Hi everyone! Hope you all had an amazing Christmas, and that the New Year has been treating you all well!? Just thought I would pop on and give an update on how things are going...
So, I had plans to start doing more blog posts and to do that thing I said with Gruesome Games where I'd post a game a day for a year on my other blog. Well, that hasn't started yet, mostly due to the fact that I just need a break after the holidays to recuperate...I always find this time of year stressful, and this year was no different. But overall, Christmas was quite good! Managed to catch up with an old friend who was back from Australia for the holidays, and even went out to my first concert (a stripped back, laid back Twilight Sad gig) in 5 years!
Anyway, the plan now is just to take things easy for a while, recharge the batteries, and hopefully get fitter and healthier this year and manage any ongoing illnesses to the best of my abilities!
I do still have big plans for this year though, and hopefully at least one of these will be kicking off in the next couple of months. In order to make this happen, I purchased myself an early Christmas present of a brand new PC!
The specs weren't bad at all for the £700 I spent on it, and I asked ChatGPT some questions about what I'd be able to do with it to make sure it was capable of performing the tasks I want it to do before clicking the buy button, and so far everything is looking good, so I'm hesitantly optimistic about things going right! More details will follow when I'm ready to get things started....
Once I've rested up a bit, I'll also get working on the Gruesome Games ideas, although maybe posting every day is a bit ambitious, so let's just say I'll post when I can. I also have some other ideas about things I'd like to post here, but I know what I'm like so I won't make any promises!
Part of my Christmas Haul
Anyway, I'd just like to finish the update off by wishing you all a happy, healthy & prosperous New Year, and I hope 2025 is a good one for all of you! I'll see you again soon, most likely to talk about some of the awesome things I picked up at Christmas!
Ok, so it's been a few years since I tried to cover loads and loads of horror games in one Halloween season...I always intend to, but for various reasons it never seems to work out the way I intend. But this year, I thought I'd give covering a big splurge of games a go again...we'll see how this pans out!
Just to be on the safe side I'm not going to bother numbering them, and I'm also going to try and rein myself in whilst talking about them to try and get through a lot, and just let you know that these things exist without spending too much time going into too much detail, but we know that hasn't really worked in the past, so we'll see how that goes too! Hehe....
Anyway, let's not waste any more time and get right into the first title, which is......
2Dark - (Xbox One, PS4, PC) :
Starting up 2Dark is an unsettling experience. As a top down, almost SNES like, retro-looking styled game you wouldn't expect the very first thing to see to be the brutal murder of your wife and kidnapping of your children. But as the protagonist and his family experience a camping trip gone wrong, this is exactly what unfolds in front of you.
And no, it doesn't mean that you immediately go on a mission to rescue your kids, as the next scene sets things up seven years later, where our hero has become a jaded, recovering alcoholic of a PI, who has also become somewhat of a vigilante....tracking cases where children go missing in the hope of finding a clue to the wherabouts of his long lost kids.
In doing so, he has discovered a child trafficking ring, and so heads to various locations to track down these sick child-traffickers, rescue the kids and shut the whole thing down, one way or another.
So yes, it's all rather grim....even more so than is usual in horror games, and the fact that the game's style is sort-of nineties in design makes it seem all the more wrong and gloomy. And everything is dark...really dark! Including the levels!
Each level works as a themed haunted house type thing, with, for example, the first being a closed down circus/theme park, and our hero, Mr. Smith, enters these buildings armed with a torch, a gun and some candy to lure kids to safety with and/or to fling at switches from a distance.
Of course the torch requires batteries, and the gun requires bullets, so you'll need to pick extra packs of these up along the way. But even armed with a torch, the overly dark levels can be a very dangerous place.
The floors are always filled with massive holes, that aren't easy to see, and more often than not you'll instantly die when you come across them for the first time. Hopefully Mr. Smith will have smoked a cigarette not long before you encounter the holes, as this is how you save your progress. Too many smokes though, and you'll have a coughing fit, which will alert the baddies!
Ah yes...the enemies! The game would like you to pass by most of these guys stealthily, but the mechanics of 2Dark make that very difficult, so usually you'll just try to lure them to a good area where you can blast their brains out, and get them out of the way.
