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• Silent Hill, Killer 7 and Not Having Fun With Great Games

  I am less than taken with Bit.Trip Beat. Subsequent playings have not improved my opinion of the game. As I’ve gotten further into it, the fundamental flaws in its design I spotted at the beginning have been born out later in the game. Some people love it. I don’t. They think it’s fun. I don’t. C’est la vie. As I mentioned in my article about Bit.Trip, though, I don’t think that games need to be fun in order for them to be good. I was pretty vague in making my point though. 61FPS reader Kit wrote me an email last week to ask just what the hell I was talking about. How can a game be good if it isn’t fun to play? Isn’t fun implicit in the very act of playing? When’s a game good but not much fun? Read More... Posted Apr 06 2009, 10:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, super mario bros 3, silent hill, nes, konami, playstation 2, gamecube, super mario bros, wiiware, quantic dream, david cage, suda 51, silent hill 2, gaijin games, BIT.TRIP BEAT, silent hill shattered memories

• WTFriday: Silent Hill. Star Wars. No. Words.

  Note to readers: WTFriday is a weekly feature where we find something stupid about video games and get you to laugh until it goes away. Please try to forget this is what we normally do every day of the week. So. Fanart. Like cosplay, fan fiction, and an unwholesome love of tie-in knick knacks, fanart is a common pastime for media fanatics. Often times, as our own Nadia Oxford has noted recently, videogame fanart can be quite good. Talented artists love games too, dontcha know. Like koala bears, who appear to be adorable little ragamuffins until they reveal themselves to be heartless, savage killers of the most deranged kind, fanart has a hidden and terrible dark side. One most only type a scant few words into Google’s image search to discover it. This, though. This goes beyond anything else I’ve seen. Read More... Posted Mar 27 2009, 05:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, star wars, silent hill, wtfriday, cosplay, freaktastic fanart, evil koalas

• Wii Brings Silent Hill to Climax

  No, wait. Rewind. Switch that. Climax is going to bring Silent Hill to the Wii! The rumor going ‘round the campfire is that those nutty Brits behind Silent Hill: Origins will be remaking the original Silent Hill for both Wii and PSP. 61FPS just spent this past Monday celebrating Silent Hill’s tenth birthday. What better way to celebrate the occasion than by taking a stroll down memory lane, waggling as you go? Read More... Posted Feb 26 2009, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, nintendo, wii, psp, silent hill, konami, silent hill origins, Playstation, klonoa, namco, climax

• Sailing the Internet Seas, Historical Preservation, and The Great Rumble Roses vs. Silent Hill vs. Metroid Dance Party Throwdown

  Beware! Sail too far to the east, brave soul, and you will come upon that most dangerous of seas. The sky changes to a sickly fresh bruise color, all angry purple and yellow, and the waves will toss madness and froth against the bow. Even the sturdiest ship, the steadiest mind, will be shaken by the foul humors waiting for them beyond the horizon. Ye have been warned. Beware! Beware the internet! I got lost in an internet vortex this afternoon. It all started innocently enough. Smooth sailing, reading Multiplayer’s interview with Steve Papoustis about Dead Space: Extraction. This led to Matt Hawkins’ Fort 90, and that’s when things started to veer off course. For anyone unfamiliar, Matt’s one of NYC’s great games journalists, but he’s also a madly prolific renaissance man. Fort 90 is a dangerous place, dense with images and text. It’s an easy place to lose your bearings, and that’s what happened to me. Matt linked to the Garry’s Mod work of one MrWhiteFolks. MrWhiteFolks made some spectacular high resolution images of No More Heroes character models stripped of their cel-shading. Very cool stuff. He also made this: Oh there’s more. Much more. Read More... Posted Feb 26 2009, 06:30 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, metroid, no more heroes, resident evil, silent hill, gears of war, halo, resident evil 4, dead or alive, dead space, mtv, silent hill 2, dead space extraction, gmod, silent hill 3, rumble roses, fort 90, garry’s mod

• 10 Years Ago This Week: Silent Hill

  Silent Hill (released February 24th, 1999) did not mark a pivotal moment in the original Playstation’s lifecycle. Technologically speaking, Silent Hill was a solid effort, but nothing unusual for the time. Foregoing the pre-rendered backgrounds that were horror games’ stock-in-trade, Silent Hill’s full-3D environments weren’t as pristinely rendered as Konami’s own, year-old Metal Gear Solid. The CGI cutscenes, another requisite of the era, were competent but by no means up to the Squaresoft gold standard. Its control was wonky, its camera unwieldy, and the voice-acting was stiff even for a Playstation game. Of course, none of that matters. Silent Hill was a pivotal moment in game’s maturation as an affecting, expressive medium. Forget technology; its technical failings made it a stronger work. Forget genre; Silent Hill is not survival horror. It’s just horror. Read More... Posted Feb 23 2009, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, capcom, metal gear solid, silent hill, konami, sony, rule of rose, Playstation, tecmo, fatal frame, team silent, silent hill 2, sunsoft, 10 years ago, akira yamioka, shuji ishikawa, punchline, david lynch, jacob’s ladder, Adrian lyne, siren, clock tower

