Developed/Published by: Size Five Games Released: 20/07/2017 Completed: 6/08/2021 Completion: Finished the story mode! Trophies / Achievements: n/a
If you’re familiar with me, this blog, or even any of my appearances on the Insert Credit Show you’ll be well aware that I consider Sensible World of Soccer one of the greatest games of all time and I wish it came out every year on modern consoles with updated rosters and everyone was playing it online against each other like what it was FIFA.
Unfortunately, it does not. So, even though I boot it up every once in a while, I generally chase the dragon by playing other footy games, of which Dan Marshall’s Behold The Kickmen has been on my radar for a while and once I noticed it was on Switch [“Not a very good radar, then”–Ed.] I picked it up, what with the Switch being the indie handheld of choice (until the Steam Deck shows up, I suppose).
Now. I’m pretty sure I remember reading a review of this where the reviewer got really annoyed at it for sneering at football. And I can see it, in that saying things like “foot-to-ball” or whatever is tedious and just about as boring to people who like football as football is to football non-likers, but Behold the Kickmen has a genuinely funny, absurd little story that you’d have to have quite the chip on your shoulder to take offence to, and the “wrong” football, even it actually came from an sneery, anti-football stance… creates a really interesting video game???
Being annoyed at this because it offends the beautiful game is a big old waste of time. Behold the Kickmen is mostly played like football with a “bullet-time” like mechanic for aiming, shooting, and tackling, but what makes it interesting is that each action you perform while holding possession (or not losing possession for too long, anyway) adds to a multiplier that increases the amount of money you’re going to make when you score a goal. If the opposing team scores a goal or the half ends, you lose it all.
It leads to a really remarkable game where it’s not really about goals–until it is. You’re much better pissing about in mid-field, passing and dodging, until you need to score or lose it all. I played on the default settings and to be honest the AI was nothing to write home about and I beat them handily, but maxing my multiplier (and scoring in time…) became the game, and I loved it.
There’s issues with it–it’s technically “funnier” to have a round pitch but it’s a lot of wasted space and the slow-down is a bit stop-start and means there’s no multiplayer (which I think would work!)–but it does what any good “football” game should do in making every goal feel incredible. The daft story that you follow as you win games had me lollin’–although there’s several set-ups that don’t actually have any pay-off and I wished that there was more of it (I’d be tempted to play again to see if anything different happens if I make different choices, but I suspect not.)
Anyway if you like sports games or games with interesting design twists this is worth every penny of the couple of bucks it’s going to cost you on Switch or PC. Pick it up!
Will I ever play it again? If it had multiplayer I would. Just turn off the slowdown, see how that works.
Final Thought: It includes a theming that parodies Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe, the second greatest game of all time behind Sensible World of Soccer [“Steady on”–Ed.] but sadly doesn’t do anything with the theming like adding score pads on the side or slide attacks or something because, I guess, that would be a completely different game. But now I want to play Speedball 2…
Developed/Published by: Dani Bunten Berry / EA Released: 11/1983 Completed: 24/06/2021 Completion: Beat Tournament mode against 3 AI with a colony score of 110,000+ Trophies / Achievements: n/a
MULE is an interesting one. I was trying to think what the cinema equivalent is, as a sort of easy metaphor: a classic that was lauded (if never particularly imitated) by a generation of filmmakers that goes almost completely unwatched these days. It’s not one of the obvious ones (you know, Super Mario Bros. as Birth of a Nation, or something); it’s too sophisticated to be something super early (Space Invaders as Journey to the Moon) and so I just can’t place it. The Red Shoes, perhaps?
The thing is though–and I suppose it’s the reason I’m trying to draw the metaphor–is that if you want to watch The Red Shoes and see what the likes of Scorcese have raved about, you can do so easily–it’s streamable on about nine different services, free with subscription or even ad-supported; you can buy it on a Criterion blu-ray and get a boat load of special features to give you context. Nothing is holding you back.
Here’s how you can play MULE: you can pay $8 to Good Old Games to play the trash PC port that is totally unrepresentative (it’s maybe also available on Origin, but I haven’t looked.)
