• The opening may be the best in the series. It’s heavily inspired by Jacob’s Ladder, and serves well to crank up the dread right away. It’s also a big nod to the Silent Hill 3 opening, though this is definitely more elaborate.
• Alex is by far the most emotive of the protagonists. It’s a pretty sharp contrast after the near-emotionless Henry Townshend in Silent Hill 4: The Room, and I think he’s the only one that’s ever sounded genuinely terrified at what was going on (and all this just from the brief opening).
• The controls are easily the best in the series, though this comes at the cost of dynamic camera angles: the camera is now fixed directly behind the protagonist. No more (that I’ve seen or heard of, anyway) interesting camera tricks designed to disorient, confuse, or scare you.
• How the camera decision affects the cinematic feel of the game is arguable. The graphics are gorgeous, and all the cutscenes appear to be done in-game. While I’ll miss the interesting camera angles, the improved controls may be worth the slight hit to in-game cinematography, and the cutscenes may pick up some of the slack (like the opening, which is awesome).
• The overall look of the game seems heavily inspired by the film, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
• The Steam version suffers a bit from a decided lack of graphic options… there’s no way to enable AA (that I or anyone else can find, apparently), there’s no way to adjust various levels of detail (shadows and lighting vs the environment vs character models, for example), and the game actually crashes when you try to change the resolution (though there’s a dead simple fix for this; still annoying).
• The Steam version also suffers from control customization. You can use an actual controller, which I love, but the default button mappings make no sense and the game refuses to save your customizations. The only way to get permanent, correct button mappings is to edit a config file, which is not the right way to do things. I actually spent most of this morning figuring this out, a large part of why I haven’t actually played very far yet.
• It took me a little while to notice, but the environments are now seemless: there’s no fade-to-black pause after opening a door while you wait for the next room to load, it’s just one big area. This is incredibly cool, and has the potential to increase the lethality of combat (enemies may be able to chase you from room to room, though I haven’t had the chance to test this yet).
• Those nurses are very distracting. *cough*

That’s all for now.

At least part of this has to do with my financial situation: totally broke and in desparate need of a job. Even if there was a game I just had to have I couldn’t afford it anyway. But the problem is bigger than that: there really aren’t very many games that make me want to buy a PS3, Xbox 360, or Wii. There’s Silent Hill 5, but that’s also availabe via Steam. I’m not interested in mediocre First-Person Shooters like Halo 3, and Metal Gear Solid wore out it’s welcome for me after the second installment (seriously, I want to play my games, not watch them). The Wii has Super Mario Galaxy et. al., but as much as I’ve played with it I’m still not totally sold on the wiimote (blasphemy, I know).

Brutal Legend, however, may change my mind. Unless it’s released on Steam, I’ll purchase a PS3 (income willing) just for that game.

It’s an interesting question for a series like Silent Hill. The first, third, and fifth (Origins) games are directly linked, while the second and fourth games stand-alone titles. There are some allusions to the second installment in Silent Hill 4: The Room, but they’re so minor (and the game itself is so different) that claiming any kind of serious story-based link between the two is ridiculous.

So if you’ve never played a Silent Hill game before, where do you start? Some people would probably argue for the order the games were released in: 1, 2, 3, The Room, and Origins. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, though. As stated, 2 and 4 have no direct link to 1 and 3 or even themselves, so there’s no particular reason to play them “in order”. Origins also confuses things; as a prequel to the first game, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to play it last.

A better way to approach the games would be to view parts 1, 3, and Origins as the primary arc (which I’ll call the Alessa Arc). So we have 1, 3, and Origins lumped together in a single continuity, with 2 and 4 as spin offs of the main series: related by setting and theme but not by story. We’ll come back to them in a moment, but let’s ask the same question of the Alessa Arc: what order should these be played in?

Chronologically, the correct order is Oirigins, 1, and 3, but (much like playing the games in release order) this doesn’t make a lot of sense. A large part of the fun in Origins are the references to Silent Hill, which would be lost on anyone that hasn’t actually played the original. Silent Hill 3 suffers from a similar problem, as well as wrapping up the Alessa Arc at it’s completion. Because of this, the best order for the Alessa Arc would be Silent Hill, Silent Hill: Origins, and then Silent Hill 3.

How do 2 and 4 fit in to all of this then? Silent Hill 2 is arguably the best individual Silent Hill game to date, while Silent Hill 4: The Room is only arguably even a Silent Hill game. Anyone being introduced to Silent Hill, having no experience with the franchise, should almost certainly start with Silent Hill 2. It offers a compelling storyline, the ability to tweak the game to individual play style (it has separate “Action” and “Riddle” difficulty settings), and some of the best graphics in the series to date. Silent Hill 4: The Room is more of a throw away title; interesting if you’re a serious fan, but not particularly interesting (or necessary) if you’re unfamiliar with the games.

So the final, best order for a newcomer to the Silent Hill games is: Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill, Silent Hill: Origins, Silent Hill 3, and Silent Hill 4: The Room (if you really can’t get enough of Silent Hill).

