I'm not totally sure where the tradition for doing "Zero" entries to a series, the logical step backwards from the first to represent a part of the story that happens before it, came from. Certainly the first prequel that I heard naming itself this way was Ring Zero. The Cube series started off with Cube, then Hypercube when it added an extra dimension, then Cube Zero (which really should have been called Square). I'm sure there are many others. Silent Hill Origins was called Silent Hill Zero in Japan, but they clearly thought that nobody else would get it and they tacked "rigins" onto the title to form the odd hybrid that it eventually ended up with.

The game opens with CB radio speak that might as well be in a foreign language ("20/20, ten pints right. Keep the hens in the henhouse") that introduces Travis, a trucker who rather overoptimistically decides to take a shortcut through Silent Hill in the middle of the night. While a-truckin' down the road he sees a cloaked figure in the mist ahead in much the same way as the first game, slams his brakes on and comes to an emergency stop in an impressively short distance of about a mile and a half. After getting out, he sees nobody there, but when a distressed figure appears in the mirror he flees into Silent Hill, a mistake unmatched by even the most dim-witted protagonists in the series yet. To cut a long story short, he then finds the Gillespie house on fire and saves the smouldering Alessa, starting the events that began the series in the first place.

For some reason I had heard a lot of things about this game that caused me to have low expectations of it. The average score from players on Gamefly was around 6/10, Yahtzee's review of it was fairly scathing (but then, when isn't he), and I had mentioned because of those that when I started playing it I was expecting it to be (quote) a bit rubbish. But I've been pleasantly surprised - for everything that's been said about it, I honestly think that it's the closest to classic Silent Hill that the series has managed to come since the second game. It might be just because I'd been so alienated by the complete departure that was Silent Hill 4, but it's oddly nice to see the familiar things again - having to hunt around darkened buildings (sometimes in a ghastly alternate dimension) with rooms that have been stricken with some sort of Dutch Door Disease, trying to find the rooms you can enter and then working out gradually how to escape in between running away from half-seen apparitions with heads on their bottoms and legs growing out of their ears. Lisa the nurse is back as well, with a new voice actress who's merely sub-par instead of wallbangingly appalling.

A new addition to the gameplay comes in the form of being able to switch between the light and dark dimensions via the use of - and I will probably have this game to thank for playing on and fully awakening another thing I've always found unsettling - mirrors, which show the wrong reflection and will transport you between the worlds when they're touched. This makes the possessed world become more a fact of exploration than something that you're forced into by the plot, and instills a new sense of dread in you, that in order to progress you're going to have to visit it voluntarily. In fact, because of the way that the worlds are now used as part of the general puzzle in this way, with some parts of the scenery being subtly different (for example, you have to knock a key down a drain in the light world and then switch to the dark one to pick it up, because in the dark world the grate on the drain isn't there) I find myself wondering if somebody on the team had played through Trilby's Notes, which itself took an enormous amount of inspiration from the Silent Hill series and used two parallel worlds in this way. It's a nice thought, anyway.

As for things that might have prompted the negative opinions that I've seen... well, it's true that as far as the story goes, Travis doesn't seem to have a whole lot of reason for being in Silent Hill. Unlike other people who were searching for others (or themselves in time paradoxes), he doesn't seem to have quite strong enough a connection to the place to really want to find out what's going on as much as he does - his first objective is to see if Alessa is all right, but at the stage we're at he seems to have forgotten about that and is following clues to seemingly irrelevant places like a demented Treasure Hunt with Anneka Rice. I would certainly have started finding a way out when the second location that the game directed me to was a giant abandoned sanitarium. And some of the combat feels a bit strange - there seems to be an encouragement to use melee weapons like in the fourth game, except those weapons break faster than most of my webpages.

This is offset, though, because as far as inventory management goes, Travis seems to be completely opposite from the dimwitted Henry in the fourth game, who had difficulty carrying more than a couple of playing cards around. Instead, he seems to have a jacket that easily rivals my own, and is able to haul around multiple TV sets, filing cabinets, golf clubs, a couple of hatstands, bottles and sticks of various sizes and still have room left over for a few guns if throwing everything including the kitchen sink at the nightmarish apparitions around him doesn't put them off enough. Ammo is not rare either - in the fourth game you had an irritating choice between clogging up your severely limited inventory space and using weapons that were totally useless, but after experiencing that, not feeling that even the basic pistol is too good to use on anything and has to be saved up is very welcome.

And the part that I pined for in the fourth game: the puzzles are back. No half-hearted sticking cards in marked places on a wall this time - instead you get properly demented ones like having to feed horrible-looking dolls different coloured pills according to what mental disorder they represent to open a desk drawer for some reason and a very Myst-like episode with an iron lung. There isn't a choice between putting them on Dipstick, Normal or Completely Bloody Impossible modes like in the second and third games, so it looks like you only get the one set this time - but what we've seen so far are at just the right level, just difficult enough to make you feel clever about working them out afterwards.

