As you will hopefully be aware, this year I participated in the Countdown to Halloween, and joined a whole load of other bloggers in celebrating the spooky speciallness of the season. You remember...that odd pumpkin badge at the side of the blog!? Clicking on that takes you to the list of participating bloggers and you can go visit their sites and revel in the beastly beauty of them all.....
Well, it turns out that a similar thing is happening over at The 13 Days Of Creepmas! For the first 13 days of December, clicking the little Gingerbread Man that has appeared below the Pumpkin at the top right of the blog will take you to another list of blogs bringing an extra collection of creepiness into the Christmas season as a response to retailers make Christmas do it's own creeping into October and November!
As such, it's a perfect opportunity for me to complete the list of Gruesome Games and help bring some horror to the holidays too....so maybe the blog isn't cursed after all, and it was just the evil demon-lords of Blogger making me ill and breaking my computer so as I could participate in the Creepmas Countdown! I'll try and find some more Christmas related spooky stuff to throw in there too, so it should be fun! Looking forward to it....
(Christmas Ash pic taken from Dynamite Entertainment'sAsh's Christmas Horror and is their Copyright)
I'm beginning to think that this Gruesome Games list might be cursed or haunted or something....just as I was about to start posting again after seeming to get my PC working properly, my mouse decided it would follow the PC's example and refuse to co-operate! The left button stopped working, making it pretty much impossible to do anything...
I have now since disposed of that particular electronic rodent, and have purchased a funky new wireless one, so hopefully that'll do the job! However, just as I was about to post again, another trip to the dentist left me nursing another toothache that requires painkillers that are making me all woozy like (not an extraction this time, tooth fans....this one was a root canal treatment!)....
But I promised one particular blog reader multi-armed skeletons, and multi-armed skeletons he shall have, in the first game of the next lot in the list! Pretty much all of these next lot are games I've only just started playing, so I've yet to experience all their wonders...I'll just be talking about what I've already witnessed!
52 - Skeleton Warriors (PS1) :
This is a game licensed from Landmark Entertainment Group's 1993 attempt at creating a new Masters Of The Universe type success of cartoon, toys and comics...Unfortunately for them, and perhaps for the kids of 1993, Skeleton Warriors never really took off, despite having some of the coolest looking toys ever and a pretty decent cartoon...
In the game, you take on the role of Prince Lightstar, who must fight through 21 levels of skeleton skullduggery in order to reach Baron Dark and retrieve the half of the powerful Lightstar Crystal the baron possesses. The crystal was what brought on supernatural changes to both the prince and the baron, when it cracked in two as they fought...
Whilst the baron has the crystal in his grasp, he can turn anyone with an evil heart into one of his Skeleton Warriors, so the prince must stop him before his entire kingdom succumbs to the skeleton's power!
What we get to experience is a fairly average side-scrolling platformer. It's digitised graphics make it hard to see what's going on a lot of the time, as do the the constant stream of explosions and body parts...Skelton's explode when you hit them with your sword y'see, and if you don't quickly collect the heartstone they drop, their bony parts will reconfigure and you'll have to deal with them again!
Every once in a while, you'll battle one of the main baddies from the toy line/cartoon/tea-cosy...such as the wonderfully named Aracula, the many-limbed monstrosity you can see in toy form at the top of this post. This would be nice if they were particularly difficult, but it appears a wee bit of shooting and dodging is all you need to see them off pretty quickly....
Not the best game on the planet then, but there's enough enjoyment there to warrant at least a play through if you see the game going cheap anywhere. Just don't expect it to thrill you to the bone or anything...
It's a real shame that the toys and everything related too them didn't take off though, as there was a lot of potential in these models. For a look at some more of the toys, and a reason why they perhaps didn't do as well as they should have, take a look at Pixel-Dan's look at the toy-line below....
51 - The X Files - Resist Or Serve (PS2) :
Another licensed game next, but this time based on the great-TV-show-that-gets-too-hung-up-on-it's-mythology-and-disappears-up-it's-own-arse of the nineties, the X-Files! Yes, you can now live out the dreams of millions of conspiracy nuts and ufonauts and take control of either Mulder or Scully, as they battle an evil the likes of which you've never seen....or it could just be more bloody zombies!!!