Ok, so you don’t want to do that (and it’s not Good Old Games’ fault: they near-exclusively sell PC games). So here’s how you play MULE “as intended”: You have to download an Atari 800 emulator or understand how to make something like Retroarch make that happen. Then you have to find a ROM (watch out! You might download a pirate one that crashes if you catch the wumpus!). Then you have to find the BIOS files that will let the emulator run the Atari 800. Oh and don’t forget that the Atari 800 emulator requires a bit of fiddling to make that work. And because you want to see the game as intended, you’ve either now got to make this run on that CRT you’ve got lying around for this sort of thing or run it through a shader, preferably with a nice border so it looks like you’re running it on an old TV.
Oh, and for context, you’re going to want to look up the (beautiful) box and manual online.
The alternative, is, of course, to buy an Atari 800, monitor, a copy of the game (good luck finding it for less than $200) and four joysticks.
This is, clearly, absurd. Now don’t get me wrong; there are lost films and inaccessible films. But MULE is out there, and in the history of games it’s at least as important as The Red Shoes is to cinema. But you have to be extremely dedicated to play it–and worse, if you don’t need to be (for example, you pass an Atari 800 in a “VIDEOGAMES!!!” exhibition at a museum) it will be completely impossible to grasp.
So anyway, that sucks, because if you’re a student of games and their history you should play MULE, and not just because it’s honestly still pretty fun. Because it’s passed into this position that people only talk of it from the second or third hand–often to pay tribute to the pioneering Dani Bunten Berry–and I actually feel a bit sad about that. We pay tribute to those who came before us by playing their work, not just talking about it.
[“OK, now start the criticising”–Ed.]
How dare you… ahhh you got me. I think MULE is super cool but here’s the thing that happens after you put in all that work: you go “mannnn this is olddddd” because MULE is old, and “80s personal computer” harsh. It’s at its heart almost a board game, but it’s slathered in early “we haven’t quite worked all this out” design decisions that sorta made sense at the time but also extremely don’t now.
It’s played like this: you and up to three other players (though it’s always played with four) are settling a planet; each round you have to select a plot of land (from plains, mountains or river) and then select a mule, equip it to either mine ore, collect energy or farm food, which it can do on any plot (well, you can’t mine on river tiles) but gain the most benefit from doing so on the equivalent tile. After everyone has done so, a random event happens (a solar storm makes more energy production, for example) each commodity is consumed by your community and the surplus is traded: either to or from other players or to or from the town store. And then the next round happens (oh, and sometimes you can buy plots of land at auction, not just take them when given.)
It’s actually pretty graspable, but the quirk is the law of supply and demand. With particular lands (and land placement) you can create massive surpluses of certain goods, and you can also choose to ignore some goods even though your community needs them. “I’ll make so much money selling this ore” you think, “that I’ll be able to buy as much food as I need.”
Trading happens in a format that must have inspired the negotiations in Theme Park (“Ah yes, I know exactly the mini-game”–every reader, who is as decrepit as me) where you walk your characters down or up the screen to meet at a value, with the quirk that if the store doesn’t have any of a good to sell you the sellers can walk back infinitely (well, within the set time limit) to bleed you dry. (And the computers will do this…) BUT–if they do this, they’re in danger of the colony getting a bad score at the end of the game! So it’s all about the balance of winning (individually) without losing (as a collective). Man sounds like those clowns in congress should play some MULE, am I right???
So far so good, right? The problem is it’s the early 80s, so all of this is done with a one-button stick where you have to control your character and make them walk into the mule pen and then walk out with the mule and then walk into the outfitter and then walk to your plot and then the timer runs out because you didn’t make enough food, or because moving your character is janky as hell. And selecting your plot of land? Oh that’s a reaction test as a cursor moves along the screen (faster on the higher difficulties) meaning the PC is gonna screw you out of half your lands (and mis-timing is going to screw you out of the other half.) And because there’s not that much space on the screen, actually fully understanding supply and demand in context… isn’t going to totally happen. You need to remember how much of a good you need to buy to not be in shortage. How the shop price affects things and changes is… obscure.
