8 Video Games In Desperate Need Of A Remaster

Talking about Silent Hill is like opening up an old wound and rubbing scotch bonnet seeds in it these days. With Silent Hills - a collaboration between Hideo Kojima, Guillermo del Toro and Norman Reedus - unceremoniously cancelled by Konami in their ongoing quest to surpass EA when it comes to universally despised publishers, the promise of a new entry in the terrifying survival horror franchise seems all but impossible. Despite the later games in the series being markedly less well received than the original trilogy, the Silent Hill franchise is still generally well regarded for its tone, writing and design.

The indisputable benchmark, however, is Silent Hill 2. Released in 2001, it looked phenomenal for its time and in many ways still holds up. This was the first time the town of Silent Hill felt fully realised, with its deserted streets folding back into themselves and the cold, damp fog that shrouds it appearing to creep into the room to engulf the player. The monster design was also at its peak, with its armless, acid spewing figures and disfigured mannequins representing protagonist James Sunderland's own feelings of guilt, anguish and frustration stemming from the death of his wife. The iconic Pyramid Head also makes his first appearance in Silent Hill 2, and this time round he and the scantily clad nurses actually bear some symbolic significance as opposed to simply being there for the sake of popularity.

After 2012's appalling attempts at remastering Silent Hill 2 and 3 that saw the atmosphere greatly diminished by a lack of adequate fog among other things and clumsy, lazy porting work, maybe it could be argued that Silent Hill 2 doesn't need, and indeed shouldn't be, remastered. But the feeling can't be shaken that handled properly and rebuilt from the ground up, Silent Hill 2's oppressive atmosphere and unspeakable tragedy would be a sight to behold if given the current-gen treatment.