Programs: New 'Silent Hill' Is Gruesome and Awesome
463204
PROVIDENCE, R.I.  - I hope the tenants at South  Ashfield Heights are getting cheap rents. The place is a mess:  The hallways aren't just filthy, they're splattered with blood.  Bloody handprints mark the walls opposite Room 302, which is  also the source of some verrrry strange noises.
704636
Gabe: I took the Wii home over the weekend and was able to put quite a bit of time into Zelda. There was what I would describe as a bru ha ha over at Joystiq when one of their bloggers claimed the game was a flop. He cited its terrible graphics as reason enough to dismiss it entirely. The response in the thread afterwards was heated with lots of people claiming that the graphics weren"t as bad as he claimed and that the game actually looked really good. Having played it all weekend I"m here to tell you that"s not the correct response.
659002
Doom 3 combines hectic gameplay with genuine shocks to deliver a deliciously uncomfortable gaming experience.
448752
ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed.   This release adds support for 8 new games, including freeware Lure of the Temptress as well as I Have no Mouth, and I Must Scream, Elvira 1 and 2, Waxworks and Sierra pre-AGI games. Also iPhone and Maemo ports are distributed officially. Many bugfixes, more non-English versions of the games are supported, and much much more.  For the complete list of changes, please check out the release notes at http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=568141   This project can be downloaded at: http://www.scummvm.org/downloads.php
579938
There's only one thing better than riding a halfpipe ramp in "Tony Hawk's Underground 2" - doing it in real life. Since I'm pretty sure that's never going to happen, I'll keep on defying gravity in this new game from Activision.
584293
When a game constantly subjects you to scary new things, keeping you eternally off balance, the experience frightens far more than gore-heavy horror films that lack suspense and subtlety.
618473
Tycho:  Gamespot is saying there's a reproducible crash in the new Tiger Woods for the 360, and that the Gamernet functionality doesn't work there either.  PS3 version sounds clean.    Next year, can you guys make sure you put your crash bugs into the demo, too?  It would really help the consumer make an educated decision.    It's so weird; we had problems with the last one, but it never occurred to us that the next one could be worse.  That is to say, I expect inertia.  I don't expect it to break before I even get the Goddamned thing home.      (CW)TB
334178
There's only one thing better than riding a halfpipe ramp in "Tony Hawk's Underground 2" &#151; doing it in real life. Since I'm pretty sure that's never going to happen, I'll keep on defying gravity in this new game from Activision.
305759
Tycho:  In case you are wondering, cats apparently need regular maintenance, like cars.  And, like an oil change, this juicing process can be done (I'm told) at home, preferably with the curtains drawn and a couple inches of sawdust laid down.  That's right: you can wring out your own cat's asshole.  This is the kind of helpful information you can expect when you visit Penny Arcade.  Don't everybody run home at once.    I've been playing a lot of Prism on the DS, even though the Zelda cartridge seems to squeal as I remove it.  I understand there's some kind of Ghost Ship?  I forget all of my cares, and also the cares of Princess Zelda, once those beams begin to refract.    They've ginned up some ridonculous crap about light eating space monsters to support their gameplay, which is very solid, and requires no extraterrestrial photophiles.  It's a puzzle game.  When I put pieces of a puzzle together, I never think about how alone each piece must feel, longing only to congregate with similarly knobbed partial images.  So, discard that.  Discard also the truly nasty presentation, no doubt a result of hard time done in already the Mobile and PC Casual markets.  Part these imperfections like tall savannah grass, and gaze into the game's rich core:  the creation of sometimes very complex circuits.     Inside each puzzle grid, the player is given some combination of Light Emitting Entities, Reflective Mirrors, Splitters, or Prisms.  You must jigger the aforementioned until light of the correct colors is distributed to targets around the edge of the field.  That's it, and the fun comes from how complicated this process can become.  There are quite a few cooperative puzzles as well - where each player has access to half the grid, and they must work together to route everything.  If you try this mode - and I request that you do so, as you only need one (1) cartridge and a willing accomplice - I recommend that you each turn your DS sideways, so that the UI is along the bottom.  That will make it so that "left" and "right" and "up" and "down" all mean the same thing to each of you.  Trust me, you want this.  The game is hard enough without the horror of fully relative terms.    Prism actually taught me something fairly significant about why I play games, and I think it's because the gameplay is so clean and the presentation so spartan that I could pick up on it.  I like games that generate communication.  This is why team-based shooters, roleplaying games, and tactical games are my delight - every one of these entails a suite of custom language to describe it, they require constant dialogue, and, most importantly, all other things being equal these games can be won by the efficient use of language.  Working out puzzles together in Prism has a strong logic component, but in large part the challenge was communicating ethereal notions succinctly.    I suppose this is also why I torment you here, thrice weekly: even when playing a game by myself, I am harvesting the experience so that it may be reconstituted here.  So, thank you for reading.  You dignify my leisure hours.          The Playstation 3 in the office has been more than acceptable for playing the sometimes short, often bad games that have arrived on it - but this holiday, with the titles to prove out the claim, I had to "get mine" in the bawdy parlance of the young.  What tipped my hand wasn't the four hundred dollar system on offer, rather, it was the three hundred and seventy nine dollar model.  These are probably mostly a mail order proposition, but any of those rare twenty gig models the platform launched with got bumped down by the new price.  It's inexpensive by PS3 standards, but it's positively cheap for a Blu-Ray device.  Now fully franchised, flexing all the rich benefits of Sony citizenship, you may expect me to be even more brutal in my critique.
179741
Forgot scary movies. Horror video games loaded with zombies and other monsters will really make your skin crawl.
448930
It may be hailed as one of the most innovative and popular video games to date, but media watchdogs are warning parents to think twice before placing the sexually explicit and ultra violent Grand Theft Auto: &quot;San Andreas&quot; adventure under the tree for
254774
See the selfless gameplay in this new batch of altruistic games.
698615
These games aren't the best, nor are they the prettiest. &nbsp;Instead, these are the games I played with my friends - the games let us kick the ever-loving-crap out of each other in increasingly fascinating ways. &nbsp;These are the most original head-to-head sleeper hits on the Sony Playstation. Just some fun stuff you might've missed the first time around.
6198
Morally duplicitous torture porn: how else to describe âUntraceable,â a bleak, rain-washed horror thriller.
93167
Violence is anathema to modern German sensibilities. That pacifism applied to video games could mean legal repercussions. By Bruce Gain.
735999
A workout is certainly one way to burn off some excess anxiety after a long, stressful day at work. For wound-up video gamers, though, it's a lot more fun to fire up the console and plow through endless waves of zombies.
208464
Tycho:  When I started reading articles about Senator Brownback's bill - the one that would require that the ESRB play through games in their entirety - I expected to agree with it in principle, but take issue with its execution.  The shrill phase of the site, where I would don armor and ride under the aegis of the true gamer no matter how mild the incentive, now rests in the reliquary with Xbox Controller Jokes and Jabs At User Friendly.  I had chosen a singularly poor moment to become reasonable.  Upon further examination, the Senator's plan (which I think may be rightly called a machination) is the sort of thing one might forge in the fires of Mount Doom.