The Death of Silent Hills
As most of you know by now, Silent Hills has been cancelled. Let’s take a moment of silence for that…
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This is a few weeks late but since we were out of town camping and work has been insane, this is the first time I have had to sit down and think about what this means. Silent Hills is something that I have been waiting for. I have played Silent Hill 1, 2, 3, and 4 but I have not played the other side games or the ones on Vita or Wii or whichever platform they were on. But Silent Hills gave me hope in an often bleak survival horror genre. P.T. was something that was not only interesting but also scary. It reminded me of the times when I was in college and my best friend and I printed out all the walkthroughs for Silent Hill 1 – 4. We then confiscated a lounge at Pitt, closed all the blinds, turned the lights off, turned the TV up the whole way and made sure we did EVERYTHING in all the games. We would even pick which ending we wanted and tailor for that. There was screaming, laughing, shouting, and general commotion in the room as we beat the games for probably the tenth time each. There were times when the games scared us half to death and that was what I was looking for with the new Silent Hills, those moments that grabbed you and you would laugh about later after you remembered it was just a game.
Now don’t get me wrong there are other great survival horror games out there, the Resident Evil series, Alien: Isolation, Dead Space, ect. But nothing has seemed to not only scare me like a Silent Hill game but also entertain me and keep me coming back for more. I even enjoyed the movies (I know, liking a video game movie is bad…) which hit a lot of the areas I wanted to see in a Silent Hill film. Plus there were some moments where I almost jumped out of my pants!
The moment that I saw P.T. I was super excited because this game felt even bigger and scarier than Silent Hill 2. This gave me hope for the future of survival horror games. Over the weekend we took time to play P.T., with my husband at the reins. There was jumping, yelling, laughing, and all around debauchery while we played. The scares were on point and the environment was great. My only complaint was the puzzles which seemed a bit more difficult than they needed to be and honestly without Googling we probably would have given up! But I get why they were that way, it was a playable trailer not the real game. They were testing expectations and trying to see what the audience thought. All in all, I loved P.T. and I wish Silent Hills was not dead.
What Does it all Mean?
Obviously this news of the cancelation is hard to swallow but we still knew/heard that Konami was going to work on other Silent Hill games which would at least continue the genre. It was a small victory but a victory none-the-less. Then it seemed like Konami took a few steps off the deep end when they announced they would be “pursu[ing] mobile games aggressively.” And also by saying “our main platform will be mobiles.” The CEO of Konami (Hideki Hatakawa) also goes onto say “The success of Power pro especially has motivated us to actively push more of our popular series onto mobile than ever before.” Queue the O.O face from a large portion of the gaming community and enter my brain telling me “well your chance at a new and amazing Silent Hill that is not on a mobile device is now slim to none”…awesome. Now I know that I could be just taking this to the extreme since I love the series, but I feel that Konami just signed Silent Hill death warrant. There is a chance in the far away future that I am wrong, but most of the evidence is leading me down the path of conviction.
I feel that this is a massive blow to the survival horror genre. There are a lot of games that are being labeled as survival horror that are zombie games and do not get me wrong they are fun, but to me they are not as scary as say Silent Hill 2. Even the new Resident Evil games do not have the same feel to me as they once did. I feel they have gone downhill since Resident Evil 4 and that is something hard to say as a self-proclaimed Resident Evil buff. To keep this genre fresh we need to have a game come out that WOWs us. We need something that had the same reaction as P.T. Maybe some of the new horror games coming out this year will help, Soma and Darkwood look promising. It is true that things come in waves so maybe soon our time will come.
How do you feel about the state of the survival horror genre?
New Stuff!
Now it is time for some new stuff! My husband, a friend of ours, and I have decided to start a podcast/website! It is called Geeks and Geeklets: An Adventure Guide to Gaming Parents (www.geeksandgeeklets.com) and is a site devoted to gaming, parenting, and all around geekery. Come join us as we balance our lives as gamers with parenting and as we watch our littles grow up surrounded by geek culture. The website will contain articles, tips & tricks, and eventually a podcast (in the works!). We are up and coming but would love for you to stop by and check things out!
Also, some of you might know that I run this site as a general gaming blog. Here I talk about other games (other than WoW which is found at sarindre.wordpress.com) I am playing and the joys/struggles of being a gamer mom. Well I will no longer be posting here and will be focusing these posts to the Geeks and Geeklets site. So if you have read and enjoyed The Geeky Mommy, hop on over to Geeks and Geeklets for similar content.
Geeks and Geeklets Contact Info:
Email – geeksandgeeklets@gmail.com
Site – www.geeksandgeeklets.com
Twitter – @ggeeklets
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If you are interested in guest writing, please feel free to email us your post to geeksandgeeklets@gmail.com with the subject “Guest Post.”
Happy Gaming!
The Geeky Mom 