Developed/Published by: Sega
Released: 3rd September 1998
Completed: 1st November 2015
Completion: Finished it.
Trophies / Achievements: n/a
I was looking for something spooky to play on Halloween and I was certain that I got a copy of this when I bought my Saturn a few years ago (I had sold the one I had in the UK and hadn’t replaced it until recently) but after an afternoon of digging I couldn’t find it. Which means that I own a Saturn with a Virtua Gun and literally the only game I have that uses it is one third of Die Hard Trilogy.
I did however find that the person who sold me the Saturn had also given me a bunch of what I thought were blank CDRs, but which after testing turned out to be a bunch of unlabelled naughty games. Things like the terrifically dull and mild Girls In Motion Puzzle series, but also a pretty astounding Yakuyen Special, in which you play rock paper scissors with a dancing, increasingly nude Japanese lady.
The copy of Yakuyen Special is so beat up, he used the hell out of it.
Moving on! I’m fond of The House Of The Dead, I played it a bunch in the arcades but had never finished it, so I thought I would. The lack of the Saturn version required me to fiddle about and get a PC version running and play it with a mouse. It at least looks as bad on PC as it does on Saturn…
What to say about it, really? It’s a rail shooter released at a time (and you may have to stretch to remember this) zombies weren’t totally overexposed. The hilarious amounts of gore and exploding body parts offer great feedback to your shots. Every level—though I doubt it pioneered this—has a bunch of different routes you can find either by saving certain people or shooting certain background objects (i.e. shooting a lift’s buttons, or whatever.) It doesn’t rely on too many cheap unavoidable hits to kill you fast, and the only truly annoying boss is the final one, an utterly irritating bullet sponge. I’m almost surprised by how fair it is.
It’s really (really) short though—four levels, and level four does that annoying thing where it recycles a few of the earlier bosses, which is just unforgivably dull. And the only way you’re going to be able to play this most likely is via the (awful) Saturn port, or this (also awful) PC port (unless maybe you can get it running in MAME, I don’t know.)
I’d be interested to know more about the development of The House Of The Dead, though. The arcade version came out just six months after Resident Evil and has almost the exact same setting (spooky zombie-infested mansion turns out to be secret lab.) So who knows, maybe it’s only got four levels because they only had a few months to knock it out as quickly as possible. I do wish they’d just kept to the mansion though—the lab setting is pretty uninspiring compared to the opening of the game.
Anyway! The House Of The Dead is fine but it’s clearly ok to start with The House Of The Dead 2. Which has a great Dreamcast version, so get on that.
Will I ever play it again? If I find an arcade version on free-play?
Final Thought: I probably seem a bit down on this but it’s just due to accessibility. Strange how old arcade games are so hard to “re-experience” in a lot of cases. The House of The Dead, for example, got me thinking about one of my favourite early rail shooters—Sega’s own, very literal, Rail Chase. The game was great because it was played on a mad hydraulic chair that reacted to every bump of the in-game rails. If you played it in MAME or whatever you’d think it was crap, I imagine. Tell you what: come round to mine and shake my office chair about while I play it and I’ll do the same for you.*
*Not a guarantee.