To be fair, I've only just started the game, and it looks like there'll be more to fight than the zombies at the start of the game, including people filled with that black gloop that ended up smothering the series itself. Before we get to all that though, I have to say I hope you're all fans of Mark Snow's theme tune, because you'll be hearing it a lot during play of the game...
Anyway, it plays a lot like other survival horror games, with you roaming around looking for keys and trying to work out puzzles, and although I've yet to see it, there's some interesting looking autopsy sequences you get to muck around with when you play as Scully.
All the characters are voiced by the original actors, and the script is by the writers of the show too, so you can probably view this as a "lost" episode of the series. It's far from amazing, and suffers from some repetition of dialogue, odd camera angles and some rather frustrating placement of items in the areas I've played so far, but if you're a fan of the show you should find extra worth in playing through this and seeing how the story plays out...
50 - Cursed Mountain (Wii) :
Eric Simmons is looking for his brother in the Himalayas in the next game on the list, and whilst doing so he encounters a darker side to Buddhism that we westerners aren't really accustomed to.....dealing with spirits of the dead and unhappy goddesses and the like...
Another survival horror title then, and one that seems surprisingly faithful to the teachings and rituals of the Himalayan people. There's a definite air of creepiness to the game that you won't find in many other titles, and even though I've only played a small part of the game, I'm keen to stick with it to see how the story unfolds and what exactly has happened to Eric's brother....
It's just a pity that the controls seem to want to make the game difficult to play at times, but then that's the case with a lot of Wii games, at least for me personally. Waving my arms about wildly trying to slash at a spirit, whilst said spirit tries to chew my face off, isn't always as much fun as it should be...and the game can feel a bit sluggish at times too, but it could be argued that this helps add to the tension and spooky feel of the game I suppose....
It also sounds like there'll be a lot more to enjoy from the game too, with some climbing sections and a bit where you have to try and escape a maze using the remote as a walky-talkie and getting directions from a voice in your ear! So yeah, I think I'll stick with this one for a while and see what's in store further up the mountain!
49 - Dead By Dawn (ZX Spectrum) :
Ah..yes...something a bit special next! A game created by my very own brother, who instead of clambering off up mountains instead decided to tackle the perhaps equally daunting task of creating a game using Incentive Software's 3D Construction Kit!
Fans of The Evil Dead series of films might have guessed from the title what the source of inspiration was for the game's design, and once you start playing it becomes fairly obvious that it's a not-very-subtle homage to Sam Raimi's horror hits...mainly the second movie, which had Dead By Dawn as it's sub-title...
The video above is of a work-in-progress version from a few years back, and so the finished game looks a little different...
Playing as Bruce Charcoal you've awoken an ancient evil, and must find 12 pages of a spellbook so you can find the right spell to send it back to wherever it came from...You'll find a few enemies along the way, and get access to a couple of weapons too in the shape of a shotgun and chainsaw...the chainsaw being required to deal with one particular nasty!
Anyway, being that it was made by my brother. it would probably be wrong for me to tell you how groovy it is and how you should go and download it and play it straight away....instead I'll just give you tell you to CLICK HERE which will take you his blog where you can find the game and even an inlay for it should you decide to download it to tape and play it on your actual Spectrums!
I'll leave you now with a video showing the very construction kit he used to make the game (although it is the rather more impressive 16 bit version in the video), and I'll see you back here soon for more games....providing the curse of the list has been lifted by actually making this post!
Just a quick post to say that my computer has been playing up again, hence lack of posts lately...well, that and the fact Halo 4 came out last Tuesday! :)
It seems my computer only goes weird when I try to access Blogger for some reason though!? Anybody else having any problems?
Anyway, it seems to be working fine for the moment, so if it continues to do so, I'll be putting up a new Gruesome Games post very soon!
Right...hopefully my computer has stopped playing funny buggers and decided to settle down, and I can get on with posting things without the fear of another error freezing everything and switching itself off!
Before I continue with the list though, I just want to thank everyone who has been following and commenting on the blog...it's just had it's 10,000th page view which is pretty freakin' awesome, even if it's just one guy somewhere looking at it over and over again! So thanks....whether you've stumbled upon it whilst looking for some random picture or horror game, or whether you're one of the guys and girls who read every post...it's when I see the number of views or read the comments that keeps me motivated to continue doing this, even after I get really frustrated with massive problems like the other night's refusal to work by the computer!
