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Silent Hill: Homecoming creeps out of hiding
click to enlarge Wait ... where are the floats, the cheerleaders, the awkward slow-dancing? Oh, its not that kind of homecoming. No, it's a Silent Hill homecoming, which means it's really foggy, those "cheerleaders" are grotesque creatures, and the dance move of choice is called "running for your life."Konami finally rolled out a playable build of the series' fifth installment at its press event last night, and we were on hand to, well ... get our hands on it. We're writing up our impressions, along with Double Helix design lead Jason Allen's musings on bringing the series to a new generation. For now, get tickled by the first screens (on your console of choice) -- and several new videos embedded after the break!%Gallery-22985%%Gallery-22986%
Vampires rejoice, Harker on "indefinite hold"
After a brief burst of early hype, The Collective's Harker -- a vampire slaying action game -- completely disappeared. Of course, that makes sense when you factor in the fact that The Collective (who have now been combined with Shiny to form the new Double Helix studio) was later handed the reins to the latest entry in the Silent Hill series. If Konami decided to let us make the next Silent Hill (note to Konami: not a good idea), we'd drop whatever we were doing too. Unfortunately, it looks like Harker might be buried in an early grave, as Double Helix's parent company Foundation 9 has announced that the project is on "indefinite hold." Frankly, we were looking forward to killing vampires using the game's environmental hazards and brutal combat engine.Here's hoping Harker gets another chance to prove his undead-slaying worth.[Via Joystiq]
Silent Hill V now 'Homecoming,' dated for September
When you're a blogger and you don't have a lot of facts to go on, one of your greatest tools is hypothesizing, or as it's more commonly known, guessing. For example: Konami has announced that Silent Hill V has been retitled Silent Hill: Homecoming. Now, we don't know the reason for the change, but we're going to hypothesize that people were uncomfortable with an American-developed game that appears to be a departure from previous Silent Hills being one of the main, numbered series. See what we did there? That was just guessing. They also say that the game will be out in Europe at the end of September. We're going to hypothesize that it will also arrive in America around that same time, but honestly we have no idea. [Update: Hypothesis correct!] Feel free to offer your slightly less authoritative hypotheses about the name change below.
Foundation 9 melts together Collective and Shiny into Double Helix
Whatever last remnants of identity clung to by both Shiny and The Collective were lost today as the duo were merged together by owner Foundation 9, creating a new, wholly unfamiliar entity known as Double Helix. Studio head Michael Saxs Persson calls the new name and logo, which were chosen from a pool of employee submissions, a "perfect" match for the company, adding that "making games is in our DNA." The founding follows the initial merger, announced last October, and according to Foundation 9 creates a studio "that is now able to build upon its previous experience to gain new heights in quality and efficiency." And all it cost us was our fond memories of a simpler time spent playing the likes of MDK and Earthworm Jim. While the company remains coy regarding what it's up to currently, today's announcement notes that Double Helix is developing a trio of multi-platform licensed games, one of which we assume to be the already announced Silent Hill V.
