues). Still a little slowdown and the syncing is still off, but it's better, and they fixed/polished up some other things. They didn't get rid of all the bugs, though (post-patch, I still ran into a weird bug in SH2 where an area didn't load properly and I could run through walls and stuff and had to reload to progress...and I've run into recurring freezing issues in SH3 that I didn't have pre-patch).
Also, Silent Hill 2 features the original voice track and a new voice track, but Silent Hill 3 only has a new voice track. If you haven't played them before, you probably won't notice (or might even like the new voice track better if you aren't looking at it from the subjective viewpoint of a long time fan), but it's worth noting. And they changed some textures and there's some wonky water in a 5 minute section in SH2 that you can barely see through the fog now. Not a big deal, but it apparently was to some fans.
Basically, it was sort of a mess of a production. They cut corners and handed it off to a somewhat inexperienced production team. They didn't have the final code, and instead of dismantling the final game and working backwards like Bluepoint said they do, they were working from unfinished beta code. They had issues with getting everybody on board with voice over licensing, hence the new voice recordings. The fog issue was apparently due to the fact that the ps2 fog used some kind of ps2 hardware-specific filter that the ps3 had issues with.
Despite all that, though, I still appreciated the new HD coat of paint and had fun playing them again both pre and post patch. And I'm a big Silent Hill fan. So, ya, basically, SH2 was pretty solid pre-patch and is better post-patch. SH3 is way better post-patch. Neither is perfect, but they're still solid enough on the ps3 with the patch. I'd say the collection is still worth it, especially if you've never played them. They're great games.
I'd, honestly, really like Konami to do a second collection with SH4, Origins, and Shattered Memories, but I'm guessing there's little chance of that happening after the backlash from this one and the money they had to dump into fixing the issues (which they apparently gave up on with the 360 version).