Silent HIll back on the EU Playstation Network store

Well this snuck by most gaming news sites i visit.

Browsing the PSN store for some ps one classics i spied the original Silent Hill is back on the store for £5.79 in the UK.
The game was up for a couple of days in 2010, but hastily taken down when it received unanimous reports that the game would crash at the moth boss and never go any further for anyone, not just one or two players but the game itself was broken.

Well its back up now and i just finished downloading it. I'm not one for reviewing the classics- because they either aged so badly they arent a fair comparison to todays games or they are just so well known, and well regarded that a 'review'- However i may give a little follow up to see if this ones worth your money- that and the psn parasite eve 2 i was browsing the store for at the time.

Still, if your willing to risk it it is there and ready to go.

WELP.

I tried to ignore the nu-mettul. God help me, i tried.

So yeah, here is the latest, unfortunately put together, trailer for silent hill downpour. My opinion? my early thoughts about some inspiration from the suffering and alan wake seems like it was right on the money. I'm gonna hazard a guess that they may even try the alan wake/ alone in the dark route and make it more like an episodic horror tv series. Which i cant say i would be adverse to. Both of the aforementioned examples, regardless of overall game quality, pulled it off quite well. I think it would certainly help in a game like this to have a "previously on silent hill" when you load it up after a while without continuing.

Am i expecting a good story? possibly. Maybe a little cliche' in that 90's american horror kind of way but i enjoyed that schtick with Obscure so it could keep me entertained here. What about the gameplay though? the brief fashes we see between all the cutscenes showed what looked like a 3rd person clunky movement thing that reminded me of deadly premonition. Which let's be honest was dogshit at its best, however its story carried it through. Will this be able to do the same? Honestly i kinda doubt it.

We're gonna have to wait and see. After all it's not like we aren't going to play it when it's released.

Right now i'm tentatively excited for it, its showing a lot of influence in its direction from resident evil 5, alan wake, the suffering and silent hill homecoming so maybe it could be a perfect storm of influences. Or just the accumulated crap of all its touchstones combined into one terribad package. Time'll tell i suppose.

silent hill online?

whujuwha?....

http://kotaku.com/#!5783702/multiplayer-silent-hill-rumored-for-xbox-live

Konami might be working on a multiplayer xbla silent hill?

Adaption of the 2 player arcade schmup or a brand new resident evil outbreak style multiplayer?

Who knows but worth pointing out to dream about the possibilities.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories - The Review

Developer: Climax Studios
Publisher: Konami digital entertainment
Platforms: Ninentdo wII, PSP, PS2
Released: December 8th 2009


This is a tough one. really, i mean that.

This is a very hard game to surmise, to attempt to quantify the sum of its parts as some value of its worth as entertainment. To be honest its hard to call this a videogame, let alone a horror one.

Near as i can judge its an interactive experience that, unlike heavy rain, does not try to be that. It is just what its become in the process of telling its story.

Or telling Konami's story, again, i should say.

So yeah, read on but bear in mind, regardless of arbitrary scoring at the end this is a prime example of how i am one guy and as such the scores of meaningless, its just a process to express my feelings about a game upon completion of it having seen all it has to offer you as a genuine opinion of one person who loves horror games to another.


So silent hill shattered memories is a retelling of the original game in what most consider resident evils long standing rival to the survival horror franchise crown. A game that got me into the genre, a game that layered nuance, subtext and context upon the player in a way not truly seen before in videogames as a medium.
To be honest i was pretty damn wary of this. The more time passes the more i am so utterly disappointed by the cheap name drop cash in that is silent hill origins. So news of the same developer handling a re-imagining of the source of it all?
Madness, surely.

Well i was wrong, if silent hill origins is the worst experience in the franchise, including the gba visual novel and arcade lightgun machine game, then shattered memories is one of the best, in some ways usurping its original.

The game plays as an over the shoulder style explorative action adventure come light puzzler. You play Harry mason, driving along in the car with his daughter cheryl, only to crash it. Not in fog this time, or due to the ghost of some spiritual half a girl but to a blizzard the likes of which silent hill has never seen.
See Harry is not passing through silent hill this time. it is his home. trouble is he doesnt remember a lot of things about the town, and other people live in his house...
Of course Cheryl disappears and Harry spends the game looking for her, traversing silent hill proper and also some of its surrounding countryside.
The game is faily linear but the linearity is never the same at defining points. this is all controlled by the games 3 piece play system.