• Unsolicited Scares: Terranigma and the Desert

  When we talk about games that made us scream like grandmothers treed on a kitchen chair by mice, we default to the obvious. “Ohhh, Resident Evil 4 made me poop myself in fear,” one contributor gasps. “That's nothing,” another counters. “Silent Hill made my poop poop itself in fear!” And so on. It's only natural that we think about the survival horror genre during these conferences of memory. But I've been thinking lately about games that gave me the chills when I certainly didn't expect them to. I won't say I have the hardiest soul around, but even JRPGs and Super Mario games have some genuinely creepy moments that can blindside you. Not necessarily the whole game (unlike Resident Evil or Silent Hill), but maybe a specific scenario that comes back to haunt me when I wake up from a nightmare and fail to conjure something soothing to help me sleep again. First example: The “Desert” music from Terranigma. Terranigma was Enix's follow-up to Illusion of Gaia for the Super Nintendo. It's best known for never showing its face in America despite demand. It's known almost as well for its haunting soundtrack. “Desert” is a sound clip that tends to visit my memory when I'm alone in some dark place, usually when my imagination is already engorged with fear. The clip doesn't have to be taken in context for its haunting whine to skittle down your neck and back, but it helps a bit. Read More... Posted Feb 12 2009, 07:27 PM by Nadia Oxford with | with no comments Filed under: resident evil, silent hill, game music, retro, 16-bit, nadia oxford, terranigma, survival horror, unsolicited scares

• Beating the Dead Horse Who Has It Coming: Playstation Releases on PSN

  Castlevania Chronicles, the peculiar Playstation remake of a peculiar X68000 remake of the original Castlevania, was released as a downloadable title on Playstation Network today. It ain’t the best Castlevania out there, but it’s still a swell action title. The disc release was never widely distributed either, so this will be the very first time most interested players will even get the chance to try it out. Of course, the same could be said of a lot of Playstation games. The halcyon days of 2003 when you could walk into any Blockbuster or Gamestop in the country and pick up five classic PS1 games, often times still shrinkwrapped, for ten or twenty bucks are long over, and the collector’s market is making many great games prohibitively expensive. Want to play Silent Hill? Hope you’ve got an extra sixty-five dollars lying around. How about Suikoden II, considered to be the series’ definitive installment? That’ll be $150. And what about cult classics like CyberConnect2’s Silent Bomber? Yeah, seventy smackers. You shouldn’t have to pay top dollar for these games, though, considering they could very easily be released on the Playstation Network. Read More... Posted Dec 18 2008, 06:45 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, psp, silent hill, konami, castlevania, Playstation, psn, scea, Suikoden, cyberconnect2, castlevania chronicles, silent bomber, Suikoden ii

• Watcha Playing: The Palette Cleanser

  The past six weeks have been teeming with meaty, action games. I’ve been working through them slowly but surely, like an elegant seven course meal. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed was thick, hot comfort fare, a brief appetizer of sloppy design coated in delicious Stormtrooper and rancor killing action. The game’s a buggy mess, really, the gaming equivalent of empty calories, but definitely satisfying. Then there was the dynamic horror duo of Dead Space and Silent Hill: Homecoming, a soup and salad combo built to terrify. They didn’t really scare, but instead delivered visceral body simulations. Both games succeeded by making you constantly aware of your avatar’s physical presence and the heft of their actions, and they achieved this through a careful synergy between atmosphere and play. Yakuza 2 was truly the main course, a game I had no expectations for whatsoever that turned into an all time favorite. Its broad adventure, pulp tale of cops and crooks, and simple but ceaselessly engaging fisticuffs were nourishing, more substantial than anything released on current gen consoles. For dessert, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. Another bonafide surprise, Ecclesia turned out to not be another retread through Igarashi’s decade-old formula, but a challenging successor to Castlevania 2 with fierce action whose variety and elegance was exceeded only by the game’s environments. Yes, it’s been a great month of big games, but it’s been the small things I’ve played in between them, games I’ve played for no more than a handful of minutes here and there, that have given the most *ahem* food for thought. Read More... Posted Oct 29 2008, 05:45 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, whatcha playing, playstation 3, nintendo, star wars, nintendo ds, microsoft, xbox 360, wii, silent hill, silent hill homecoming, castlevania, sony, playstation 2, mega man, katamari damacy, fable 2, mega man 9, dead space, castle crashers, star wars the force unleashed, castlevania order of ecclesia, yakuza 2, wipeout hd

