Game: "Silent Hill: Origins"

Publisher: Konami/Climax

Console: PlayStation Portable

Category: Action adventure

Number of players: One

Rated: Mature, for suggestive themes, violence, blood and gore, crude language

The premise: After eight years and four games on the PlayStation and the Xbox comes the origin of a little town called Silent Hill. This game is from the survival-horror genre.

Game play: The game play hasn't really changed from the others in the series. You move and fight in third person with limited-use weapons against a variety of odd foes; your character is trying to survive to the next encounter. This leads to boss fights in which you hope you have enough supplies to survive.

The good/bad: The game screams creepy ambience as soon as you step into the dark world. Everything is changed for the worse. You can't help but be creeped out by the walls and the enemies.

The combat system is still flawed, with the games' enemies getting in cheap hits while your character awkwardly wields weapons.

For a third-party title, the game creators make a good run at making a Konami horror game.

In an effort to make the game more scary, there's white-noise distortion on the screen. It's more irritating than scary: The screen becomes distorted, making it harder for you to fight off enemies.

Tips: Take fight or flight very seriously in this game; there are just barely enough ammo and health items to go around.

Take advantage of the game's "lock on" feature to conserve ammo.

Use other weapons when you can as a way of conserving ammo.

Pick up everything you can. You never know when it will be useful.

My take: I don't get the appeal of the "Silent Hill" series. I don't find it very scary, the fighting system is lackluster and the puzzles are boring.

I would think after all these years, the formula would change. The plot is always that some guy or girl wanders into Silent Hill, gets stuck, weird stuff happens, he or she beats up thousands of monsters with a stick with a nail in it and then gets out.

I almost forgot to mention my favorite part — the incredibly boring first few minutes of the game in which you figure out where you are supposed to go. After realizing that this game will be exactly as the others, I put it down very early — and you'll probably do the same.

Jeffrey Davis, of Honolulu, is a video-game enthusiast.