A very creepy Silent Hill 3

Silent Hill 3 Review
Created by Konami
Reviewed by Greg Cutcher


Prepare to be chilled to the bone. Prepare for gruesome gore. Prepare for horror. Prepare for a linear game. All of this is true for Silent Hill 3, a 3rd person action/shooter, created by Namco. Step into the third installment of the 'Silent Hill' franchise where you play as Heather, a young teenager, caught between hell and a maddening world (Perhaps a horrifying analogy of puberty?). The game mechanics follow the previous two games, but there are enough quirks to make this game sparkle.

Heather, after waking up from a rather vicious dream, finds herself in a fast-food joint, bustling with people. Heather, wanting to just go home, makes a phone call before her departure, she is stopped by a detective named Douglas who is dressed as if he were from a 60's movie. Heather is creeped out and escapes into a girl's washroom, only to escape through a window leading to an alleyway, (i.e. The perfect place for shoplifters to make their escape). Upon finding that there is no way to escape except by going back into the mall, you reluctantly do such. Except, the mall's shops seem to be shut down and no one is inside anymore, except monsters and nastiness. She soon encounters Claudia who tells her that she must remember who she once was and stuff about Paradise. Follow Heather as she goes through the mall, the subway and a few other fun-filled places that makes open-heart surgery seem like a day at the circus as she works her way back home. Parts of the game that you go to are a Church, a Hospital and an Insane Asylum . . . Happy Times!

Before you start the game, you have to choose your setting of Game Difficulty (How hard are the monsters) and the Puzzle Difficulty (How hard are the puzzles). Both choices have the options of 'Easy', 'Normal' and 'Hard'. This nifty feature allows a player to have up to 9 different game possibilities. Back to the game-on hand.

Monsters, creepy and scary. You have the simple dog with the head that opens up fully to bite you, flying bug-like critters that sound like a cat in a blender, a giant puss-filled man with short-stubby legs, and so on. These monsters add quite the theme to the game, making noises and being of such gruesome design that their very sight gives one the heebie-jeebies.

What do you do with these monsters that you encounter? Well, I will say this: You do what most 3rd person action/shooters do, you take out weapons and smash your opponents down. First off, you have melee weapons, such as a pipe, a maul and a katana, to beat the living @#$* out of those things that come at you. These monsters learn after a bit however, attempting to dodge your close-range weapons, so what do you do then? Pull out your fine guns like your pistol, your shotgun or your machine gun that'll rock their world. Still, once again, this is nothing new. Even the limited supply of ammo for your guns that you can find isn't a new feature.

There are also puzzles in the game. However, depending on the difficulty you selected at the start, some of the puzzles are different or non-existent. This is another key-feature about Silent Hill. The Puzzles are there to make one think (or use some stupid walkthrough) to find out how to solve them. When one uses their head though, the puzzles can turn out to be quite fun and gives the player a break from all of the other nasties in the game.

The Atmosphere is strikingly scary. Each area you go into has its own quirkiness. Blood, run-down buildings, lovely texturing that makes ones eyes cry in agony and interest. There are two worlds, one where the area seems to be normal/run-down while the other is filled with blood, pulsating walls, grates, hung corpses, noises from afar that make you shiver. Even monsters create their own addition, moaning and making their own screwed up sounds a good distance away. Some areas will be pitch-black, so your flashlight will only give you a tiny area to see while your radio is the only thing that has static when a monster is nearby.

The music is awe-inspiring . . . when you hear it. Throughout many places in the game, you will have no music and no sound, save for your footsteps, the monsters and the weapons you use. However, when the music happens, it's meant to be there. Even the opening video with the song gives some good insight into the game.

A downfall in the game is that it is linear. Unlike the first two Silent Hill games, Silent Hill 3 will take you from one area to the next without allowing you to have much option to wander. The areas you will be in too have so many blocked off sections that you will be lead to your destinations without any or much feeling of wanderlust.

Still, all-in-all, Silent Hill 3 is worth the play, even if it comes across as a one-time play. I enjoyed it, it gave me a good scare here and there. I wish there was more to it, but hey, grabbing a katana and turning a monster into chop suey before spicing it up with bullets in a blood-soaked environment, makes my day!

F.E.A.R. me

F.E.A.R. (First Encounter Assault Recon

Published by Vivendi

Review by Greg Cutcher

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Or so F.E.A.R. will want you to believe.

Within the game, you will be playing the new recruit of F.E.A.R. Unfortunately, just after joining, the squad you are in relays a video-feed of a cannibalistic psychopath, Paxton Fettel, eating someone while soldiers stand about to guard him. After seeing the footage, the F.E.A.R. Squad decides to send out some members to take down Paxton. After deciding to go ahead, the head of your squad decides you are fit to go because you are quick, able and above all else, agile beyond any measure.

