100 More Gruesome Games! ( 38 & 37)

Hmmm, about time for another couple of gruesome games I reckon! Well, neither of these are actually very gruesome at all really....but "Cutesy-Japanese-Magical Weirdness-Type-Games for Halloween" isn't the name of the list......

 38 - Magical Crystals (Arcade) :

You're an odd little wizardy type in this game then, and all of your little pixie friends have been captured by some horribly nasty monster and stuck into these magical crystals....so you'll have to use your magic powers to defeat all the crazy enemies and break them back out, and go kick some baddie beastie butt!

And you'll encounter a weird bunch o' baddies indeed....everything from jelly monsters who split into smaller versions of themselves, to mad teacup-men who rush at you and try to drown you with their liquid filled heads!! 

Your main weapon appears to be mystical balls of energy or something,which you hurl at the enemies whilst also trying to avoid falling off the edges of the levels, which seem to suspended on nothingness... way, way up in mid air. 

Every now and then you'll come up against a boss (such as the aforementioned jelly thing) which will drop a huge crystal containing a Queen Pixie when defeated...or at least that's what I think is going on? I couldn't really find much in the way of story or instructions online to back up my theories...

Anyway, after you beat one of the bosses, you get treated to something a little different in one of the cool bonus mini-games! The ones I've discovered so far are pictured below, and involve a tug-of war with a random monster and some sort of whack-a-mole type thing. 

I believe there are others when you beat more bosses too...I can remember seeing a sort of skeet-shooting one when watching footage of the game on Youtube a while back....

As I mentioned earlier, the levels are just sort of floating in mid-air, and you often have to hop over large gaps in the level, or onto little moving platforms. Sometimes you'll land on one which will disappear after a short time, meaning you have to take extra care not to plummet to your doom. So you'll need to keep your wits about you....

You can also find the occasional power-up to help you out on your journey, my favourite being one which turns you super-size and lets you stomp on everything around about you! Great fun that one! 

And I think the pixies act as some sort of barrier when you collect them too, as they whirl around your body and seem to fly off if a stray enemy projectile hits them....

As you can see from the screenshots, the game looks great! And it pretty much is.....

It can get a little tricky when there are lots of projectiles flying around, or you hit a particularly nasty stretch of platforming, but overall it's a really fun game that any fan of cutesy-weirdness (or wizards.... or mad teacup-men....)  will really enjoy!

37  - The Twisted Tales Of Spike McFang (SNES) :

Ah yes, time to catch up with our little vampire chum Prince Dorobochan again now, or Spike McFang as he seems to be calling himself now one of his games has been translated to English....You'll remember I took a quick look at his previous game Makai Prince Dorobochan on the PC Engine a little while back...

That one was a platformer, but our pal Spike is set for bigger things this time round and is now starring in an action RPG! One that thankfully keeps the cute horror style and general weirdness...

We join Spike as he's about to start fight training on a far off island, unaware that back home trouble is brewing in a big way! The greedy zombie ruler, General Von Hesler has decided that his zombie island isn't big enough, and using his dark powers and army of undead he takes over the other two islands in Vladamasco and battles the two other leaders, Vampra and Dracuman.....

Dracuman happens to be the father of our hero, and Spike would have remained unaware of the situation were it not for Vampra's daughter, Camelia, who managed to escape to seek out McFang and get his help! After a quick bit of training, Spike rushes back home and gets down to sorting this whole mess out....

He has a few tricks up his sleeve to help him out with his quest....his basic form of defence being a spin attack that will smash his enemies when they approach, although you have to be careful not to spin him around too much or he gets dizzy and becomes uncontrollable. He can throw his hat at enemies too, and also use special magic cards which have different abilities...including restoring health, causing a swarm of bats to appear or freezing enemies in their tracks! These can be purchased in shops along with hat upgrades, or in other places in the game...

Rather bizarrely, tomatoes are your main source of health instead of blood in the game...which led me to assume that perhaps Spike was a vegetarian. However, apparently this was changed from collecting hearts in the Japanese version of the game? Maybe a vampire using hearts seemed too much for Nintendo, but it's a bit weird when you consider how many other games have you collecting heart pick ups....

The American release also saw a few other changes. The enemies have a higher defence & Spike doesn't regain his health after going up a level, both of which mean the game is harder in the US version. 