The first type of play is i lonely exploration of the 'real world'. A mundane snowy town thats got most inhabitants in the warmth behind closed doors. There are no monsters, no nightmares round the bend. Just a man looking for his missing daughter. A very real nightmare for every parent that requires no fictional entities to make it all the more dreadful.
This portion plays like an amusement park ride. See the sights of silent hill. An easter egg filled walk through the town where you learn as much or as little about the game as you want. There is no reason to not stop and spend as much time as you want in every area exploring every nook and cranny and drinking it all in.
The second type of play is the psychological evaluations. In first person perspective you the player are interviewed by dr. kaufman- now less a creepy peddler of drugs than a doppleganger for mass effects illusive man- who wants to help you with your apparent mental problems.
To do this you undertake certain tests as the game progresses. either you solve a riddle, or colour a drawing or just answer some yes/no questions about yourself. The opening titles recommend being as truthful as possible and i did and it was an interesting process because your choices and therefore your mental outlook shape the game around you.
Maybe you come to a small shopping arcade and there are a number of stores, but only one leads to the next area. Maybe guy A plays it and its the record store, but girl B plays it and its the electronics store. This all depends on the player and the unconscious choices they make.
There is no stark fable style good or evil choices. its all subjective. There are things like if you tend to linger the camera on the breasts of mannequins or female characters and the players lecherous nature will alter the game to suit there psyche. The enemies hips will bell out and there faces will become more feminine, cybil will dress in a much less....professional way. Whereas if you prefer art or posters then maybe the enemies look more like sculptures and dahlia seems more punk-ey than junky.
The third portion is the other world. Every time Harry nears a crucial point in the plot the world literally ices over in deep glaciers of nightmarish, angry jagged exploding ice like glass from hell. This world is full of the rawshocks. An obvious play on the psychological term rorschach tests that also change depending on the player. all starting as some raw fleshed skinned humanoid nightmare thats only goal is chase Harry through these mazes of ice and darkness and grapple him to the ground for a nasty end. Which is an ironic metaphor in a remake of a game where the spirit of the horror has gone from oppressive isolation to crushing loneliness- and this game is very much about loneliness on a few levels. You can hide from them for a time, use flrase and fire to keep them back and move obstacles to slow them down but these adrenaline fuelled periods of terror in between the calm have a single focus 'RUN'. you cannot fight them, you cannot win, all you can do is run from the problem and find a safer place to continue you journey to cheryl. a journey that will be different for most of you.

Basically its all based on you with no stark right or wrong. Because whilst there are 'good' and 'bad' endings the story is always the same.

And it is most certainly a sad one.

This is a completely different silent hill story. its still got the same named characters and places, and Harry still needs to find his daughter, but the whos, whys and wheres are a very different silent hill. Dahlia is not only a young woman but she is Harrys wife, there is no cult, no white drug, no out and out supernatural evil.
Like the games development the story is a much more personal affair. You are not saving the world in some way, or fighting a dark god or some other detracting out of left field enemy but from beginning to end this is a story of a father and his daughter and there separation. This simplicity and sole focus doesn't not detract from shattered memories, in fact i can say it only strengthens it. The game pulls you in in a completely different way per person, two friends will play it and feel completely differently about the plot twists and characters by the end than the other.

Personally i found the game surprisingly engaging on an emotional level. I went in expecting weird shit and lame attempts to scare, but honestly between tense marathons from rawshocks, and the creepy exploring the story i got was much more touching than i expected. My ending in particular got a rise out of me few movies or games have in a decade.
However like i emphasised this may differ completely for you. Based on you and how you played you may be left hating the characters and the story.

But can anyone hate the experience?

I don't believe so.


Gameplay was its a very different silent hill. nunchuk controllers movement and the wiimote is everything from harrys arm holding the torch in third person to a key in a lock or a channel tuner on a trv to a hand you move to solve puzzles like shaking tins to hear if theres a key in one you can upturn to get it out.
No longer is there a radio but a smart phone that you use to take pictures, save, load the menu and even take calls that involve you holding the wiimote to your ear to hear out of its speaker a eerie message left by some emotional ghost or a call from another townsfolk out in the blizzard.

