time for an announcement

So rather than just stay silent and keep working on the official save-point.com, we have decided to start a blogger version for the time being, it can be found at http://fantastic-contraption.blogspot.com heres hoping it proves popular as we make the transition to a full website for video game enthusiasts to find news and articles that give a genuine, honest opinion on games instead of posting what's allowed by there sponsors like some current sites out there.
So check it out in the coming weeks as we start to post and maybe you'll like it. i for one hope you do.

The Calling trailer

So first off no, your not alone for not knowing about this. It's a hudson release on the wii.

Yeah, a horror game on the wii from the guys and gals behind bomberman and mario party.

That would put me off to be honest but the trailer was neat, im a sucker for the long haired pale ghost bit and the end of this was genuinely creepy for a game with lower end graphics.

Anyway, heres the trailer.

Proof of being alive topic time!

So first off forgive the lack of any articles, but ive moved house, had to deal with a lot of crap to get the net hooked up and now im in the final month of my film degree.

but ive been playing some horror games on and off, namely semi recent releases like F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin and Resident Evil 5. Though ive finished nothing of late so i dont think i can warrant a good article on any games ive not seen the credits roll on. 

However the last few months have seen the net crawling with threads on forums debating if resident evil 5 IS even a horror game at all. In my personal opinion it is an action shooter with horror overtones, it doesnt intend to scare any more than gears of war does but there are mild jumps and rushes of adrenaline from certain set pieces though the soundtrack has greatly shifted from action and suspense to action movie music. -and i have said often that music is a key ingredient in a successful horror piece. But!, on the flipside of this we have fear 2, which literally has a shock a minute to the point where my controller was almost consistently on rumble and you were turning clone soldiers and the homeless creatures from condemned into clouds of so much red matter. this was so over the top i quickly became desensitized to any and all attempts to shock me or instill fear as i played. Plus if any fast moving or stealthed enemy showed up i simply hit the time freeze button and shot them in the head.

but this is getting into a ramble and those are topics for much longer posts at a later time, what i wanted to comment on was the current parting of ways between to series that have gone hand in hand as the two leading sides of the survival horror coin, and thats resident evil and silent hill.

Or more specifically Resident evil 5, and Silent hill Shattered memories.. For those wondering what im on about dont feel stupid, this games been prettty under the radar thus far. Its a re-imagining of the original silent hill on the wii pc and psp, developed by Climax studios, again taking over for team silent on this wii centric remake with a twist ill get to in a second.

So first off lets look back at the mid 90's resident evil and its "stylish but shameless rip off" as it was dubbed at the time silent hill have just been released. Both archetypal horror stories, you play a person in there 20's looking for missing people they know in an isolated location where unnatrual events have come to fruition pitting the player against a menagerie of monsters, either science or supernaturally based. Each have there charms, great memories for the game enthusiast to hang onto, yet remain distinctly different regardless of there obvious first glance similarities.

Now jump a decade on and we have a great divide between the once all too similar franchises. Resident evil is a new type of creature altogether, finishing the transition to full 3rd person shooter it began in resident evil 4. its still at its heart the same franchise but the essence of the game contains a little more in common with gears of war and other bloody shooters pitting your against humanoids with guns and weapons and large behemoth creatures to take down as you progress. Basically it lost the survival. when you had to survive in the early games thats because there was not enough ammo to take down everything, you had to survive by dodgeing the lurching zombies as you ran through the tight corridors, in 5 you have rocket launchers by level 3 onwards and hardly anything is greater than an equal threat.

Though silent hill appears to be going the other way, the remake is focusing on combat evasion rather than a rambo style "turn everything organic into a red paste" shoot off. tie this into the freezing environment replacing the rusty , fiery hell and i think its the one franchise of the two that is sticking to its roots, albiet in new and interesting ways and i for one am really looking forward to the new silent hill far more than i did for resident evil 5 and i dont think i'll be the only one.