Which is not even to raise the nadir of MULE: random “punishment” events. Yep, this was designed well before balancing was really a thing, and they had the best intentions at heart, but “lift up the low boats” wasn’t a thing– “smash the high ones with a tsunami” was. It’s a bummer because it doesn’t really work. It’s super clever to make the winning players play first (so it’s easier for the worse off to strategise) but some players can get into such a commanding position that losing some money here or there isn’t that bad. And instead, things tend to happen like you scrimping and saving, finally getting your engine up and running, lots of ore coming in… and a pirate ship shows up, takes all your ore on a turn when the players ahead of you all switched to energy and food, and now you’re stuck with nothing to sell and no way to afford the energy or food you need to keep your plots going. It is the dogshit worst.
That said, while MULE has the capability to cause (and must have caused) Monopoly-esque meltdowns, the game is still dang fun if you can get into the mindset. The AI is hilariously vindictive–I love that it will screw you on land auctions if you try and force the price up to screw them (it’s all about timing when to walk backwards…) and that they’ll be extremely selective as to when to buy from you, even if it hurts them (I’d swear it knows it doesn’t need food towards the end of the game…) and if you save-scum away only the bullshit punishments or mis-clicks (be generous; it’s 2021) the core here is so dang solid–and it only really makes sense as a video game, because I’ll be fucked if I’m calculating the new cost of mules based on the previous trading period using a table in a board game manual or something.
Is it a classic I’ll return to again and again? No, not really. Is it something that any student of video games should play once, twice, three times at least? Of course, and if there’s anything you take from this it’s criminal that they probably won’t.
Will I ever play it again? I am desperate to play this on tournament mode with three other experienced (but not too experienced) players IRL. No joke desperate. I think there some of my issues (the misclicks; the punishments) stop becoming as massive an issue when you’re playing with more than two people…
Final Thought: Shout out to TreyM for their classic CRT overlays! This kind of thing really doesn’t feel right without them–and they’ll continue to help me experience things “in context” as much as I can when I get to the likes of Rescue on Fractalus…
Developed/Published by: Team Cherry Released: 24/02/2017 Completed: 09/12/2020 Completion: Finished the main story with a percentage north of 100%. Trophies / Achievements: 48%
Kinda funny, but not that funny to be writing at this today [”months earlier”-Ed.] after listening to the Greatest Games Ever Insert Credit Show where Tim Rogers enthused that this was the best Metroidvania ever and Brandon Sheffield hated it very, very much.
Might as well cut to the chase and say I like it far, far less than Tim Rogers but don’t hate it quite as much as Brandon Sheffield (but then, I played it more than an hour, and if I’d stopped at an hour I might have.) However, this is me falling headlong into “no, it’s the children who are wrong” territory because I’m going to say that is pretty much everything I hate in Metroidvania design (level design in general, even) and I’m truly, truly baffled by why this is so lauded. I mean, this is a game that opens with a short tutorial segment (fine, good) but then throws you into a level with multiple long pathways, no map unless you pick the right path quickly, and extremely samey graphics across the area meaning you just stumble around second guessing every move. I mean the whole “you don’t get a map in a section until you find the guy who has the map”… people like that? And don’t get me started on how the game doesn’t let you see yourself on the map unless you waste one of your equip slots. That’s honestly unpleasant.
I mean the level design is bad enough on the macro level, but each area is also chock-a-block with blind drops, punishment drops, and enemies that take forever to kill because you have to engage with a punitive weapon levelling system that, frankly, you’ll won’t be able to engage with unless you literally look up where to get the materials.
This kind of complaint, however, is the exact type of thing that breeds what has to be one of my most hated “extremely online gamer” takes, which to respond to a complaint something is just tediously hard or obtuse by telling folk to “Git gud”. Here’s my response: the game should get good.
Anyway, what I did with Hollow Knight was ignore everyone who says you shouldn’t look anything up because I ain’t got time for that and just start to actually roll through it using a map to find the traversal skills etc. While I never ever actually liked the level design basically ever, the game only really starts to become anything worth your time once you’ve unlocked dashing and even then it wasn’t until I unlocked the ability to dash through enemies and damage them that I gelled with it at all (especially because you can’t cancel the dash or backdash, meaning until the point dashing was safer I didn’t like it).
