Konami's Silent Hill franchise has forgotten more about keeping us hiding beneath our covers than most games will ever know. Even EA's own Glen Schofield tips his hat to the series, telling us earlier this week that he considers the 1999 PlayStation original to be among his favorite survival horror games ever. But after nearly a decade of stumbling through the fog, it's easy to feel that the dilapidated burg of Silent Hill has gotten a bit too long in the tooth.

For the series' sixth installment, Konami has handed the blood-soaked baton over to external developer Double Helix Games, a recent mash-up of The Collective and Shiny Entertainment. The result is this fall's upcoming release, Silent Hill: Homecoming, and we recently puzzled our way out of mist long enough to ask the game's lead designer, Jason Allen, just why we should care about this latest return trip to Silent Hill.

Did we mention just how creepy the latest Silent Hill installment is in our most recent update on the game? Let's see ... yes, we did. Still, for those who either refuse to believe us – in which case you're meanies – or aren't yet convinced of its (dare we say?) fear factor, we offer you a ghastly gaggle of new shots from the game, by way of Konami. Just don't blame us if you have trouble breathing eating seeing walking talking sleeping after viewing them.

So thanks, horror genre characters. Your obvious ineptitude for danger avoidance may deliver you into the jaws of certain doom, but it provides us with near-limitless entertainment -- and really, isn't that more important in the long run?

When you're a blogger and you don't have a lot of facts to go on, one of your greatest tools is hypothesizing, or as it's more commonly known, guessing. For example: Konami has announced that Silent Hill V has been retitled Silent Hill: Homecoming. Now, we don't know the reason for the change, but we're going to hypothesize that people were uncomfortable with an American-developed game that appears to be a departure from previous Silent Hills being one of the main, numbered series. See what we did there? That was just guessing.

They also say that the game will be out in Europe at the end of September. We're going to hypothesize that it will also arrive in America around that same time, but honestly we have no idea. [Update: Hypothesis correct!] Feel free to offer your slightly less authoritative hypotheses about the name change below.

A jaw-dropping moment of silence for Embrace's psychotic_blade's snowman (update: fixed attribution), quite possibly the cuddliest little fella we've ever run away from in horror. Check out the highlights for today:

Joystiquery
Counting Rupees: The year of the PS3
X3F Week in Review: March 14, 2008 - March 20, 2008

News
GameTap Thursday: The Fire Flower Fleet Command Denied our Ops
Lionhead's Molyneux open to revisiting his past catalog
Check out 17 minutes of Persona 4 footage
New PS3 firmware to add Blu-ray Profile 2.0 support
Hudson bringing triple-dose of Bomberman to Wii
EB pulls plug on radical Haze promotion
Rock Band music store rockin' consoles this week
New Rock Band Store reminds us full albums are still 'coming soon'
Rock Band patch also fixing incidental issues
Rock Band surpasses 6 million song downloads
Microsoft hires former Nintendo exec to expand Euro footprint
Indie film to take on mythical, 'evil' arcade game
Battlefield: Bad Company beta to start next week
Midway CEO Zucker departs, company left looking for leadership
PS3's Orange box gets 128MB mystery patch
Civilization Revolution establishes community site
Pandemonium and Blood Omen rated by ESRB for PSN
Dreamfall joins Xbox Originals lineup March 24
UT3 PS3 patch coming March 27
Two Worlds: The Temptation dated for fall, now called a sequel
Activision believes Gibson's patent has 'no merit'
Ubisoft buys up Tom Clancy rights, announces Clancy MMO
Banjo Kazooie gets feature-light homepage
PSN Thursday: Um, well, next week could be better?
Bully patch now on Live, but does it fix anything?
Florida Supreme Court orders Jack Thompson not speak directly to them
Nintendo stock downgraded on fears of slowing system demand
British MP continues fight against Manhunt 2
Lost Planet Colonies has new first-person mode
Lionhead releases fifth Fable 2 video diary
Robert Downey Jr., Terrence Howard give voices to 'Iron Man' video game

Rumors & Speculation
Gamestop's Too Human placeholder moved from May to August
Rumor: Sony no longer funding L.A. Noire

Culture & Community
ESA Foundation offering $45K in game dev scholarships
Guitar Hero III Guinness record holder wins tournament, beats previous record

Of course, the world's just being polite. Though Konami's official announcement of a PlayStation 2 version of Silent Hill Origins is welcomed, it arrives about as unexpectedly as that surprise birthday party you planned for yourself once. That might have been more enjoyable if you had any friends, but then you're far too busy clobbering jittery, faceless nurses in your free time.

