Sam Barlow brings us the modern detective story

Sam Barlow is introducing us to Her Story on Steam Greenlight. If you viewed the credits for Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Sam was credited as the writer and designer, so I'm assuming he's going to bring some interesting things to bear in this new effort.

Inspired by YouTube and recent court cases, Her Story is a non-linear narrative where the player does the detective work, sifting through evidence and clues. The always dependable Rely on Horror has the more details.

Great Memories of Shattered Expectations

GameSpite has an interesting reflection on Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and its role in the survival horror genre. The article is concise and to the point, with some interesting reflections on this title's place in Silent Hill history and the tension that results from its challenges to what has come before.

Having still not yet finished this game myself (shame on me), I do think that it tries to do many interesting things, including trying to create a profitable game on an experimental platform. The HD gaming revolution is its own worst enemy, raising the costs of development sky-high, and this high cost is killing the smaller and more experimental games that were such a large part of the past two generations of console gaming. HD gaming is causing developer flight to the more profitable portable and social platforms available with the iPhone and Facebook, and ultimately limiting what is being published on consoles. Combine the gimmick of motion controls, with a huge install base, and old school non-HD development, the Wii "seems" to be a system ripe for the picking, but this is obviously not the case for a large number of its releases.

Click on over to the article, Shattered Expectations: A Lonelier Silent Hill.

Destructoid and the emasculation of Harry Mason

Wow those Destructoid folks posts some interesting things when they go beyond the usual gaming news practice of regurgitating press releases (like so many other site do). Digging around Destructoid the other day I found another in-depth article on Silent Hill, focused on Harry and the role of men in the Silent Hill games.

This specific essay addresses the recent Wii game that so many gamers seemed to either miss, dismiss, or just not play. I have it near the top of my "to play" pile once I decide I am sick of multiplayer Call of Duty.

Shattered Memories character designs

For the past four years, character designer Jeen Lih Lun has worked on wide range of games for Climax, including Overlord: Dark Legend, Gormiti: The Lords of Nature!, and Silent Hill : Shattered Memories.

HellDescent.com found these character renderings in the wild (they always find all the good stuff) and posted a nice feature on Jeen's work--or you can cruise by Jeen's own site to view them and see what else she has been working on. There are SPOILERS to be found for those of you who have yet to play this interesting take on Silent Hill, so reader beware.

I am far more interested to peek into the artist's process of generating creative solutions within the constraints of the Wii and last gen consoles, then I am looking at the back-end of games on HD-consoles.