The one-eyed mummy shopkeeper you can see in a screen above was originally a pretty blonde girl too, but again censors must have changed that for some weird reason.... 

I've only just started playing Twisted Tales, but already I'm loving the wacky style and all the encounters with the freaky characters. It's charming and filled with nice little touches....I love Spike's pet in the moat for instance, or being kicked by one of those Easter-Island-type butler things so I can break through a wall in the castle....

I look forward to playing through it properly once I can discipline myself to stick with one game long enough, but even with what I've played up until now I can heartily recommend it as a fun, funny, action-packed RPG for those with the time to spend playing it!

Cinema Of Stuff Presents.... VIY (Spirit Of Evil) 1967

Just discovered this little Russian treat on Youtube and thought I'd share it with you....The story is based on a Ukrainian folk tale as told to Nikolai Gogol.....and it tells the tale of Khoma, a young monk/philosopher who whilst on leave from his seminary, stays the night in an old woman's stable....

He soon discovers that the old woman is more than she seems, and after some strange happenings and a fight with the hag, he makes a hasty retreat back home. He is then summoned by a dying young woman to come and pray for her soul, and she will accept no one but him to do the task. When he arrives at her home however, he finds she is already dead, and so her father tells him he must spend 3 nights in the church praying, until her soul is saved.....

As you can probably tell from the posters, her soul isn't going to rest very easily, and all manner of horrors await young Khoma as he struggles with his own faith and attempts to thwart evil....

(Edit* Damn...Apparently the videos need to be watched on Youtube, but I'll leave them up here so they're easily found!)

Apparently there's a remake in the works too, due for release this year.....here's the trailer for that!

100 More Gruesome Games! ( 42 - 39 )

Right, it's been a while, but let's get on with the next lot on the list now...all of which I've only just started playing, despite having had a few of them for years! I've got literally hundreds of games sitting in my collection that'll take me years to get through and I have a habit of starting them, getting distracted by something else, going back to them and forgetting where I am in them and then restarting them again....

For instance, I must have started Freak Out about 6 times but I've never gotten further than the first few levels! I intend to remedy this after I'm done with the list, and get back to sticking with one game at a time and writing about one's I've already played....well, that's the plan anyway.....we'll see how it goes! For now though, let's get on with it....

42 - Zombi (ZX Spectrum) :

We can thank George A. Romero for starting off the whole brain-munching-zombie epidemic witnessed in cinema and games for the last few decades...and in his 1978 film Dawn Of The Dead he also made sure that we'd forever associate the undead flesh-fiends with shopping malls! This Ubisoft game is basically a cheeky homage ( read "blatant rip-off" ) and as close as gamers would get to recreating the movie until Dead Rising came along....

The wonderfully awful comic in the instruction manual tells how our four heroes have managed to nab a helicopter from a hospital roof, but are now severely lacking in petrol. Deciding that the shopping mall might have loads of the stuff, they head there and find the undead have decided that it's the best place to pick up a quick snack....

Using on-screen icons to move around and click on things, you start to explore the mall and can switch between characters to use their different strengths. For instance, the chaps are supposedly a bit handier with the weapons...which is probably seen as being a bit sexist, but if they're following the movie they're probably supposed to be members of SWAT or something....

Anyway...as you search, zombies keep popping up and trying to get access to your yummy brains and you have to batter them with whatever's at hand...or just, well...your hands....by clicking furiously on their head! You'll find guns lying around too which are obviously a bit better for dealing with the hungry horrors..

Items are picked up by clicking on them...Cupboards also reveal their secrets when clicked upon, although sometimes it can be difficult to work out what exactly you're picking up, as the item graphics aren't the best....and with minimal instructions, you're pretty much left on your own when it comes to working out what to do with an item too, meaning you'll probably need to seek help from a walkthrough at some point!  

Despite all this, the game is a lot of fun and you should definitely check it out! It'll keep you happy as you recreate scenes from Dawn Of The Dead such as blocking the doors with trucks, throwing dead bodies down garbage chutes to keep the place clean and eventually having to deal with a bunch of scary bikers who have come looking for food! 