As mentioned, any sound will have them hunting you down, and when you eventually find some kids, they can of course be very noisy, which makes it even harder to sneak past. Thankfully the bad guys can also fall foul of the many traps and animals that also fill the levels, which can make things a little easier.
When you do find the kids, you'll have to lead them to safety, keeping them quiet or in one place until you clear a path. Any enemy encounters will result in their deaths more often than not, and as mentioned, although the game wants you to be stealthy for the best scores, you'll get a lot further if you just clear out all the bad guys first. There are bosses to fight too of course, and these can be even more tricky to dispatch...
Overall though, the game relies heavily on trial and error. It took a few goes for me to get properly involved in it, and also to make any sort of progress. It did start to grow on me after a while, but with the very grim subject matter and the difficulty, this game won't be for everyone.
It was created by the guy who created Alone in the Dark and Little Big Adventure, Frédérick Raynal, and I can see what he was trying to do, but by capturing the old school feel, he's also captured the old school difficulty and I fear that will put many people off. But it does have a certain gloomy, depressing charm, if that makes sense. I guess it's worth checking out, so long as you know what to expect going in to it....
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Avenging Spirit - (Arcade, Gameboy, Modern Consoles and PC) :
After 2Dark, I feel we need something a little lighter, so this cute little possess-em-up platformer should do the trick!
So the premise behind this game is that while out walking with your girlfriend one night, you are both attacked. Whilst your girlfriend is kidnapped by these odd gangster types, a far worse fate has befallen you, and you have kicked the bucket completely.
As luck would have it though, your belle's dad is a scientist who has been dabbling with the paranormal and summoning your spirit into a jar, he informs you that he thinks he knows where your girlfriend might be being held and teaches you how to possess enemies so you can use their own powers against them as you go on a hunt-and-rescue mission to save your lady!
It isn't going to be as easy as you would first think though, due to the fact that you require spirit energy to maintain these possessions, and any hits that you take from projectiles or any bashes you receive from enemies, will decrease your energy until your spirit pops back out of whatever body you are currently possessing and you'll have to find another body before your 'un-life' force runs dry!
Taking control of the different enemy types is what really makes this game stand out from the platforming crowd, as each new baddie comes with it's own unique set of skills, and playing around with them until you find what suits can be great fun, as you traverse some tricky platforms and the usual jumping sections you find in such stuff.
I'm most familiar with the arcade version of the game, but it did also come out on Gameboy, and playing both again for this article, I have to say that the Gameboy version was a lot more speedy. I was emulating both games though, and the arcade version seemed to be a bit slower and clunkier than I remember, so it might be an emulation issue, but nevertheless, both versions are worth a look as they each have their plus points! And I think the game was ported to all the modern consoles a year or two ago as well, so it should be really easy to find somewhere to play it. It's definitely a cute little curio to play for the spooky season!
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Alien Breed - Special Edition '92 (Commodore Amiga) :
If you owned an Amiga in the early nineties, chances are you had some version of Alien Breed. I remember everybody talking about it at school, and as I only had a ZX Spectrum at the time, I was a bit jealous of all my Amiga owning friends, as this alien-blasting Gauntlet clone sounded amazing!
Skip forward to the late '90s and I was eventually making enough money that I was able to go to car boot sales and find my very own Amiga, for a lot less cash...and one that came bndled with a copy of Alien Breed - Special Edition '92! Finally I'd be able to sample it's brilliant-ness!
And it is indeed quite brilliant. Maybe not quite as good as Gauntlet, which it clearly takes a lot of inspiration from, but it still holds up fairly well and is certainly fun enough to be a worthy Amiga classic! Of course, another heavy inspiration is the Alien franchise, which should be obvious as soon as you see the box!
And like those films, the game sees you scurrying around metal corridors, trying to keep enough ammo as you battle the hordes of enemies that are taking over your base/spaceship/whatever...
Health packs, ammo, money...all of these things are required and can be found lying around the place, but a lot of the time they're behind locked doors, so you'll be needing to find keys too, so you can get to all that much needed loot!
