After finishing Silent Hill 2 and feeling depressed by the rather laboured ending sequence, I started Silent Hill 3 but decided I needed a break from the series.

I opted instead for Cold Fear which is much more fun.

Sure it's Code Veronica light with camera control options but paradoxically science amok storylines seem much more silly and fun than supernaturally tinged psychological ones.

I can cope better at the moment with a Russian corpse wandering around with half a face if a mad scientist did it, than kicking the crap out of a deformed headed nurse wearing barbed wire fishnets conjured out of my character's diseased and possibly deceased mind.

Nice atmosphere too, being set on a whaling ship with a secret... is leading to all manner of choppy wind swept wave and flooded room action.

The combat controls really stretch my fingers too even if my character could have done with a smidgen of Russian so he could explain that he isn't a half faced zomboid before the still living start shooting at him.

I went around my pal Martin's over the weekend and he's been playing Alan Wake.

Obviously it's graphically better (though surprisingly not that much so) than much of the generation of games I play but it was more clearly a mish-mash of gaming styles than even this overlooked little game. It's event triggers are also less obvious and it's really stingy on ammo which is good for laugh.

Modern games (and I realise I must be making a sweeping generalisation here) seem to arm you with much more than you need which dissipates much of the tension.

Any road up wish me luck on those stormy waters.