Silent Hill 3

Silent Hill 3 Official Boxart Release Date: 2003 Developer: Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo Publisher: Konami Series: Silent Hill Platforms: PC Playstation 2 Playstation 3 Xbox 360 Genre: Survival Horror

The third entry in the Silent Hill horror video game series, Silent Hill 3 is a direct sequel to Silent Hill (1999). Players assume the role of Harry Mason's (the protagonist of the first game) adopted daughter Heather, 17 years after the events of the first Silent Hill title. After living incognito for much of her life with her adoptive father, Heather's peaceful days are interrupted as a figure from her hidden past returns, with her attempts at escape only tossing her further into a nightmarish version of reality haunted by bloodthirsty monsters and supernatural dangers. As she makes her way through places deserted and decrepit or otherwise hellishly twisted by some horrific force, Heather must piece together the true nature of her cursed past and why a cult from the town of Silent Hill is after her and her father.

The plot of this game would later be loosely adapted for the 2012 film Silent Hill: Revelation 3D.

The following weapons appear in the video game Silent Hill 3:

General overview

Silent Hill 3 was the first in its series to allow for player-initiated real-time reloading of firearms, the previous titles only allowing for reloading via an inventory screen or otherwise reloading in real-time when a gun was totally empty. Trying to fire a shot from a weapon with an empty magazine while Heather still has spare ammunition will result in a slow reload animation that only allows Heather to walk, while reloading manually will result in a much quicker reload animation, albeit one that doesn't allow the player to move while doing so. Being a third-person survival horror title with many fixed camera angles, scoring hits with in-game firearms relies entirely on the game's auto-aim system, with one exception noted below. Heather also possesses the ability to block enemy melee attacks with any equipped firearm, a feature originating from Silent Hill 2.

Handguns

Beretta 92FS Centurion

Heather Mason, the player character, picks up the 92FS Centurion with wooden grips from the floor of a clothing shop in the Central Square mall. It has a ten round magazine capacity, wood grips, and the ability to mount a sound suppressor looted from a corpse entombed in a concrete pillar. Douglas Cartland, a private investigator hired to find Heather, uses a similar weapon, but never fires it onscreen in the game. The handgun is the only firearm in the game that the player must obtain.

Beretta 92FS Centurion - 9x19mm

"Holds 10 rounds of ammunition. Small and not powerful, but easy to use."

The first, clearest shot of the handgun in this game.

Heather discovers the handgun on the floor of a women's clothing store. Generally speaking, the best thing to do when encountering such an out-of-place and potentially dangerous item would be to back away and notify the authorities. . .

. . . but she then displays a shocking lack of common sense by picking up the gun, potentially ruining vital evidence for a criminal investigation, and possibly putting her own life in danger due to her inexperience with firearms . . .

. . . until she is forced to use it against the very thing that did in the weapon's former owner.

Heather runs dry at the worst possible moment.

"Some parts of this game may be considered violent or cruel."
Heather uses her Centurion to gun down three wandering Numb Body monsters. To increase their horror value, these weak and diminutive monsters make bleating noises like a lamb when downed.

Thanks to the magic of "gameplay mechanics," holding a handgun sideways like a scared teenage girl is, for no adequately explained reason whatsoever, somehow enough to virtually negate the damage caused by the punches from an Insane Cancer monster, a hulking abomination which looks like it could weigh over 300 pounds.

Claudia Wolf: "You're going to kill me? Is it really so easy for you?"
Douglas Cartland: "I've done it before."
Douglas Cartland, a private detective who unwittingly becomes involved with Heather's journey, has his own Centurion, but never fires it onscreen.

As the game progresses, Heather is depicted in cutscenes as becoming more proficient with the Beretta Centurion and uses a proper grip on her handgun, but her sights aren't always properly aligned as this screenshot shows. Ingame she uses this grip right away after the cutscene when she first obtains the weapon, but her ability to lock-on to enemies with it is limited to targets around 10 feet away.

Bonus: Heather reloading her pistol. This reload animation may make her the very first character in a video game to use a non-tactical vest in a tactical manner (i.e., to carry live ammunition).

