Splatterhouse 2

Splatterhouse 2: Electric Boogaloo, with more blood.

In keeping with the blood gore and violence of the previous review, I thought it might be nice to take a little trip back to West Mansion with the further exploits of Rick, the Terror Mask and the ongoing mission to save Jennifer from the infernal reaches of the darkest pits of flesh-covered hell, that is Splatterhouse 2 on the Megadrive (....genesis).

What's different from the last outing you ask? Why should I pay it any heed I hear you cry out from your definitely not blood-stained gaming these days? Because... well it's more of the same to be perfectly honest. Though if you tone down the graphics of the arcade version and slap in a few more levels and a few more dynamic situations within the levels themselves, you've the essence of what is a fairly typical sequel going from Arcade to Megadrive/Home machines.

Not as graphically appealing, in more ways than one.

You control (P)Rick (Heh, classic) once again as he dons the infamous Terror Mask and pretends even less to be Jason Voorhees while he walks menacing through the game punching out anything that's even remotely misshapen of the fleshy variety as he meanders from point A to point B and leaves a spritely trail of blood, guts, gore, pus, ichor and bodies in his wake. This game really does push the limit (at the time) of what is meant by a violent video game nasty and in doing so has gone all out to have (at one point, certainly) the blood running down the screen. In fact, I even took a screenie of it.

See, told you I took a screenie.

This is after you walk along a stream floating with dead Screaming-Mimi's, punch your way through infected fish waters, drown a few hapless enemies and then wander into a shed (why?) in the middle of nowhere for what I presume is simply because Rick never worked out how to move in the foreground and background before the third game! Once inside you get accosted by various gardening implements before using one of those weapons (Get the chainsaw, ALWAYS) to attack abortions hanging from ropes and hooks, then a giant flesh jaw head thing (I... can't think of much else to say on it) before it naturally, explodes into a shower of pulped flesh.

This is just ONE level, most of the others are far worse.

No... really? Never would have guessed that.

Bosses that explode intestinally, churn up into little blood piles, eye-screaming explosions, wither and die away, head melt, ignite, have their eyes skewered with large impalements and a whole host more violent things you can do with Prick's amazing abilities to walk through the undead and unholy armies and solving everything with a few left-handers.

Good job that almost everything is either made of exploding flesh or has a glass jaw as Rick himself is one slow bastard these days. His lumber gait is made all the more obvious with the drop in animation and graphics but having said that, he's still huge and more than an imposing figure on the battlefield. What is lost in detail is made up for in size. Though that also adds to the challenge as you'll find yourself unable to avoid various attacks and enemies because you're such a big target (lay off the food, fatty)

One of two left levels, this one is the harder and it's on level 2.

Story wise, you learn a little more on the start of each level and the game basically has you trying to save the girl by punching the fuck out of everything. Hands, monsters, more monsters, bosses, more monsters, but not that giant blue behemoth... don't touch him. Then having a slight twist of having to kill a monster that escaped from "hell" for want of a better word which hurls disembodied heads at you before becoming a batwing creature and trying to speed slam you while you're... you guessed it... punching it.

Rick has the low kick and the slide attack as well, but to be honest, it's all about punching. Some monsters will approach too low for the usual and if you manage to hit anything with the slide then you can credit yourself with doing double damage but if the enemy survives it, you'll be standing up straight into them for an instant damage. Not so bad perhaps but you've usually got just 4 hits and most bosses can tank damage or have multiple forms. 

The action rarely ever lets up in this game. Even quiet spots require something to be punched.

Despite the drop in graphics from the arcade to the console, the music for the system is a lot more varied than the previous game and the tone and pace of it much more suited to the game than the arcade's attempt. Boss battles are usually more intense and frantic while levels are slightly slower (depending upon the level), lift music is a lot more interesting when you're being assaulted by monsters and escape music really adds to the urgency of having to flee from a large squid monster or a collapsing house. It helps, it adds and it fits (mostly) to the game.

The big question for the players is, can you cope with the change from the original game to this in quality of graphics and a slightly more wooden game play set of mechanics? If you can then it's likely you'll enjoy this too otherwise the downgrade might be too drastic, in which this sequel begins to smell like it was rushed out the door or the ambition might have been to release this in the arcades, couldn't' find an appropriate backer so ported it to the Megadrive only to be forced to reel most of the content back JUST to fit onto the cart.

