Retronauts - 645: The Best and Worst of 16-Bit Horror

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

Last year, we explored the NES era's few horror games and ranked them on their general spookiness levels—given the standards of the time. And now we're back to do the exact same thing for a whole new generation of consoles! This week on Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Kole Ross (of Duckfeed.tv), Diamond Feit, and Drew Mackie (of Gayest Episode Ever and Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games) as the crew unites to discuss a magical time when horror games could have evocative titles like "Decap Attack" and "Zombies Ate My Neighbors." Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get two full-length exclusive episodes every month, as well as access to 50+ previous bonus episodes, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

This week on Retronauts, we'll swallow your consoles. Hello, boys, ghouls and non-by-scarries. week, it's a new episode of Retronauts, and I'm your host, Bob Mackey, and I made everyone laugh up front with a horribly corny joke I thought of, and I'm glad it worked. So on this episode, we're going to be celebrating the Halloween season with a sequel to last year's episode about NES horror games. And this time around, we're jumping ahead an entire generation to discuss horror games for 16-bit consoles, and most of the games we're talking about would never be covered by Retronauts otherwise. So they're grouped into a nice little topic package

so we can talk about very obscure otherwise unremarkable games. Although a few of them are at least slightly remarkable, but it's all for the Halloween season. Before I gone any further, who is here with me today? It's a Halloween episode, so I guess this is a demon fight. Ooh. So we have demon fight. Who else is here?

I'm trying to think of a tree house of Horstale name for myself on the spot, and I don't have one, so I'll say noted Dana Plato, Apologist, Drew Mackey. Can we say goo, man? No, we can't. Okay, well, there goes my attempt. I'm not going to say that. Okay. Well, I guess I'm blob Mackey.

And who else is here today are our final guest? Both of my names only have one syllable, so this is hard to do. I'm skull loss. I like that. That's pretty good. That's on topic. Your podcast partner, Gary Butterfield, has the best Halloween Twitter name. Or what he did when he was on Twitter was Gorey Battlefield.

Yes. Nobody can top that. Gory battlefield, scary murder field. He's got so many options. I'm very, very jealous. Lots of fields full of corpses. This episode, though, we're treading into a video game landscape with actual rating. So we're not going to be grading these games based on what they're getting away with.

That was the premise of the last episode we did. So we're going to throw the ranted rubric out the window. It's being replaced by what I call the creepy quotient. So whenever you hear that sound effect, you'll know I clip the too long sound effect for this purpose. And also, we have just added up a score. So when we talk about each game, the discussion is over, we are going to give our own scores for how effectively creepy, uki, and spooky the game in question is. And then at the end of the podcast, I'll do a lot of mental math.

And then we'll figure out what is the winner of this Halloween season's Spookyest 16-Bit game. So last time around, Diamond and I both talked about what the first time, if ever, we were scared by a game was. This time around, we have two new folks, new to this kind of discussion. I want to know from Drew and Cole, what was the first time you were scared by a video game? Let's go to Drew first. So I listened to the old episode, and I expected this, and I've really been thinking about it. And I can't think of an example other than the very common phantopanic of playing Super Mario Bros. 2 and, like, Awakening Fanto and having

like a little kid version of like oh my God I'm being chased by a monster which is a very real thing. The only other thing I could think of is seeing my first fatality in an arcade and being like they can do that? That's it. Yeah for me I think it was seeing a screenshot of the subzero holding

up the skull fatality. I think that did give me not nightmares but I did fixated on it for a while. Cole how about you? Yeah this is hard. I think that the youngest I can remember being scared of a video game was Legend of the Mystical Ninja for the S&ES, let's say.

Before you go to the side-scrolling level, the first one in the bamboo forest, there's a weird, like, looks like a panda bear kind of guy who warns you about how dangerous the place you're going is. Pretty upsetting face on that dude. I just was looking for something besides Fanto, panic to get it.

of something there. Otherwise, oh gosh, there was an arcade game called Time Killers where over the course of playing the game, you could lop off each other's limbs. And if you lopped off enough limbs, then you died. I remember being freaked out by seeing the people with their stumps and the decapitated heads and stuff. It was like, wow, I can't believe this is in the arcade. Yeah, I think you were just basically down to fighting torsos by the time any match ended.

