Since you've got a good few months before the arrival of Silent Hill: Homecoming for the PlayStation3 (PS3), there's still time to brush up your Silent Hill mythos by getting through a game of Silent Hill Origins for PS2, a prequel to the whole series thus far.

In a fitting state of normal-reality turned topsy-turvy, Origins originally debuted on the PSP and has now migrated to the PS2 platform, where gameplay and audio excellence have survived without a bruise; the visuals, not quite as much.

If you've already played one or two of the series' games, you know the drill: Every game starts with some luckless soul drawn to, or blundering into, the namesake town, and Hill-arity ensues. Origins is no different: Travis Grady is a solitary type, a long-haul trucker with more internal baggage than most of us, but he -- like all Silent Hill protagonists -- mostly seems like a fairly normal kind of person; no conquering hero, no elite agent, no super-cop. Just a guy... about to have the worst day of his whole life (or worst day of his whole life so far, if you’re an optimist).

A candid homage to mind-bender films like Jacob's Ladder, as always, the camera follows Travis through a well-presented -- but bleak, deserted and menacing -- town of fog-shrouded streets crawling with skinless, wobbling horrors; of dilapidated, gore-splattered hospitals and nightmarish crumbling sanitariums filled with terrible secrets and walls scrawled with messages in blood. And that's before you flip into the alternate, hellish other-world lurking just beyond every mirror (as with all Silent Hill games, the world of Origins has two overlapping versions of the same world -- one is decidedly worse than the other, but neither one is very nice).

And here's where we hit the first hitch in this PS2 port (for a no-frills "port" it is, nothing more): This version doesn't avail itself of the PS2's power at all, so visuals that were effectively gorgeous on the PSP screen are simply bigger and crunchier here. Also, that second analog stick that your PS2 is so proud of? Wasted here, alas, offering no better camera control than in the handheld version. True, it's not usually much of an issue... until it suddenly is, and you find yourself saddled with an occasional awkward camera angle that has you fighting something you aren't always able to keep in full view. Call it a tension bonus. With the exception of some cutscenes that seem a tad smoother, anything that could be faulted in the PSP iteration comes limping back in this one, larger than (virtual) life and, thankfully, just as ugly (there's a phrase you don't often hear).

Compared to some previous "heroes" of the series, Travis is actually an okay fighter, even with his bare hands. In addition to obvious things like pistols, rifles and police batons, just about anything you can find lying around the town can be pressed into service as a weapon: Hammers, scalpels, chunks of ragged wood -- you can even bash threatening creatures with IV drip stands, TV sets and file cabinets, if you have to.

Such implements can eventually break, but in practice you're likely to end the game still carrying a dozen serviceable weapons; it would have added to the menace if, as in the previous games, armament was a little harder to come by. If a monster catches you by surprise before you can crank off a round (or huck a television or a gin-bottle) at it, there are some real-time button-pressing sequences to break the hold an advancing creature might manage to get on you, but since the best you can hope for is a zero-sum breakaway, you still end up having to deal with the thing you just grappled with. Combat was never the strong point of the Silent Hill series anyway, really; it's always first and foremost about the mood, and the constant menace.

Which brings us to something of a sore point (and a fairly major deviation from the Silent Hill formula): Travis can bring on the change to the hellish otherworld at will, simply by touching any mirror he comes across; sometimes this is done to bypass barriers, which may change or disappear from world to world (the opposing realities have the same general layout, but with different details -- and a persistently crumbling, blood-soaked, major-yuck makeover for the otherworld), and it also creates new rooms and situations.

Unfortunately, this flies in the face of the "traditional" Silent Hill world-shift which, in previous games, usually came uninvited, and indeed at what would seem the worst possible moments. It was part of the charm, the beyond-your-control enthrallment; long-time series fans may find the new scheme makes them feel a little, well, safe.

But that feeling generally won't last long. There's always some godawful thing lurching for you out of the darkness or the fog, some creepy but not-overly-brain-bending puzzle, and a fair amount of seamless, startling flashbacks and other cinematic intrusions to throw a scare into you (they're slightly cheaper scares than the Silent Hill norm, on the whole, but they're effective all right; you might fumble or drop your controller if you're playing in a reasonably dark, quiet place -- as you should).

Since almost nothing has changed from the PSP version, that includes the sound -- and that's a good, good thing. Headphones are a must: Music composer and all-around Evil Sound Wizard, Yamaoka Akira, has once again done the score and the industrial-haunting sound design for this game -- and over the years, his work has been consistently phenomenal; his moody game music (often with actual vocals) is always a serious, album-worthy soundtrack in its own right, and he finds creepy feelings on his musical equipment you didn't even know there were sounds for.

Origins continues the Silent Hill tradition of multiple endings and weird little rewards for finishing the game the first time -- everything from new outfits and items to game options and goofy little extras best left as surprises. And even the voice acting/dialogue is decent (God knows even the excellent Silent Hill 2 had some Razzie-caliber Bad Moments in Voiceovers).

Even with some heretical veerings from the earlier Silent Hill iterations, Origins is a solid, spooky game in its own right, a decent-if-flawed alternative for those with a PS2 but no PSP, and something of a mythos-liaison between the cluttered back-stories of the games and those fleshed out by the Silent Hill motion picture. It's also something of a refresher course in combat, since our new hero Travis can actually fight -- a work-up to the character in the forthcoming Silent Hill: Homecoming (that protag is purported to be a soldier, so it's reasonable to assume he will be able to authentically kick some ass ...even if comes wobbling and lurching for him on sewn-together nurse's legs.)