Silent past

Last week Konami asked fans on their Facebook page if they would be interested in exploring the history of Silent Hill through games. It's certainly an interesting proposition, and not without merit, as the comic has been exploring the early history of our favorite town for a while now.

Every Silent Hill game has gone to great lengths to grow the history of Toluca Lake and its residents, but IDW's recent comic, Silent Hill: Past Life has been garnering more than the usual amount of attention with it's own tale of the past.

With Konami showing us it won't hide from experimenting with the series, I think we can be hopeful that interesting things might pop up in the future.

Come in and have a drink

Stumbled across a great post at Retronaut that screamed a little bit of Silent Hill to me. Retronaut found this wonderful post on Cool Stuff in Paris that featured several photos of le Café de L'Enfer, The Cafe from Hell. Apparently very little information still exists on this place, and only black and white photos, leaving one to wonder what kind of garish and crazy colors this place was actually painted in. Click on over for more pics (including an interior photo from National Geographic), along with a picture of its neighboring cafe Le Ciel (Heaven).

Everyone loves the music

You can't have this.

 Gotta love the Twitters. @SilentHillWorld brings us a link to a post from MMOMFG on the music of Silent Hill, Beyond the MIDI: Silent Hill series.

The post calls out the quality inherent in Yamaoka's work on the series, and also notes the upcoming changes in Downpour with the debut of Daniel Licht's work on the series. Its worth a look, so click on over.

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.

Looking back in The Room

With E3 2011 coming any day now, there has been a lot of news about the future of Silent Hill on the interwebs:

• Silent Hill: Downpour to be released late Winter
• Silent Hill: Book of Memories announced for the NGP/PSVita/PSP2/whatever
• Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 get HD remakes

However, I find Destructoid's retrospective on Silent Hill 4: The Room to be the most interesting thing I have come across in several days. Destructoid does a nice job of sharing the background of this Survival Horror game that got shoe-horned into the Silent Hill universe by a (likely well meaning, but misguided) Konami Executive. Read on.

Principal photography is finished

Director Michael Bassett posted May 14th that principal photography for Silent Hill Revelations 3D has finished.

At this point its a wait and see game for fans. Let's keep our fingers crossed that Mr. Bassett pulls this one through and gives us the film we want.

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.