Just torsos rolling into each other Somehow still screaming Well thank you for letting us know About where you first encountered scary games I want to get to these games themselves Because we're going to be talking about nine distinct games To kick things off I will say No Castlevania

Retronauts has never covered Castlevania It's a huge blind spot for us Maybe one day we will Today is not that day I'm more concerned with covering one-off games Released in America that aren't part of any major series I'm not going to get them all I hit the ones that I think are going to

be most interesting to talk about. And one of the games we're talking about today was not released in America and is not a one-off game. But I think it's so important to the future of horror games that we have to talk about it. But for the most part, these are all released in America and just their own thing. And because these have to go in some kind of an order, I put them in chronological order and it made me feel better about the list here. So we're going to start with a little game called Decap Attack, perhaps one of the best

video game titles in the worlds, I think. It just, it really some, it feels like what someone who hates video games would name a video game in 1991. Just the stupidest but most evocative title you could give to a horror game. You know, it's funny that Cole Ross just brought up time killers, because I feel like time killers should have had a, I don't know what they called the attack in that game where you try to chop off someone's head, but that surely would have been a decap attack. But in this game, you are not decap attacking because you don't chop off any.

heads but you have like a head and a secondary disposable skull it's it's very curious it's a very curious concept that i guess i think they got decap attack first and then they work backwards and they're like okay what can we do with this we thought of a title let's figure out how to stick a face on a mummy stomach well this is some real i think uh cole did you guys coin dokey dokey trivia, watch out for fireballs? Yeah, we did. I don't know if we coined it, but just the idea, we call it a dokey dokey fact, which is

something you can just say like it as a trivia factoid, but everybody already knows it. Just a very obvious historical point. Yeah, this isn't so much of a dokey, dokey panic because I don't think as many people have played this game compared to Mario 2, but decap attack for the Genesis

1991, by the way, originally a much different game in Japan. Its original title is Magical Flying hat turbo adventure maybe a little too busy i like the elegant simplicity of decap attack but it was based on a non-notable one-season anime series called magical hat um if this had been localized for america it would be totally my thing when i was nine or ten but it never came over here a good chunk has been fan sub but it's actually kind of like doki dokey panic and that it's very arabian nights theme but i think that was just in the water in japan at the time taking those visual cues the

turbans on the heads, the flying carpets, the, I guess, the cimitars. It's all happening in this anime, and there's a lot of animal people there as well. I think it's interesting that they would change the original design of the character to what we got. Because just looking at him, you have to assume this is something that was plucked from another franchise that makes sense in another country, but just doesn't make sense in America where he has a head embedded in his chest and then a second head that he is separate from his body. But no, that's not the case at all. The American people actually invented as four Americans, and that just makes it so much more confusing to me.

Yeah, it's entirely original IP, and they could have just made a simple Frankenstein rip-off, but because it has a very unique sense of humor, it goes beyond that in which you're playing a guy named Chuck D. Head, and yes, he does that. That's not all he does, who is a mummy without a head who has a face in his stomach that he extends to attack enemies. The whole chuck D-head thing is optional because the skeleton head or skull you get is a power-up you can use to throw like a boomerang. So occasionally he is chucking D-head, but usually he's extending D-head out of his guts. It's a weird and very morbid game, but it's very, very creative. And I don't know why Sega decided on this branding. They published it. I'm sure they mandated these changes. But they really anticipated the fad of the whole gross out.

cartoon, which was really kicking off with Ren and Stimpy the fall that Decap attack launched. So they understood the way the wind was blowing and kids wanted gross games and gross media in general, I think. If you're like grasping for a theme for something, slapping a quick coat

of Halloween paint on it, there are worse ways to go, especially for your game that is a dry run for Dynamite Hetty. You know, I looked it up 1991 is also the year that Chuck Rock came out, so clearly someone realized that, hey, wait, this commenting English nickname sounds like throwing

something. We can use this to make video games. Well, Stuart is not here so I can say Chuck D. Head is better than Chuck Rock any day. I dislike Chuck Rock. I find him hideous. He had children. We have to play as them in the sequels. I don't like it. But this, in this case, they didn't just do

a doki-doki panic makeover. Of course, Mario USA has some gameplay changes, some level design tweaks. This, I guess, is about 80% the same in terms of level design. But all the music is different, all the graphics are different, and the levels are a bit different. But they essentially started with the framework they had and built a partially new game with that framework.

