100 More Gruesome Games ( 73-70)

73 - Destroy All Humans (PS2) :

For years people have asked that if indeed we are being visited by extra-terrestrial visitors, just why are they interested in us? Do they want to make friends? Are they just curious about us? Or do they want to wipe us from the galaxy before we destroy it ourselves? Well, according to Destroy All Humans it's simply a case of them requiring our brains....

You see, thousands of years ago, an alien race called the Furons visited our solar system and battled the Martians, wiping them from the universe before they became too much of a threat. After making Mars inhospitable, the Furons decided to land on Earth for a little downtime, and indulged in a bit of hanky panky with the nubile natives.....

Zipping forward to 1950s-Earth-time, we find that the Furons have rendered their genitalia useless through unrestricted use of dangerous nuclear weaponary, and are now unable to reproduce! To combat this they have resigned to cloning themselves, but this has brought up a new problem....with every new clone, the Furon DNA weakens, meaning that clones are becoming increasingly stupid every time. They decide to send someone to Earth to collect the brain-stems of the humans, who now all possess Furon DNA after the earlier shore leave shenanigans all those years ago! This is where Cryptosporidium 137 comes in.....

After his brother Crypto 136 gets captured by the humans, the leader of the Furons sends 137 in his place...to rescue 136 if possible, but mainly to harvest DNA from the various humans. Crypto does this by traversing the sandbox-style world of the game, using ray guns, anal probes and occasionally taking the form of a human so he can sneak into places usually off limits...He can also read thoughts, which makes for some amusing revelations about what certain individuals are thinking in the game....including the cows that Crypto first encounters when he arrives on Earth!

He can also access his flying saucer, and take to the skies....destroying buildings with his Death Ray or lifting up creatures or vehicles with the tractor beam, which adds to the huge amount of fun the game has to offer! And it is lots of fun! Wandering around listening to the various characters, zapping them with the anal probe until their brains pop out of their heads for you to collect, levitating cattle and flinging them at the annoyed farmhands.....it all makes for a great little game, that reminds me a bit of the equally fun Stubbs The Zombie that I mentioned in last year's list....

It comes with a nice selection of extras too, including the entire B-Movie Teenagers From Outer Space for you to enjoy, and a few clips from Plan 9 From Outer Space! So yeah, you should definitely give it a go if you enjoy old B-movies...or anal probes......

72 - Shin Megami Tensei (SNES) :

This is the first in a series of games that tell a story of demons returning to earth and causing the apocalypse, with you playing as the hero who has a major role to play in it all, eventually deciding whether to be naughty or nice and siding with the angels or the demons.....

You start off the game in a dream sequence, where you witness bizarre goings on and rituals and meet people you will later encounter in the real world. Demons start appearing in the city you live in, but thanks to a mysterious computer program some random dude has sent you via e-mail, you can engage some of these demons in conversation and either threaten or coax them into joining you in your quest, whereupon they are stored on your PC and you can call on them in later battles to give you a hand....sort of like an evil version of Pokemon....

It's all viewed in first-person, and as you travel around the city you'll enter various buildings and shops, chatting to various different NPCs and finding out exactly what it is that's going on and what you should be doing next. It's all a bit trippy, dreamlike and wonderfully Japanese....

So Japanese in fact, that an English-language version was never actually released! But thanks to the wonders of modern technology, some dedicated fans and perhaps a bit of digital-devil magic, if you grab yourself a SNES emulator, a Shin Megami Tensei rom and head over to Aeon Genesis, you can find a patch you can add to the rom to allow you to play a fan translation of this wonderful RPG.

As I say, I've just started it but already I'm finding it loads of fun and a really interesting SNES RPG...I can look forward to about 50 hours of gameplay when I actually get back to playing it after I've finished doing all this Halloween stuff, and I'd recommend you play it too if you think you'll be able to immerse yourself for as long.....

71 - Pinball Of The Dead (GBA) :

Having loved the House Of The Dead games in the arcade, I was eager to include one in this years list...However, not having any current working Saturn to play the only conversion I ever owned of one and the general lack of any arcades pretty much anywhere these days, it was looking like I was going to have to ignore the series again this year....

And then I discovered this nice wee pinball game! Although technically not a proper House Of The Dead title, it does a decent job of capturing the feel of the gun-games and lets you play a pretty good game of video pinball. You get 3 different tables to play on, and these are filled with various zombies roaming about the screen, getting smooshed by your virtual steel balls...There's the usual loops, bumpers, rails and holes you'd expect to find in a pinball sim too, and some nice special effects that see giant zombie heads pop up in the playfield to add to the obstacles....

Although the game can feel a bit slow at times compared to other sims, it's still not so slow as to make the game unplayable, and if you have a GBA and are a fan of the other House of the Dead games and/or video pinball, you could do a lot worse than play this! 

70 - Altered Beast - (Megadrive/Genesis) :

Rise From Your Grave!  I can remember hearing those words booming out in various arcades I frequented back in the day, and remember being slightly tempted by the fact that when the Sega Megadrive appeared in shops over here, Altered Beast was the game you got in the box with the system! Eventually, I got a SNES instead though...most likely because I remembered when the time came to get a new console, that actually the music and voices in Altered Beast were probably the best thing about this game.....

You play the part of a dead chap who has been resurrected by Zeus to go rescue his daughter Athena from the clutches of the evil Neff, some baldy demon lord who has whisked her off to the underworld. To help you can gather souls to enable you to change your form into a werewolf, dragon, werebear or weretiger, depending on what level you're on....

So off you trudge on a pretty dreary adventure...It's not that it's totally terrible. It's just very basic in it's design.....walk right, kill things, transform into a beast that kills things a bit differently, repeat.....nothing terribly exciting happens at all really! You could argue that this is true of most side-scrolling beat-em-ups, but this one moves so slowly and has so little variation that it's really noticeable. The fact you can transform into different creatures does add a little to the charm of the game, and it has some interesting enemies for you to fight! I especially like the weird blob things that attach themselves to your head in the second level! And the music and sound is pretty good, but overall it's just...well...a bit boring....

Still, if you were a fan of the original arcade title or one of the first buyers of the Megadrive,  it's still a nice nostalgia trip to play this game now...I know some people absolutely love this game to bits too, but for me it's just a game to play for a twenty minute session just to reminisce about the old arcades and mourn their disappearance....