Wave after wave of alien scum will do their best to stop you from completing the various goals of your mission, and there's a lot to get through, with this Special Edition coming with an extra 12 missions, including some where you're in the dark and can only see the blueness of the alien beasties eyes (apparently at least, I haven't got far enough to see that yet!)....
If I have any gripes about the game, it's that it can be a bit fiddly to control. You'll frequently get stuck on some of the scenery, and you'll be wishing that your little marine had eight-way directional shooting, which unfortunately he doesn't.....and this makes the game a lot harder than it feels it should be. You do get more used to it the more you play, but it definitely takes away from the shine of the rest of the package...
But the game is still atmospheric and groovy enough that you'll forgive it's faults, especially when you hear the Star-Trek-esque door noises, the classic si-fi trope of a female computer voice and the funky title music! Alien Breed then, is definitely one to play.....just remember that in space, no one can hear the narrator say "Green Marine is about to die!"
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King of the Monsters (Arcade, Neo Geo, SNES, Megadrive/Genesis) :
There's always room for some Kaiju-battling, and this fighting game from SNK gives you plenty of apartment-block sized baddies to bash! Originally released in the arcades in 1991, there's not really a whole lot to say about the gameplay of this title...it's exactly what you would expect! You fight either the computer or another player after choosing your character from the selection available, and battle it out until the other one's energy has dropped enough for you to finish them off!
I guess the way you have to pin them for three seconds, wrestling style, is a bit different from the usual Streetfighter-style of ending a match...and being able to pick up planes, cars, etc. that are passing by and fling them at your enemies is a little different, at least from most other beat-em-ups, but it's all pretty much par for the course with regards to other Kaiju battlers!
The arcade version is definitely the one with the most stuff to look at and interact with, and has an excitable guy who pipes up every now and again at the start of a match to shout about the giant beasties, but I found the Megadrive/Genesis game to be a bit speedier and slightly more fun as a brawler.
The Super NES version is probably the worst of the bunch, as it seems slower and clunkier. It's still okay, but you'd definitely be better off with one of the other versions if you're able to choose.
The Final verdict then, is that King of the Monsters is fine. But it's just fine. It's nothing special, but there's just enough fun involved for it to be worth a go if you fancy some beat-em-up action. Oh, and yes, when I was recording the video, I had no idea what the hell I was supposed to press to pin my opponent, but worked it out eventually! Hehe....
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Escape From Monster Manor (Panasonic 3DO) :
When I got my Xbox Series S a couple of Christmasses ago, I had no idea that it would open the floodgates to thousands of games that I had been waiting to play for ages...but a few months after buying it I happened upon a video that told me about the Xbox's Dev Mode, and the emulation possiblities that it offered. One purchase of a portable HDD and much transferring of game files later, and I was finally able to emulate lots of machines that were beforehand unavailable to me....including the Panasonic 3DO!
I had experienced the wonders of the 3DO many years before when visiting a friend of a friend, and for years I wanted to play Need for Speed, Road Rash and whathever the hell that Golf game was that I had played on it....but then I discovered a few horror title gems that had also been hidden away on it. Including this one!
Escape from Monster Manor is a first-person shooter / adventure, that sees you enter the aforementioned mansion trying to find pieces of an ancient talisman that the owner of the manor had brought back to its halls in order to try and harness the great power within.
Unfortunately, he kicked the bucket and his descendants scarpered after discovering that lots of evil nasties had filled the manor, looking to find the pieces of the talisman and use it for their own nefarious deeds!
And so now it's up to us to try and piece the talisman back together before the bad guys can get to it. Armed with some sort of weird electro-doohicky zapper gun, we enter the manor and try to navigate its many corridors and corners, making sure to stay topped up with ammo, health, keys and some random coins and gems that can add to your points or give you extra lives.
Playing the game nowadays, it definitely lacks a bit of sparkle. The manor itself is a bit sparse, with no roof or floor textures and only random pieces of furniture sprinkled around every now and then to give a very poor impression of it being a house. The ghosts and ghouls all have a decidely 2D sprite feel to them, but somehow this does add to their spookyness! But the game has definitely taken inspiration from Wolfenstein 3D, which I guess is no bad thing.
