Here's another selection of Radio & TV shows starring some of my favourite Horror Stars! Managed to put this together quite quickly, but I'd best be off to college now! Just in case I don't manage to post anything else today, have a Happy Halloween! But hopefully I'll squeeze another couple of posts in when I get back!
Anyway, enjoy these horrific treats!
Peter Lorre in Mystery In The Air - Horla!
Boris Karloff's Thriller - Parasite Mansion!
Bela Lugosi in Suspense - The Doctor Prescribed Death!
Vincent Price & Peter Cushing in The Price Of Fear - The Man Who Hated Scenes!
There are literally thousands of games available on Microsoft's Xbox 360 that a lot of people will never have played or even considered. Some gamers looking at the Indie Game section on the dashboard will see games you can buy for 69p/$1 and automatically dismiss them as being pointless rubbish that's not worthy of their attention. Other's will look at the fact that some of the most popular games just involve minimum gameplay and badly-animated, big-boobed, scantily-clad girls and again think that the Indie section of Xbox is to be avoided. And there is a lot of pointless, sexist and just plain rubbish stuff floating around on there....
But there's also a lot of great games! Some of which are a damned sight more entertaining & innovative than a lot of the full price releases on the console....some that are totally unoriginal and steal stuff from other places, but are still a massive load of fun! But it's finding these games that are worth playing that can be tricky! So I've decided to give a mention on the list to 10 horror-themed titles that I've considered good enough to buy, and once Halloween is over I might let you know about some other games that are worth a lot more than the few pennies the creators are asking for them!
29 - Bloody Death (XBLIG) :
Remember when FMV was the future of gaming? Almost every game that came out at one point in the nineties had some sort of live-action element in it! And then it just sort of fizzled out and went back to pixels & polygons....Well, thankfully a group of Italian (I think?) game developers decided that we needed anew Night-Trap style game and provided us with this little gem!
It's obvious right from the start that English is not the first language of the stars of this game...a slaughter takes place at "Quite River" which was surely meant to be "Quiet River"? Maybe not, maybe it is quite the river! Anyway, the rather blood-soaked tutorial introduces you to the Quick Time Event controls you'll be using for the entire game. Yes, it's just a case of bashing buttons as they appear on screen while you watch a really bad horror movie, but what a great bad-horror movie!
Our heroine escapes the slaughter, and we join her 3 years later as a couple of friends join her and her boyfriend for a night of booze and Xbox! Unfortunately, in true schlock-style, the killer from Quite River has tracked her down and phones to let the group know he intends to murder them all! You have to try and keep them alive by using the aforementioned QTEs...
The acting is terrible, the script hilarious and sometimes you'll successfully manage to hit the correct combination of buttons only for the character to be horrifically murdered anyway, but it all makes for a hugely entertaining 20 minutes or so play, and the fact that they've even attempted to resurrect FMV games is to be applauded, as is the fact you can pick it up for £1.99! If you love cheesy, so-bad-they're-good horror movies this'll be right up your street, and as a fan of such fare I highly recommend you download it immediately!
28.5 - Hell's House (XBLIG) :
Look! It's the star of Bloody Death Francesca Mamo in a sort-of sequel! This one has our star wandering around a Haunted House, and again you have to QTE your way through the game as you try to stop her dying horribly! This one doesn't have a lot of talking...in fact I can't actually remember if there's any talking at all, so it's not quite as funny! It does mean that the acting doesn't seem quite so bad too though, so we may see Francesca in a Dario Argento movie yet!
Anyway, it's another fun little interactive movie and again worthy of the £1.99 it asks for the pleasure of sitting through it!
28 - Dead Pixels (XBLIG) :
This one is a great retro-style side-scrolling shooter that has you trying to make it to freedom across a town filled with zombies! It's got a brilliant Grindhouse-inspired intro, and groovy music throughout! You can stop at shops to sell items you pick up along the way and purchase health packs, ammo & guns, and there are several types of zombies to try them out on! The zombies will drop extra cash too, but try not to die as you pick it up before it disappears!
Dead Pixels is packed with references to zombie movies & games, and there's some free DLC that adds a survival mode, and another set of levels that changes gameplay a bit to keep you on your toes! Both of these extra DLC modes come with their own great intros and it makes for quite a large package of stuff to play through! It's awesome and could quite easily have been an Arcade release....And yet it's yours for 69p/$1!
27 - Midnight Bite (XBLIG) :
Draku's parents have flown off on vacation, but they forgot to stock up the fridge before going, and so it's up to us to guide the little vampire through a stealth action game so he can snack on the villagers, quench his first and emerge unharmed when his parents return!
You'll have to evade the guards, who have Metal Gear Solid style lines-of-sight, and hide in the occasional box to avoid being seen. If you keep your eye on the guards, you'll get to know their patterns, and you can slip past to the villagers! Once you get to a villager you can feast on their blood, and when you've got them all you'll move on the next screen via a magic mirror exit. Soon, extra dangers are added to the mix, like cats that'll wail if they see you and garlic that'll slow progress even more!
It's a fun little puzzler with a cute style that'll appeal to any little monsters that happen to be lurking in your own crypts, as well as anyone who generally loves sneaking around as a bloodsucker!
26 - I Maed A Gam3 W1th Zombies 1nit!!!1 (XBLIG) :
This game is as much a music video as it is a Robotron-style twin-stick shooter! You battle to survive hordes of zombies, picking up various power-ups and trying to last to the end of the creator's 15-minute or so song about the very game you're taking part in! It's a game with zombies in it, for goodness sake! What more do you need to know!? Go spend your dollar!
