Review: Horror comes home in &#39;Silent Hill 4&#39;
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Editor&#39;s Note: The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of Marc Saltzman, a freelance technology journalist whose reviews also appear on the Gannett News Service.
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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.
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Tycho:  There was so much news, we had to poke it with a schtick.  I'm allowed one or two puns like that a year.  At least, I hope.    The value of each leisure minute has increased exponentially since the holiday deluge began, that's not precisely news, but the games that are losing out over here are of such a high caliber that it's a little scary.  I downloaded the demo for PGR4 and loved it, in fact I still play it - I'm playing it right now, and you would be horrified if you knew how.  This said, I have no idea where I would fit this game into my life.  This is patently ridiculous - a game of this obvious polish and pedigree would command that tray for weeks at any other time of the year.  We're both in love with Zelda, but can so rarely consummate this love as bright baubles are constantly rolling in.  Gabriel doesn't even make time for nightly Halo - his evening is entirely routed to The Lion War.  When Call of Duty 4 hits on the fifth of November, I have plans to betray our collective in a similar fashion.    The time I did have yesterday wasn't even invested in the long-form retail games that I see as the core of my responsibility to you.  Every moment not devoted to Halo was soaked up by Every Extend Extra Extreme, an XBLA game I had already played on the Playstation Portable and the PC, only to find that its true calling was on the console.  Another game with a strong audio focus from the creators of Lumines and Meteos, the entire objective is to blow yourself up in such a way as to create the most casualties - I can't wait until Jack gets ahold of this one.  It has other modes, but that's the basic idea, and of course it's all very abstract.  Like other games from Q Entertainment, how much you derive from it is often a function of how open you are to its audiovisual synergies.  It's fun, but that fun is not a result of complex systems.      I also picked up Everyday Shooter for the PS3, in further dereliction of my duties, having a series of profound experiences with it that might be too strange to describe.  The game's author expresses a debt of gratitude toward Q's Mizuguchi and others, but he's accomplished something wholly his own here.  Superficially it's one of these dual analog, robotronian shooters every platform is weighed down with now.  Don't be fooled by that trope, and certainly don't think you can come to any conclusions based on screenshots.  Where Lumines or Every Extend Extra draws from electronica, a great match for their style of presentation, Everyday Shooter disarms the player with a suite of earnest, analog songs played on guitar.  At times, during the course of ordinary play, I felt as though I were interrupting him.     In gameplay terms, each level apparently plays around with the idea of chains and combinations, and I say "apparently" because I've only played two levels in - every time I die, I get sucked in by his menu.  It's just a bunch of text, but moving down or right produces a single note, and pressing left or up produces a two note chain.  Pressing a face button produces a string of four notes, and with these rude tools one can actually augment the title music quite well.  I didn't realize I was doing it at first.  When Gabriel came in perhaps fifteen minutes later, I felt as though I had been woken from a dream.
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Tycho:  Kotaku carried a story yesterday that is (basically) the Nintendo DS version of that Playstation Pornable scare from six months ago.  You can see it here, and you should, because it's awesome.  It depicts a scenario so imaginative that it juts into the realm of speculative fiction:
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After a 12-year slumber, ethereal jester NiGHTS returns to the Nintendo Wii in NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams,  a nightmare adventure doomed by frustrating controls. The last time this franchise made an appearance, Sega was still in the console business.
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"Saw IV" was a Halloween hit -- but has the series lost its edge?
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Poor Renny Harlin. When the director&#39;s name appeared on the screen at the end of Exorcist: The Beginning, the friend we dragged along to see this dog&#39;s breakfast exclaimed, &quot;That explains everything.&quot; ...
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Even if you don&#39;t particularly like video games, you&#39;d better resign yourself to what appears certain to anyone who has spent a little time with Sony&#39;s new PlayStation Portable.
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Sidewinders, scorpions  and dehydration. There was never a dull moment on the set of  &quot;Resident Evil: Extinction,&quot; which hits theaters Friday.
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The Silent Hill series of games have always been ripe with weirdness and hellish alternate realities.
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Following the success of The Ring and, more recently, The Grudge, a slew of Hollywood remakes of Japanese horror movies are in the pipeline. But audiences beware: These are not your typical monster-in-the-closet scary movies.
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It takes a special kind of person to stay up all night and stand in a line nearly 250 people long just to buy a video game -- but for rabid fans of the first &quot;Halo&quot; on
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The game isn&#39;t for everyone because of its graphic violence and coarse language, but mature fans of this 32 million-unit-selling franchise who want to know if this sequel lives up to its hype, the answer is a resounding yes.
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Move over Japanese horror film makers: The best stuff is coming out of Korea these days. Get ready for some really weird, genre-bending movies. By Jason Silverman.
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Shotgun at the ready, I inched along the muddy path toward a ramshackle wood shed shrouded in the foggy distance. After countless run-ins with possessed villagers in the new video game "Resident Evil 4," I'd learned to take each step with trepidation.
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Well, somehow they did in the first adaptation of the videogame âResident Evil.â All was loud, gory and yet somehow flat. All is certainly loud and gory in the sequel
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Tycho:  There's a new Alternate Reality Game spinning up for Halo 3, God Damn them - God Damn them to hell.  I know perfectly well that I am being subjugated by a sophisticated marketing effort, that the best one can accomplish in these games is to get a real good look at the teeth before the mouth closes around you.  I type this even as the rabbit holes stand open in two other windows.  I don't presume to speak for the entire species, but there is something about secrets that does bit the mind.