Honestly i wasn't expecting these motion controls to work but they are intuitive and engaging- and capable of more than i would have thought on the wii, especially the torch in a game that for its platform looks absolutely fantastic.
The biggest complaint is the visual cues on how to shake the wiimote and nunchuck to shake off rawshocks during the otherworld phases are often wrong or the movement detection doesnt work well. but truthfully its pretty easy to get through without getting caught once and a handy check point system means even if you do its not an hour of gametime lost or anything.
The biggest portion of the games controls or harry interacting with the normal world and most use the wiimote and the a and trigger and somehow climax made so many things feel intuitive and natural with this claw grip motion.
The camera and torch acting as the same hand as the point of view works seamlessly in this snowy town and the option to zoom in and focus makes it much less constrictive than it would appear to be in the limit range of movement given to a sensor bar compared to a never ending thumbstick held in one direction.
An excellent example of the zoom being in the elementary schools principles office where harry must decipher his password by exploring every nook and cranny of his office to find every clue to get in to find what he needs.
In fact most of the puzzles are well thought out. none are truly hair ripplingly tough but all are neat. another involves altering the positions of statues so there shadows spell out a word. something done in real time with a very impressive lighting engine for this not so hardware heavy console.

The voice acting is not its strongest point but its not resident evil level cheese at all. harry is played as a normal guy. and i mean a truly normal guy, not the hollywood 'normal' guy that other games like alan wake or heavy rain failed to capture. He truly comes off as a poor man caught in a terrible situation. and each member of the backup cast no matter how small there part all put in the effort.

Soundtrack wise its Akira Yamoakas last silent hill soundtrack and he goes out with a bang, like the voice acting id say it pales to silent hill 2s raw emotional nature of it but it still knocks it out of the park. in particular another series of collaborations with mary elizabeht mglynn are haunting and beautiful.
Also it was nice on a personal note to see the change from foggy or rusty nightmare to a more natural, but out and out psychologically devastating world meant we see akira abandon his usual heavy industrial interludes for a more melancholic sound that only serves to emphasise this game is less about making the player feel scared at the oppressive, almost hateful nature of the world around them. But sad, lonely and altogether isolated. not only from the townsfolk in the blizzard but form the protagonist himself.


All in all it is an experience that is hard to evaluate. which is why i will probably deem this my worst review to date but honestly this is a game you need to play. it is the best silent hill game since 2 and you will give a shit about these characters and not just wait to see who gets killed off if and when the next dramatic push forward occurs.

Is it a masterpiece? not at all. the very nature of its split play style means you get wise to it and know "no ice, im safe no worries" or "ice, dont worry, this will have a set end point i just need to reach". This is why i feel it fails utterly as a horror game, because it gets less scary as the game goes on.

However this fault does not dull that fact that this is a pretty damn unique experience in the way that makes silent hill great. does a silent hill game have great combat? no. fluid controls? not really. Tough characters you can get behind? never.
It does have memorable characters, a superb soundtrack, a spooky world you will adore to explore every facet of and an ending that leaves you numb as the credits role.

You know how i classify this kind of game?

It's Silent HIll. simple as that.


SCORE [9/10]

SCARE FACTOR [4/10]

Konami announces Silent Hill 8 with a trailer at this weeks E3

Well, i wasn't expecting this. good week to get back into things huh?

So there's the trailer and i am not quite sure what to make of it. For one thing this is the, what?, fourth developer on a silent hill game? Honestly i'm not sure but it seems like a new survival horror franchise, just using the silent hill games as a basis.

From the trailer it looks like we are going to get the same sort of play as homecoming meets shattered memories (look for a review for that later this week) and i like that. There's a few things that i want to point out.

For one thing the moment where the new protagonist picks up the torch and waves it around with himself dead center in the screen seems a little suspect to me. At the same keynote konami revealed they already have games in the works for microsoft's unfortunately named Kinect and the playstation move. Is it possible we will see controls in 8 similar to shattered memories intuitive torch controls and puzzle solving elements? i for one would love to see that because i can say before any critical review that the controls were part of the reason i enjoyed shattered memories much more than homecoming. For now who knows, but i would bet some good money that this will see motion gaming integration. At least as a possible control method if not a fully implemented one.

Another thing was the, for lack of a less filmmaker based descriptive, was the mise'-en-scene. The 'whole of the scene'. This means the general ability to build a world using location, music, lighting, actors- or in this case character models.