41 - Arachnophobia (Amiga) :

Ah yes...time for anyone with a hatred for things with more than six legs to look away! This BlueSky Software game is based on the 1990 movie of the same name and has you take control of bug exterminator Delbert McClintock, John Goodman's character in the movie

A deadly Venezuelan spider had hitched a ride in to town and got frisky with the local arachnids, creating an infertile but dangerous horde of offspring. Driving around a map that reminds me of the Ghostbusters game, Delbert must stop and go through the houses in eight different towns, killing all the spiders in each one. 

He's armed with a can of bug spray, and you can aim the joystick in the required direction depending on where the spiders are, and give them a blast of the repellent...be careful though, as some of the little feckers will jump at you, making it easy to miss them as they try to chew your face off and web up your insides!!

You also get a couple of gas bombs that you can set on the floor, and these will wipe out all the spiders in that room....unless of course it's a queen spider! Yes, in every town there will be a queen that you have to track down and kill. She's not always easy to find, but the compass on the map screen will handily point in the general direction of where she might be hanging out...

You'll discover her nests everywhere though, and these need to be taken out to stop spiders spawning in the houses. Also, if you find yourself running low on spray, a quick jump on top of a spider should squish it in to a sticky, bloody mess...a trick worth remembering when you're in a tight spot. If you run completely out of spray, you'll need to leave the house for another can y'see...but this spawns all the spiders back to life when you re-enter...

As I just mentioned, gas bombs will only slow the queen spiders down when you find them...not kill them....and spray is pretty useless against them too. No, these silk spinners need a special kind of finishing off! Somewhere in town there will be a red can lying around. This allows you to spray fire once you aquire some matches, which will also be lying around somewhere...it's worth checking where the queen is first though before you light up and waste the spray, as I've been told the queen sometimes isn't in the same house as some of the matches, meaning you might light up only to discover you've no flame spray left when you actually need it!

It's a fairly enjoyable little bug hunt, and the spiders move around in a suitably creepy way. It can get a bit repetitive I guess, but in the short time I've played it it's never really become a problem. Whilst looking for the box art I discovered a little extra something awaits those who clean out all the towns too, so I'll definitely be going back to the game later to try and do just that! And also try to avoid the screen below that greets you every time you die....

40 - Sanitarium (PC) :

Waking up in a sanitarium after a nasty car accident, your character in this game realises he is suffering from amnesia and has no recollection of how he got there. Wandering around the madhouse, he chats with a few crazy characters and decides that it'd be best if he tried to work out how to escape....and it's not long until he appears to do just that...but by some rather unusual means...

This game is properly weird...and is another of those games that it's best to start playing not knowing too much about! Apparently the game design came about by Dreamforge wanting to make an adventure game that was different from the normal type of thing on offer, but everyone had different ideas as to what they should put in the game....

Eventually, they decided to put all these ideas in and come up with a weird main plot to tie them all together, and from what I've experienced so far, it seems to work in creating something truly different...

As you wander around the isometric landscape, you'll meet all sorts of bizarre individuals and come across puzzles that will need to be solved in order to progress, some of which are fairly straight forward, but others that'll require a little hunting around for clues..

Flashbacks happen every so often too, but is it your past you're seeing or someone elses....and what memories are real? It's this sense of not really knowing what exactly is going on that keeps you interested in what's going to happen next! You'll suddenly find yourself in an entirely different area, or even looking a bit different....it's totally insane but brilliant! The visuals help add to the atmosphere too, with some truly odd offerings to be witnessed...

The game oozes atmosphere, and its unusual story should have you hooked from the start...I'm certainly intrigued enough to keep playing! As with most of the PC games in the list, I picked this one up relatively cheap over at gog.com

39 - Freak Out (Stretch Panic-US, Hippa Linda-JPN)  (PS2) :

More utter insanity now, but this time from Treasure, a company who excel at making great games that nobody buys! And even a lot of Treasure fans seemed to not give this one much notice...

Freak Out tells the tale of Linda, a girl who has to deal with 12 rather vain sisters who constantly mock Linda's fashion sense and love of her scarf, which was gifted to her when she was six by her now deceased father. One day...whilst Linda is off picking up the weekly cosmetic shopping for her self-obsessed sisters... a mysterious package arrives on their doorstep. Possibly thinking it has come form some secret admirer, the sisters open it.....and unleash 13 scary vanity demons looking to punish pretty types!