Beretta 92FS Ammunition

Boxes of ammunition for the Beretta 92FS Centurion are the most common ammunition pickup scattered throughout the game. They normally provide 10 rounds to a box, unless the "Bullet Adjust" option (which is a multiplier for ammunition found ingame) is set higher than one in the game's options menu.

Heather Mason: "The hand outside the window . . . "
Heather in the middle of exploring the Otherworld version of Silent Hill's Brookhaven Hospital, here showing understandable hesitation to snatch handgun ammunition from something that might just snatch back.

Single Action Army

Returning from the previous game, the Single Action Army is used only by a few monstrous Nurses in Brookhaven Hospital. It is used rather inexpertly (but nonetheless lethally) by those monsters, and cannot be obtained by the player. The Nurses can only fire it slowly at Heather, but never need to reload. Contrary to its name, the Bulletproof vest item will not actually stop rounds fired from this weapon at Heather. If Heather closes to melee range with a revolver-wielding Nurse, the Nurse will try to pistol-whip Heather instead. This game marked the first time in the Silent Hill series that monsters (not hostile human beings) could use firearms against player characters.

Colt Single Action Army with 5.5" barrel known as the "Artillery" model. The most common of the SAA revolvers as it is just the right length. - .45 Long Colt

A monstrous Nurse about to shoot Heather with its revolver. Yes, it can hit her dead on without the Nurse even looking at Heather, and from a far greater distance than Heather can accurately retaliate with her own firearms. Then again, Silent Hill's monsters never did play fair.

A better view of the revolver used by the monstrous Nurses.

Shotguns

Remington Model 870

The Remington Model 870, referred to simply as the "Shotgun," makes a return from Silent Hill 2 and is first picked up in an opened gift-wrapped box in the subway level. Heather can then commandeer this grisly "gift" and blast monsters away with its buckshot. It has a sawn-off barrel, no iron sights, a tube magazine capacity of six rounds, and, for some reason, can be completely reloaded by inserting a single shell into the magazine. Keeping in line with most video game shotguns, it has enormous stopping power up close and is capable of knocking monsters down with a well-timed blast, but shotgun ammunition is fairly rare in this game. Like James Sunderland from Silent Hill 2, Heather does not properly shoulder the weapon and thus can only fire it slowly as she struggles with the weapon's recoil from every shot.

Remington 870 with short barrel - 12 gauge

"Holds 6 rounds of ammunition. It's hard to handle, but has great range." GREAT range?!

The perfect "present" for a 17-year-old girl surrounded by inhuman, bloodthirsty monstrosities. Happy birthday, indeed.

"Some parts of this game may be considered violent or cruel."
Heather blasts away with the Remington 870 at two large Numb Body monsters while spelunking through deserted underground tunnels in search of a way to get back home to her father.

Heather takes out her anger at the Silent Hill cult by giving its Chapel a healthy dose of buckshot. As was the case with its Silent Hill 2 incarnation, the Remington Model 870 in this game has an incredibly wide (and incredibly unrealistic) spread, indicated by the clusters of yellow "bullet sparks" that show just where its pellets hit in this screenshot (one can be seen just to the left of the leftmost stained glass window).

A floating Pendulum monster uses its rusty metal poles (its equivalent of legs while groundbound) to attack Heather, who improbably blocks them with her Remington Model 870. The gas station in the background is the Texxon Gas Station in the town of Silent Hill.

Shotgun ammunition

Boxes of shotgun ammunition are an uncommon sight throughout the game. Each contains 6 rounds, unless the game's Bullet Adjust option is higher than one.

In a world gone mad, shotgun ammunition is always a welcome sight, even if it's stashed inside a morgue's recently-used "corpse cupboards."

Submachine guns

MAC-10 (dressed up as Uzi)

The MAC-10 (mocked up to look like an Uzi) is the first fully-automatic weapon ever implemented in a Silent Hill game. It was apparently inspired by "MAC-Uzi" from A-Team and some other productions. This submachine gun can be found in the basement of Brookhaven Hospital (a mental institution also explored in Silent Hill 2) near a bloodied wheelchair, the barrel still warm from its recent use. It has a 32 round magazine capacity and can use the sound suppressor as well, which would imply that it shares a caliber with the handgun since suppressors are manufactured for specific calibers to be effective. An unlockable version with unlimited ammunition is available as a bonus item.

