Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is the newest addition to the Silent Hill series. From what I have heard of Silent Hill, it is supposed to be a pretty good survival horror series. What has brought this one to my attention more than the others, however, is a friend has told me he thinks it is one of the greatest stories in a video game ever. I found this hard to believe for a survival horror because usually the best stories go to the RPGs.

I found out that the story is the main character, Henry Mason, is searching for his daughter, Cheryl, in the town of Silent Hill when she disappears after a car accident that left him unconscious. Apparently the game starts in a therapist's office where Henry is talking about everything that has happened, so the therapy is after the actual game. While he's explaining what had happened during his search, you're playing through the explanation. Apparently he had amnesia and was left with few memories, and his reality keeps changing throughout the story. I tried to see what it was about without spoilers and found out that on his quest to find his daughter, Silent Hill freezes over before your eyes often and you have to go through nightmares in icy mazes.

From what I have seen the game has gotten an 8 or higher out of a scale of 10 for most game sites, all of which praised the story but did not like that it was to short. I'm guessing that since every explanation I've heard of it's pretty good, so I know that I want it. I'm sure it being the best story ever like my friend says will be debatable, though.

Holograms

Holograms have been used in many movies for quite awhile now, and I've always kind of wondered if they could one day become reality. I would love to have a world with actual holograms like in Star Wars and Star Trek. I started looking around, and found out this world might not be as far off as many people think.

I found this picture at www.laser-magic.com. It still needs a projection screen, but it looks like an actual hologram of a screen. I also read about holograms at electronicdesign.com where it talks about hologram keyboards at places that require good hygiene like hospitals. The keyboards can detect finger presses for entries, but since there's nothing there except light, there's no germs spreading from touching it. It also talks about when we're going to get actual videos in hologram form. We have actually discussed that in our N100 class, and it raises the question of are we ready for it? Would it actually be more enjoyable to watch an action movie with explosions going on in our room? There's also the fact of it would scare many people because someone might walk into a room where someone left the hologram machine on and it looks like there's actual people the person doesn't know walking around in there house. The police might see an extreme jump in the amount of burglary reports. I believe it would be nice to have a would where you can have a message like the one in R2-D2 from Princess Leia, but whether or not we have hologram movies is undecided for me.

Playstation Home

Playstation Home is something on the PS3 that looks pretty much like Second Life. It's kind of a social network for PS3 gamers. At first I didn't really like it because it just seemed like a way for people to waste their time asking for pictures of each other (at least that pretty much all I saw when I got on with my PS3). Although I looked into and when it's explained more as a gaming social network it sounds like a really good idea. You can meet new people to play games with if you don't have many friend's on your list. Sony can even profit for it by selling people stuff in the virtual world for actual money (I don't really know who would buy stuff for their in-game avatar, but apparently people do). There's also events with prize-giving events to entertainment events in the game world. Since it's free to join, it's at least worth a look for anyone with a PS3.

Playstation Network

Plastation Network is the PS3s online community. It's what you use to play online and buy things from the online store. One thing the PS3's online store has started doing is selling PS1 games as full games for the PS3. This seems like a really good idea on their part, because some PS1 games are really hard to find and instead of having the people that want to play them look for a used one somewhere and buy it so a store can make some profit, Sony can just sell them a digital copy of the game and make the profit themselves and make it more convienient for the consumer. The only thing that seems like they could improve upon that would be to put PS2 games in that market, but they can't do that since PS3s cannot play PS2 games. There was a program on the marketplace that supposedly would let you play PS2 games, but I tried to get it and it didn't work. I also have talked to other people that have downloaded the same program and they couldn't get it to work either. I think if they could get that software up and running, their profit would be increased immensely by all the PS2 games they would sell online.

Singularity

Singularity is a Sci-fi shooter that takes place in present day (2010 which is when it comes out) and takes place on an island called Katorga-12 where there's Russian experiments involving the element Einsteinium which took place at the height of the Cold War. During 1950, an event known as Singularity occured on the island. You play as Nate Renko, who is an Air Force pilot sent to investigate bizarre radiation coming from the island and crash lands there. Nate finds a Time Manipulation Device and finds out the island is constantly changing between the times 1950 and 2010. The goal is to stop the Singularity from happening back in 1950. This seems like a great concept for a story since there aren't many games that have to deal with time manipulation like this, and definately not during the Cold War. This game looks like it will incorporate interesting uses of time control with an interesting story. It could be a good game, but there's not enough information about it out there yet to make a definite opinion.

Braid

Braid is another game that is on the Xbox live arcade that I've seen on gamespot.com's front page quite a bit, but never actually looked into. Turns out it's a puzzle/platform game with a guy named Tim trying to save a princess from a monster. Gamespot describes the story as a deep plot that makes you feel what the character you're playing as is feeling. Tim has lost his love because of a mistake he made and throughout the game you see Tim's thoughts on subjects that are eating away at him. The puzzles also emphasize clever thinking over quick reflexes, so it would probably be a fantastic puzzle game because you're encouraged to think more than act fast. It got overall great ratings ranging from 9-10 out of 10. A game that got that good of ratings from everyone seems worth looking into, even if it is more expensive than most arcade games at $15.

Castle Crashers

I've only heard of Castle Crashers because every once in awhile people tell me it's a good xbox live arcade game. Other than that I know pretty much nothing about it. It's eesentially a side scroller with RPG elements. The game got overall high ratings and seems to be mostly geared towards multiplayer play. In each level, the objective is to save the princess and if you're playing with more than one person the players have to fight it out at the end to see who gets the princesses kiss. In the game you can level up and purchase items with coins you get from defeated foes, so it seems like it has a certain party fun essence to it. It seems to me like it's a 2D Gauntlet game, which was an extremely fun multiplayer hack and slash game (although it was a lot less fun when not playing with other people). This game seems like it would be a good buy if me and a friend or 2 are just bored one night and looking for something to do, but other than that, I think this game might be not for me.