Awesome, so now you have your in. Go forward with your gun-in-hand and read your one-page mission brief as the game loads. As the game actually begins, you find yourself in the heat of action, sorta. You shoot your way through some areas until you discover some burnt skeletons and a nasty girl with long hair covering her face and fire dancing about her. She crispifies some more solders and tosses you out of a window.

As you play more, you find that there is a corporate cover up for military testing, another group that wants to interfere and random 'scary' bits. Some of these 'scary' bits include random people getting burnt to cinders or you winding up in a random pool of blood and seeing a skeleton emerge. You will eventually run into robots and the like, but they are not scary beyond the fact they can kill you in a blink of an eye. Sometimes you can listen to phone messages on random phones to get some more story insight, but it's an over-used mechanic.

Okay, so I gave you a smidgen of insight into the game, but what gameplay makes this game potentially appealing? You can slow down time . . . Wait, you are just lightning-quick. By holding down Ctrl (or whatever key you set it to), a small blue bar will start draining while you speed up. Whatever is about you slows down dramatically, however, you slow down a fair bit as well With this ability, you can crouch, improve your aim with a keystroke and wait for the enemy and plug him with bullets. Unfortunately, F.E.A.R. Starts off by training you that this ability is good for running away. So you have the ability to slow down time, so-to-speak, wonderful.

Next on our list is what the FPS bits that make F.E.A.R. its own. You can either have the ability to run and fast-walk like there is no tomorrow, save that your aim will be like the Imperial Guard out of Star Wars, pathetic. With one keystroke, you can limit your running to a walk and your walk to a stagger, but this improves your aim. After you kill soldiers, you can go near them to steal ammo and weapons. Seriously, if this is sounding like mechanics from other FPS games, you can skip this paragraph now.

I'll hand it to Monolith Games however for the AI. Within F.E.A.R., the enemies act as individual characters that interact with one-another against you. If one spots you, they'll be quick to alert the others. If you hide, they'll shot to one-another, devising ways to either flush you out or to kill you where you are at, and do it.

Scripted events really bothered me in this game. At one point I'm playing, then I find my character getting thrown around by the evil girl, or someone knocking me out from behind. What really seemed irritating was that you could see at points some 'distortion' in reality and you have no choice but to walk into them. Well, you have a choice, but the other option is to turn back and face empty areas that you've cleared. Not fun. Other scripted events have random things like a kid running through a dark cavern and vanishes to a ghost walking away from you and eventually exploding into ash.

There is a huge section of gore in this game. With gore toggled on, you can see blood and mayhem caused by you or the girl or anyone else for that matter.

Lastly, I'll kick the can with physics. With the game engine, many things can be moved about/knocked over/what have you. However, unlike some games now, you cannot interact with 90% of the things about you besides knocking them around. I wish there was more you could do with the environments, but not much you can do. However, it's always fun to see things flying about with your grenades or a spray of bullets.

Concluding for this simple review, I find F.E.A.R. to be adequate. It will not scare the bejeebers out of you unless you really are revved up for a scare. However, the game play offers a little bit of entertainment, but not enough. Scare factor is quite meager, unless are scared of random pools of blood and skeletons. If you get F.E.A.R., play for the AI, the gore and the semi-decent storyline.

Not another Video Game Journalist?!

Hey everyone! (Probably just myself for the next while). Welcome to VGRemote, where you will be able to read Game Reviews with a touch of pizazz~

Before I get into this, this first post is a quickie of just 'who the $%&*' am I? My name is Greg, 22 years old and I'm single and lonely. If you like this ad, please leave your message on mailbox #12345687. Kidding. I have gone to two schools for Game Design, only to walk out with a small job in the wonderful field of 'Games Journalism' (Generally the review of video games).

I kept myself in that field for as long as I could, reviewing games such as Shadow: The Hedgehog, Shadow of the Colossus, Jak X: Combat Racing and a few others.

Am I still in that field professionally? Sorta. I have not done any paid work in the filed for awhile. I still do them for fun here and there, and am now wanting to put up a blog for fun reviews that people can get something out of (And if you want to Flame, breathe the fires of hell on replies! Just don't be vulgar).

Will I have any pure direction of systems/game genres/etc. that I will be reviewing? Not so far. I'm just here to entertain, do a dance, sing a song and so forth. I will take heed to requests of games to be reviewed however!

Well, without further ado, I will say that my first review will be posted.

Is this interview done? Geez. I feel like I am only talking to myself. Am I crazy? Yes, yes I must be!