The MAC-10 in this game appears to be missing a charging handle, but Heather will still pull a nonexistent one during one of her two reload animations for this gun anyway (see below). The MAC-10 also seems to be modelled with a folded buttstock, but this cannot be extended in the game, requiring Heather to always fire this SMG from the hip.

Though not terribly effective for most enemy encounters anyway (since its ammunition sports the lowest stopping power per shot ratio in the entire game, implying that it may in fact be chambered for a low-power caliber like .380 ACP that is the same diameter but shorter than the ingame Beretta Centurion's own 9x19mm ammunition), the decision to include a fully-automatic weapon was still criticized by some game reviewers as placing too much emphasis on firepower within a survival horror game, and to date this game remains the only Team Silent Silent Hill title to give the player control of a fully-automatic weapon; however, Silent Hill 4: The Room has an unlockable MAC-11 submachine gun as a weapon for a friendly NPC.

For comparision: "MAC-Uzi", as it appears in S1E08 ("The Out-of-Towners") of The A-Team.

"Holds 32 rounds of ammunition. Great for its continuous firing."

Heather Mason: "The wall is scarred with bullet marks. What the hell could they have been shooting at?"
The location where the MAC-10 is discovered. Judging from this nightmarish scene, it's obvious that the Submachine Gun wasn't of much use to its previous owner.

"Some parts of this game may be considered violent or cruel." SOME parts?!
Deciding not to trust the unfriendly nurses of Silent Hill's Brookhaven Hospital, Heather prefers instead to give them some new fully-automatic piercings, free of charge.

"Try walking that one off."
Heather kneecaps one of the imposing Closer monsters on the roof of Brookhaven Hospital with a burst from her MAC-10 SMG. Some spent brass casings can be seen coming out of the right side of the gun, an early example of casing ejection from firearms on the Playstation 2 game console, albeit not as extensively modelled as that of Metal Gear Solid 2 (an earlier title on the same console from the same game developer), where spent casings could pile up to a surprisingly high amount, and each spent casing even followed a realistic physics system for a short time.

Her latest shootout over, Heather finishes off reloading her MAC-10 by pulling back a non-existent charging on the top of the SMG. This is the slower of the two reload animations available for this gun, and is only triggered should the player press the "Fire" button if the MAC-10 is completely empty. In reality, an open-bolt SMG like the MAC-10 in its original configuration similarly needs its charging handle (and by extension its bolt) to be pulled back only if the user held the trigger down after its last round of ammunition was fired, after inserting a fresh magazine to ready the weapon again.

Caught by hostile Nurses while trying to loot some medical supplies, Heather blocks an awkward lunging attack from one of them with her MAC-10, somehow nullifying almost all the damage from the attack even though it didn't hit anywhere near her SMG (which is presumably what she's blocking with).

Bonus: If Heather dies at certain points within the game, a humanoid figure (unnamed within the game) will appear and drag her still-warm corpse away to parts unknown. This is a clue that Heather isn't quite entirely what she seems, and that something terrible is happening to her body as you play the game. During this sequence, she will also be holding whatever weapon she was last using before she died, like the MAC-10 SMG in this screenshot.

Submachine gun ammunition

The rarest ammunition pickup of all, these items come in the form of fully-loaded 32-round magazines (assuming the "Bullet Adjust" option is set to 1). These are only available after the player enters Brookhaven Hospital, and were the first ammunition pickup in the series that came in magazines rather than boxes of loose ammunition (James Sunderland of Silent Hill 2 is seen to load his handgun with a fresh magazine in one cutscene, however).

In addition to giving certain unhinged patients the urge to "fly," the roof of Brookhaven Hospital apparently also gives people the urge to store SMG ammunition there too. Despite being modelled with an empty magazine follower, each of these magazines when picked up is treated as fully-loaded ingame.