Even at that, a bit like with Celeste, I didn’t ever really care for how the main character controlled, nor how battles felt or having to go and get your “shade” any time you died so you could get your money back (guess what! It was never hard to do that, my stomach only ever sank at the waste of time.)
The problem is of course is that metroidvania design is so… more-ish? I played this wayyyy longer than I needed to because it’s actually fairly trivial to beat this if you “git gud” and just do the exact main quest, but instead I unlocked all the abilities, fully upgraded my sword, got all the equips… I mean, I basically dredged this because even if I wasn’t really having fun in the moment I was always so close to doing the next thing and so I did.
Anyway I beat it and the spell was broken.
Will I ever play it again? No, and no fucking way will I play a sequel or anything like that.
Final Thought: Hollow Knight is… not good. There’s no excuse for lengthy, tedious mapping and no excuse for punishing, tedious level design. Or the terrible introduction to the game or pacing/planning of the unlocks (I mean come on, the first unlock being a spell instead of dash, which is so core to the experience; lol). That said, you’ll probably stockholm syndrome yourself into thinking it’s the bee’s knees because there’s just so much content. Plus, to be honest, there’s some charming animation and even if I didn’t like the setting or any of the world design (so bland! So samey!!!) I actually thought the soundtrack was nice. In conclusion: the children are wrong!!!
Developed/Published by: EA Vancouver, EA Romania / EA Released: 27/09/2016 Completed: 29/08/2020 Completion: Finished a season with Partick Thistle winning everything, Scotland won the World Cup, and completed Alex Hunter’s Journey. Trophies / Achievements:
Yes, I was still playing FIFA 17 in 2020. There’s a reason, though!
It’s a bit melancholy, really. I was moving out of my lovely wee apartment and leaving the city I’d called my home for a couple of years in a time of tremendous upheaval, and FIFA 17 was the first game I played when I moved in. I was deep in world cup fever and I fancied playing a FIFA, and at the time I was like “oh yeah, there’s that story mode they just started with FIFA 17, I’ll try that. Plus it’s like $8 now.”
Of course, at the time I didn’t even try the Journey mode. I just played all the other modes and I have such nice memories of sitting in my wee home, sweaty in the height of a heatwave, banging in goal after goal because it was too easy on Semi-Pro and too hard on Pro (lol).
Anyway, I knocked through the story mode, “The Journey” in my last couple of weeks in the flat to sort of say goodbye the way I said hello, and what a strange experience. To play a mixed-race Black kid from London while protests continued and in fact the NBA itself went on a wildcat strike right in the middle of it. I kept thinking about how Alex Hunter would have experienced race, of all the awful ways that Black football players and other players of colour have been treated on and off the pitch and I thought–ridiculously, I guess, for a yearly franchise and an instalment from three years prior [”Michael Brown was killed in 2014″–Ed.]–”I wish they could deal with this.”
Instead what you get, obviously, is cut-scenes here and there (far fewer than I expected!) a terrible meaningless Mass Effect-me-do conversation system and endless training sessions which you can’t skip because for some fucking reason Alex Hunter will pretty much always get Ds and Fs (but I still should have skipped them.) It feels like you maybe have a lot of opportunity to make the story go different directions but apparently you get game overs if you fuck anything up too badly, so you probably can’t. In fact you definitely can’t because even though I was able to keep Alex Hunter in the first team consistently Hunter’s social media is like “Alex Hunter should be in the starting eleven” so it definitely barely pays attention to what you’re doing. It’s your basic “struggle to the top” story where you suffer a setback and your pal turns out to be a prick that you have to defeat anyway.
FIFA is pretty fun though. I mean it’s no Sensible Soccer (too many fucking buttons) but it was a laugh for a while.
Will I ever play it again? Good question would be “Would you play FIFA 18 to continue Alex Hunter’s story?” Well, probably no for two reasons: 1) if you have to succeed when you’re playing in the England squad fuck that, because I’ll just turn around and pump in as many own goals as possible. 2) Apparently it’s still full of training mode shite. Maybe it’s easier to skip though.