If there's one thing that I think has been wrong with the series for a while it's the bosses, because the games' combat was always awkward by design - it's meant to make you feel like your characters were fragile and really didn't know how to handle weapons. But during fights with large monsters, the result is generally that you had a direct mutually exclusive choice between shooting and trying to run away, meaning that boss fights are exercises in standing still and pounding away while checking your life force every so often (and the stylistic choice of using red-amber-green for your health, only absent from the fourth game, means that I always have to have someone on hand to tell me how my state looks). In this one, movement seems a little more free - at least, I defeated our latest boss just by shooting all the shotgun ammo I'd saved up at it while continually walking backwards - but it still seems like something that could work rather better. I've actually heard that the team doing the next game said that they had replaced the boss fights with things that were more "Zelda-style", which sounds like possibly a good idea but puts strange images into my head of Harry Mason spinning round on the spot madly with the Master Sword.

Somehow my memory had filed the Ratchet and Clank games - starring as they do a fluffy protagonist and robot sidekick very reminiscent of Gir - as very innocent, which made it a bit of a surprise to be continually reminded of their underlying air of sort of cheerful wrongness. For a start, the third game happens to be called (I promise you) Up Your Arsenal (the European releases, for whatever reason, decided they couldn't call games things like that and they were simply numbered). And throughout the game there's a sort of Futuramaish humour that would show a universe that would really seem quite tragic if it wasn't played for laughs - like the announcements in the background that say "All life forms please report to section B for execution" and (the current highlight) an upbeat sort of Europop song about exterminating everyone. I hadn't actually realized that she was meant to be Britney Spears until much later. Such is my awareness of popular culture.

I also didn't know that the series had grown quite so extensively since the last time I saw it - even though I thought of it as a very new series, it's now over six years old. Once again, time's going past too quickly. Anyway, the games have extended on to the PS3, and they've chosen to call the latest one Quest for Booty. Just as well there are no innuendoish misinterpretations to get out of that, then.

I've been playing Mother 3 on the train a lot recently, and ( I have some possible non-plot-related spoilers up to chapter 4 ).

Finally, no matter how validly thematic the title is, I just can't take the new action/horror game from the creators of Half-Life seriously at all if they've chosen to call it Left 4 Dead. Ace.

I want to add a couple of things that I got too late for the last post to the list of birthday acknowledgements - quadralien, who managed to excel himself again by coming up with jewel cases of Alone in the Dark and Quake 2 by hunting around charity shops (I miss doing that in America - there aren't any places that I know of around here where you're likely to find relics like that) and pami_zee, who sent me the softest dressing gown in the world. My parents had also bought me a new leather jacket when they were over - both items of clothing replace two things that I've had for a number of years and, difficult though it was to consign them to the back of the cupboard, I have to admit that my old ones were absolutely falling to pieces. I also happened to receive the latest game in our Gamefly queue that evening, too...

Since I got the recommendation to join Gamefly a few months ago I've been mostly happy with it so far - I'm not sure what the price of 'conventionally' renting a game is now, but I'm sure it was about £5 for three nights when I last went to Blockbusters during the PS1 era. With this online method, you have no rental limits, instead paying a monthly fee to be able to take out one or two games at a time and keep them as long as you're using them. I'm surprised that nobody thought of the idea before, because it makes a whole lot more sense than having to blitz through a rented game by playing it constantly for a couple of days.

The service did had a couple of shortcomings at first - the most obvious was that I found the process very slow, with gaps of just over a week between sending a game and receiving the next in our queue. However, that's been improving over time, especially with their recent introduction of being able to send the next game as soon as the post office confirms that the one you're sending back is in the post rather than on the day that they receive it - that pretty much cuts the waiting time in half.

The other problem is something that's only come up recently, and that's the issue of unplayable discs. A few weeks ago I got out the original Ratchet and Clank because I thought Whitney would like it, it was a success and we then worked our way through the rest of the series. But the disc of the second game that we received wouldn't work at all, sticking at the first loading screen - we sent that one back and got a playable one in its place after a few days. And after moving on to the third one, it sadly had similar problems - the first disc we had wouldn't go past a section where it had to load a cut-scene a few hours in, and after getting a replacement of that one as well, the replacement disc then stuck a couple of hours later (and has left our save game in limbo eternally trying to load a planet that it can't find!)

So I'm not sure if it's just because of the relative popularity of the games compared to what we had out earlier (I noticed the first attempt they sent us of the second one appeared to actually have bite marks in it, as if someone had mistaken it for a really shiny cracker) - I should probably look into cleaning our PS2's lens as well just in case that's the problem, though it doesn't seem to have had any problems when I've been replaying Resident Evil 4 in the meantime.

So we've given up on the Ratchet and Clank series for now and have gone for what I'm going to literally parse as Silent Hill Zerorigins instead. I'm aware that some people think it's a bit rubbish, but it's for the sake of completeness as I liked the others (and that fewer people will have got their grubby fingers on the disc).