I really wish SH4 didnt cost so much. I, luckily, acquired SH 1-3 pre-Pandemic and was able to get real copies for reasonable prices, but I put off 4 like a fucking idiot and now its 3 figures for a decent copy. I did a playthrough on pcsx2 emulator, but it had a bunch of graphical glitches and that cheapened the experience. I've heard the pc version of 4 is missing hauntings in the apartment, but that version might be my best bet for a second playthrough.
This hurts me a lot. I played Silent Hill 2 when I was way too young to play it, but I got a ton out of it and the story. No game ever hit me quite so hard.
Since then, I collected all of them any time I had spare pocket money. the mainstream audience didn't really give a shit about Silent Hill till PT brought the name back to the public mind. I got all 4 of the OG's for probably less than $100 over the years. One of my copies of SH 2 Greatest Hits got fucked, so I checked eBay for pricing. That's where I learned that "Silent Hill" tax is real. Same for stuff like guidebooks, or the vinyl soundtracks. I pity people wanting to collect the physical games and play them nowadays.
For those of you talking about emulation, you are correct. Just emulate them. But the best way is to "natively" emulate them. Buy a fat ps2 off reebay for $50, get an IDE hard drive and the network adaptor for it for $30 (or get the third party knockoff, it's SATA and I have heard good things but have never used them), install FreeMcBoot. Dump the raw isos to the PS2, and bang. You are playing the game natively, on the native console, with no issues that come along with true "emulation." I've got about 200 games on my PS2's hard drive, never even have to put in a disc. And they all work perfectly. I have em set up on a PVM, so I can even play PAL games. FreeMcBoot does the work of switching the PS2 to PAL, the PVM does the work of displaying PAL.
Edit: Will admit that there is some problems with playing the games ISO off the hard drive in the PS2, and that is the art of the loading screen minigame/cutscenes. Back when it had to read disc data, there were fun cutscenes, story beats, or mini games that would show up in the loading zones. Because you're streaming the iso from the harddisk, most loading screens are a fraction of a second, so you miss those fun things.
Edit 2: Also forgot to add that doing this will allow you to play online network games, if you can find the info on the private servers. For instance, I have been playing a TON of Resident Evil Outbreak 1&2 (best RE games hands down, wish they would make another) online with people on their private servers.