Despite it looking a bit bare, the sound of the game really helps with the atmosphere. Unearthly voices, groans and screams fill the air, and spooky tunes play throughout. Random ghosts will pop up in front of your face every now and then too, which also adds to the feel of things.
And so in the end, traipsing through the manor is actually a lot of fun, and that early nineties experience you can only get from early CD titles seems to work in it's favour for adding that extra spark of spooky goodness. Go play it and discover it for yourselves!
Well, thankfully Blogger didn't bork on me tonight and wipe all my stuff. As you can see I took a break from redoing the Spook Sighting stuff, but I'll get back to that either tomorrow or Saturday. I hope you enjoy this first batch of Gruesome Games though, and hopefully I'll get a lot more in before the end of the month. In the meantime, you all know what to do...give that badge below a click to see what everyone else had been up to for the Countdown, or you can head straight over and visit Dex at AEIOU....and Sometimes Why, where he has some awesome monster cards for you to have a nosey at!
As you've probably noticed, I tend to steer clear of a lot of the more well-known horror games when doing the Gruesome Games lists, preferring to draw people's attention to the more obscure hidden gems or under-appreciated titles. Having said that, I had always planned to cover everything eventually...so it's probably about time we got to one of the most influential horror games ever!!
If for some reason you've never heard of Alone In The Dark, it's perhaps more famous these days as being the original 3D 'Survival Horror' game, and heavily influencing Capcom's Resident Evil series. Originally it was intended to use real photographs of an old 1920's mansion for the backgrounds of the game, but this proved tricky for the tech available at the time, so they used hand-drawn bitmaps in their place. This 'pre-rendered backgrounds with 3D polygons on top' setup was what Shinji Mikami would discover whilst developing the first Resident Evil, changing his mind from making that game a first person adventure, and thus we have Edward Carnby and pals to thank for the tank-controlled craziness and weird-angled-camera jump scares in Capcom's classic!
Ah yes...Edward Carnby! Not your typical game hero, with his auburn hair and middle aged moustache! Picking from either him or the owner of the mansion's niece, Emily Hartwood, you set off for the mansion on the hunt for an old piano....P.I. Edward hunting it for an antiques dealer, and Emily looking for a letter hidden within it that she suspects will shed light on her uncle's sudden suicide!
After making your way to the attic and finding this piano, the doors of the mansion slam shut, locking you inside...and all manner of strange, Lovecraftian horrors start emerging from behind doors and smashing through windows to try and capture you so that some ancient evil can possess your body and wreak havoc upon the world!
To stop them, you'll need to push things around to block openings, hunt for clues, solve puzzles and use weapons you find to keep them at bay until you can find an escape from the haunted halls and creepy caves you'll find yourself running through.
Playing the game these days, it can feel a bit clunky. With its tank controls and faffy menu-driven inventory systems, you'd best be prepared for some fiddling around to get things to work...but it's still a fun adventure once you get used to its mechanics!
If you've played later survival horror games it won't take you long to get into the swing of things, but like I say, just be prepared for a slightly slower pace than you might be used to! Edward and Emily arent the fastest of movers, although there is a run function included. But that will most likely have you stumbling around missing turns and things when you really need to be moving accurately. And be sure to search everywhere for clues and things, which you sometimes might forget to do while wrestling with the menus! Take your time, and you'll be fine though...
I picked up a copy of this from GOG which is probably your best bet for a working version that'll run well on modern PCs...and it's well worth picking up, whether its just to see where it all started for 3D survival horror, or you really want another Lovecraft inspired horror nugget to wrap your tentacles around!
There are of course many sequels to Alone in the Dark, but we'll save those for another day! Because it's about time you went exploring the other blogs taking part in the Countdown to Halloween, which you can do by clicking the badge below...
As has somewhat become a tradition of the blog, every time I tried to write this next installment of Gruesome Games, I ended up feeling terrible...the dreaded Curse of the Blog!! Nevertheless I persevered, and so here are four more games for you to consider for some fiendishly freaky fright-fest fun!
