A demo of Silent Hill 4 has been released - locally from AusGamers. Silent Hill is one of the popular horror series from the console world so could be worth a look if you've got a hankering for something a little different.

silent hill series is good, very scary (try playing at night)

Silent Hill 4 doesn't really have any link to the storylines from the previous Silent Hill games though. In fact, it started off development as an entirely separate game, and then got badged with the "Silent Hill" name halfway through its development.

I don't see how you can have a demo of a game where nothing happens for like hours at a time.

Must be the most pointless demo ever.

it's probably just the intro. That took like 20-30 minutes, and then i woke up in a room full of blood, and was like... ok.

returned it.

If it's going to take half an hour and won't let me click through just to start playing, i certainly don't have the time for the rest of the game.

Last Silent Hill I played on PC was number 2. Although it was good it needed higher resolutions because it looked very grainy even at 1024. Great atmosphere but was let down by shonky controls but maybe they have changed since then.

Are u sure u didnt have the shoddy film grain filter on rev? I think SH2 has it on by default that makes the game look all gritty and s*** for effect. Personally i think the effect looks like arse.

Yeah, I think you can turn the film grain filter off on the PC version. On the ps2 version I actually liked it, the lower resolution and the fuzzyness (is that a word?) of the tv sort of worked to its advantage and made it look pretty cool. But when its on PC in high resolution, the film grain filter just looks s***.

I spose if I had decent outputs from my PS2, like component or even svideo it might have had the same problem as the PC one did, but I didn't.

That's the worst demo I've ever played.

I started off in a rusty room, spent 20 minutes trying to figure out what to do and gave up. I don't know if that counts as scarey, but I sure won't be playing it again.

There was the sound of a scream at the start. I don't know who was screaming or what direction it was coming from, but it was the same sample as the one used in Dune 2 when you run over troops, and also in Weird Al Yankovic's "Jurassic Park". There's something about that that takes the edge off it being scarey.

The invert y axis on the mouselook doesn't work, making it pretty much unplayable for me. It seems designed for a console control system.
The rest of the controls are confusing and counter-intuitive. For example, you can assign keys for Left, Camera Left, Turn Left, and Move Left. I'm unfamiliar with the nuances of this many types of Left, and the Readme file explains nothing.
And to exit some menus, you don't click on Exit. You click on the word Press, which is on the other side of the screen from the word Exit. But the word Press doesn't appear until you hover the mouse over the word Exit. That ranks as bad as BF1942's "Conflict Detected" controls setup message.