100 More Gruesome Games For Halloween ( 81-77)

Garh! This damn tooth (or ..uhm...lack thereof...) means that now, just like last year, I'm going to have to rush through some of these games in order to get to 100 before Halloween! Best laid plans and all that...*sigh* ....Oh well....best get to it then, and crack on with the next lot....

81 - Castlevania (NES) :

If you haven't played this, the first in the epic Castlevania series of games, then you're missing out on a truly classic platformer! Most of the elements that appear in later titles started here, and although it's starting to show it's age a little, there's still enough atmosphere and gameplay to make it worth a play this Halloween!

If you've played later Castlevanias, you'll know what to expect...lots of great platforming action with cool weapons, hidden items tucked away behind walls and a whole gaggle of ghastly ghouls trying to stop you reaching our old friend Count Dracula! It can be fiendishly tough in places, often due to the rather crappy controls, but as this was the first game you can forgive it it's faults as it does such a good job with everything else! It's the best place to start if you've yet to be sucked in to the Belmont's battle against old Drac, and even if you have played it before, why not go back and remember where it all started!?

(Oh, and in case you're wondering, the version I have is in Spanish...fret not, English versions are available!)

80 - Forbidden Siren (PS2) :

This is another one of those games....you know the sort.....ones you really want to like but for whatever reason it does something to just really annoy or frustrate you to the point you end up just hating it and flinging it back onto the game pile, where it sits and waits until you convince yourself you were just being too harsh and the whole scenario begins again....

Forbidden Siren at first seems to tick all the right boxes for me....it's a survival horror set in Japan and the plot is suitably odd and Japanese...it has really freakish realistic faces plastered on to the in-game characters....the atmosphere is weird and dreamlike....Basically, looking at the trailer I thought it was going to become my new favourite game!

But then I bought it. I discovered that the Japanese speech had been re-dubbed by British actors who were quite clearly practicing for an amateur dramatic play. I found out that the interesting sounding Sight Jack ability, where you get to see what the zombie-type enemies see through their own eyes, is incredibly tricky to use properly. I was enlightened to the fact that this was not to be my new favourite game......

Other people seem to really enjoy it though, and I'm sure to someone out there it is perfect! So maybe you should give it a go and see if it does anything for you...It just didn't click with me the way I expected it too....As I say, I want to like it, as the sight-jacking probably is really good once you know how to use it, and the environments and graphics look great, and the plot is really freaky, and.....maybe I am being a bit too harsh on it! In fact...hmmm...where did I put it??

79 - Zombie Zombie (ZX Spectrum) :

Another game that was recommended to me after last year's list now, but it's one I feel I may be trying out about 30 years too late...From Sandy White, the creator of the Speccy classic Ant Attack, this game also uses his famous SoftSolid3D isometric graphics. It sees you in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, and gives you a helicopter which can drop blocks to create new terrain, and a gun which fires a sort of zombie deterrent to keep back any flesh-eaters that start rushing towards you as you traverse the landscape...

Unfortunately, I found the game to be rather boring. All you do is wander around a rather empty set of walls, with the occasional neon-green zombie turning red and charging towards you, almost inevitably killing you instantly as you try to work out the old isometric control system! And the helicopter is also very confusing to begin with, as pressing fire either drops a block or makes you exit it, meaning you can leave it parked in some very difficult to reach places.

I can see how back in the day, being able to create new landscape with the helicopter could be fun...and the graphics would still have been pretty revolutionary...and having zombies rush at you suddenly was probably terrifying! But as I said at the start, I think I maybe arrived at the Zombie Zombie party a little too late to fully appreciate it, and just ended up finding it all a bit frustrating and pointless....

78 - Escape From The Planet Of The Robot Monsters (Arcade) :

The evil Reptilons have taken the beautiful scientist Sarah Bellum hostage and it's up to our heroes Jake & Duke to rescue her and the other captives enslaved by these evil Robot Monsters in this isometric-arcade shooter from Atari...

As you traverse the various levels, you'll have to dodge bullets, rays. homing devices...all manner of nasty stuff chucked your way by the nicely animated enemies. Switches need to be flicked to activate stairs and the like, and you have to be extra careful not to shoot the various hostages that are busy working away for their alien slave-masters! Every now and then you'll get to pilot a little spaceship too for added enjoyment...

There are loads of secrets to be found in this B-movie style blaster, and it's loads of fun shooting everything in sight to see what it does. There's tons of stuff I could witter on for hours about, but as time is short I'll just tell you to seek it out...either in the wild,  via MAME or the retro compilations it's appeared on....even most of the conversions to other computers like Amiga and the good old Speccy....and just give it bash for yourselves! You won't be disappointed.... 

77 - Koudelka (PS1) :

Hearing a ghostly voice summoning her to an old abandoned monastery, our heroine Koudelka dons her skimpiest costume and heads off to see how her witchy powers can help the spectral source of said spooky voice, in this crazy mix of JRPG and Survival Horror release from 2000... 

Koudelka soon meets up with another couple of adventurers...Edward, who has heard tales of treasure and loose women being kept at the monastery..and Father James, a bishop who was sent to find out what was going on here! Our team of three proceed to wander through the various fixed-camera-angled rooms, encountering all manner of spooks and beasties and the occasional Resident Evil style puzzle that is expected of such games....

It does a fairly decent job of it, but a major flaw is quick to introduce itself....the JRPG-style random encounters! These take the form of grid based combat, where you move your character around a few squares at a time and you and your enemies take turns at hitting each other with spells, guns or knifes...which is fine if you can handle such things, but if you're expecting a proper survival horror affair you'll soon tire of the frequency of the battles.

Another problem is being able to find stuff you can pick up or interact with. It's not very clear just what objects in the background have secrets to reveal, so it ends up with you wandering around clicking X on everything, with most background clutter not even having a description of  what it is, never mind any objects to pick up.

Still, if you tackle it as an RPG and can forgive it's battles, lack of  providing you with very much clue of where to go and what to do and just explore the game working it out as you go, you should find quite a lot of enjoyment in it's ghastly tale of murder, possession, witchcraft and other spooky shenanigans! It's also a prequel of sorts to the later Shadow Hearts RPGs on Playstation 2, so if you've played those or are interested in trying them later you might want to try this too..

Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, Hiroki Kikuta (ex-Seiken Densetsu composer at Square and designer and composer of this game) had originally wanted to put an action-battle system into the game, making it more like other survival horror titles....but his fellow employees wanted to put out something more RPG-like...Maybe things would have turned out differently if Hiroki had got his way, and the game might have created a different kind of franchise from the one it went on to spawn....