And with certain gameplay tweaks and certain, you know, new abilities for the main character. But it is impressive. They didn't have to go this far, and they did. No one would have called foul because nobody in America was playing magical head turbo-flying adventure. At least I wasn't. you know the thing that strikes with this game is that all the levels are kind of you know it's like you know you're running around this you know what uh Dave Rudin once called airport hanger you know platform or stages like you're you're growing up going down you're

really know where you're supposed to go but the backgrounds are always this sort of it's you're supposed to be some sort of like tropical maybe archipelago so you got like these these big backgrounds of like mountains and and and barren ranges so it's like to me it reminds me of lot of like the caveman games we used to get because like this this play this game is taking place like nowhere it's a place where people must live because this creature is going around there and there are monsters trying to take it over and you get this weird introduction where this whole continent I guess was shaped like a big skeleton and then the bad guys it gets broken apart and as you play the game you bring it back together piece by piece

which wasn't the original game that that that landmasters looked like you know on island But they're like, no, no, we need to go in on this. We're making a skeleton, we're making a whole skeleton, skeleton land. So it's kind of this weird, it's weirdly empty. So I'm like, why, you know, why is Chuck here? Why are these doctors here? What are these monsters, like, were these monsters always here? Is this just a monster land that, like, is another monster breaking up monster land?

You know, as usual, I read the manuals for these that are all online in PDF form. And there's, there's no apparent reason why you're doing these things. you're just brought to life by Dr. Frank N. Stein and he's telling you, you know, go out, defeat the main antagonist, and reunite these islands. And then when you do, when you beat the game, you're actually brought back to life as a human. It's one of those things like Bubble Bobble, where when you win the game, you're given a less cool form. In this case, you're just kind of a boring blonde guy named Charles or Charlie, I think. That's the ending. It's like, no, call me Charlie. Well, he can't chuck us head anymore.

He can only chuck his head once, I guess. Yeah. There was never any follow-up. This could have been an IP, you know, with future sequels and stuff, but it stops here. And this was made by Vic Tokai, never known as a great developer. Although this feels of a piece with Clash a demonhead in terms of they're both kind of janky platformers. They've both got a very silly but kind of morbid sense of humor to them. But DeKap is a much more linear game. You're not doing Metroidvaniae stuff. But I like the spirit of both of these. I feel like they have the same kind of vibe. I'm sure someone's language has a word for, like, janky, but kind of charming in being janky, and that's why this resonates a little bit better with me than it might otherwise. Like, there's something corny and cute about it, even if it's dumb. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of, it's largely pun-based.

You know, that's apparent with the main character Chuck D. had, but all the lands you go to are pun-based. It's not gory. It's very silly. It's like Halloween decoration horror. Oh, go ahead, Diamond. I just, they're real bad. Like Elbow Island, like, it's like Spanish but also French, but it's island.

It's like, yeah, because I guess, again, the continent is shaped like, you know, a skeleton. So each land has a different name that's supposed to look like what it's supposed to sound like what it looks like. Read the other ones. Read the other ones. They're all bad. Oh, I didn't run them down. I just remembered Elbow Island because it's stuck into me like a knife. I know there was something based on abdominal something, like a dominole something, like a domino.

the first one. It's all, yeah, okay. Yeah, I just, they're, they're using every pun in the book. Again, it's like sort of like Halloween decoration sense of humor. And yeah, this was never a series. This never went anywhere. Vic Tukai wouldn't be around for very much longer. But what I found shocking was, so Stuart Jip was going to be on this podcast. But the time zones between me and Stuart and Diamond don't really work out. So it's rare to get both of them on the same podcast. So Stewart bowed out. And then I'm on Twitter. saying who's talking about decap attack i'm searching for it and stewart comes up first because stewart wrote an official decap attack comic and this is because decap attack was a one-off game that i'm sure some people played but it lived on in the british comic magazine sonic the comic the comic the comic started when the game was new and it went on for seven years and i guess before sonic the comic sonic ended in 2022 stewart wrote a revival strip for the magazine so Stuart has dabbled in the decap attack universe and I can't believe he didn't say anything about it

I feel like we should just call him I think it would be fun just to like surprise get having as a guest on this no matter what time it is there wake him up yeah it's it's 2 a.m. He needs to wake up and answer a lot of questions about this because this went on for a very long time in the UK and of course they're building their own lore

they're making their own fun with these characters but I guess people, at least British people, were really attracted to these characters and wanted to see more of them. That was not the case here. I don't think he mentioned Decap Attack in his book, All Games Are Good. It seemed like it would be a perfect opportunity

to mention Decap Attack. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it could be one of those Stewart things where we find out he doesn't like the game and I will ask no follow-up questions, but it's also, so I'm going to let you know that if some of these games are available and some of them are not.

