Silent Hill 3 (PS2)

With its gloomy sets and quick-cut visual shocks, the Silent Hill series owes much to the macabre timbre of films like Videodrome or the original Japanese version of The Ring. Hints of unseen horror, creaky noises and shadows glimpsed in the distance all come together to form an unsettling feeling that something is out there.

Much like the first two Silent Hill games, SH3 combines nightmare-like monsters with a dense plot. While we can only hope that the story makes a little more sense this time around, we have seen a few definite improvements in the gameplay and especially the graphics.

As a fairly standard survival horror series in terms of control, the Silent Hill games have always been somewhat tough to maneuver around. Aiming and shooting are inexact, and you would often get caught up on corners while trying to run through tight corridors.

Playing a bit of the newest version, we still had some of those old control issues, but were pleased with some of the tweaks, including a block move, which makes fighting a little more fair.

We were especially pleased to find a female protagonist at last. In the first two Silent Hill games, the women your male character encountered ranged from slightly twisted to downright evil.

Silent Hill 3 puts you in the shoes of Heather Morris, who, naturally, finds herself trapped in the nearly deserted town of Silent Hill. We’re sure the game will involve the same puzzles and monster-fighting the series is known for, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as Silent Hill does this genre better than most.