100 More Gruesome Games! ( 69-66 )

69 - Splatterhouse Wanpaku Graffiti (NES) :

Last year, I talked quite briefly about Splatterhouse 3, and about how the Splatterhouse series is one of my favourite horror game franchises. It's renowned for it's graphic use of violence and adult themes, and the games rank among the rankest when it comes to splatters of gore! So what the hell happened with this entry, actually the first sequel to the original and only released on the Famicom in Japan!?

Perhaps it took the cutesy route so it could appear on a Nintendo console? Whatever the reason, this cutesy version of Splatterhouse is a weird but fun little game, that plays slightly easier and a little more platformy that the rest of the games.

As always, you're in control of Rick who for whatever reason starts the game 6-feet under, with his girlfriend Jennifer crying at his graveside....but then a random lightning bolt strikes the ground, and Rick is revived and Jen jumps for joy! However, a second lightning bolt wakes the evil Pumpkin King...who speedily nabs Jennifer and flies off across the graveyard! So our hero must dust himself down, and prepare for rescue mode once more! 

So yes, it all starts with a great sense of deja vu...but things soon become less than normal, and as quickly as the end of level one, you find yourself watching some zombies getting groovy with a parody of Michael Jackson! The game is filled with lots more references to spooky pop culture, with nods to Evil Dead 2, Jaws, The Exorcist and a few more classic horror flicks among them....

Think of this as being like....I dunno......Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein maybe....a different take on a great horror title that plays for laughs but also does a good job of representing the original!  If you're a fan of Splatterhouse but have yet to play this, seek out the English translation online and get playing it! You'll be missing out if you don't....

68 - Splatterhouse (360) :

Yes..that feeling of deja vu I was talking about is due to strike again as I take a look at the reboot of the Splatterhouse franchise from 2010...In this game, we once again fill the blood-spattered shoes of Rick as he attempts to rescue Jennifer from the clutches of Dr. Henry West who intends to sacrifice her....luckily, Rick finds the Terror Mask and it persuades him to stick it on and use it's powers to hunt down West and free Jennifer....

Being a re-imagining it ignores the previous games except for the mask-wearing plot, although it does try to retain their shock value and love of violence and gore! Working your way through the mansion, you'll soon be ripping monsters jaws off, sticking them onto spiked chairs before roasting them in an oven and battering more baddies with your own severed arm........

Most games reviewers didn't think much of this new Splatterhouse when it was released, saying it was trying too hard to be violent, it had clumsy mechanics, the story sucked.....there were a few who seemed to get it though! In the seventeen years or so between games, gamers have become slightly more accustomed to seeing violence in games...so it was always going to be tough to try and be shocking in the way the original games were.....so it seems like the developers just thought "What the hell..." and tried to put as much violence, gore and swearing in as possible and go totally over the top, but in a sort of cartoony way.....

And gameplay has never really been that great in Splatterhouse titles anyway! The first two were basically just walk right, kill stuff, repeat....That's not really what they were ever about...not to me at least! For me, they were always about being able to play a game that had proper horror leanings...and smashing horrible, gooey, messed up monsters into walls and watching them slide down into the muck....The most fun was in the splatter! It's in the name people....

But to say that this doesn't have any gameplay is just wrong...this has the most meat to it than any of the games! You'll find recordings Dr. West has left behind detailing his experiments...you'll fight all manner of creepy creatures and dismember them in different ways, including with chainsaws...every now and then the game will throw in a different move or style or even mini-puzzles you'll need to work out to progress....heck, it even has levels inspired by the old 2D games, where the camera shifts and you view them side on! AND it has all 3 original proper Splatterhouse games included as unlockables!!!

It's far from perfect...it has long loading times, the kill moves can get very repetitive and they've felt the need to include nudey pictures of your virtual girlfriend to collect, which is even harder to explain to your parents if they're visiting than why you're smacking a man with chainsaws for arms with your own dismembered one....but it's decent enough, especially if you're a fan! If not, you'll find a rather gory, arena style slashathon with platformy bits and light puzzling to be done...oh, and like Wanpaku Graffiti it has nods to other horror things too like Evil Dead 2 and perhaps Re-Animator......so give it a bash if that sounds like it'll float your boat!

67 - Nightbreed - The Action Game (ZX Spectrum) :

I loved the movie Nightbreed when it appeared in 1990! Not only did it have a whole underground community of weird and wonderful monsters from the brain of weirdo Liverpudlian horror writer Clive Barker, but it basically portrayed them as the good guys, which made a nice change to having them preying on innocent victims and the like! So when a conversion of the film came out in game for on the good old Speccy, I knew I'd have to get my hands on it.....

You take control of Boon, the film's hero, as he trys to find the entrance to Midian, the underground lair of the Nightbreed, all the creatures us nasty humans have tagged with the collective term "monsters"...believing himself to be responsible for a series of murders, Boon wants to be accepted into Midian to live among the other outcasts....

Boon is unaware that actually, the murders have been committed by his very own psychiatrist Doctor Decker... and to make matters worse, Decker has teamed up with a bunch of crazy neo-nazi style cops calling themselves The Sons of The Free, and they've all come to Midian too to destroy Boon and the Nightbreed! And to make things even worse, Boon's girlie Lori is also running around looking for Boon, unaware of all the weirdness.....

And so you wander around the game avoiding or shooting at the Sons Of The Free and various Nightbreed of the more stupid variety that can't tell the difference between you and the cops, and try to enter Midian...which you eventually do, and then you have to do other things which will reveal far too much about the plot of the film and/or game for me to go into here...

Anyway, it's a fairly tricky but decent enough romp through a pretty colourful maze of screens, with the baddies and yourself as monochrome sprites against the background... Various traps, pits and ladders are scattered around too for you to avoid or use, and you'll get three lives to do stuff with...which you can keep an eye on at the top of the screen, as your face slowly melts off the three skulls depending on how much damage you're taking....

All in all, not too bad...although if you're playing via cassette on the original Speccy, the multi-load can be a nightmare..and it also makes it pretty tricky to emulate too, unless you have a decent emulator that lets you rewind to certain parts of the cassette! And as I say, it can be fairly tricky and hard to see what's going on sometimes, but other than that it's quite a good conversion of the movie!

66 - Nightbreed - The Interactive Movie (Amiga) :

And then there's this! Not content with releasing one version of the game, Ocean Software decided to release another game for the systems that could handle it...this time in a mouse-driven adventure game style....

When I think back to playing this game on my friend's Amiga, two things come to mind....the fact that at the time I had no idea what the hell I was supposed to be doing and ended up back at the asylum a lot whilst driving around the map...and that crazy chase sequence you can see in the video above, where you try to outrun Peloquin...for some reason I really liked that!

Revisiting it, it's an okay-ish adventure game that gets more annoying the further you get in it....give it a try and see what you make of it if you like the look of the game from the video above.....