25 - Saturn 9 (XBLIG) :
Sent to a suddenly silent spaceship to find out what happened to the crew, you discover that things have gotten a little out of hand and some sort of creatures are running riot! This might not sound like the most original set-up for a game, but Saturn 9 was a pleasant surprise when I discovered it!
Taking influence from games such as Fear, Dead Space & Eternal Darkness, this first-person survival horror has hallucinations making you question just what is really happening, and what's in the protagonist's head. These occur when your character is running out of oxygen, which you'll need to keep topping up. Locked doors provide some password hunting and puzzle solving, and you'll need your wits about you to work some of these out.
The atmosphere of the game was really surprising to find in an Indie title, with the constant breathing coming from your character as they move around the incredibly dark levels in their spacesuit and the diary logs left by the crew creating a truly spooky environment..
Again, it's worthy of reaching a larger audience than the one XBLIG has, and like a few other games here it looks like you'll soon be able to get it on Steam too! It's well worth a look, especially for under a quid!
Well last week, Erick, over at the Wonderful Wonderblog did a Thursday Throwback where he showed off some of the stuff he’s posted over the last 15 years of the Countdown, and I liked the idea of showing some newcomers stuff they might have missed, and the thought of reviving the Throwback Thursday, so much that I decided to do the same sort of thing this week! So thanks for the inspiration, Erick!
Just click the links in the names of the posts to go visit them…..
Next, lets take a look at how to improve the ‘Great Druidic Fire Festival’ of Halloween, with Marian McNeill’s ‘Keeping Halloween - How to Enhance the Festival’ from a 1937 copy of The Scotsman newspaper…
And how about going and rewatching one of the very first Cinema of Stuff offerings, the 1962 cult-classic, Carnival of Souls…
And this visit to the Digital Comic Museum wasn’t even part of the Countdown, but really should have been, so lets remedy that right now and re-read ‘AIEEEEEE! The Teeth!’
And lastly, lets take a look at my own personal ‘Big Border Cat-Dog’ Spook Sighting…..
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That should be enough to be getting on with for now…..I hope you find something you missed first time around! Be sure to go check out the other participants in the Countdown too by clicking the badge below!
And go have a look at their posts from previous years too! You never know what you might find….
It's time once again for Vincent Price, Boris Kaloff and Christopher Lee to haunt my blog.......with something to listen to, something to watch, and something to learn......
Hope you enjoyed those....again my original plans for today's post were ruined, this time by the ongoing shutdown of Internet Archive due to some idiotic, juvenile, attention-seeking hackers.....but hey, it is what it is.....
Be sure to go check out what everyone else has been up to over at the Countdown Hub by clicking the badge below! Just realised it's only 10 days left until Halloween itself, which is quite frankly the scariest thing yet! Where the heck does the time go...and is it going by quicker and quicker each year? Certainly seems so to me.......
And here's an episode of the British Tales Of The Unexpected from 1979....this one stars Siobhan McKenna and Leonard Preston....but you'll have to click through to watch it, as it won't let me embed it!
Okay, so it's time for another selection of old ads from my Eagle collection, and as promised we're looking at eatables this time! Eagle had a section of the mag each week called "Sweet Talk" where they looked at any new sweets or snacks that were coming out, and reading through it was weird as I suddenly remembered all those flavours of food that I'd long forgotten!
Like these Tom & Jerry bars below....
....and a whole load of things on this page! KPGriddles, Smith'sFarmer Browns and Golden Wonder100s and 1000s!
And on this next page we have some Horror-themed goodies! Doctor Death's chews and BarrattsHorror Candy sticks! And even more terrifying are the pictures of 80s pop-stars you can get in the Barratts Pop Star Lucky Bags!
This last one is a sweet I only have very vague recollections of.....Topps Bubble Gum Beans!
On to the actual ads now, and first up a selection of Hubert Windpipe strips! Hubert was AngloBubbly's mascot for a while, and also appeared in ads for other Anglo sweets...
Some more Griddles ads next....Man, I really miss these old crisps! I can totally remember all the flavours!
These Outer Spacer ads were great! I only have the first and last parts, but I managed to find the middle bit online, so I've added it here so you can read the whole story! :)
Outer Spacers later became Alien Spacers, and these in turn evolved in to Space Raiders, which you can still buy today!
A competiton to win a BMX with Barratt Sherbet below, which I could have put in the video game ad post too, as 2nd prize is some Firefox F7 games!
You can still get the Sherbet obviously, and you can still get these too! Caramac bars!
...and Curly Wurlys, only I don't think there's any Moose-based Clubs these days.....
These were a bit odd...green, cola flavoured ET Cola Cream biscuits! I've still got a card from one of these, and it still faintly whiffs of the biscuits.....
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You can still get Skips, but there seems to be a lot weaker Prawn Cocktail flavour nowadays. I can remember them being pretty strong...
Rowntree's Fruit Gums are still pretty popular too!
I remember the stickers from this Nesquik promo adorning many a school workbook! Wonder if any one still has a working radio?
Wooo! A pounds worth of stamps from Rolo wrappers!
And lastly, a Superman IIIShreddies set of wipeable game boards! I remember getting these and being pretty happy with them! They were a great set of collectables, and it's a pity I don't still have them!
That pretty much wraps up my collection of ads from Eagle...well apart from the Weetabix ads, which I'll put up in a post fairly soon, so keep an eye out for those! Laters!
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