Incidentally, that's exactly what you do in this game. Casting some light on the spooky town's black history, Silent Hill Origins for PS2 aims to impart the "chilling, suspenseful and fear-filled experience that handheld gamers encountered" to those who prefer considerably larger screens. "This is their chance to learn more of the mystery and mythos surrounding Silent Hill that's been hinted at in earlier games and made the series such a success," said Anthony Crouts, VP of marketing and ineffective secret keeping at Konami Digital Entertainment.

We'll share further details as soon as they come shambling out of the foreboding mist.

Film director and screenwriter Roger Avary, whose game-related work includes the Silent Hill, Driver and Return to Castle Woflenstein adaptations, has been arrested in Ventura, California on suspicion of driving under the influence and manslaughter.

Avary was driving the car with his wife Gretchen and friend Andreas Zini when the car crashed. Avary's wife was injured and Zini later died at the hospital from injuries related to the crash. Avary is also known for co-writing Pulp Fiction and Beowulf. He has been released on $50,000 bail. The film adaptation of Return to Castle Wolfenstein has been on hold since the beginning of the Writer's Guild of America strike.

The man who makes Silent Hill sound so creepy, Konami's Akira Yamaoka, has been working with an American team to bring you Silent Hill 5 and as a result, has a pretty unique perspective on how Japanese and U.S. teams compare. His conclusion? The future isn't particularly bright for Japanese houses. "[The U.S teams'] graphical and technical ability is amazing," he says. "There's a huge gap, actually. They're very advanced. I'm Japanese, and I think this is not just with Silent Hill but with the whole of the industry -- I look at what American developers are doing and I think wow ... Japan is in trouble."

He elaborates on the problems, citing too much pressure on aging developers and the language barrier slowing some development. We would have guessed that the troubles would stem from trying to work under the constant threat of ninja attack, but it should be noted that we're not big readers.

So get this: Konami made a (by most accounts) pretty good game called Silent Hill Origins for the PSP, and according to a Kotaku tipster, the company will be moving the game to the PS2 in March 2008! Making a port of a decent game from a well-regarded franchise for a system with 120 million units sold worldwide, can you believe it? ... Yes, so can we.

As we said, this hasn't been confirmed by Konami, but it seems like one of two things would be happening right now. Either they are porting SHO to the PS2, or they've seen this story on the internet, fired the guy in charge of thinking of things like this and are in the preliminary stages of porting SHO to the PS2. Either way, we'd bet that you'll hear more about it soon.

It's been a while since Konami first announced Silent Hill V, and details revealed since have been few and far between. A new issue of Official Playstation Magazine, however, has revealed some new tidbits of information about the latest in the survival horror series.

The radio and the flashlight -- which were abandoned in the previous Silent Hill game -- return in the fifth console installment of the series. Unlike previous games, the camera will feature full 3D movement, and the article hints at some possible Sixaxis functionality in the PS3 version. The rest of the article features some new, "exclusive" images and character renderings, and recaps story and gameplay elements that were already known, but it could be a nice refresher for anyone who's forgotten exactly what to look forward to.

[Via PS3 Fanboy]

Not quite as terrifying as the titles he's been working on, Akira Yamaoka sat down with us during E For All to give us a teensy bit of information about the upcoming Silent Hill: Origins, and what it took to bring the game to the PlayStation Portable. While he didn't tell us the secret to being scary on a much smaller screen, we imagine it'll mean a lot of OMG IN YOUR FACE moments and spooky noises. Perhaps they'll even tell people this is a game better enjoyed with headphones.

Check out the brief interview after the break.