Final Thought: As you might be able to tell I couldn’t give a fuck about English football, which made picking a team for Alex Hunter challenging. I went with Sunderland for two reasons: it was the most northern squad I could get and it said right on the selection screen they’re called the black cats and of course I bloody love black cats (even if they’ve only got three legs, like mine.) This definitely led to a hilarious sequence where Sunderland were somehow facing Middlesborough for the FA Cup.
It would be a couple of days later when I’d discover just how bloody hilarious that was by watching Sunderland Till I Die on Netflix, the weirdly entertaining docuseries following the club’s absolute implosion in the 2017-2018 season from mismanagement and having a disinterested arsehole billionaire as an owner. The lesson is that capitalism must be destroyed. The lesson is always that capitalism must be destroyed.
Developed/Published by: Intelligent Systems / Nintendo Released: March 13th, 2015 Completed: 25th April, 2017 Completion: Finished all the levels, collecting all but eight of the gears. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Here’s another Nintendo failure, then! You know, I do like to complain that Nintendo only seem to pump out games in just a few franchises (Mario, Zelda, recently Fire Emblem) but here’s what happens whenever they put anything else out: it tanks. So no wonder they’re getting the idea that people just want the same thing over and over until they run it into the ground. And honestly, sometimes it’s fair that the things they release fail, because they’re insanely misguided (Metroid: Federation Force) but then it’s also sad because Nintendo then learns the wrong lesson from them (“people hate Metroid”).
I mean, the lesson they might have learned here—Intelligent System’s attempt at a Valkyria Chronicles-esque third-person strategy title—is probably “don’t let Intelligent Systems do anything except Fire Emblem” because bloody hell I can’t keep up with the number of Fire Emblems that have come out. (Remember Advance Wars? It’s been almost ten years, guys.)
And, frankly: it’s a shame. Because I liked Code Name: STEAM. I know, that’s insane. I hate everything. And let me state as caveat that I immediately installed the patch that allows you to speed up the enemy turns. But Code Name: STEAM is a completely serviceable strategy title that—outside of a few frustrations—I found completely pleasant.
Now, I can agree: it’s a bit weird looking. It doesn’t manage to nail the comic book look it wants, and the enemies are somewhat… dull. However, it’s got a weirdly interesting and diverse cast drawn from literature. It gets some points, for example, for gender-swapping Zorro (was this secretly why it failed? Neckbeard boycott?) but loses some for having Dorothy bare her midriff (why?) but maybe it gains those back by including Queen Califa. I’m not a perfect arbiter of points, ok?
It does have some other flaws. Many (most?) people complain about the lack of a true tactical view, but that didn’t bother me because it’s obviously not what they’re trying to do. With free movement before you commit (hindered by enemy overwatch attacks), it’s a game about careful scouting and much more about the feel of being in a small attack squad. I do think the game is much too stingy with its steam-based action points, meaning you travel through levels very slowly, and the game doesn’t have any good sense of a progression of power—all of the unlocks are similar in power levels, just different, when it could have done with more steam being offered as you unlock new boilers (for some reason, most boilers don’t refill fully each turn, and the ones that refill slowly that you unlock I found unusable. Rather a big misstep, I feel.)
I’d say the main mistakes they’ve made are in working against the slow, methodical play style that the limited action points engender. To mix things up they add a lot of “pressure”—first with baddies that spawn in (behind you, usually) which is a mild irritant, and then just the worst: “spotter” baddies in levels featuring mortar attacks. They spawn and you have to get out of their line of sight or take a severe hit. Of course, so you can’t stall, you can’t kill them (just move them, hopefully out of sight, but it’s generally awkward to do) and this is insanely frustrating with the limited amount of action points on offer. There are certain levels where you will be harried to the point scouting is impossible, and you get situations where you stumble forward, get shot by a baddie with knock-back, and then land directly in the path of the spotter you thought you were escaping, and die by mortar. Oh, and there’s a couple of difficulty-spike levels outside of that: one with mounted guns that don’t have a clear range (frustrating) and another with a bunch of exploding enemies dropping in that I found… ragey.
Honestly, at least one of these levels had me considering stopping playing, and that’s really awful, because the game is so close to being an all-round nice time like Valkyria Chronicles. The final boss is a pain in the arse too, admittedly—but at least it’s nothing like the final boss of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, my last dalliance with an Intelligent Systems game.