BOO! Yeah I got nothing really to add here.

Overall, it's the weakest game of the initial trilogy and I totally didn't rush this review at all on the last minute of Wednesday to meet my own arbitrary deadlines. There's just so little different from the arcade to this game.

Duke 3D

NO I am not talking about Duke Nukem Forever (yet) or Manhattan Project (yet).

This is Duke Nukem 3D, a game that brought with it controversy with supposedly excessive violence and raw porn in a game. (Yeah right... a few badly animated gifs) which kicked off censors in ways that most hadn't expected since the Mortal Kombat fiasco and followed on with people crying to the skies for us to think of the children (on a game that's rated 18, so why are they playing it?) and stating how life and society are collapsing around us and we'll all live in sin and base needs or writhing orgies and death and murder and...

What a load of bollocks. One thing I hate more than people decrying games for being corrupting, are those that seem to think that just because something doesn't fit into the world view, it must be stamped out or it'll cause the end of the world as we know it.

In some cases, that's not a bad thing.

But behind the uproar, behind the mask of bullshit of focus groups braying for blood like loud-mouthed toddlers, there's a game and that's what I'm looking at today.

With the main competition being Quake, a 2D based shooter being released at the same time as the full 3D games, was always going to be compared as the last solid bastion against the new age of the prosperous future. While Quake was a full 3D game with focus on combat and showing the 3D arena, Duke was able to utilise the BUILD engine to put a 2D engine game into one of the brightest, most colourful (language too) and humorous games of the 1990's.

In a plot that is summed up probably more quickly than I'm about to do, "Aliens have invaded, go kick their ass", starting with Duke leaping from a crashing spacecraft, watching it fall and explode while landing upon a rooftop and immediately presented with the idea of blowing up canisters to cause things to open, dropping down an air vent into a deserted street by a porn theatre and the fighting begins.

With a massive number of weapons, sporting kicking (Both legs on early versions), pistols, shotguns, ripper guns, RPGs, pipe bombs, shrink guns, laser trip bombs, dual-handed mini rocket launchers and a freeze thrower with bouncing projectiles, Duke is well armed and well equipped to run his testosterone fuelled, muscle headed, one-line quoting ass from here to the final boss. Much in the style of doom, each level is ended by either slapping the end button or killing the boss of the level across 3 (initially) episodes.

On the way you'll be assaulted by an army of alien invader, mutated cops (into pigs... how droll), machines and robots while also encountering every movie and film reference possible from the 70s to the present day from Alien to Star Wars, Terminator to Evil Dead, Space 2001 to Independence day. Practically every level has some reference be it audio or visual to any number of aspects of pop-culture.

The game uses a huge array of textures and structures, with some very clever Build engine tricks to allow for rooms above others in a sort of 5th Dimensional space (coined by Marathon originally), allowing for more convincing levels set with a city, a space ship/moon and another city across the episodes. As cartoony as the graphics are, you can still identify the levels and what the intentions were, while red brick walls are very red still and not the dulled out and brown-washed mess a lot of modern games happen to be.

In many levels, there's the inclusion of "babes" that hold various positions of being offered cash to "shake it, baby" or moan "Kill me" of which killing any of these traps will cause more enemies to be spawn, usually those that require several shotgun rounds and likely, the Octobrain enemies. While other areas of the game act as touch plate spawn points for enemies to trigger or appear as soon as you step on a specific part of the floor or enter specific rooms and then in comes the army. Not hidden behind a wall, not teleported in from another room, but actually CREATED right then and there with no warning at all other than hindsight from playing beforehand. In later levels there's a lot of this type of trap.

The designers and makers of this game and levels show their colours as being children of the 70s and grew up in the 80s, in one level you'll find the obelisk from 2001, another you'll find a smashed up terminator complete with outstretched hand and more subtle take-that's such as a Burger House with drive thru, being supplied by a dog-pound from next door, accompanied by the genitally based quip "Nobody messes with MY meat" to really hammer the joke home and bypass all the subtlety one could have mustered.

A lot of the humour is beaten over the players head until they're forced to groan about it or just left scratching their head at the missed joke as it sails over their head at mach-1. The humour is there, but like a lot of time-based jokes, it falls flat when people no longer remember the incident, such as the OJ case with footage of him fleeing, large signs of "Innocent?" and "Guilty!" dotting the landscapes.