And if you're a lurker who visits all the time but hasn't clicked the "follow" button, don't be shy! Click that button and let me know you're interested, and I'll be kept motivated even more! Unless of course you've just visited again to see if I've stopped filling people's minds with drivel, in which case..sorry, that's not very likely to stop anytime soon I'm afraid!
Anyway, on with the show I suppose! We've still got the rest of these games to get through, and loads more games and other things I want to start covering too!!
55 - Elvira - The Arcade Game (Amiga) :
As I said last year, what's a spooky list without Elvira!? Here she is in a jumpy-leapy, fiery-shooty platformer on the Amiga! The plot of the game is some nonsense about one of her ancestors appearing as a ghost, and offering Elvira his castle to live in if she can prove herself worthy enough by battling through two dimensions he's lived in in his previous lives!?!?
Once you beat the first two levels, the Transylvanian Castle level will be unlocked, and if you beat that Elvira will become the queen and the castle will be hers.
It's not too bad...it's not too good...it's just a run-of-the-mill, pleasant looking Amiga platformer with added spookiness and ladybumps......there are power-ups to find, a trader who appears to swap spells with, and the usual odd beastie-baddies to deal with along the way....all pretty standard stuff.
Worth checking out I suppose, especially if you're a fan of Elvira...just don't expect it to become your new favourite game or anything, and you should do fine! Right, another game down....Next!!!
54 - Castleween (PS2) :
Oh god....remember last year when I played the GBA version of Castleween and quite enjoyed it, so I asked if anybody had played the PS2 version that supposedly existed? Well, I found it a couple of months back for a couple of quid and thought I'd see what it was like....
What I found was a very linear trot through a very, very average game...You again play as either a little boy dressed as a demon who can manipulate fire, or a little girl dressed as a witch who can use ice spells...and try to rescue your friends who have had their souls stolen by the Bogeyman...
Some strange little imp guy appears, talks to you in weird gamespeak while text appears below, and then you're stuck along a fixed path, followed by a really dodgy camera and have to fight past beasties and puzzles using the children's respective powers...
It could have been a really cool little game, and in fact is on the GBA, but with the weird camera angles, boring linearity and crazy distance the game puts you back if you lose a life, you'd be best ignoring this and sticking with the handheld version instead......
53 - Mad Doctor (C64) :
You can almost be certain that if you have a scientist with an odd name who lives in castle on top of a hill overlooking a quaint old village, come the first thundery shower and he'll be creeping about the graveyards acting rather suspiciously around town and carrying large bundles of something about the place...
So it is with Dr. Franz Johann Blockenspiel, who has devoted his time and energy to gaining worldwide fame as the creator of life! Of course, in order to achieve this goal, he has to first dabble a little with death.....
Taking control of Franz, you wander around the village of Strudelberg, looking for parts for which to create a body you can use in your twisted experiments. You can either go to the graveyard and search the coffins for a suitable corpse or go into town and cut down a recently hung criminal! Of course, doing such things won't go unnoticed by the villagers, who if you rile up enough will start rioting and hunt down and kill you!
So how do you get a body by other means if the village is too busy??? Well, along the paths outside the village, you sometimes encounter a lone traveller...and who's to say what happens to lone travellers who disappear on dark, stormy nights.....Mu-hu-hu-ha-haaaa!
I can't believe it's taken me so long to find this game! For someone who loves horror games as much as me, it's a real hoot to roam around a village breaking into hospitals to steal equipment, cut down corpses and loot graveyards, pop up in the tavern through a secret passage that leads from my castle.....all the while avoiding an angry mob and the police who are all out to stop my crazy experiments!
The game feels years ahead of it's time, giving you a huge list of options and things to do...you can read books on the creation of life left by your uncle, you have to eat & drink to stay alive, you can lock people in a cell for use later if the body you build doesn't work out....the game is filled with choice! If you succeed in building a monster from good parts, getting it alive by electrifying a kite and are able to subdue it with tranquilisers..you can even show it in the village hall and gain the fame and notoriety you seek!
The controls can be a little tricky at first, and there's not much in the way of sound....but everything else about this game is great, and I highly recommend it! The fact it allows you to murder innocent victims might seem a little controversial, but like modern day games like GTA, if slaughtering masses of random folk isn't your cup of tea then there are other options available! I mean, after all...I would never do such things, would I...*cough*...Your Honour?