• Yahtzee's Homecoming

  I love the Silent Hill series, but I've never really been able to play any of the games; the music, characters, mythology, and storylines are all fantastic, but the actual playing process scares the crap out of me. Well, maybe "scare" isn't the right word. My last attempt to work through a Silent Hill game happened in 2002, when I tried as hard as I could to overcome my wimpyness--only to find Silent Hill 2's unique atmosphere of loneliness and dread leaving me feeling physically ill and mentally dirty.  But my near-nervous breakdown is a credit to how effective Silent Hill 2 is; and this title's spectacular atmosphere is also one of the reasons why SH2 is a favorite of gaming curmudgeon Yahtzee (of Zero Punctuation fame). But since development house Team Silent has been disbanded (or since they broke up, it's never really been clear), the future of the Silent Hill series has been hijacked, first for the PSP's Silent Hill: Origins, and now with the new PS3 release, Silent Hill: Homecoming. While the latest Silent Hill doesn't have the hubris to slap a "5" onto the title, the aforementioned Yahtzee finds quite a few problems with Homecoming's lack of authenticity: Will there ever be another Silent Hill game as good as the second one? It seems unlikely, but I'd certainly be happy if it happened. Of course, I'd be appreciating it from afar. Read More... Posted Oct 23 2008, 09:30 PM by Bob Mackey with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: silent hill, silent hill homecoming, konami, silent hill origins, bob mackey, team silent, silent hill 2

• Question of the Day: How Do You Make a Horror Game Horrifying?

  Don’t be afraid. There are no ghouls here. Just nerds. ‘Tis the season for delighting in frights, is it not? That time of year when Halloween is just around the corner, the days get darker, and the things that go bump in the night start getting goosebumps, because, hey, it’s cold out there. As I mentioned last week, it’s also the beginning of game season. Horror, as a genre, doesn’t have quite the presence it did in gaming a few years back, but autumn 2008’s seeing a number of high-profile scary games hitting consoles across the land. Silent Hill’s back after a four year absence, EA is releasing their brand new IP Dead Space in just over a week, and Atari is re-launching their ill-fated Alone in the Dark on PS3. Horror games are an absolute favorite of mine. There’s a visceral thrill they provide that is distinct to the medium, mixing the tension-and-release dynamic essential to horror in any medium with the deep satisfaction of accomplishment that comes from successfully playing a game. Read More... Posted Oct 06 2008, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, ea, silent hill, konami, atari, alone in the dark, dead space, question of the day

• Five Games That Will Be Awesome to Remake in LittleBigPlanet

  Ever since its announcement, excited gamers across the internet land have been discussing their level-making plans for LittleBigPlanet. Puzzle levels, hardcore platforming levels, insane art landscapes, and, most importantly, Level 1-1 from Super Mario Bros. Yes, LittleBigPlanet may be all about getting your creative juices flowing but there was never a doubt in anyone’s mind that players were going to throw down all sorts of lovely, copyright-infringing devotionals to gaming’s beloved creations of old. Team Sportsmanship, a group of art students participating in Parsons New School of Design’s Game Jam event, didn’t explicitly recreate a level from Fumito Ueda’s epic, but as PS3 Fanboy put it, their level can only be named Shadow of the LittleBigColossus. It’s a work of art, a lovingly crafted riff on Shadow of the Colossus’ grand encounters made terribly adorable by LBP’s style and Sackboy mascot. Of course, this got me thinking: what games are perfectly fit for the LittleBigPlanet treatment? Here’s what came to mind. Castlevania III Besides being a classic platformer overflowing with badass levels primed for reimagining, Castlevania III is also uniquely suited to LBP’s four-player challenges. You’ve got a vampire, a pirate, a witch lady, and a dude with a whip. What do they do together? They scale clock towers and kick the crap out of less-than-friendly vampires. Perfect. Read More... Posted Sep 24 2008, 08:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, little big planet, top ten, silent hill, castlevania, shadow of the colossus, leisure suit larry, silhouette mirage, top five, joe & mac

