Silent Hill 3 is my personal favorite entry in the series, and one of my favorite games ever, so very happy it ended up happening.
A Silent Hill on-rail shooter arcade game did eventually release. It has some of the corniest voice acting I've ever heard, but if you can accept its existence then it's not a bad arcade game by any stretch.
Silent Hill 2 is now hailed as one of gaming's masterpieces, but yeah at launch it wasn't received that well. Complaints about it not being related to the first game, being too easy and dumbed down survival-horror, as Ito mentioned the lower variety of monsters wasn't as well received at first, and how much downtime there was in the game was critiqued and that it wasn't as scary as the first game. Some even critiqued the story being ambiguous and confusing. It's actually a really good example of how expectations of a game can make people really dumb with critique, the gut reaction of how different SH2 was to SH1 made a large group of people at the time tear into the game for what it wasn't rather than for what it was. A lot of the critique of SH2 had to do with people's expectations as a horror game and as a sequel to SH1, and as SH1 had a reputation back then as "one of the scariest horror games ever," SH2 going a very different direction initially had mixed response. Expectations can be killer.