Other

Flamethrower

A bonus weapon unlockable under certain circumstances, the Flamethrower is a fictional model that has an unlimited supply of fuel. It looks like it modeled after the notorious M240 from Aliens, albeit with much smaller dimensions close to the in-game "Mac-Uzi". It can be found by starting the "Extra New Game" mode inside the Central Square Shopping Centre (the game's first level), specifically in a shop called "Helen's Bakery." The Flamethrower initially possesses limited stopping power and range; however, these characteristics are enhanced if the player achieves the maximum possible score at the end-of-game ranking screen. It is also useful in keeping certain enemies "stunlocked" (in other words keeping them in their "wounded" animations) as long as they are being sprayed and they are not yet killed.

M240 Flamethrower prop from the movie Aliens.

Heather Mason: "This thing'll roast the bad guys, and I don't have to worry about fuel, either."
The Flamethrower at its initial ingame location. The flier underneath it reads "Crispy toasted bread DEAD right to your very door."

Point Blank Genesis Covert Body Armour Level IIIA

The only appearance of ballistic body armour in a Silent Hill game, the "Bulletproof Vest" appears to be a Point Blank Genesis Covert Body Armour Level IIIA, and is only available inside a trashed and filthy clothing store inside the Otherworld Central Square Shopping Centre. Heather can choose to put it on after taking it to gain some damage resistance and better blocking abilities, but in return gives up some of her mobility (only when she puts the vest on), though the vest is never actually visible on Heather should the player equip it on her.

In real life, the term "bulletproof vest" is discouraged since no piece of body armour (no matter the kinds of attacks it is rated to stop) is truly "bulletproof" against the countless varieties of ballistic ammunition to be found throughout the world. The term "ballistic vest" is instead preferred. Rather more unrealistically, the ingame ballistic vest is primarily useful against the melee attacks of Silent Hill's monsters and doesn't actually protect against their firearms attacks, which is the opposite of how soft Kevlar vests (non-stab resistant and without hard armour plates) work in real life.

Of all the places you'd expect to find a ballistic vest, a looted women's clothing store would be the last. However, given this is the same, albeit Otherworldly, location where Heather found the Beretta Centurion handgun early on in the game, this could be a tip-off that the Otherworld locations Heather visits do in some way "mirror" their non-Otherworldly counterparts, since she found a firearm in this location and now can find firearm-resistant body armour in the Otherworld version of this store.

Sound Suppressor

A sound suppressor (called a "Silencer" ingame) can be found in the Construction Site level, but only if Heather breaks open a specific concrete pillar there to find an entombed corpse and the sound suppressor. Heather can then attach the suppressor to either her handgun or her SMG to muffle her gunshots and make it harder for monsters to find out where she is shooting from and also avoid alerting monsters in the area to her shots, but also sacrifices some of her suppressed firearm's stopping power whenever the suppressor is "equipped" (i.e., set to be attached to any firearm that is not the ingame shotgun).

However, it is clear that Konami could not get realistic references on what sound suppressed gunshots sound like, and so they used the standard "Hollywood silencer" sound effects whenever the player makes Heather fire a suppressed weapon. Suppressed firearms in this game also have no muzzle flash at all, which depending on the combination of firearm and sound suppressor may not be completely realistic.

As it turned out, this game would be the first and last time that a sound suppressor would ever appear in a Silent Hill title.

The sound suppressor and its unlucky former owner. The camouflage pattern on the pants worn by the corpse is a tip-off from Konami that the corpse is none other than that of Solid Snake from the Metal Gear Solid series who was well-known for his use of suppressed firearms, albeit come to a most ignominious end.

Heather contemplates the one of the game's numerous save points, the red "Halo of the Sun" symbol, while holding a suppressed MAC-10 in Brookhaven Hospital. The PC version however allows players to save anywhere in the game as long as Heather is not near any monsters nor in the midst of dying.

Heather getting her Metal Gear Solid on by putting down a canine Double Head monster with her suppressed Beretta Centurion in the Hilltop Centre office building.

"Some MANY parts of this game may be considered violent or cruel."
Further adding injury to insult, Heather "breaks a leg" by finishing off a Double Head monster with a good stomp after bringing it down with her suppressed Beretta Centurion on the fog-shrouded streets of the town of Silent Hill.