I've spent a lot of time stumbling my way through games in the Silent Hill series. While I have spent at least a little time with each, I've only finished three of them though, the first, third, fourth. Oh, and Silent Hill: Play Novel which is a bit of an oddity because it was entirely in Japanese and I don't really count it because I just mashed the A button and selected random options until the text ran itself through. In any case, the original Silent Hill and SH4: The Room had always been my clear-cut favourites. SH4 was never a big fan-favourite, but I loved the story and gimmicks enough to look past the lousy controls and awful combat.

The original game I'll always love because it birthed a franchise that has kept me captivated to this day, even though the actual gameplay in the series ranges from sketchy to mostly awful. While you always had a particular destination, the game gave you more or less free run of the town, with tons of little secrets to find all over the place. I think SH2 and Silent Hill: Origins were similar, and maybe even Silent Hill: Homecoming, but I've literally played less than two hours of each of those. I also liked that while the gameplay was still fairly sketchy, it was still serviceable, especially once you acquired the hammer, which basically makes Harry unstoppable if used correctly.

Also, Harry was awesome. Far and away my favourite character of the series. He was just a normal dude on a vacation gone wrong. No trite world-saving stuff here. Just a man on a mission to find his daughter. And who couldn't sympathize with that? And he huffed an puffed if you made him run for too long. I totally understand that. Maybe he wasn't the most strongly-developed character, but I still resent Konami and SH3 a little for what they did to Harry. Plus he's got mad mixing skillz.

Given the last couple paragraphs, you might imagine my glee at hearing that Konami would be remaking the first game, a situation I'd been dreaming of for years now. What you might not have expected is my added glee upon learning that Tomm Hulett would be leading the project (he's awesome guys. Go chat with him on Talking Time). Also the fact that it would be a re-imagining rather than a remake made the situation a little more interesting. On that note, you know this were gonna get crazy.

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Okay. Looking back, I only published three articles last year. Ouch. All-time low there. Well, four, technically, but I've only gotten to putting up the article version of the 23 Days of Materialism 09, even though it was written and posted in it's entirety last year. So that one could go either way. The worst part is that I had planned to write twice as many, but they take so long to research and write that it's really hard to put aside the time to actually do them.

So what I'm thinking here, is that maybe from now on I need to concentrate on writing shorter, more focused pieces. I used to be really proud of my word counts, but in complete honesty, a really embarassing portion of those huge counts are padding. I'm like a JRPG developer, adding in a bunch of extra fluff to justify that "70 hours of gameplay!" bullet point on the box.

...

You know what I mean. So yeah. So my new year's resolution (which I just came up with this morning) is to write at least 10 articles this year. Not that anyone reads them or anything. Which begs the question of why I even bother. Well, hits are decent right now, but last year's have taken quite a dip from 2008's numbers, which is a bit different from the comic, which peaked in 07 and is spiraling downwards as we put up more and more filler each week.

On an interesting note, the highest concentration of hits for this site come from Facebook users.

So yeah. I'm hoping that 2010 will be a good year for my websites. Of course, that's what I hoped last January and then things just went to Hell. It doesn't bode well that my first post of the year is thirteen days in, either. Oh well. Fingers crossed!

Okay, I'll admit it. I blew it. On the last damn day too. But hey, it was Christmas Eve, and I had absolutely no time to do any blogging. So let's just be happy that we got a solid twenty-three Days of Materialism. I did a lot better than the last two years anyway!

Christmas was pretty rad too. Aside from the ginormous day-before snowfall and subsequent driving through said snowfall, of course. I got most of the stuff I wanted, and tons more because I'm a spoiled little shit. But I spent more than half as much as I received (probably) so I'm thinking we can call it even maybe? The main thing to consider here is that I got Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and it's everything Tomm promised it would be. Well, maybe not in the way I perceived it would be, but it's still awesome! I also got The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, but I haven't played it yet because I'm finishing up my second playthrough of Phantom Hourglass, which I don't hate nearly as much as everyone else. And I bought Pokémon Rumble with the one (shame, people!) Nintedo Points card I received, and the full version is even more addictive than the demo! Hooray! And finally, Z sent me Zombies Ate My Neighbours, which is still great, but I need someone to play it with.

Also I got a shitload of clothes and a bunch of movies and a sweet RC helicopter, but those don't really fit the theme of this blog, which has been "talking about a video game once a month" lately. Sad. Here's hoping that this new year will bring back the variety, creativity, and volume of content that this stupid site used to have before I started dating my girlfriend.

So I'm already through to the "c" articles in Gamespite Quarterly 3. That's already farther than Parish has gotten posting several articles a day for the last few weeks. And I've only had two evenings to read. Told you I'd burn through it.

So I finally saw New Moon last night. And I'm using "finally" in the "I finally ran out of ways to avoid it" sense, not the "I'm so excited we finally saw it" sense. It was not nearly as awful as Twilight, but still pretty bad. Robert Pattinson and Kristin Stewart still can't act, and the Bella character is the stupidest fuckwit I've ever seen. But Taylor Lautner was atually quite good! I was surprised, to say the least. Also the fact that the werewolves were all Hulk-out rather than full moon was neat. A little sketchy, but it allows for a lot more werewolf than the full moon mythos allows. Anyway, it's still basically two hours of whining, so I don't recommend.

So I opened TE at work today, just to take a peek (not to update at work or anything... that would be wrong), and it turns out that at least there, the site is horribly broken in Internet Explorer. Now, if it weren't for not having any alternatives at the office, I wouldn't touch IE, but them's the breaks. Quite unfortunately, I'm pretty sure I would get a scolding if I installed Firefox or Google Chrome.

So a while ago I discovered that somebody ripped the entire soundtrack from Super Smash Bros Brawl, made it all into MP3s and put it in a torrent. I can only assume this happened ages ago, but HOT DAMN I am excited. Whatever noble soul is behind this triumph of goodwill is my new hero. I seriously looooove the Brawl soundtrack. I wish Nintendo would release a 20-disc compilation of it. I love having physical copies of things. And we'll talk even more about that later into the month. But I do have some other music to get all smooshy over tonight though! Avast!

Ugh. Sometimes I forget just how wonderful medication can be. I've been down with the sickness for the last week (and not changing my routine at all to compensate for it), and today my boss finally forced me to head over to the walk-in medical center. I'm now doped up and... well, not feeling great yet, but that shit really does take the edge off. I don't get sick very often, but when I do, it really wreaks havoc on my physical self. I also finished Christmas shopping for my girlfriend today, which has been a three-month long endeavor, so woot on that.