Feature: Resident Evil vs. Silent Hill: Horror Series Showdown! Subscribe to this RSS feed

With Halloween approaching, you'll want to find a survival horror series that satisfies the horror fan and gamer in you equally. We've run the two biggest horror franchises in gaming in all the major categories. Who will emerge undead?!

In recognition of All Hallows' Eve, two of the most storied horror will battle to the death with one another in a last-man-standing Halloween slugfest (refereed by Games.net, or more specifically, Aaron Koehn).

In an attempt to determine the Greatest Horror franchise ever put to disc, we (or more accurately Aaron Koehn), will pit various aspects of the Resident Evil against the Silent Hill series. And then, through various means known only by the darkest, most evil gaming journalists (Aaron Koehn), we will record the results and surrender them to you, the malevolent gaming enthusiast, for your wicked amusement.

Controls:

Watching someone attempt to control a character in Silent Hill or Resident Evil is like watching your mom attempt to control a character in any game on "one of those new videogame machines." Since Resident Evil incorporated a fixed camera perspective, a preset controlling method had to be implemented so that the controls followed the character's point of view, regardless of the gamer's view. But at times these perspectives made the controls feel very unnatural.

Silent Hill, on the other hand really had no excuse for its cumbersome and imprecise controls since its third-person perspective constantly followed the character's movements. Maybe it was just attempting to ratchet up the intensity by making monster confrontations that much more constraining. Whatever their excuses, the bottom line is they both controlled pretty poorly. We'll give the duke to Resident Evil, however, due to the fact that Resident Evil 4 made great improvements to the formula (particularly the Wii version), to the extent where other titles now rip off RE's control scheme! We never thought we'd see the day...

Winner: Resident Evil

Graphics:

Neither title has been a slouch in this department in any of its releases. However, Silent Evil appeared to slow down a bit graphically near the end of the last generation.

Apparently perpetual visual improvement was reaching a ceiling. In contrast Resident Evil 4 ended up being that ceiling; it was simply one of the best-looking games of that time, ultimately trumping all of the titles in either series.In fact, a national polling agency found that trips to small, creepy, Spanish hamlets dropped by 75% after this game was released. People just felt like they'd already been there (note: no such poll was ever conducted, and all such findings have been made up. However, the veracity of this game's stellar graphics was in no way mischaracterized).

Winner: Resident Evil
Sound:

Which game sounds better? That's like asking who would win in a fight: me or a grizzly bear, it's just too close to call. Both games' amazing use of sound effects and ambient music helped push the fear and tense atmosphere to a frenzied pitch. And while both won't win any awards for voice acting, Resident Evil set the benchmark for bad voice acting with the original, and has only moderately improved over the years. Silent Hill wins this round. Capcom really needs to hire a master of unlocking good vocal performances.

Winner: Silent Hill

Atmosphere:

(Or is it "atmosfear"? Oh, it is atmosphere? OK, just checking).

While both games are renowned for creating intense and heavy atmosphere be it through intense fights with gory monsters or the anticipation of intense fights with gory monsters, Silent Hill set itself apart with more bizarre enemies and settings.

When you here Silent Hill's trademark enemy static, you can never be sure what form of fear is awaiting you. Is it the strange, rotting dog-man that ticks like a clock (I'm not making that up) or maybe the well-endowed zombie nurse with a backward face (also actual enemy, and strangely attractive)? Only god and the games' developers knew for sure.

While Resident Evil has changed up the formula somewhat, we've found that the jump from slow zombies to fast "we're not calling them zombies even though they seriously are" doesn't quite match up to the crazy setting changes Silent Hill has continually cooked up.

Winner: Silent Hill