It’ll be interesting to see how Homecoming fits in to all of this. Word has it that it’s much closer to Silent Hill 2 in terms of story and game play; combined with an impressive graphical overhaul and (hopefully) improved game mechanics, it could beat out Silent Hill 2 as best individual game in the series.

One thing I fealt needed addressing, however, was my personal database of stuff. Yes, I have so much stuff that I took the time to catalogue it all in a database. I first started it while I was *ahem* acquiring anime, to help eliminate duplicate acquisitions. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen often enough that felt something could be done. Enter Microsoft Access, that useful application that lets you put together databases in no time. Soon I had not only my growing collection of anime cataloged, but also my video games and movies.

After awhile things got really busy (graduation, interviewing, etc.) and I didn’t really keep the thing updated, making it fairly useless. Now that I have loads of free time, however, I thought “Hey, why not go back and redo it?” So last night I started over, this time beginning with my video games. After an hour or so of data entry I now have a Video Games table that contains the title, genre, and platform data on 161 games I currently own.

While that process is horribly boring, there is some fun to be had once it has been completed. Access 2007 gave us PivotTables and PivotCharts, obscenely useful tools for organizing and presenting data stored in an Access database. I’m sure PivotTables have their place, but PivotCharts are more interesting to me. Let’s take a look at one now, shalle we?

Useless Statistics

Here we can see the number of games I own sorted by platform, and then further broken down by genre. Steam is used here as it’s own platform since it’s a fundamentally different thing than traditional PC games. Likewise, the genre listings are largely subjective and some (listing Kingdom Hearts as Adventure instead of RPG) could be disputed. From this chart we can see a number of interesting (and totally useless) bits of information:

• I own a lot of games. More than even I thought. It should be noted that this database does not contain all of my games. Duplicates (owning the same game on different platforms) were excluded, as well as some platforms that I still have but rarely play anymore (Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64).
• I own more Windows games than any other platform, which is pretty surprising. I’m not really a huge PC gamer. Part of this has to do with how games are listed, however. Command & Conquer: The First Decade is listed as the individual games it contains–twelve in all–and not as a single game. Expansion packs are also counted as individual games, which isn’t entirely accurate.
• Of the Windows games I own, nearly all of them are first-person shooters, real-time strategy games, or sim games.
• Survival Horror games make up a significant portion of my console games, accounting for half of my Gamecube games and being the second and third largest genre’s I own on Playstation 2 and Playstation One (respectively).
• Combined, I own more Playstation games than any other platform, with the widest range of genres (9 of the 14 listed).
• I own only four Gamecube games.

There’s more that could be done here. For example, each entry also has a completed option, which I can check off as I complete the games. I haven’t completed 53 of the 161 games I own, for example, most of which are on the PC. “Completed” here is a little subjective, however. Games that don’t have a traditional win scenario (sim games for example, or strictly multiplayer games like Team Fortress 2) are checked as completed.

Anyways, I was having fun with Access and thought I’d share these useless statistics with you all. Next time: useless statistics for anime!

1. I love Silent Hill
2. I love Steam
3. I don’t own a Playstation 3 or Xbox 360

For those that aren’t familiar, Steam is basically iTunes for games. It’s a great setup, and I love the fact that Konami is putting the newest Silent Hill on there. While I’d love to own a Playstation 3 sometime in the future, I’m not dropping $600 on one, not even for Silent Hill.

What would really be great is if they released the previous installments on Steam as well. Yes, I already own them all, but I’d gladly pay for them again to have the Steam copies.

As tribute, someone has put together Meet the Cow, a brief but hilarious video that introduces us to everyone’s favorite cow prop from the game.

The full version of the Spor Creature Creator is available today. I haven’t really been keeping up with Spore to well; it was first revealed way back in 2005, and for whatever reason it never fully caught my attention.

It’ll be launching this September now, and EA has just released the Spore Creature Creator today. Looking at it now, the idea behind Spore it pretty impressive: you take a single-celled organism and guide it through it’s evolution from protein microbe to creature. Then, your creature can multiply and form tribes, which eventually progress into a fully-fledged civilization. Then, your civilication can explore an entire galaxy filled with four billion plantes populated by creatures created by other players.

That’s awesome.

Pyrohawk

Having brought myself up to date on Spore, I had to get the Creature Creator. It’s basically a sandbox tool for creating Spore creatures; I assume it’ll be included in the full version of the game, but it’s available now for $9.99, which isn’t bad if you’re not totally sure about this hole Spore thing. There’s even a free trial of the Creature Creator if you’re extremely cheap, which includes about 25% of the total pieces you can use to build your creatures.

So instead of looking for a job like I should be doing, I’ve been playing with the Creature Creator most of today. It’s a lot of fun; there are just enough different pieces to keep things interesting without overwhelming you with options. And you can come up with some outlandish things. The Piranhapa pictured above is one of my more interesting constructions, but even it only scratches the surface as far as outlandishness goes. It’s downright tame I dare say.

If you’re completely lost about this whole Spore thing, check Wikipedia and download the trial version of the Creature Creator. You owe it to yourself.