So there my point, ill cut my ramblings off before they get to tangential, but there you have it folks, taking the fight to the majini guns blazing as the special forces chris or hiding in the frozen hell of a new silent hill as disturbed writer harry. i know which one of the two id call survival horror, but whats our view?, discuss.

-uhh.....

Playing silent hill homecoming and resident evil, hang on.

"generic denial of death anecdote not found"

So its quite as the streets of raccoon city in september here because im working hard on the design of save-point and i haven't bought any new horror games.

Though now its finally come out this weekend i should be buying silent hill homecoming later on today.

silent hill 2 NES edition, whaaa?....

Yeah, yeah, so this is very old news, but honestly, its bitchin' and still news to me. this is a "demake" of silent hill 2 for the NES, dubbed soundless mountain 2 (take that you konami copyright goon force!) that looks really good for the hardware.

I'm out.

okay, now im suspicious

So apparently the video IS legit for dead rising 2. 

But honestly this has me worried, ive pointed out that video was not impressive, and mostly recycled footage, so if thats representative of a game and most of us are willing to dismiss it as a bad fan made video, what does that say about the final product.

im all excited about more rising, but honestly it smells fishy to me, why was it tagged as fake?

im holding judgement on this one.

dead fake.

no doubt you've seen this doing the rounds - 

-and its being featured on all the big name sites like kotaku.- but am i the only person who's bothered to notice the bloody video is tagged with the word "fake"?!?, or that its almost entirely footage from the original games opening cutscene. the rest is either frank in lost planet or some zombie character models in a casino level from some sega game thats name escapes me.

you learn at university when studying film that the smallest changes can edit anything into something new, just google scary mary or shining on youtube, why this has sold so many people is beyond me. the team behind the original game has said the "we'd like to but theres no plans right now" line so many times its like a bloody mantra.

also why would frank start a game dressed as mega man?!?

i understand that wishful thinking on the fans and slow news days on the journalists part will cause something as traffic generating as this (i realise the irony) to spread like wildfire but come-on people!, this is fake.

end of story, if im wrong good, we get a new dead rising, but i highly, HIGHLY, doubt it.

So... quiet 'round here huh?

So yeah, indeed it has been quiet as hell. partly because my current s.h games are siren blood curse and left 4 dead. Which i have yet to get the most out of to review. but more importantly, ive a announcement to make.

I started this blog a year ago because i love videogames, survival horror has always been my Niche' genre, but i also have an equal love for Roleplaying games, Action adventure games and the like and at the time the situation i was in dictated that i had to pick my niche' and go with it. i didn't have time for articles. news or major reviews of many genres. but this blog has been excellent experience to show i can and it doesn't interfere with my work or my University studies. 

However the thought of a full ,journalistic, videogames site. By videogame enthusiasts and for them, cheesy as that sounds, was always in my mind. Never anything like gamespot was when it was still respectable, or IGN. but more like an online magazine, somewhere between kotaku and giant bomb. but with the more independent blogger vibe thrown into the mix.

Well long story short is im going for it. this place will hopefully not update less whilst im at it. but in the long run i should be able to spend the start of this year making the transition from this blog to the full blown games site. So it could be the end of one type of gameing site from me, the start of another, better one.

so look out for save-point.com coming sometime later in the year.

"LIT"

So i just found this on youtube, a trailer for an upcoming wiiware game called "lit", created by WayForward and released this monday. Lit is a puzzler survival horror ,from what i can tell, about two people in a vastly altered version of there school, where creatures are lurking in the dark.

So right up my alley then. honestly this reminds me a lot of obscure by hydravision from what ive seen and it looks pretty cool.

Heres the trailer doing the rounds right now - 

brief commercial brake

LOOK.AT.THIS.

its a mod for left for dead that recreates the locations, but not the story of resident evil 2. now im still on a left for dead kick, hence why there's still no article on here about it, and resi 2 ties with silent hill 2 as my all time favorite survival horror game from when the genre was at a "golden age" of sorts.

i know ive got it on the 360 but these mods are tempting me to grab it on my mac as well.