Another odd game this one....You take on the role of a Princess who's father has been murdered, and everyone thinks it was you who assassinated him! Running from the castle, you eventually manage to escape the accusers to another royal home...but upon entering this new abode, a demon who has been possessing your right arm awakens, and forces you to commit murders so he can eat the souls of your victims! Which obviously makes it slightly harder to prove your innocence.......
As you can see, the plot is completely mental, but what the game basically boils down to, is some sort of medieval, gorier, Home Alone-type stuff! As your attackers enter the mansion to try and capture you, you can lay traps for them using a menu to pick the weapon you want to use. You can put things like bear traps on the ground, swing pendulums or drop rocks from the ceiling and make walls shoot out and crush your victims or fire poison darts, amongst other things....
It can be really satisfying if you manage to string these traps together, and disposing of the enemies is a lot easier if you manage to do so! The trap animations can be quite brutal (but never really that gory), and quite funny sometimes too... If Macaulay Culkin had these sort of traps, there's no way The Wet Bandits would have ever caused him any trouble...
It does have a few issues...cutscenes are long and many, the camera isn't that great, and the game slows down to a crawl sometimes when a lot's going on...but because of the unique gameplay, and the satisfaction of pulling off a trap combo, it still comes recommended!
54 - Darkstalkers (Arcade) :
Not much needs to be said about this one...it's a fighting game from the creators of Streetfighter 2, and plays very similarly, only instead of Ryu, Ken and chums, you have a bunch of mystical creatures knocking the crap out of each other!
It has a lot of nice nods to the horror genre, with the werewolf character being called Jon Talbain, an obvious reference to Larry Talbot from the Wolfman films for example...and it's all very nicely presented and plays exactly like you'd expect a Capcom fighter to play! It's got some awesome sequels worth checking out too...
53 - Zombie High (Megadrive/Genesis) :
Not really a proper game this, but I thought I'd add it anyway. It's a prototype of a game from EA that was never released, and sees you controlling a chap who has to deal with zombies taking over his high school...
It was previously thought that you could only get to the end of the first level of the game before you came up against some unstoppable enemies, and until yesterday that's as far as I'd got, but then I was really pleased to discover this link which tells you how to access a debug menu by plugging in a second pad and holding Start and A on that....
This lets you explore the game a bit more, and you can get access to levels with zombie cheerleaders and american footballers, and fight weird teacher bosses or bulldogs and stuff...Anyway, I thought I'd include it just as an interesting look at something that for whatever reason never made it to shop shelves...
It actually looks like it would have been a really fun little game if it had been finished properly, and it's a shame it got cancelled. Go find a copy of the prototype online, get a decent Sega emulator and check it out....
52 - Ghost Castle 1 & 2 (ZX Spectrum) :
Another one of these new Speccy titles now! As I mentioned previously, although Speccy games stopped being sold in shops years ago, there's still a lot of games released for it every year! Here's another couple of homebrew hits, which has you trying to reunite a little ghost with his lost body...
The first game is a puzzley affair, and has you finding keys to unlock doors so you can escape the castle. You have to think carefully about which order to pick up the keys, as if you open the wrong door first you could be trapped forever in this slimy hellhole! Watch out for those nasty other spooks too, as they want to keep you there so they can keep themselves entertained torturing you....
In the sequel, you've managed to escape the castle, but you still need to find your way through the castle grounds to the crypt where your lost body lies, so off you go avoiding more nasties in a flip-screen adventure!
Both games are loads of fun, and great examples of the quality of games still coming out on the dear old Spectrum! What? Why am I adding two games at once to the list??
Well, that's because you can pick both of them up in a Special Edition release from Cronosoft, and what's more...all royalties from the sales go to the Douglas Macmillan Hospice, so you'll be helping out a great cause too! So go buy them...even if you don't own a Spectrum! It'll be the perfect excuse to pick one of those up too......
51 - Dead Space (Xbox 360) :
The backstory and plot for Dead Space could fill a book, and we don't have time for that right now so let's try and simplify it a bit...
People what live in space and mine planets for stuff have discovered a big alien statue thing called the Marker..some cultist nutters thought it was some sort of sign from their God and started worshipping it, and then all sorts of weird, crazy stuff started happening! The Marker started to turn people into evil mutations called Necromorphs too, but the church decided to send the Marker up onto a spaceship called the Ishimura anyway, so they could transport it somewhere safe..
On the spaceship, it started changing everyone too, and the alien virus spread throughout the whole ship. You, as Issac Clarke, have gone to investigate the Spaceship to find out what happened to everyone and look for your girlfriend, who was a scientist aboard the ship....
Gameplay is in the style of Resident Evil 4, with the camera sitting up behind your shoulder and you hunting through the ship, laying the smack down on the alien freaks and solving puzzles and all the usual Survival Horror type things...
Dead Space does it all extremely well though! The setting allows for some nice anti-gravity sections, and features a fair few nods to some Sci-Fi classics like The Thing and Event Horizon. The different sections of the ship are varied enough to keep boredom from setting in, and the different enemies you face will keep you entertained too! And it has some epic boss battles!
The story should keep you stuck to your seat, and although a little unoriginal, it's told well enough to keep you happy...and features some nice twists and turns throughout ! In fact the game's presentation is all really good and the graphics and sound all help add to the suspense and horror you'll feel while playing!
Guns and your suit can be upgraded, and if you don't manage to get them to their full potential on the first playthrough, the game saves all your stuff so that when you start again you keep all your upgrades! This helps in making you want to play through it again, although it's enjoyable enough to want to do so once you finish it first time anyway!
I recently picked up Dead Space 2, and that seems to be even more filled with scares and awesomeness, so if survival horror is your thing, you could do a lot worse than playing through this series!
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