Big giant monsters! Ever since King Kong climbed the Empire State Building and Godzilla first rose up from the sea, huge creatures have been stomping all over our on-screen cities. Naturally it wasn't long before such creatures met up to battle each other to find out who was the best, and cause even more destruction! Once video games appeared on the scene, they also didn't wait very long before giving us control over these mega-sized monsters!
This game then is similar to a few other monster beat-em-ups, but it is a very good example of the genre! There are eight characters unlocked at the start of the game, with a few more available to unlock. These characters will look fairly familiar to any fan of the aforementioned sci-fi flicks too, with a giant ape, a giant lizard, a huge robot...you get the idea! The game knows it's target audience and knows what they'll want to see!
Once you've listened to the 50's style music, watched the spinning newspapers of the intro and picked your favourite monster, you can play against a friend in fully 3D environments, smashing buildings, picking up cars or sharp pointy pieces of metal to throw at them, and using your characters unique abilities (radioactive breath, for example) to defeat the other player. You can also add an extra couple of fighters, although sadly these can only be computer controlled. If you can't find anybody else to play with, there is a fairly decent solo mode too, with the added feaature of slightly smaller monsters to battle in between the big fights!
The environments are pretty cool, often hiding little discoverable easter eggs such as extra weapons to use, and the way the buildings fall apart and add more things to lob at your opponent is pretty cool. There are apparently also a few mini-games to unlock, but I've never managed to unlock any of these yet, so can't really comment on those.
It all makes for a pretty enjoyable, suitably sci-fi, beast-filled brawler that's a bit of a hidden gem on Playstation 2. It took me a while to find a copy, but Im really glad I did, and would recommend it to anyone looking for a slightly unusual addition to their collection of fighting games!
I stumbled upon this game in a charity shop a while back, and was amazed I'd never heard of it before. I thought I knew about most of the 360's horror-themed titles, but this one had totally escaped my attention, maybe because it was quite an early release on the system....
I'm certainly glad I picked it up though, as what I found was another hidden gem of a game, that almost feels like a 3D version of my old favourite, Zombies Ate My Neighbors! Almost.....
You play as one of four teenage characters, who are having to deal with a zombie outbreak that seems to have happened at the worst possible time for one in particular. Zack, the nerd, was about to tell Carrie, the goth, exactly how he felt about her just as his skater friend Andy turned up, swiftly followed by Jennifer the cheerleader and the zombie horde!
Starting in Zack's house, you'll need to scour the environment for weapons and pickups to use against these icky ex-humans, and you'll also other pieces of metal and materials that can be used to later to construct more powerful weapons to keep them at bay. A boss zombie appears, and once you defeat him you can escape the house to the city and a whole host of other environments as you try to stop these undead fiends from ruining your night!
It soon becomes apparent however, that its not just zombies! There are all sorts of messed up monsters to battle....Bigfoot, Zombie Dogs, Werewolves...even Evil Clowns! Each new monster is introduced by a short cut-scene, which is a nice touch, and from what I've played so far new enemies pop up very frequently which keeps things interesting!
There's a fair dose of humour involved in the game too...it doesn't take itself too seriously at all, and this is what gives it that B-movie mocking, light hearted feeling thats similar to Zombies Ate My Neighbors. The weapons also harken back to that classic, with you using all sorts of weird implements to bash in the baddies heads! It does add a few tricks of its own too though, with a selection of vehicles to control such as a boat to battle zombie pirates, or a hot-rod style buggy thing to traverse the roads...
Sadly though, the game has a few issues, chief of which is the camera. It quite often picks a weird angle to show you, and although it can be swapped between a close up view, or one that gives a slightly more top-down look to the game, it would be better if it gave you full control over it instead of it being semi-fixed. The controls can sometimes feel a bit janky too, and sometimes the gameplay does some weird things, and jumping around the levels can be frustrating.
So a gem, but a flawed one then! Interestingly, there's apparently an updated version for PS3 that fixes some of these issues called Monster Madness - Grave Danger, so I'll need to see if I can find that one! I can still recommend this one though...despite it's flaws it is the closest thing to a ZAMN sequel that I've seen, and was a very pleasant surprise! Pick it up if you can!
