Silent Hill Homecoming now on Steam with limited-time discount

On November 6, 2008, the anticipated new installment for the Silent Hill franchise, titled Homecoming, was released for direct download on the STEAM servers.

Silent Hill: Homecoming is the fifth game to take place directly in the Silent Hill lands of the Toluca Lake area where the little foggy vision of hell on earth resides. Taking a strong turn towards Jacob’s Ladder, it follows an injured veteran through his returning home to find that his brother disappeared. Haunted by the real demons of Silent Hill and the demons of his past deeds in war, he stumbles into a sanity stealing problem as his grip on reality slips away.

The game promises to go deeper into the troubled past of Silent Hill and its surrounding area. With the next-gen graphics, things should look even more frightening than the previous chapters.

One of the things shown at various gaming conventions that should intrigue the gamers is the that you will be able to see, in real-time, the real world shift to the Hell-world state. Also, if they actually followed through with the promise for the controls, the game will offer some of the best and most responsive controls the franchise has had to date.

The system requirements are for some of the beefier machines though. This is all according to what is listed on the Homecoming page in the STEAM store. The requirements are XP or Vista for the Operating System, Dual core CPU such as Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ for the processor, 1 GB RAM (for XP) or 2 GB RAM (for Vista), a DirectX 9.0c compliant video card such as ATI Radeon HD-series graphics card (minimum 256 MB) or NVIDIA GeForce 7800-series graphics card (minimum 256 MB), a DirectX®: 9.0c compatible sound card, and 10 GB free for hard drive space. The supported controllers are keyboard and mouse or Xbox 360 controller.

For those who buy and download before November 10, 2008, there will be a 10 percent discount. This cuts down the original $49.99 price down to $44.99 for these couple of days. Enjoy the horror and madness that is Silent Hill. With the holidays coming up this might be the perfect STEAM gift for that horror junkie and PC gamer in your life.

Site [Silent Hill Homecoming] Read [STEAM] Also Read [Gamertell]

Valve’s new Steam Cloud service is go

On November 6, 2008, Valve’s Steam Cloud service launched with the Left 4 Dead demo (full game releases November 18, 2008). Left 4 Dead is the first game that will utilize Steam Cloud support while Valve has plans to patch older titles to use the player syncing service. Valve also plans to release the code to developers for free. What nice guys they are!

The service will work with Steam, retail, and other outlets including Good Old Games.

Steam Cloud allows players to store individual settings for PC games server-side, enabling them to log in from any computer (assuming the computer already has the Steam client already installed) and play with their customized settings for “keyboard, mouse, and gamepads” without going through the hassle of resetting configurations every time. A nifty service for PC players, indeed. Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve, was quoted in the press release as saying:

For some time now, Steam has allowed gamers to log on from any computer in the world and access their applications. This also makes it easy to upgrade a PC without worrying about losing your games.”

If that’s not a ringing endorsement for the new service, I don’t know what would be. Now that it’s out, what do you PC players think? Does it really make things as easy it sounds? Let us know in the comments below.

Read [Steam News] Also [BigDownload] Site [Steam] Site [Good Old Games]

Get ready for NIS Wii and Wiiware games

Siliconera‘s been busy uncovering new information this week, as it also found out that Nippon Ichi has been approved to develop Wii and Wiiware titles. As any DS RPG fan already knows, NIS has developed and released games for Nintendo’s other system - two of which, Disgaea DS and Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, were released stateside in October, 2008.

NIS’ first game for the system has already been revealed, Let’s Hitchhike. It is a Wiiware game that is currently scheduled for a 2009 release in Japan. No other titles have been confirmed or announced.

Both Siliconera and Wii Fanboy have mentioned that this could potentially mean a Wii version of Disgaea. I, for one, hope that NIS uses this opportunity to create some new games, rather than create a third port of an already familiar title. I love prinnies, the penguin-bomb Disgaea mascots, as much as the next girl, but I’m Disgaea-ed out.

Read [Siliconera] Via [Wii Fanboy] Site [NIS America]