• Silent Hill: Homecoming is, Thankfully, Both Silent and Hilly

  Horror, in any medium, relies heavily on the unknown to be effective. For any fans of Silent Hill out there, I recommend not reading the following impressions. They aren’t spoiler heavy, but knowing anything about the game prior to experiencing it first hand may dilute it. You should, however, know that if you’re one of those fans, you should play Homecoming on day one, and don’t be embarrassed if you have to turn on the lights when you do. It speaks volumes of Double Helix Games’ new Silent Hill for Xbox 360 and PS3 that, provided you have a pair of slick headphones, the game can manage to be terrifying, ominous, and discomfiting even when played in a room bustling with journalists, PR agents, and noisy Dance Dance Revolution kiosks. Silent Hill: Homecoming does what Silent Hill should, in principal, do: it makes you profoundly uncomfortable. Not just scared, but itchy and nervous. If you can’t tell, my playthrough of the game’s first half-hour not only left me impressed, but helped to allay my fears that a full-bore Silent Hill game not crafted by Team Silent’s careful eye would not live up to the series’ past accomplishments. Read More... Posted Sep 17 2008, 06:30 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, silent hill, konami, double helix

• Overworld: Friday the 13th

  Overworld examines how one game or series establishes a unique sense of place. Buzz for EA Redwood Shores’ Dead Space has gone from indifference to genuine excitement in the weeks since E3. Now that people have actually played the interactive paean to Cameron-Carpenter-styled horror, they’ve found that its forbidding atmosphere, sound, and HUD-free presentation are hype-worthy and legitimately scary. I haven’t gotten to try it out myself but I’m anxious to get my hands on it. Redwood Shores have taken the essential road to designing quality interactive horror; Dead Space is, at its core, a game about confinement, about being trapped in a hostile environment with limited means of survival. Videogames lend themselves to this method of creating tension and anxiety because their environments are, naturally, closed. System Shock’s dilapidated space station, Resident Evil’s mansion, and even the more expansive town of Silent Hill are perfectly closed spaces, places that simultaneously create dread and a functional goal: how do I get out? It’s far rarer to see a game take the opposite route. After all, it isn’t easy to make a game that makes you feel lost. If a game forces you to lose yourself in its environment, by way of randomly generated environments or trick passages that lead to incongruous locations (as in Zelda’s Lost Woods), it risks frustrating the player – this is especially bad if the game’s intent is horror, since frustration can easily replace anxiety. It’s equally difficult to create a closed environment that is delicately constructed to confuse the player. The original Metroid and its Game Boy sequel are two of the only games that manage to successfully pull this off thanks to its series of identical hallways and dead ends. Another is Friday the 13th. Read More... Posted Aug 14 2008, 03:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, overworld, metroid, nintendo, ea, resident evil, silent hill, nes, dead space, Friday the 13th, ljn

• Games to Movies: Why Is It So Gad-Danged Hard?

  Pardon me, but might I bother you to turn your head while I spew vulgarities? The live-action Castlevania movie by Paul W.S. Anderson is going to be as stinking and putrid as a zombie's testicles. Yeah, as rotten as zombie testicles stewing like dumplings in a pool of sweat collected in the crotch of a pair of leather pants. And...the testicles are dangling. By, like, one scrap of skin. One scrap of maggot-chewed skin. We're used to this, right? It's the curse of video game-based movies to be absolutely no good. A friend of mine who's a huge Silent Hill fan convinced a non-gaming friend of mine to see the Silent Hill movie. Second friend saw the movie and still insists that first friend owes her eight bucks for making her see the stupidest film in the world. But it's not as if the Silent Hill series is incapable of keeping even hardcore horror fans up all night. Why do games translate so badly into movies? Is it because directors (we're not even counting Uwe Boll) have no qualms about taking creative liberties with the source material--the lack of a whip for Simon Belmont's film being a perfect example? That certainly can't be helping the problem. On the other hand, there are game-to-movie adaptations, mostly of Japanese origin, that are as easily recognisable as their inspirations...but they still suck. Read More... Posted Jul 18 2008, 06:10 PM by Nadia Oxford with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: silent hill, castlevania, crisis core, castlevania iii, the dark knight, advent children, james jean, bad movies, spirits paul ws anderson, game movies, within, final fantasy vii, warren ellis

• Looks Are Everything

  There are no gameplay screenshots for Tri-Ace’s Star Ocean 4 yet, but as you can see from the image above, the Xbox 360 game’s cinematics are already quite lovely. The series has never been A-list, but it’s been a persistent presence in the gaming world since 1996, a trail of breadcrumbs marking technology’s path over the years. Star Ocean games have always been gorgeous, from the lush hand-drawn original through its polygonal, but not less colorful, descendants. They have, however, always played like hell. Read More... Posted Jul 01 2008, 04:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, silent hill, star ocean