Watching this trailer its mise'-en-scene didn't feel like silent hill. If anything it felt like the suffering crossed with fatal frame. Not that there is anything wrong with that. The prisoner with psychological problems isn't a new thing, it certainly wasn't by the time the suffering was released. It works though. You would be hard pressed to find someone in a worse psychological state without an escape in terms of game protagonists, and honestly its not an average joe looking for his missing loved one. Again. Which is a nice change of pace.

I got the fatal frame vibe from when the protagonist entered the apartment building. With the moving inanimate objects and the little girls it seemed to show something a little different this time. For all of its similarities to the live action movie and homecoming what we see here is a different kind of horror. Instead of what's come before in western attempts at silent hill -in your face scares that underwhelm and seem to scream "YO' DAWG, THIS SHIT IS CRAZY!" we have the scares for the audience and remains unseen for the in game character.

This seem's to suggest a different style of horror. By seeing the scares while the protagonist remains oblivious allows us to be further scared as we put ourselves in there shoes. In many ways its so much worse to have this thing literally breathing down your next without you knowing than a gibbering sack of skin twisting its head, jacob's ladder style, at you straight in your face.

Its highly reminiscent in tone to the openings of the fatal frame games which i have honestly found is the most consistently scary series in the entire survival horror genre.

Honestly we didn't see too much to read much more into it. It could be a cliche mess. It could be a new enthralling survival horror game with a silent hill flavour. Regardless i got a good impression from this, at least in terms of tone. from music to direction to construction this showed a very different take on silent hill, in a subtle but different way.

I'm holding off for gameplay video for a definitive judgement. However let's be honest. we will all buy it, and since when has gameplay and combat mechanics been the selling point of a silent hill game?

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.

Changing gears for a second, next stop dissapointment.

Now needless to say by now you readers know I'm a silent hill fan, and when a new Eldridge tome bearing the moniker appears on the shelves of forbidden planet I'm inclined, neigh, driven to buy the latest offering of silent hill to the comic book medium.

And more often than not I'm disappointed.

The ones on the silent hill experience UMD were good reads, not really inkeeping with the vibe and aesthetic of the series that we've come to expect but i enjoyed them for what they were, thankfully the one about a painter who painted murders and a school bus of cheerleaders fighting the creatures decked out in military hard wear was left out of the package.

They've never been a high point in my comic collecting fanaticism but yet again i saw a new one "sinners reward" on the shelf for £2.80, so i tried, i really tried, to fight against the urge but again i walked away with my all ready light wallet a little lighter and the result?

Utter disappointment.

Sinners reward is about a man driving along near silent hill ,he stops at a gas station with an old man running it who seems to be in every cliche horror movie ever made. wonder were they go for these gigs, the job center?, it look good on your c.v "i spend the last ten years sitting in a rocking chair, hocking into a spittoon and warnin' them no good punk kids not to go down tha' road, but they never listen".

Or something like that.

the story is another poor narrative trying to ride on the series rather than originality, he is a mobster on the run with the bosses wife, why they felt the need to add a 2 page traumatic past about being forced to shoot a dog is beyond me, they must have just been whacking each other off and been in such a euphoric state even all this cliche' crap must have seemed like pulitzer worthy gold.

and so she gets kidnapped and wouldn't you know it she is dragged to silent hill and our not of sound mind mobster has to go and find her.

I know ,Ive heard it before somewhere too....

Id like to comment on the art but there is in fact none in it. it uses prerendered character models from what looks like the Sims, they add some grain to some screen shots and add speech bubbles. its so poor and cheap i cannot stress it enough, rather merely ponder when comics went from actual art to something you'd see on a web comic from 1995.

Theres a part 2 but needless to say i don't think i will be getting it.

avoid [2/10]

Tubbypaws does "li'l hill"

http://tubbypaws.blogspot.com/2007/11/this-is-my-new-little-paper-tribute.html

Feast thine eyes on this piece of horror charm from the tubbypaws blogspot. Its a papercraft models you can print off, cut out adn with a bit of dexterous glueing youll have your own little silent hill diorama.

ive never been into this sort of thing, but im a big silent hill fan so as you can imagine this neat little finds made my day, the torch on the floor is such a good touch, they should use there talents to try a silent hill 4 one, probably one of the holes.

Still, its cute, charming and creepy at the same time, what a combo!