Late last week Climax LA sacked half of their employees in a move GameSpot called a "tweak", but at least one insider says was really just an attempt to salvage the disastrous development of Silent Hill Origins for the PSP and keep it under Climax's umbrella. The project has been transferred to Climax's Solent studio in the UK.

While the 16 employees who were laid off were given ample warning that another shoe was about to drop last week, the problem with development of the game apparently started back in December when work on the game first started.

Early on management in charge of the game's development made a bad call that lead to the team not getting their hands on a working engine until June of this year, according to a mole.

The same managers were reluctant to hire new employees despite that poor planning and employee treatment were causing the company to "hemorrhage" employees, including the lead designer and lead artist, according to the insider.

Because of those setbacks, the mole says, the game had been cut extensively to try and meet the increasingly unrealistic deadlines. Origins, once envisioned as a robust PSP game that would take eight hours to complete, has been shriveled down to a handful of much smaller levels and three to four hours of gameplay, the mole says.

Many of these difficulties were hidden from publisher Konami by management until a few weeks ago, when they were finally told the truth. Konami was understandably disappointed because the project would miss fiscal 2006 entirely as a result of the needed delays, and employees were told there were "no assurances" that the Origins project would continue. Last Wednesday, employees were told there would be lay-offs and given envelopes with an appointment time. In those appointments they were told whether or not they would have a job by the company's CFO, which most had never met.

The laid-off employees, some of which had only started a week prior, were each given a week's severance. Some of those who remain will help transition the now hobbled version of Origins to Climax's Solent studio in the UK, where expectations are the game will continue to suffer, the source said.

The rest will then wrap up their development of Steel Horizons and the studio will likely be effectively shuttered, leaving only a shell office for meetings with LA-based publishers, according to the mole.

While the company told GameSpot that there was a third project in the concept phase, the mole says none of the employees were aware of it and that even current staffing couldn't develop a new game

This release contains the following 7 games.

1) Swaps : Find a new word, by replacing the letter shown, with any other letter.
2) Crosses : Create words on the board, in a criss-cross fashion using the tiles provided. (Was previously labelled Scrab, but I changed it in case Hasbro came to kick my ass.)
3) Towers : Build words upside down, inside the tubes provided.
4) Triplets : Create words which contain the 3 letters provided, in the order shown.
5) Strings : Trace the stylus over words to score points.
6) Anagrams : Get the longest word possible from the letters provided. Each set of letters can be made into a single longer word.
and
7) Dice : It's Yahtzee, and it has nothing to do with words!

Also, now includes Single DS Multiplayer gameplay.
Click the little fellow, bottom right, to decide the number of players.
Set the time limit to something small.
Select a game.
Each player gets a round to themselves, with the highest scorer being declared the winner.

(Note : Doesn't work as intended with the Dice game. I gotta fix that!)

Main changes :
- 16c background code improved, more examples (animations !)
- Gif2Frames added, cuts an ainmated gif into frames for you
- FATlib code changed, do not use this beta if FATlib was vital to you...
- Sound code rewritten, now multiple sounds per frame will work
- Makefile updated, no longer screws sounds when a non-padded sound is included
- PAFS and PAGfx bugfixs, nothing major though
- Platform Game wiki tutorials 4 and 5 files added, 6 will come...