However, the levels in which it works—it really works. In general the map design is clever, with a good mix of complex indoor and outdoor spaces, and while generally it’s a bad idea to split up your team of four, the level where you’re forced to do was a particularly fun one, I thought. There are far more fun levels than frustrating ones, it’s just the annoying ones are going to stick in your craw (I mean, they’re ultimately why I didn’t collect all the gears you can find in levels, and I wanted to.)
I’m gonna say that it’s weird to me that Code Name: STEAM didn’t get a fairer shake when it was released. It was slated by almost all reviewers with them almost all concentrating on the (pre-patch) lengthy wait between turns, and I guess that one mistake wrecked any chance of it managing critical acclaim at least.
Well: It’s got the only critical acclaim it truly needs: that I liked it. I mean, I didn’t love it or anything but I had a nice time. That should be more than enough!
Will I ever play it again? I won’t, but the sequel they tease at the end I would have played, except it shall never exist.
Final Thought: I recommend this, actually. I’m gonna… recommend it. Really! Because when I picked it up it was $5, and pretty much any store is gonna have it for pennies. You can do so much worse.
Developed/Published by: Honeyslug Released: May 22nd, 2013 Completed: February 29th, 2016 Completion: Finished all the challenges with a bronze cup or higher. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
“Ball, ball, ball, Footie, footie, footie, Ball, ball, ball, Football!” —“The Footie Song” by Adam & Joe
Will I ever play it again? Probably not, to be honest.
Final Thought: Passing Time is a tremendously charming little PlayStation Mobile title that you can’t get any more because, you know, PlayStation Mobile got shut down and that. I got insanely raging on one of the challenges (actually complaining about it on Twitter to the developers, I think?) and put it down for about a year, but when I was just making sure my PlayStation Mobile purchases worked (that they had the runtime thing that would make sure that they worked forever, or something—the whole PlayStation Mobile shutdown was kind of a bugger) I started it up and beat the challenge after a couple of attempts, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Developed/Published by: Wow Entertainment / Sega Released: February 7th, 2012 Completed: 18th November 2015 Completion: Finished it. Trophies / Achievements: 45%
Yes it’s The House Of The Dead month here at exp., which probably to the eyes of the trained seems like a bit of a cop-out because the games basically take about half an hour to finish each, but look, I really only just realised that I own all of them, and being able to polish off an entire franchise seems like a cool thing to do, ok?
So! The House Of The Dead III then. I don’t know what lies in store with The House Of The Dead 4 (I’m excited) but this is, so far, totally the weakest of the series. It’s more The House Of The Dead as you’d probably expect, except with a few serious changes: first, you’ve got a repeating shotgun thing (doesn’t make too much of a difference really, though it’s on screen the whole time in the ports for some reason) and secondly one of the things I really liked about the first two—the ability to change where you go by shooting things in the level—is totally gone. It’s been replaced with a level selection thingy, which (outside of the first level?) basically just allows you to change the order you do things in. Pretty disappointing!
If you’ve been following along however, this is the first one to not feature a super tedious boss rush to drag the game out a bit. However, it does instead all happen at a research facility, which means that the world design is literally never interesting. It giveth, and it taketh away.
I do though really appreciate the game’s slavish dedication to continuity. Despite being a game that’s really only intended for people to put a few 20p pieces in, fire wildly for a while and then go and do something else, it goes to the bother to re-introduce the hero from the first game (James Rogan) keep series stalwart G, and age them appropriately! (they’re proper old!) Unfortunately, it also introduces Rogan’s daughter, Lisa, who… well, frankly, she’s just got a weird face (it’s her eyes, or something?) and someone at Sega decided what The House Of The Dead series was missing was cool one-liners after a boss is killed, so she drops clunkers like “I never was any good at gardening” after shooting a big plant to death.
(Ok, this only happens like four times, but it’s really annoying.)