• The Ten Greatest Fire Levels in Gaming History, Part 3

  The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker — Dragon Roost Cavern Generally speaking, I have as much disdain for the 3D Zelda games as I have love for their 2D predecessors. With some exceptions, they're tedious slogs of fetch questing, hand holding, and unskippable, unbearably patronizing prattle. ("You got a key! You can use it to open a door!") This subject tends to be a bone of contention between me and my esteemed colleague here at 61FPS, but one thing I have to concede to him is that the dungeon design in these games is usually pretty swell. For all of Wind Waker's faults, it has the virtue of being visually gorgeous, which is why its fire dungeon, Dragon Roost Cavern, beats out the dreary Fire Temple from Ocarina of Time. (Don't even get me started on Twilight Princess.) The dungeon's architecture and mood are admirably cohesive, too — you can almost feel the breezy air outside the volcano give way to a brutal dry heat within. And the boss is — no argument here — spectacular. You win this round, 3D Zelda. . . grumble, grumble. . . — PS Read More... Posted May 29 2008, 06:32 PM by Peter Smith with | with 8 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, peter smith, final fantasy, top ten, silent hill, list, zelda, final fantasy vi, axelay, ocarina of time, thunderforce iii, gradius ii, wind waker, twilight princess, the ten greatest fire levels in gaming history

• Screen Test: Alone in the Dark

  As a youth, conceptual horror was enough to scare me into insomnia. Violence was one thing - I could process that as fantasy - but lurking terror was too much. If someone said that they were going to watch a horror movie or tell a scary story, I would freak out. It was right around pubescence, when my capacity for abstraction was growing exponentially, that I developed a taste for fear. Like any other extreme emotion, fear can be delightfully narcotic. After watching It (yes, it scared me. You look at Tim Curry in a clown suit without shitting yourself, I dare you,) I was finally clued into what everyone else seemed to know: being scared is fun. It wasn’t until the late ‘90s, with early Resident Evil and Silent Hill entries, that I started getting my fix from videogames. So those games’ shared ancestor, Alone in the Dark, is an unknown quantity for me outside of reputation. The new Alone in the Dark from Atari, after a couple of years of development purgatory (not quite hell), is looking like it will live up to that reputation. Read More... Posted May 29 2008, 10:00 AM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, resident evil, silent hill, screen test, atari, alone in the dark

• OST: Rule of Rose

  Horror lives and dies by its ability to create an atmosphere that unsettles the basic human state; it must confine, pursue, and isolate. It must be desperate, wrong. Even more so than in other mediums, sound is essential to horror in games since it must constantly envelope its audience in a way that keeps them moving through the world. A horror movie takes its audience with it but a horror game must rely on its audience’s willingness to keep going of their own accord and its aural landscape must antagonize and sooth a player in equal measure. Music itself typically takes a back seat to ambient noise. Akira Yamaoka is the torch bearer for this genre maxim. His work in the Silent Hill series, while not devoid of melody or traditional song structure, is predominantly dissonant squalls, distortion laden static, and the thick organic sounds of things that go bump in the night. Punchline’s Rule of Rose, a cousin of Silent Hill in the horror genre, takes a decidedly different route in creating a soundscape of dread and wrongness. Incidental sound takes a backseat to Yutaka Minobe’s chamber music score. Read More... Posted May 21 2008, 03:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, ost, silent hill, angelo badalamenti, rule of rose, yutaka minobe, akira yamaoka

• Screen Test: Silent Hill Homecoming

  The recent announcement of a Richard Kelly-less Donnie Darko sequel reminded me of a universal truth: just because something’s good, just because that something’s profitable, does not mean there should be more of it. The original Donnie Darko was a deeply personal work and it was that creator’s touch that made it such a wonderful artifact. S. Darko may be end up being a fine film but what’s the point without Kelly’s voice? Silent Hill without Team Silent has already proven to be just as questionable a proposition. Read More... Posted May 15 2008, 02:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, neogaf, silent hill, silent hill homecoming, screen test, jeux-france, donnie darko, climax group, konami, richard kelly, double helix, silent hill origins

• Top Ten Most Terrifying Enemies and Then Five More

  I’ve got to hand it to Cracked, this is an almost perfect list of pants-wetting aggressors from videogames across the ages. Wallmasters, poison head crabs, Baron von Blubba, and Sinistar have all caused seriously tense moments for me in addition to all sounding like euphemisms for incurable STDs. That said, there are a handful of noticeable omissions from this list. 61 Frames Per Second, being the civil minded outlet it is, brings you five other baddies. Read More... Posted May 15 2008, 10:00 AM by John Constantine with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, metroid, final fantasy, cracked, top ten, silent hill, prince of persia, a boy and his blob