Goodnight sweet prince.

HURM.



I get back into playing some horror games. whats come out that i havent posted about? resident evil 5, left 4 dead 2, silent hill homecoming ect. ect. What do i own them all on? the xbox.

I turn it on and 40 seconds later it red rings. superb. Not my first, just my first microsoft won't repair for less than £100.

*sigh* i don't know why i keep putting up with this....

Something neat for PS3 owners in the uk

So i took one of my bi-yearly trips into playstation home to have a nosey and wouldn't you know it but they've added-in summer for some reason, the haunted house hospital,'the ward of despair' from siren blood curse that was released on halloween in '09.

I don't know why we have it now, maybe its been hidden in the mess of files home was till the last interface update but its there, its free and im about to give it a shot. Two sec's.

.....Okay, tried it. Its a little janky, but its got a few genuine jump scares. you and 5 other people are meant to work together to escape.
You really dont work together, you basically set off alarms and stuff to get keys and stuff to escape the hospital from siren. Its a little creepy and i jumped once. it even attempts to use resident evil set camera angles.
Don't get me wrong its not that great but ive seen worse in retail games and this was just a neat freebie so give it a try!

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?

Hello old friend.

Well after a bit of thinking i've decided to restart this blog. The main site we have been working on is coming along, but slowly. Plus i figured why didn't i just keep this going as a fun little side project, since that was how it got started in the first place, and thats my thinking now.

When save point goes online it will have most of my reviews and articles and such, but i'm gonna get back into The Raccoon city times blog for my own little hobby of horror videogames.

In retrospect i think it was stupid and overzealous to stop altogether, especially when ive played a lot of new horror games since then and so much has happened in recent months to the genre as a whole.

Well, enough rambling, back to the games!

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.