Oh! The plant level has some cool tentacle zombies in it, though, I liked them. But, as I’ve said, outside of that, the game is not particularly inspired. I like that the game ends with Rogan and G sharing an old bro moment, talking about how young people are the future—it’s almost like the designers think you’ve spent a lot of time with these characters and have grown to love them, like it’s bloody Lethal Weapon III, not Arcade Shooter III—but overall the story doesn’t make any sense, the level design is a bit boring and they’ve actually taken out some of the stuff that makes The House Of The Dead cool in the first place. Skip it.
Will I ever play it again? I can’t see why I would. And remember: I could play The House Of The Dead 2 again like right now and not complain.
Final Thought: This is, and I’m not joking, the only game I’ve played so far with my Move controller. I picked up a Move really cheaply a while back thinking I would use it for something, and here we are. I’m not very impressed honestly—I’m pretty sure something is off, possibly with the calibration of this game specifically, because it’s way, way less precise than a Wii Remote. But I don’t really like either in comparison to a light gun anyway. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll use it for more stuff outside of The House Of The Dead franchise. Or I’ll buy a second-hand Kinect one day literally just for Diabolical Pitch and then at least the Move won’t be the most useless piece of plastic I own.
(“Dude, you’ve already admitted to owning both a Virtua Gun and a Dreamcast Gun.”)
Developed/Published by: Sega Released: 1999 Completed: 3rd November 2015 Completion: Finished it. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Well, all that talk of The House Of The Dead 2 got me in the mood for it, and as I’m several thousand miles away from my Dreamcast and Dreamcast Gun (probably my favourite light gun, for some reason?) I might as well play through famously loved wacky port, The Typing Of The Dead.
It’s The House Of The Dead 2, except you type to kill the zombies instead of shooting them.
Do you ever think about your typing? Do they still teach it at school these days? Thinking about typing is like thinking about breathing or blinking, indeed as I type this my typing gets worse and worse as I start to over-think it. When I think back, I feel like my secondary school still had two classrooms with typewriters and I must have learned to type “properly” in first or second year that way—I feel like second year, when you’re rapidly shuffled through some different classes before you choose what you’ll do in third and fourth (note: Scotland-specific, possibly “Scotland in the 90s”-specific). I don’t remember it at all, though. What I do remember though is getting a copy of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on the front cover of PC Format and “playing” it pretty extensively. If you’re looking to learn to type properly, I’m not sure I can recommend anything more highly than the original Mavis Beacon, it’s really great.
Of course, nowadays I type fast, but messily, and I’m pretty sure I mostly type with my two fore-fingers on each hand despite basically keeping my hands on the “home keys.” In fact I’m really exploring it now—screwing my typing up badly—and yeah, I use most of the fingers on my left hand, but my right hand dances about the place and my left hand will do things like type Y, which it’s really not supposed to be doing.
I’ll be honest though, it works. I’d love to go back and learn typing properly again—I’m sure I was very solid after a course of Mavis Beacon—get that right hand better, but I can’t be arsed, because to do so is a bit dull and I’ve got other slightly dull drills I do daily (kanji doesn’t learn itself.) And The Typing Of The Dead hasn’t improved me any. It’s possible that if you’re willing to put the effort into the drills and lessons the game includes you’ll improve though?
Anyway. The Typing Of The Dead is a fun way to play The House Of The Dead 2! The game has all the great dialogue and level settings I remember—a boring lab only takes up the very last level, and while it does recycle all the bosses again, it at least spaces out the recycles a bit. It’s totally one of my favourite campy horror experiences, a bit like watching a crap bit of Italian gore or something (it’s even set in Venice, maybe?) So yeah, whichever flavour of this you choose to play I think it whiles away about a half hour rather nicely.
Will I ever play it again? The Typing Of The Dead, probably not. Typing Space Harrier: I’d love to! The House Of The Dead 2: if I ever get my Dreamcast out of storage, but after I finish the other Dreamcast shooter I own, Confidential Mission. Wait, the Dreamcast only has like two light gun shooters? Man, light guns are such a bad investment.
Final Thought: Unlike The House Of The Dead, The House Of The Dead 2 did something right for Sega for them to keep pushing it: Not only was there The Typing Of The Dead, there’s also Nintendo DS English Of The Dead (The House Of The Dead 2 teaches you English) and Flick Of The Dead for iOS (The House Of The Dead 2 teaches you Japanese cellphone style texting.) I do think it’s best as a shooter, though.