12 of the demons possess the sisters, but the 13th only manages to attach itself to Linda's scarf... thanks to her lack of vanity. Despite her obvious annoyance at her stupid siblings, she decides she better get to the task of saving them from the vile Zakos, for that is what these demons are called! Because Linda took good care of the scarf, and with it's magically gained sentience it agrees to help Linda rescue her sisters, and let her utilize its newly acquired powers of stretching... that turns everything it touches into elastic!

Each of the sisters has been zapped off to a seperate dimension, and these are accessed through various different dimension doors. In order to open the doors, Linda must first defeat some more vanity demons...ones named Bonita Zakos! 

These rather large-breasted baddies can only be defeated by pinging their heads or bums, which can be tricky to grab hold of as their bulbous boobs block your aim! Once you've managed to get a few of them to explode though, you can access one of the doors to the other dimensions..

Here you'll face one of your possessed relatives, and have to work out exactly what needs to be stretched and pulled in order to free them. Once..well, if... you've managed to do that, your sister will be saved and she'll be added to the Gallery Of Shame...a place you access by pinging a bell in the hub world and that lets you mess around with your families features and textures later in the game! And you set off to blow up more Bonitas and rescue the next victim of vanity!

It's truly a weird little game, and won't be for everyone. It has a sort of odd Tim Burton-esque atmosphere, but probably has just a touch too much colour in it to be really classed as such. Still, I think it looks rather groovy but I can see how some people might find it a bit too strange...

It was one of Treasure's first 3D titles, and you can see they haven't quite mastered how to make a good game camera, with it spinning around and not letting you see what you need to see sometimes.

It can also be tricky to judge exactly where your scarf is in relation to things, and the controls for using it take a bit of getting used to too. And I've had to refer to an online guide more than once to work out exactly how to defeat the bosses...But having said all that, I still enjoy it every time I restart it to try and play through again, and if you're looking for something very different from the type of things you normally play, then this could be a good place to start!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Still writing the next gruesome games post, but thought I'd better wish you all a Happy Valentine's Day! So have one of these lazy cartoon posts filled with sickening smoochyness and love-struck 'toons.....  

First up, Pluto makes a fatal flaw and shoots cupid's arrow into a big, butch pooch!

A heartbroken Pepe Le Pew joins the Foreign Legion but still manages to harass an unwilling feline fancy!

Popeye feigns illness to woo back Olive!

And finally a Betty Boop cartoon from 1985! The Romance Of Betty Boop!

Gruesome Games - Extra Entrails !!!

Last week, whilst getting distracted from doing things I should really be doing and instead wasting time surfing the web, I happened upon some old video game preview trailers hidden away in the murky depths of The Internet Archive. Amongst them were various trailers for games I've already covered in the Gruesome Games list, so I thought I'd re-upload these previously hidden videos to my Youtube channel, and post them here as a little extra treat while I prepare the next entry in the list!

Enjoy this first blast of trailers then, and I've a few more to post at a later date! I've put some videos of other old games on the Youtube channel too, so if you like you can check those out as well....some of them are rather....odd!

100 More Gruesome Games! ( 45 - 43 )

45 - Painkiller (PC) :

Daniel Garner is another one of those game characters who is having a particularly bad time of it....whilst taking his wife Catherine out for a birthday meal one stormy, rainy night, he decides to sneak a quick loving glance at his missus, meaning he misses the truck plowing towards them and crashes the car! Both of them are killed instantly.....

His wife manages to float on up for an un-life of bliss in the clouds, but poor Daniel is trapped in Purgatory! After quite some time, an angel type called Samael appears and tells him that in order to be purified of his sins and gain entry to Heaven and meet up once more with wife, he has to kill four of Lucifer's generals in order to prevent a nasty ruckus between the nice place upstairs and evil, stinky, nasty Hell. Lucifer has been secretly amassing an army y'see, with a view to taking over Heaven, and he's already managed to secure most of Purgatory! not having much of a choice anyway, Daniel decides to help out and tools up ready to slaughter his way back into God's good books....

What you get to do then, is fight past all the demonic denizens of Hell in a first-person-shooter style, and a classic FPS style at that, which owes a lot to the likes of Doom, Quake, etc! There are 5 chapters each split into about 5 levels, and all of them take place in a wonderful variety of gloomy settings such as castles, monasteries, caves, graveyards, etc....

