Gruesome Games - Four More With Gore!

Time for another batch of Gruesome Games I reckon! It's been hard getting screenshots for these since all my tech decided to pack up right at the start of the month, so most of the screens are photos rather than screenshot downloads from emulators like I normally do, but they get the job done....

 I'll also take this opportunity to give a shout-out to the West Mansion site, where I found a few extra images to put up...Give their name a click to head over to a great site that's been active since 2001! Right, now that that's out of the way, let's crack on with looking at some games!

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 Splatterhouse (Arcade, PC Engine/TG) :

I've already covered a few of the Splatterhouse games on this blog, but it occurred to me last week that I've never actually covered the first two games that started off the series...so let's remedy that situation now by taking a look at the original.

Student Rick Taylor and his girlfriend Jennifer Willis get caught in a cliché....sorry, I meant a storm....and to escape this storm, decide to take refuge in the spooky old mansion known as the "Splatterhouse," so called because of rumours of heinous experiments carried out there by missing parapsychologist, Dr. West.

As they enter the mansion, the door slams shut and leaves them in darkness, the echo of the door barely having a chance to end before Jennifer's screams fill Rick's ears! The next thing he knows, he's waking in a spooky dungeon, with something stuck to his face. Something that then informs him that it is an ancient "Terror Mask" that has resurrected Rick and for some nefarious reason wants to 'help' him rescue Jennifer by giving him superhuman strength and encouraging him to splatter as many monsters as possible against the walls and floors of the mansion...

What follows is a very straight-forward jaunt through level after level of right-scrolling environments, with Rick and his not-at-all-based-on-Jason-Voorhees's-mask face-friend using anything they find at hand to bash the baddies, jump over traps and try to reach Jennifer before she becomes Dr.West's latest victim.

The enemies range from your standard zombie types, chairs and furniture, knives ....all the way to weird looking gut slugs and giant sack covered meat-beasts with a fair few other spectres and spooks thrown in for good measure. And there are a lot of them....

Although quite a short game once you know what you're doing, it is incredibly difficult! Stupidly so! I'd like to say that it's just a case of memorizing where enemies will appear and when in order to progress, but while this is mostly true, the game will still throw random enemies at you that unfairly kill you with no real way to avoid it. This will sometimes mean you end up in a death loop that'll quickly eat up your sparse life count, causing a great deal of frustration!

The game does have a checkpoint system that will stop things becoming too annoying though, and there are alternative paths you can try in most levels if you're finding a particular section too much after a while. The PC Engine version is also slightly easier, I find...and I was able to get much further in that than I did in the arcade game.

I'm not sure I'd recommend Splatterhouse to anyone these days if they weren't a fan of the horror genre though. As mentioned, the gameplay can be annoying, it's really unfair, and it basically just boils down to 'walk right, kill, jump, kill..walk right, die, repeat'......

But if you love horror movies, even just a little, the atmosphere and style of Splatterhouse will make you forget everything else, and you'll enjoy the gore that seeps from the screen as you battle your way through to Jennifer's aid. As I've mentioned previously, despite its difficulty, the series has become one of my favourites, and this is almost entirely down to the feelings it manages to capture as a love letter to the horror genre...

It's also worth remembering that the game comes from a time when such violence and horror was genuinely rare, if not completely absent in most other games, making it a horror classic by default of being such a rarity! So if you are looking for something a bit grim to spice up your Halloween gaming, you could do worse than playing this....

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Splatterhouse II (Sega Megadrive/Genesis) :

Splatterhouse II was my entry point to the series. Back in the day I owned a SNES, but my friend Ed had a Megadrive, and this was always the game I wanted to play when he would hook it up to his TV. Thanks to Ed generously donating me his old Megadrive and games a few years back, I now still have the original cart I used to play back in the day and the original system on which I played it, which still blows my mind!

This sequel sees Rick recovering from his ordeal in the first game, only to be visited by the reformed Terror Mask which shattered after Rick defeated the final boss of the original game. He was unable to save Jennifer, but the mask persuades Rick to put him on once more, promising that there is still a way to save her and only the mask can help him do so! And so Rick heads to another house and prepares to battle evil once more for another rescue attempt!

As sequels go, this really does go with the 'if it ain't broke' line....literally everything I mentioned about the first game can be said about the sequel! It's still scrolling right to fight, it's still unjustly unfair a lot of the time, and it's still best appreciated if you have a love of gore and horror!

There are a few small differences to note though. The fact that this game was a console release and not an arcade game, means that a password system has been implemented. Now if the game becomes too much, you can restart at a later date by taking a note of the password which will let you start on that level, skipping any frustrating parts you had to endure to get to that point.

Also, the spooky atmosphere and gruesome graphics have all been spiced up a bit, meaning that it's even more grim and delightfully disgusting than the first game. I remember one magazine review at the time getting a bit upset over the fact that one boss fight has you chainsawing through what look like hanging devil-baby foetuses.....

The sound is an aspect I didn't really mention when talking about the original, but in both games the random screams and spooky tunes help add to the atmosphere, with some nice evil cackles adding some more enjoyment in Splatterhouse II..

