Within the circle of paranoid and traumatized Silent Hill fans, there are two fundamental truths that must be embraced upon the release of each new entry in Konami's survival-horror franchise. The first, and more difficult to accept, is that the core gameplay in Silent Hill is sort of awful. Oh, but that gripping atmosphere! That inescapable miasma of melancholy! That's where the second truth comes in: if series sound maestro, Akira Yamaoka, composed the soundtrack (and he did for Homecoming), then it's probably an experience worth having. What say you, early reviews?
1UP (B): "Homecoming stays true to the macabre Silent Hill atmosphere without feeling stagnant. Exploration's perfectly in line with previous games, complete with tons of locked doors, decaying structures, and doubling back between the real world and its hellish counterpart -- but some little nuances intrigue."
Cheat Code Central (84/100): "This game delivers on the experience you have come to expect from the franchise. It will also give you reason to begin clamoring for the next installment. The folks at Double Helix gave me the Silent Hill I wanted: a nerve-racking, scary as hell experience to hold me over this Halloween season."
IGN (67/100): "Unfortunately, I admit that the game feels like a bit of a letdown. The gameplay has been reduced from a tense psychological experience fraught with spine tingling jumps and scares to a generic, predictable action title set in the location with good graphics and a great soundtrack."
Atari, the distributor for Konami games in Australia, has stated (via GameSpot) that Silent Hill: Homecoming won't be coming to the land down under. The game has been refused classification by the OFLC, making it illegal to sell the game in stores. At earliest, the title is expected to arrive "next year" while Konami decides whether to edit the game for the region.
Fallout 3, which was also refused classification in Aussieland, endured minor edits so it could be sold in the country -- and those edits poured over to other regions. That will apparently not be the case for Silent Hill: Homecoming, which is still due to arrive everywhere else this year.
A few things. First, I love the Silent Hill series. Second, E3 really isn't the venue for demoing a Silent Hill game. Even in Konami's relatively quiet meeting room, it was impossible to hear any dialogue or music in Silent Hill: Homecoming -- headphones were available, but they were broken ... grrr. Considering that the soundscape of any given Silent Hill game is responsible for half of the atmosphere (arguably more), it makes it hard to judge how the game feels. So, you'll just have to settle for a look at how the game plays.
There are two things we know about Pyramid Head. One, he is a physical manifestation of guilt. Two, he generally causes the physical manifestation of crap in your pants. Oh, actually, there is a third thing we know about Pyramid Head: he makes an appearance in Silent Hill Homecoming. This raises the question: what is protagonist Alex Shepherd guilty of? Our guess is that he feels guilty about the desperate fan service required to keep gamers interested in this series.
Konami's Silent Hillfranchise 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 breathingeatingseeingwalkingtalking sleeping after viewing them.
Though the characters in Wes Craven's magnum opus would be an obvious exception, we're pretty sure that protagonists in horror movies have never seen horror movies -- looking at the Silent Hill series, it's clear this rule applies to video games as well. Not that we're complaining, as if the characters in Konami's beloved horror series would collectively realize that abandoned, fog-filled towns are abandoned and fog-filled for a reason, they would probably stop going to them in search of deceased or missing wives/offspring/brothers -- and we wouldn't have these gorgeous screenshots from the upcoming Silent Hill: Homecoming to drool over.
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 Vhas been retitledSilent 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:
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.
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 5and 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 Hillgame -- 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.
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.
Of course, the world's just being polite. Though Konami's official announcement of a PlayStation 2 version of 