Game play however, is smooth and fluid, with Duke running around about as fast as the Doom Marine does (and he turns up too in this game in a secret area), generally outpacing most of the planet and sprinting the world over in short time, even faster when taking steroids, while jumping and ducking allows for a few extra ways of navigating levels that many wouldn't have been accustomed to doing since the days of Doom. The extra functions and abilities found within the engine put it head and shoulders above most of the games on the Build Engine and slaughters all Doom Style games save for the best one or two (of which I will be reviewing later).

Multi-button switches, switch combos to unlock doors, flat platforms over platforms, destructible areas that react to the player blowing stuff up, moving carts/train (noticeable on the Subway level), underwater swimming, falling damage, and many more bonus features not found in your standard Doom Engine game, all await you in Duke 3D. Though in some cases you cannot help but feel that some of the features were written in with JUST one aspect of one level in mind and nothing else. That said, there's a lot of features and tricks that can be made within the BUILD engine (that comes on the CD of the game) where you can create and design your own levels and make your own episodes. For some this aspect might be more appealing than the actual game and certainly had myself making a myriad of games when I first started the game, way, way, back.

The satirical edge aside for the humour, there's a very disjointed feel to a lot of the levels when you're jumping from one to another, going from an adult theatre to a red-light district then to a prison, is rather jarring to the flow of the game and then to a submarine and a factor, before turning up at the San Andreas Fault, one can't help but feel these levels could be done in any order and it'd make NO difference to the overall experience. There's no story to be told beyond getting from a to b and a brief (see VERY brief) talk by Duke to the boss of the episode followed by a short, stop-frame, FMV of him doing something... usually ripping off a head and shitting down a neck.

While there is a large level of outrage over the needless sexualisation and objectification of women within the game, serving as either eye-candy for the player or a pointless additional reminded to beat the level and save people, the game wouldn't have suffered at all had it simply removed this aspect of the game, because otherwise the world gets invaded and everyone's dead except for Duke, Aliens and a few scantily clad women. It's a misogynistic view of the future but one that fits Duke's mentality and atmosphere, whether rightly or wrongly and for that matter, suits the character rather well as a guns-blazing, meat-headded, steroidal ass-hat, but one that's fun to play as.

What is apparent, is that there was little clue at the time that this game would accelerate the brand into super stardom and become something many would remember fondly but never find it accurately re-made with ports to the play station, N64 (yep even on Nintendo), and other consoles through the times, other future games being released beyond Duke 3D with one being a return to the platforming roots of the first 2 games then the stunningly, ACTUALLY released, vapourware of Duke Nukem Forever (and it should have remained vapourware). Nostalgia masks this game as being something far greater than it was and all the hype and failures of recent time’s only further cement this game in being something far more than it actually was.

As a game, it's interesting to see a take on Adult that doesn't just rely on gore and swearing but also sexualisation, which a lot of games didn't for a LONG time, and quite likely because this did it and nobody dared to match it in the same shameless manner, while games in the past had facets of sexualisation, few were as readily accessible as this one (except porn games, but that's just obvious and I don't expect anyone to defend porn games because it takes too long type with one hand). Must take balls of steel to implement that as your object in a game's release.

Maybe one day, someone will release the source code and we'll get to enjoy duke in the same way we enjoy Doom with lots of ports and online functionality pushed through the roof and huge levels way beyond the limitations of the build engine.

Until then, we've only this to go back to and play it fondly.

C64 Barbarian

For some games it can be hard to tell whether it's a blatant rip of a franchise or other Intellectual Property, a parody of the source material or if it's a genuine attempt to reproduce the source in an alternative form of entertainment. Beyond that, it is done for money, for the challenge or simply to advertise themselves and their talents.

It's almost always for the money, a company that sets up to not make money, isn't a company. It's a charity.

Barbarian, on the C64, is harder to categorise as to whether it's a blatant rip or an actual genuine attempt to honour the Conan films. It's certainly not what one would call or describe as a parody of the films. Given the lack of plot beyond "Beat the warriors, kill the warlock, save the scantily clad cluster of pixels" the game itself is an interest blend of homage and beat-em-up.

The premise is simple enough; each warrior enters from their respective side, armed with a sword. They each get 6 life spots and lose a half per hit they receive while a timer counts down. The first one to lose all their life spots is dead and the green goblin creature drags the dead body away. Failure to kill the opponent results in a draw and rematch, back at full health, as opposed to the "one with lowest health, loses" rule we see in more cash-based franchises, especially in arcades.

