Grave Gamer News & Views — silent hill

Silent Hill: Book of Memories Demo Arriving for Vita Next Week

Whisked away from the critical flops that were Silent Hill’s HD Collection and the full-fledged sequel Downpour, Wayforward Technologies’ portable Book of Memories is finally seeing release on October 16th.

Exclusively designed for the PS Vita, Book of Memories infuses multiplayer – something not even its console counterparts have dared try – into a dugeon-crawling RPG that has masked itself in the skin of a survival horror game.  You’d think such a cocktail would come across as disjointed as one of Silent Hill’s hapless abominations, but early impressions paint Book of Memories in a positive light (and thank the Old Ones for that; the Vita could use more meat on its library’s bones).

Come this Tuesday, North American Vita fans will be able to download a demo for the game, finally giving Hill fans a hands-on with 2012’s last entry into the franchise.

Silent Hill Revelation 3D in Theaters October 26th

And here’s the official trailer for those of you looking to revisit the Hill in October.  What’s that?  You didn’t even know they were making a sequel?  I understand.  Usually direct-to-DVD sequels that don’t even feature the original cast slip right underneath the radar…

Except this isn’t DTV.  Revelation 3Dis theater-bound. And most of 2006’s...

Konami’s Not Doing E3 Next Week, They’re Doing It Tomorrow

If you’re hoping to catch Konami’s presentation at E3 next week, you’ll have already missed it.  The company is instead streaming a pre-E3 conference tomorrow night detailing their latest endeavors which are sure to include Metal Gear’s Bayonetta-esque turn, the new Lords of Shadow game (with, hopefully, clarification as to how many Castlevania’s we’re supposed to be getting), and maybe a status update on the missing-in-action Silent Hill: Book of Memories.

If Konami looks to seriously impress, they either have to unveil Metal Gear Solid 5 or, I don’t know, fix the last half-a-year of Silent Hill.  Whatever they’re cooking, I hope you East Coasters are night owls given that the conference won’t air for us until 1:30 in the A.M.

Gaming Quotables of the Day: Corporate Greed Edition

What is slowly becoming common practice in the gaming industry is once again coming under fire because, honestly, it deserves to be abolished like a money draining asshole on your elbow.  What are we talking about?  On-disc downloadable content.  How do we feel about it?  Well, not great:

“Yeah, it’s just plain greed.  The answer is that simple. I think that DLC has been so successful that publishers are trying to get a jumpstart and if you put it on the disc it allows them to unlock it when they feel like it.”

-Michael Pachter, industry analyst

You can read more of Pachter’s musings on the matter here.  He gathers that while DLC will and should remain in the market, locked content’s days are numbered (we’re already seeing progress on that front).  Of particular note, Pachter questioned the legality of, say, a consumer hacking into their copy of a game and unlocking stashed away content.  “I’m not even sure that’s stealing because you did, in fact, buy the disc. That’s about as close as you can get to legal piracy.”  Next time you get into trouble for hacking into a game you bought and paid for, tell them the Pach-Attack told you to do it.

Another money racket the current generation is both simultaneously blessed and cursed with is the advent of HD re-releases – opinions are mostly skewed between Hooray-for-Nostalgia and Stop-Selling-Me-Things-I’ve-Already-Bought.  The latter encampment seems to oft win the argument especially when companies like Konami dish out horrid, buggy ports that de-improve a title’s quality.  Case in point: the Silent Hill HD Collection.

"We got all the source code that Konami had on file – which it turns out wasn’t the final release version of the games.  So during debug we didn’t just have to deal with the expected ‘porting’ bugs, but also had to squash some bugs that the original team obviously removed prior to release, but we’d never seen before…We certainly had our hands full. I think at one point Heather was blue.”

-Series producer, Tomm Hulett

So that’s why Silent Hill 2 and 3 were actually worse than I remember them a full generation ago!  All is forgiven Konami.  I can enjoy these broken, technically incomplete versions fully now that I know a lack of quality won’t stop you from cashing in on a property you’re brutally flogging.  Out of all the missteps taken, I think I actually might’ve wanted to see Blue Heather kept.

Heather Mason by Paul Duffield