100 More Gruesome Games For Halloween ( 76-74 )

Wow! Only nine days to go and due to all these various unforseen circumstances I'm not even at 70 yet! Looks like this list might have to continue past Halloween unless I really whizz through all these games.....Oh well, we'll see how it goes and get through as many as possible before then! Besides, any excuse to make the Halloween festivities last longer into the equally spooky November can only be a good thing right!? Here's the next few then......

76 - Dangerous Dave In The Haunted Mansion (PC) :

Before John Romero and the Carmacks started the whole FPS craze with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, they developed this fun little platform shooter! A sequel to an earlier platform game, Dangerous Dave, this has us take control of Dave as he enters a haunted mansion to look for his brother Delbert!

Armed with a shotgun, we travel through 8 levels of spooks and traps, blowing baddies apart into bloody chunks and leaping over various walls and obstacles, opening doors to reach further into the depths of the mansion.The enemies are a nicely varied bunch, with Frankenstein Monsters, Witchy-looking little imps, spiders, slimes and others all out to put a stop to Delbert's rescue.

Good job then that you get decent control of your gun and are able to aim it at different angles to help dispose of them before you come a cropper! But useful though the shotgun is, it will require reloading...something which you better remember to do after blasting every few fiends, or you'll end up witnessing one of the many animated death scenes that pop up in a nice little panel every time you pop your clogs....

It's a great little platformer and heaps of fun! The feel of the shotgun feels strangely familiar if you've played Doom too, even though the games are in different perspectives..which is a bit odd! But yeah, find a copy of this if you can and you should find yourself suitably pleased!

75 - Scratches (PC) :

Writers, it seems, never learn....how many horror movies, novels or games have you seen where a writer decides to spend time in a spooky old house to get inspiration for their new book, only for horrible happenings to occur rendering them mad, beaten & bruised or dead? Loads, right!?

Well guess what our numpty hero Michael Arthate has just gone and done? That's right...picked up the keys to Blackwood Manor, a spooky old house in the Northumbrian countryside, where he hopes to find inspiration for his next horror novel...

This is another game where it's probably best going in not knowing much about it...All you need to know is that you creep around the house, looking through old diaries and newspapers and finding objects in a mouse-driven point & click style affair, and the horror is of a more slow-burn approach than out and out scares....Ticking clocks and creaking doors hoping to fill you with dread, rather than zombie flesh-demons ripping out your innards.

Although a bit slow to start with, once you start working out the puzzles...and start hearing scratches....the game gets better. I've only just started it myself, so I'm not too far into it yet, although I hear it is quite short which seems to annoy a few people. Personally, I'd recommend picking it up if you can find it for a few quid..The atmosphere should be good for creeping you out during this increasingly cold month!

74 - Obscure (Xbox) :

A fresh setting for old survival horror gameplay with this title. In Obscure you get to take control of various different stereotypical American high school students as they try to evade death by weird plant-type monsters in a The Faculty ( Robert Rodriguez's 1998 movie) style situation.....

Now, lately, a lot of people are complaining about the fact some of their favourite survival horror games are getting co-operative play (Resident Evil / Dead Space) in their latest sequels...but having played through most of the Resident Evil games with a friend anyway, I can say that although it does mean you won't be quite as scared as you would be on your own, it doesn't mean the games won't be any less fun...In fact, sometimes they can be more fun if you have someone helping you!

Anyway, that's a big part of Obscure...Most of the time you'll be playing through the game as a pair of protagonists, and at the time being able to pass control of one of these characters over to a friend was a pretty unique thing to be able to do...

Unfortunately, I've yet to play the game in this way...or yet to play it much at all really! I started it a few months back, put it away so as I could play it nearer Halloween, and then for some reason it doesn't appear to be in the game box.....which means it's running loose somewhere around my flat! Meaning that if I want to properly tell you how good or bad it is, I'll need to wait until I can find it again! Terribly sorry.....I guess I'll need to cover it in the blog later, but at least if you didn't know about it before, you do now! But until I can find it I suppose it'll just need to stay a bit obscure......