Depending upon the opponent, whether in single player or vs. mode, the background changes after each battle from one to another, given the complexity of the combat, one could forgive the lack of choice in backgrounds. But the game's main focus is the combat and there's a lot of it there in the arsenal of moves the characters each have. Graphically there's no differentiation from one enemy and another save for the colour of shirt they're wearing and the specification of which level you happen to be on (Save for the Warlock but more later). Each combatant has the same moves, mirrored depending upon whether they're on the left or right side of the fight.

While on the subject of graphics, the combatants are fairly recognisable as Barbarians, while the goblin looks green enough to be a goblin, the backgrounds form enough of the artwork to be recognisable as a dungeon, throne room etc. Blood spots in the soft red shade, the snakes hiss and animate each time a wound is scored on the opponent, serving as borders to the screen and the play area.

One would be forgiven for thinking the combat would be limited if each player has a simple joystick and just one button as a control system, but borrowing heavily from International Karate, the control system works well on the C64 to provide a suitable selection of moves and abilities. Each character responds to the 8 directions of the joystick by ducking, rolling, walking, jumping up or holding a block stance to cover the body or the head from attack. Each direction used with the fire button depressed, permits the character to attack in one of 8 different ways, from kicks to leg chops, body attacks, head butts, twirling the sword and the infamous, "flying head chop".

While all this is going on, the characters are duking it out to a fairly solid rendition of the main theme music to Conan the Barbarian and reproducing faithfully with the SID chip, even taking the full length of the piece of music into account that many viewers of the films would likely miss save for the longest fight scene, the composer having really done their research on this one and it shows. Thankfully it can be switched off too to listen to the sounds of swords being twirled, flesh being chopped and laughing little goblins when they collect the corpses.

The complexity of the game permits a level of depth that one wouldn't normally associate with a game of this time. For each move there is a counter, be it ducking a high attack, blocking a mid, rolling or jumping around moves and such, for there's one move you WANT to avoid at all costs, the flying-head-chop, an easily accessible, long build up move that if it connects, decapitates your opponent and sends their bonce sailing away from their neck. Instant win, goblin collects body, kicks head off stage, next level. But thanks to the large run up time to the move, it can be easily avoided and even if barely avoided, takes half a life spot if it hits anywhere other than the critical area.

In single player, the game progresses from one opponent to another for 8 levels, each opponent getting tougher in difficulty as the player completes each one, later opponents will also attempt the flying head chop and shocking, can achieve it. If the player loses, game over, thanks for playing. However, should they progress far enough to the Warlock, the game play changes to either jumping or ducking magical attacks while trying to progress across the stage to the opponent. One hit from a magical attack spells death while just touching the Warlock, beats the game. The shift in game play and objective usually is so jarring, and without warning, too often kill the player before they realise what is going on. After beating 8 opponents in sword-combat, to suddenly play a game of fatal dodge ball, is a huge dick move on the part of the designers.

It's on the same lines as playing a game for 20 hours, you're well versed and practised in how to play the game, and you know the moves and have come to learn several combos and specials. Then in the last five minutes, you have to play a version of Tetris where the colours have to link up rather than beating lines, you learn it quickly but the final boss already has 20 specials performed on you before you do the first piece.

The game play however does suffer from the clunky movements of the walking-meat-sacks, moves take a short time to perform, while this gives an opponent a chance to dodge, also allows the pixel perfect reactions of the AI to slaughter someone before they realise what they're doing. Rolling is BEYOND annoying, the animation is jerky, movement unrealistic and it knocks the opponent down if it connects with them. Holding down the attack just after, raises into a kick move that most opponents cannot avoid, giving you a hard and fast method of beating EVERY opponent (AI at least), for another amazing flaw in AI routines and exploitation methods.

Barbarian is an interesting piece, while it might appeal to fans of the source material, the stories, the films, the comics, there isn't enough here for the average player to want to come back to it, though playing it with another player and trying to fake each other out for the decapitation moves, is worth a chuckle at least. Nowadays there's less substance within the game than one could expect from games like Street Fighter 2 and onwards, Mortal Kombat and such but there is a level of charm, lightly glistening upon the surface of the game which shines through as a mark of dedication by the programmers.