A surprising number of enemies appear to try and stop you too, with new ones appearing in pretty much every new level you visit. Old hags that seem to be formed from murders of crows...skeletal warriors...mad monks...there's an amazing array! But all of them die pretty swiftly when you introduce them to your arsenal of awesome weaponry!

Your main starting weapon is called the Painkiller, and is a stave with three blades attached at the end that spin round, grinding into any enemies you thrust it against. This is only the weapon's "Pain" mode though...With it's secondary "Killer" mode, the end flies off! If you charge it up before hand it will spin as it goes, causing significant damage to whoever it happens to hit. And if it lodges into a wall, it creates a sort of energy trip-wire effect, with anything wandering between you and the tip getting zapped with mystical energy and taking constant damage! It really is one of the best starting weapons I can ever remember having in a shooter!

The rest of the weapons are more standard shooter fare, but done in interesting ways...the shotgun's secondary fire works as a sort of freeze ray for instance, and rather than having a seperate Mini-gun and Rocket Launcher, the developers have decided to combine the two to a pleasingly destructive effect! All of them are a joy to use, and the constant stream of baddies gives you plenty of opportunity to do so!

I'm really enjoying the old-school style of this. It's a no-nonsense, straight forward style that I've missed whilst playing more modern FPS games. Hopefully, once this game gets it's new shiny HD remake released on new consoles, it'll be hugely successful and we'll see a load of new shooters in a similar vein!  So yeah, I totally recommend any fans of the genre to pick this up, and get blasting those evil demons back to Hell! 

44 - Domain Of The Undead (Atari 800) :

The box-art is probably the best thing about this stinker! It's basically a really poor Ghosts 'n' Goblins clone where you just move from one side of the level to the other, repeatedly shooting the rather rubbishy skeletons whilst also combating falling asleep from boredom! I don't think you should bother wasting your time with this....I'm certainly not wasting any more......

43 - Satan's Hollow (Arcade) :

After Domain Of The Undead, I needed to play a proper classic....Bally Midway's 1982 shoot-em-up was just the ticket! It's a rather groovy game, where all you have to do is defeat Satan's evil army of swooping Gargoyles, who are out to put a stop to you building a bridge to cross a lava-filled chasm leading to the big bad himself!

Flying in formation at the top of the screen, these fiendish flying freaks will drop eggs of fire and bombs to try and destroy your bridge building work, before swooping down to the screen and dive-bombing you...Luckily, you have a shield that protects you from attack for a short while, and you can fire back at the enemies as you move from the left side of the screen where you collect the bridge parts, to the right of the screen where you plonk them into position...

Occasionally, Satan's disembodied head will appear and try to spew flames on you too, so you'll need to avoid that as well! Every time you beat a wave of enemies, a little flag gets added at the side of the screen to keep tabs, but we'll get to that in a minute...

Once the bridge is complete, you can slide along onto another screen, where Satan appears and flings his trident at you. If you manage to defeat old devil-bonce, your little flags you got when kicking gargoyle-butt get added up as a bonus score, and you pop back to the first screen to fight ever more aggressive nasties!

Fairly simple in design, but actually pretty challenging, it's classic arcade gaming that will have you adding credit after credit for another go! Go get Satan behind thee now........

Back to Bloggy-type Business....

Hello people! It's been a while since I last posted, so thought I'd let you know what's been up in this short post before I start getting back on with things!

Just before Christmas, I managed to contract the Norovirus, a particularly nasty bug that makes it very difficult to do anything but stay in close proximity of the nearest toilet.....during the last day of having that, I managed to pick up the flu from somewhere too. Must have been a 2 for 1 kind of deal or something.....

The flu still lingers even yet, with a cough I can't shift and random bouts of sneezing, but generally I'm a lot better than I have been for about a month. Hopefully, this year will see my immune system not being quite so temperamental, and the PCs I use will work long enough to let me finally get on with the last half of the 100 Gruesome Games list, so I can move onto other games and stuff I want to talk about on the blog...

Anyway, I'll probably start writing a list post tomorrow, so it should appear over the weekend, and then I'll crack on with the rest of the list next week! Sorry to keep all you Gruesome Game fans hanging for so long....