Blair Witch is another one of those games that I really don't want to talk about too much...I just want to recommend it to you so you go and experience it for yourself! I feel the less you know about it going in, the better the experience will be...
I can tell you the basic details though. Two years after the events of the original film, a young boy has gone missing in Black Hills Forest. Ellis Lynch, the character you play, is an ex policman and military veteran who decides to put his training to good use and go help the local police force to track down the kid. With him he takes his faithful dog, Bullet, and can use his canine chum to access areas that would otherwise be inacessible. Bullet also becomes really handy when things get a bit darker or foggier at night, finding paths and ways through the forest....so you'll be wanting to keep him on your good side by occasionally playing with him or giving him treats when he does well.
As you search through the creepy forest environment you'll discover various clues and items, the most notable of which is a camera. I mean, of course....you cant have a Blair Witch game without a camera right? Needless to say this also becomes a very handy thing to have around...
Like previous Bloober Team games, this first person horror will have you jumping in fright on more than a few occasions, and it does a great job of capturing the feeling of being lost in a forest at night, before it ramps things up into the suitably weird experiences of being around the Blair Witch. But maybe I'm saying too much...
It's not a flawless game, but it's certainly suitably scary and worth a playthrough, especially at this time of year! Just be prepared to have your mind warped as you try to wander the woods.....
In true horror movie style, American football hero Harry Johns and his girlfriend Conny have found themselves stuck on an island near some spooky old mansions. These mansions are owned by a mad scientist called Dr. Graves, who has been pottering around in the corspe filled places that he shares his name with, and conjuring up monsters with which he plans to take over the world!
It's up to Harry to wander around the island, enter these mansions and find the special weapons required to take down the six main monsters who are also lying sleeping in some of these cursed buildings. He'll need a gun to defeat the werewolf, a hammer and stake for the vampire...you get the idea! Trying to put a stop to Harry's plan are all the lesser monsters under the control of Dr. Graves. Touching any of these fiends will see you bounced around the screen, your health diminishing as you do so. Luckily Harry has somehow managed to power himself up with some sort of magical energy and can fire bolts from his hands to kill the beasties! Bizarrely, they also seem to be a bit spooked themselves, as pressing down on the joystick while in a building sees you giving the baddies a scare by waving your hands around in a spooky fashion. It's all a bit odd...
I had high hopes for this one after reading the premise and seeing the screenshots, but unfortunately the game is a mess. Trying to navigate the map screen I immediately came up against an invisible wall that stopped me going in one of the directions. Entering the first mansion I couldn't find anything but enemies, but had no idea how to leave the building again. And so I spent my time endlessly getting bounced around the screen before dying 3 times and getting a game over screen. Oh, I should say that was actually my second attempt as well, as the first time I tried to play the game self-aborted to the title screen from the map.
A real shame then, but although this game looks lovely and has pretty good presentation, I can't recommend it at all, as it is utter, utter poop!
Hopefully I'll be able to get a few posts done for the Grand Finale! There will definitely be the second part of the Wendigo stuff, and hopefully another comic strip and some more stuff to watch too! I'll see you here for all the Halloween hilarities anyway! Right now though, go check out what the other folks taking part in the Countdown have been doing by clicking the badge below to be zapped as if by magic to the Countdown hub!
So the lack of time to put the blog together this year has meant that the Gruesome Games section has been somewhat lacking....to make up for this, have a post that brings together links to all 253...yes 253....games that I've covered so far!
I had big plans for another list this year, but it looks like you'll need to watch this space next year...there's still plenty more where these came from! ;)
The first 202 games are listed down from 100 in their order from the first two lists, and then all the other games I've covered since then are numbered after 202..if that makes any sense? (It probably doesn't, but it does in my head...so...)
Click the name of the game you want to read about to be whixked away to the appropriate link!
Halloween again! We made it another year! I might still have time to do one last story from the Digital Comic Museum later, but just in case I don't let me just wish everybody a Happy Halloween! It's been great fun taking part in the Countdown once again....please go visit the other bloggers taking part by clicking the badge below! Have a good one everybody!
