Scarefest serves up Halloween chills

Halloween season is finally here, but if you work in the financial sector, you've probably experienced more terror in the last few weeks than Freddy Krueger has dished out over 25 years.

It's a shame that we've never gotten a decent Krueger video game. Instead, two popular franchises have consistently delivered the scares: Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Resident Evil 5 won't be out until spring, but a new Silent Hill mystery has arrived along with some other good horror games.

Here's the best of the lot:


Silent Hill: Homecoming The Silent Hill series is all about atmosphere, from the eerie sound effects to the fog-drenched streets of the title town, and the bloody halls of the "Otherworld".

Homecoming introduces Alex Shepherd, a soldier returning home to Shepherd's Glen. Alex's brother and father have disappeared, and the search leads to you-know-where. Which means the return of all the beasts – the faceless nurses, the flayed dogs – and new monsters.

Alex fights better than the typical Silent Hill protagonist, which makes the game easy. But the sharper controls are an improvement, which helps the game deliver enough jolts to make it worthwhile.

Dead Space Isaac the engineer is sent to investigate a mining ship, the Ishimura, whose communications are dead. Of course, that means everyone on board is probably dead too.

The culprits are the Necromorphs, a race of aliens who feed off humans.

Sometimes they gang up on you, and other times, they pretend to be dead and attack when you get close. You can only kill them through ripping their limbs off. Nice.

While Dead Space freely cribs from movies, it has beautifully gory graphics and marvellous sound effects.

Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice Disgaea 3 features a Halloween-worthy cast of demons, witches and, well, exploding penguins. It's a strategy game rather than a survival-horror game, and it aims to make you laugh rather than scream.

Mao, a student at the Evil Academy, wants to dethrone his father, the overlord of the Netherworld. To gain power, he has to endure strategic contests and accumulate a team of comrades.

The battles are challenging and quite lengthy, so devoted admirers of Disgaea will get plenty of value. But the graphics haven't advanced at all and NIS hasn't added enough new features to make it worth most players' time.