Celebrating two amamazering things!

Not even a week ago something phasmalogical happened, followed up yesterday by something absolutely hipsterific. The first one, almost a week ago, happened over the space of three days. On the first day I was talking with a good friend of mine, and remarked that I couldn't wait for the inevitable day when Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of The Escapist's Zero Punctuation would finally review his favorite old game and mine, Silent Hill 2. Two days later, he did. Now I'm no psychic, and this momentous day really was inevitable; I'm sure lots of people saw it coming before I did, but that's really what's so amazing. I'd never thought about it all before then, which rates it as the most astounding and incredible coincidence I have ever experienced. That his review actually touched on issues in a similar way mine did was pretty awesome too.



The second thing, the hipsterific thing from yesterday, was that I actually got Silent Hill 2 to work on this puny office laptop running godawfullVista. SH2 PC is a notoriously glitchy game, but the internet is sprinkled with wisdom, and some of it is devoted to helping people like you and me play Silent Hill 2. From what I've heard it breaks in different ways for different people, but to celebrate my good fortune I'm gonna' tell you what at least helped me. Perhaps I'll be able to make this kind of information just a little bit easier for people to find, abundant though it already is. The key for me was to get it running on only one core processor. Before I did so it would frequently crash no matter what graphics or compatibility settings I used, especially after cutscenes and when I was using the flashlight.

First, start the game. Then reduce it to an icon. Start windows taskmanager. Look at the bottom left of the window and click "Show processes from all users". Click "Applications" in the top left of the window. Right click the Silent Hill 2 application and click "Go to process". Right click the process and select "Set affinity". You will be shown a small window with the names of all your core processors and a tick mark for each. Unselect all but one of them. This won't affect the rest of your computer.

Regardless of whether this helps your specific problem you'll probably still have to do it eventually, based on what I found out. Sadly you'll have to do it every time you start the game. But it has definitely worked for me. I've even been playing at full graphics, which are very good. I should also add that you should probably run the game as administrator or it might not let you save, and a compatibility with windows 2000 may or may not help, but doesn't seem to hurt. And get both patches.





James used Canned Juice.
It's super effective.