But again, I can't really recommend the game to people if they aren't horror fans. The gameplay is a bit lacking and too tricky for anyone who isn't, and while it seems a bit tamer these days, there might still be some who find the gore and violence a bit distasteful. But I repeat, if you are a fan of the genre, then this is definitely for you....there are few other games that manage to capture the feel and atmosphere as much or as well as the Splatterhouse series!

Somehow, using passwords and perseverance, Ed and I were able to beat Splatterhouse II back in the day, which is something I have yet to do replaying it this year...but I'm going to enjoy the frustrating fun of giving it another go in the run-up to Halloween!

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Zombi Mall (ZX Spectrum) :

Zombies really, really love shopping malls don't they!? Ever since George A. Romero's classic 1978 horror film Dawn of the Dead, they've been popping up constantly in massive shopping complexes everywhere! I'm pretty sure I've even seen some lurking around my local Aldi store recently.....

Well, once again, in this game they've taken up residence in one such shopping centre, but outside the walls of the mall it's even worse! As a matter of fact the mall was the best place to be up until recently, with handy resources and food...but then the power cut, and the doors opened, letting a few of the brain munchers inside! And so you've been camped out on the roof for days...but now you've just seen a helicopter, and you need to find some way to get whoever is flying the thing's attention!

And so you must use your wits and ingenuity to escape the mall, by collecting items, combining them, solving puzzles and avoiding the zombies! Luckily they have a limited field of view, so will only bother you if you get too close. Of course, sometimes you will get close, causing you to lose a bit of your energy, so avoiding them as much as possible is definitely the best course of action. Also, don't do what I did in the first few minutes of playing and exit the building via the front door, or you'll be consumed by a massive horde of undead fiends and force an immediate 'Game Over!'

This 2022 release from The Mojon Twins is a fun little adventure, and I enjoyed hunting around for keys and trying to work out which items to use. If you want to try it out for yourself you can find more info and download links at the game's Itch.io page! Definitely a great one to be playing during the creepy season.....

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Resident Evil - Gaiden (Gameboy Color) :

As I've mentioned in previous years, I generally try to talk about games that are less well known as I love sharing information about games that might have passed you by. As such, game series like Silent Hill and Resident Evil have been sorely under-represented on the Blog of Stuff. This doesn't mean that I don't tend to include all of the games in these series at some point, because I do eventually....but with Resident Evil Gaiden I can cover a game that whilst being from a well known series, is still one I'm guessing a lot of fans missed!

I'm not sure if the events that take place in Gaiden were ever considered canon in the Resident Evil universe, but if they once where they certainly aren't any more! The plot has Barry Burton going on a mission to rescue Leon Kennedy after he goes missing while investigating a viral outbreak on a cruise ship...

As Barry, you'll find things a little different to how Resi games usually play. Given the limitations of the Gameboy, we obviously couldn't expect fixed-camera, 3D environments...even if Alone In The Dark did make an attempt at this a few years later, although that game shows that Capcom were probably right in taking a different approaach. That approach being a top-down perspective, where you wander around the ship looking for clues to Leon's whereabouts and try to find out what caused this latest zombie outbreak.

You'll still find some sparse ammo and occasional notes scattered around all over the place, so it has at least retained that from the main games, and although the spookiness has been lost a bit with the shift in perspective, there's still enough exploration and zombie slaying to keep things interesting!

The combat is a bit odd though...when you encounter a zombie, either by bumping into one or aiming your gun at them, you'll find yourself in a first-person mode where you're looking through your character's eyes at the approacing undead fiends. I guess this makes Gaiden the first non-lightgun game in the series where you get to stare a zombie straight in the face.....

You blast the baddies by way of a sliding reticle, which moves along a bar at the bottom of the screen. You need to time your fire button press to the moment the reticle reaches the middle of this bar. It seems an odd choice to make for the combat at first, but ultimately this is probably the only bit of the game that has any real sense of tension, as you rush to hit the zombies before they reach you. Apparently the sliding reticle element was original Resident Evil's director Shinji Mikami's recommendation, with the rest of the battle concept being inspired by creaky old fantasy game Dungeon Master!

Eventually you'll meet up with Leon, and a character called Lucia...both of which also become playable characters...but as of yet, I've not reached them as I've only just started playing the game myself as one of this year's Halloween treats! 

First impressions of the game so far are that it's a wildly different, somewhat less impressive than normal entry in the series, but still has enough of the usual Resident Evil features to feel it's worth playing. The exploration seems decent, and although I feel the combat will get repetitive quickly, there's something oddly enjoyable about seeing the zombies stumbling towards you in first-person on a Gameboy! The in-game music can get a bit grating after a while, but I love the moans from the zombies...an element that helps it keep some of the atmosphere from previous titles.

One point I should mention is that I'm playing via emulation, so I can't really comment on the how the save system would be on an actual Gameboy, but I have heard people mention that for a handheld, having a system that only allows you to save at certain points is a bit annoying..

All in all, it still seems like a game that's worth checking out, even if it is all now some sort of fever dream that Barry Burton had in his downtime after he escaped the mansion of the first game! If anything happens to change my mind after playing it on Halloween, I'll keep you posted.....

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Be sure to head over to the Countdown to Halloween hub to see what the other Cryptkeepers have in store for you today, as we get ready to enter the last week of the Countdown! Just click the badge below to find a list of links to wonderful bloggers like Maple Grove Cemetery!