Honestly, as much as I love Silent Hill 2, I find it to be overrated among the Big Three Silent Hill games, since it feels like the weakest of them all. As my score indicates, however, I still adore Silent Hill 2! It destructively deconstructs the male ego and its institutions of power, noting the irony of a religion (Christianity) based on mercy being so punitive in practice. Through destruction and reconstruction (the latter being the Silent Hill franchise's secret sauce), Silent Hill 2 creates compassion from the thin air of nihilism boastfully masquerading as realism.

If you are going to play this game, then please, learn the development history. This game is so completely expressive of the suffering of the people who worked on this game, sometimes without rest or pay. Every end felt like a dead end, and every reason to push on felt meaningless. Who was even asking for this game? The last game hadn't even sold anywhere near the copies of its predecessor, but a third Max Payne game was put into development anyway. Even when the budget had become bloated, they didn't cancel the game. It just wouldn't die. So fed up with their conditions, the development team of Max Payne 3 transformed Max himself from a self-obsessed antipathetic loser into an avenging archangel of the people.

In some ways, perhaps, Max Payne 3 surpasses the likes of John Woo, Michael Bay, and even Remedy Entertainment themselves with its narrative progression from the destruction of the criminal but destitute to the slow-mo obliteration of bourgeois institutions. I wish for the police station level to have been better designed, yes, but I can forgive it because the message came through loud and clear.

To all the people of Rockstar who wrung their blood, sweat, and tears into this game, thank you.

I was really having trouble figuring out what made this remake different from the original, but then, I played on Hard. RE96 didn't have any Hard difficulty, so on replays, it's easy to hoard ammo and breeze through the whole thing. The game loses so much of its magic. The magic is still there and can be experienced on replays, yes, but not all of the magic is there anymore.
REmake amends this with a Hard difficulty that doesn't do the normal thing of buffing enemy stats. Instead, it shifts the difficulty around resource scarcity. I swear that there was only one grenade launcher ammo pickup in my whole playthrough. ONLY ONE. (And I didn't even use any of it, so yeah, thanks, Capcom.) Therefore, for the sake of resource management, I had to navigate the mansion more carefully and dexterously, and because RE is all about navigation at its core, it was like playing an entirely new game.

REmake feels to me like a game about growingly scarce resources in a dead world that won't fade away for some reason. It just remains, so in efforts towards resurrecting it, it reanimates itself but without any of the soul. Where RE98 felt like a large-scale inhumane science experiment, REmake feels truly apocalyptic. This world (the Spencer mansion) should have been dead and buried a long time ago, so why is it still walking? Maybe it just can't let go of itself and its legacy, so it has to shape everything within it into its image. It's most evident in the character of Lisa Trevor, who cannot die or rest. She shall live forever yearning for her lost parents, whom the mansion also consumed in its attempt to transfigure them.

TL;DR REmake is the GOAT.

Resident Evil (1996) was a perfect game, remains as such, and shall never age because nothing ages good game design and world design, which interact with each other to create not only the survival horror of the game itself but the whole genre.

Since that dynamic has become generic, REmake applies the only thing left unique to the Resident Evil franchise: sci-fi cosmic horror (explored in Resident Evil 2 (1998) and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (1999)). It's a horror that's scarier to think about than to play through, and I am going to be thinking about REmake for a very long time.

(Arrange Mode)

"Do you want S.T.A.R.S.? I'll give you S.T.A.R.S."

How are these games better than The Matrix?