There are a few places in video games that I’ve seen enough times that they’ve become familiar places to me.  Most of them are in MMOs, of course, since you tend to run through the same bit of scenery enough times that it sinks in.  When I was playing EQ2, there were even a good number of places that were close enough to EQ1 to evoke that feeling of comfort that came from knowing the originals.

Outside of MMOs, the best example I can think of for this was starting Ultima V and realizing that the world was still generally the same world as in Ultima IV, even though it had changed in each of the three games prior.

And now I have a new example, because playing Silent Hill 3 shortly after playing Silent Hill 2 meant that I got to run through Brookhaven Hospital again – and, even with the blood dripping down the walls and the tortured screams of the dying and the killer nurses, I still got a comforting sense of being somewhere familiar.

Like I said, there may be something wrong with me.

I won’t say much about the game proper – it’s held in very high regard by fans of the horror genre, and I’m inclined to agree with that assessment.  I was playing it on Easy combat, which is basically God Mode, and I still felt genuinely threatened most of the time.

It was a new experience playing an entire PS2 title using PCSX2, and it’s something that I will be doing as much as I can in future.  The PS2 was a fine system in the days of square tube TVs with scan lines and S-video hookups, but PS2 games kinda look like ass now.  Running this in 3x resolution mode made it look like an entirely new game.