While the rest of the gaming world begins focusing on the holiday season around, well, August, I like to lock my greedy eyes in on something a little more immediate -- the Halloween season.

Scary videogames games pack so much more visceral, immediate punch than their cinematic counterparts. Instead of watching some poor schlep being run down by a bloodsucker in "30 Days of Night, " it 's you who 's backing down the corridor, hoping the scalpel you found in the blood-soaked room is enough to hold off whatever the-heck is shambling toward you, claws outstretched.

Last year gave us Resident Evil 4, a game I 'm still afraid to reboot. The 2007 crop is a mixed bag of scares -- a few Three Musketeer bars jostling with some strips of black licorice.

Stop covering your eyes: Let 's take a look.

You 'd think by now that just about everyone would have learned to avoid the fog-enshrouded burgh of Silent Hill, home to faceless, homicidal nurses and shambling monstrosities that look like a Silly Putty experiment gone gruesomely wrong. In Silent Hill: Origins (Konami, Rated Mature), the long-running series (installment five 's only a few months away) goes a couple of places it 's never gone before: back to its roots and onto the PlayStation Portable.

This tale is about Travis, a trucker who, naturally ends up in Silent Hill after nearly running down one of the series ' trademark creepy little girls, and saving her from a burning house. In addition to that tourist-friendly deserted and grainy vibe, Travis discovers that touching mirrors sends him into a gore-drenched alternaverse where the game 's secrets literally ooze to be revealed.

Silent Hill: Origins was originally supposed to be an action-focused Resident Evil knock-off, and while the rebooted version -- with weapons that break all too easily and much more creepy ambience -- is a huge improvement over what it could have been, it can 't overcome one of the scariest things in gaming: The PSP 's confounded loading times. Nothing evaporates the chills out of a scary moment faster than watching the screen hitch and hearing the deadly whirr of the PSP 's UMD drive. How bad is it? Imagine Jason or Michael Myers passing gas in mid-slash.

Unlike Stephen King, in whose shadow he 's always crouched, horror novelist Clive Barker actually gets the visceral possibilities of video games. The first couple of hours of Clive Barker 's Undying, a 2001 PC title that mixed magic, monsters and genuine terror with Barker's storytelling remains one of the best horror-game experiences ever. (We 'll just forget about the game's lame second half.)

Can 't quite slap that same label on Clive Barker 's Jericho (Codemasters, Xbox 360, rated Mature), a squad-based shooter featuring, as one of the characters puts it early on, "witches with guns. " The set-up 's certainly terrifying enough: An evil sect seeks to open up a temporal rift that will unleash The Firstborn, God 's disastrous first attempt to create humankind. The Jericho squad, a team of occult-powered operatives gets dispatched on a containment mission.

Watching your squadmates unleash flame spirits and telekinetic bursts on the monsters that inhabit the city of Al Khali is enough to make you wish your own character could do more than shoot and resurrect fallen teammates. Then, about five missions in, the character is shredded by a horrific monster. His spirit lives on, able to bounce between the surviving members of the squad and, conveniently, access all his pals ' occult powers.

Given that the man who gave us Pinhead has his name perched atop the title of the game, it 's no surprise to learn that the monsters here -- skeletal Crusaders, pike wielding Egyptian priests and teleporting Nazis -- are seeping, disgusting stitched-up horrors. Nobody does this kind of visual terror quite as well as Barker.

Trouble is, the squad-based fire fests overwhelm the gruesome vibe. Even the lamest horror hackers -- Uwe Boll, we 're looking at you -- understand that terror comes from the sense of being alone, trapped and overmatched in the face of a monstrous evil that 's looking for lunch. (Think Doom 3 and Dead Rising.) Even when your teammates are falling like flies, having a full occult arsenal at your disposal just doesn 't have that down-to-your-last-bullet desperation. As a shooter, Jericho 's got chops; as a horror game, there 's just not enough scare there.