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Reviews: Metacritic 73%| Game Rankings 77%
Reference: Achievements| 
Walkthrus: WikiCheats | GameFAQ | Mahalo
Developers: Konami | Double Helix Games
Genre: survivor – horror
Status: Abandoned after escaping hospital
As explained in my “Video Game-induced Nausea, Dizziness and Headaches” post, I had to abandon Silent Hill Homecoming due to nausea caused by the inability to invert the Y-axis.
It came as a shock to me that, while there is an option to invert the Y-axis when shooting, Silent Hill Homecoming does not give you the player the option to invert the Y-axis when walking around, fighting or doing anything else in the game. This is extremely rare in modern video games.
A quick Google search to see if there is a patch, cheat code or some other way to rectify the situation yields posts like this one and flame wars like this one. It seems that Konami is aware of the issue and just doesn’t care. No patch is available and none is in the works. It’s truly bizarre that Konami does not provide an across-the-board option to invert the Y-axis in a major title such as Silent Hill. This is a standard option in virtually every console game that comes out these days.
The upshot for me – the game was unplayable. I tried. I killed some nurses and critters, got a couple achievements and made it out of the hospital. But 25 minutes of playing without inversion made me too dizzy and nauseous to continue. FYI, the game also suffers from reliance on quick time events – which I detest.
Thank goodness this was a rental. Back it goes.
When you say there’s no option to invert it, does that mean that if you press down, the camera goes up? That would totally suck!
When you say there's no option to invert it, does that mean that if you press down, the camera goes up? That would totally suck!
My first video game was a flying game. When you fly an airplane you push the control stick forward to go down and pull it back to go up. When I hold my Xbox 360 controller. It is mostly held flat. So what most consider ‘pushing down’ on the controller, it’s ‘pulling back’ in my head. So, yes, I pull back to look up and push forward to look down. It’s kind of like a left hand/right hand thing. Just like most people are right handed, most people do NOT invert the Y access – most push down/pull back to look down. Not me, its the reverse. And just like there are a lot of left handers in the world, there are a lot of games just like me that move the stick the opposite direction from the majority of gamers. That is why every game that has come out in the last 10 years has had an invert option – well every game EXCEPT Silent Hill Homecoming and its predecessors.
I wish I’d read this before I ordered it. Fortunately it was a cheap game as it’s almost 2 years old, but I too can’t play it without getting nauseous, so I’m done with it after twenty minutes. Hard to believe two years on they never did a patch for it. I’m really bummed. I was looking forward to delving back into SH. Oh well.