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.*
Now, it’s not going to be that apparent from that long play up there, but what makes it so horrifying—in the arcade too—is the way that the baddies rush you to just… hold on to you. And you have to waggle the stick like mad to get them to fall off. Every missed kick or punch leads to a desperate waggling as your health drops, with more and more baddies rushing and hanging onto you until you die. It’s chilling. They’re relentless, there’s no break, you just have to keep traipsing through the level fighting without error. That sense of no escape, no rest, just always horrified me. Even the pause button offers no respite. When you start again, they just go back to rushing you.
After all, what’s really more disturbing than the inevitability of death, eh?
When I got a bit older, though, something like Splatterhouse—despite being largely inspired by Kung-Fu Master—seemed amazing. I’ve never actually liked gore or horror movies particularly—I’ve never seen, for example, any Hellraisers, Nightmare on Elm Streets or Friday the 13ths—but that opening level of Splatterhouse, what’s not to love? Slicing baddies in half, or smacking them with a bit of wood so they explode across the wall. There’s a lot to be said for the slight abstraction of pixels when it comes to something that would have freaked me out properly in a movie as a kid (I count my lucky stars I never actually saw An American Werewolf in London as a child, like pretty much everyone else I know.)
But why have I gone back to finish it? Well, I was just at Fantastic Fest in Austin, the best film festival where you spend far too much money on food because they serve it to you in the cinema and you’re like “sure, apparently I do need a $6 milkshake” (but also, generally, the best film festival?) They’re not only a film festival but have Fantastic Arcade, which did lots of cool stuff this year (including the amazing Super Russian Roulette for NES) but, most notable here, a beautiful restoration of a Splatterhouse cabinet by (I believe) Estil “Doc” Vance (who may actually be a doctor based on Google searches.)
I thought to myself “what a nice opportunity to play a game to completion” and I had a bunch of goes of it but by the time I got to stage 5 (not bad going) the annoying nature of the level (or, hell, the entire game) meant I gave up and just came home and beat it in MAME. (Which is still a huge pain to set up, by the way.)
Splatterhouse is one of those great old games where you kind of feel like the developers didn’t really know what they were doing, and they were also pretty sure very few people were going to finish it, so there are several ideas that go half-implemented and the game gets less interesting as it goes on. In fact, I’m not super clear why the game has seven stages when it feels like it should conclude at stage five, I wonder if they were told it was too short.
Really, when you get down to it, you see everything interesting about Splatterhouse in the first level. Enemies don’t get more interesting, and the weapon pick-ups are absolutely sparse, in a “is this really intentional?” kind of way. My favourite being the spanner you pick up in stage 2, throw once at a completely ordinary baddie, and then never ever see again. It’s real weird! (Actual favourite: the shotgun in stage 3, which allows you to blow dogs up in an enjoyable fashion, and also never see again.) There’s some level branching for replayability, I guess, but it doesn’t add all that much (it’s most apparent in stage 5.) And the two levels after stage 5 are so boring. In one, you fight bubbles against a generic organic background, in the last, you jump over enemies on fire in a slight modification of an earlier background (insanely frustrating—the jumping in this game is awful and you always seem to land short) but I suppose at least the final boss looks like Marilyn Manson if he’d melted slightly.
So yeah, Splatterhouse, totally one of those games you put 25p in, play the first level, see the fun weapon effects and then die. At which point you are, if you’re sensible, done. There’s definitely a pretty cool Kung-Fu-esque game here—I mean even if the game just had more weapons and unique kills it would be instantly more fun—and I wonder if the home console sequels managed it.
Will I ever play it again? No, and I can’t be arsed to find out if any of the sequels managed it unless someone chimes in and says I’ve got to play X or Y with a good reason.
Final Thought: In a surprising twist, however, although the game’s ending is a nothing, the end music is actually great. A very atmospheric Italian horror-esque lament. Totally worth it, but you can listen to it without going to the effort I had to.
![The House Of The Dead [PC] (Sega, 1998)](https://expzine.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/the_house_of_the_dead_pc_header.jpg)
