Lone Survivor has arrived

Lone Survivor released this week. And, it took me this many years to connect the dots to the NES Silent Hill demake Soundless Mountain II. Same guy, Jasper Byrne.

While Capcom talks of the demise of survival horror, the indie scene keeps bringing it. With people like Jim Sterling of Destructoid, Terry Cavanaugh of VVVVVV, and Adam Smith of Rock Paper Shotgun saying great things about Lone Survivor, I think you owe it to yourself to check it out.

A free in browser demo is available on Kongregate, so you can try before you buy, but at $10 this game is a bargain, and it's available for both Windows and Mac.

Telling time

Destructoid brings another blast from the past with a look back to the SNES version of Clock Tower. Some of you may remember this series from the PS1 and PS2, but did you know it started on the SNES? Destructoid does.

Want to play the SNES ROM in English? Well someone has you covered on that too.

Abuse

If there was ever a game that should not fade into obscurity, Abuse is it. Fortunately for us, Sam Hocevar has got our backs.

This little game made by Crack dot Com was published by EA, Bungie, and Red Hat. How about that for credentials? A darling of the young Linux community when it debuted, Abuse captured the imagination of everyone who saw it--a fast, 2D sidescrolling shooter, with you as a Predator fighting Aliens. Not licensed Predators and Aliens, but who needs a license when your game looks and plays this good?

The objective of the game is to run around the map and shoot anything that moves, and there are plenty of things moving. At one time this game even featured multiplayer.

Abuse's source code was released years ago, and various people and projects have tried to keep it alive since then. I haven't been successful trying to play it since Apple OS 8 when I bought my copy from Bungie. Now, Abuse has been ported to the iPhone and to the Wii, my preferred platform for retro console emulation. Regardless of which platform you play it on check it out.

8 bit Twin Peaks

No, it's not the latest Deadly Premonition game. Rather, Black Lodge 2600 is an 8 bit style Twin Peaks homebrew game put together by artist and musician Jak Locke. For both PC and Mac (thank you!). Black Lodge 2600 is reminiscent of the Atari/Intellivision era of games, complete with a faux Atari manual and label. The only thing missing is an Atari compatible ROM that I can drop into my Atari emulator of choice--but who can blame him, as programming in batari Basic is not for the feint of heart.
You can read more at WelcomeToTwinPeaks.com, or just click on over to download and play the game yourself.

Racket horror

I love Racket Boy. There, I said it. If you don't know what I am talking about, click over to RacketBoy.com for one of the best sites on classic gaming.

You won't find ROMs. You won't find emulators. What you will find are piles and piles of articles on classic gaming, classic consoles, and some incredible podcasts. What brought me to Racket a couple of years back was my search for games on platforms that I never owned, but adopted later in life: specifically Gamecube and GBA games. Racket Boy's guides to gaming on the cheap, and hidden gems really helped me find the Nintendo games that I never played but should have.

Today, Racket Boy posted an excellent article on The Playstation 2 Survival Horror Library, and what an article it is. They dug through everything, absolutely everything, to remind us how much there actually is to play on the PS2. Over 70 games make the list, including PAL and Japanese games that never made it to those of us in the US of A. I don't want to claim this is the most comprehensive retrospective of Survival Horror on the PS2 ever, but I can't imagine that they missed much.