You can buy Decap Attack a la carte on Steam. You can just go to Steam, type in Decap Attack, and add it to your cart and have a credit card bill with decap attack written on it, if you so choose. But this game is very available today if you wish to play it. I've been listening to Retronauts for a long time, and at this point, the regular people on the show, I can predict what they like and don't like. Not Stewart. Stewart's very hard to predict what he will passionately like and passionately hate.

No middle ground. He's a wild card. He really is. He really is. So I want to go around the virtual room here to judge Decap Attack on its a spooky factor, the creepy quotient. I will start with Diamond. I need a score between 1 and 10 and why you're giving it.

Well, I think most of this goes to the lead character who is just kind of uncomfortable to look at. I don't know what's happening. I don't know why. Did the doctor put them together that way? Like, why do they make these decisions? I don't understand. And also the fact that it's all on a giant skeleton island, which is bizarre to me.

I also the skeleton is a heart. I don't like that either. So I'm going to go pretty high. I'm going to say eight. I find this game to be creepy. It's creepy. The heart island is called Pumpington. I looked it up.

That's great. Drew, how about you? Decap attack. Like, janky, charming. I like goofy horror. I think when, especially in this era of video games, when you try to take it very seriously, it usually doesn't go very well because of the jank factor.

but I think that I'm going to give this one a good six. That is based on design of the character being upsetting, but it's Halloween-ish, so it's supposed to be upsetting. The music's actually pretty good. The music is by Fumito Tamayama. Back in the day, I had a video game music podcast, and this was on my Halloween music episodes. So some of the tracks are actually really good,

even if they maybe weren't designed for a Halloween-themed game back in the day. But like Cole said, Halloween paint is good to slap on something to make it appealing to Americans. I wish they'd gone a little bit farther for the background reasons that Diamond was talking about. So, six. Great. And Cole, how about you? What's your

score? I like this game. It's good. And Genesis didn't have an awful lot of exclusive platformers outside of Sonic. So all of that is working in its favor. As far as scariness goes, broadly this does not rise above, let's say,

We've got ourselves a real, a real, a real, a real, a real, a booberry or whatever the mummy one was kind of going on. So that would make it like a four. However, I've been watching a long play of this while we were talking, just to refresh my memory. And I believe one of the first bosses you fight is one of those Suriname toads where the little babies are living in the holes on the back. That jump, that jumps up from like a four to like a seven for me. just by the inclusion of that actual monster, which is horrible. Yeah, it's a horrible real-life monster. And as for me, I think this game, it's not seeking to be scary.

It's more of the Halloween decoration, monster serial brand of scariness, which I find very charming, especially in this era. And then if you try to go too hard, sometimes you can be a little to be redundant here, a little try hard with the horror. So I like the spirit. I'm giving it an eight, and I've tallied up all. all the scores, and right now, Decap attack has a 29.

And in case we end up going short on this podcast, the series of screams really add up to about 20 minutes of audio here. So we're going to give that. That's a 29 out of a possible 40. Let's move on to our next game here. It came from the desert. So this is really a part of the 90s trend of recontextualizing cheesy sci-fi and horror movies of the past

for an increasingly irony-pilled audience. Younger Boomers, Gen Xers, they were really getting into this. And I was, too, with things like Mystery Science Theater 3,000, the Burton film Ed Wood, the film matinee. We were really into finally, you know, pointing at these movies and laughing at them and finding qualities to find endearing. And this game is by Cinema Ware. They're a company that specialized in making very cinematic for the time games. And that meant all the Cinema Ware games are a bunch of poor to fair mini games. I think Defender of the Crown is probably the most ported

and the most famous and successful. I played the NES port a lot because my stepdad really liked it. But also the Three Stooges is probably a close second in terms of cinemaware awareness. But that was their bag, baby. Right before the CD-ROM era, they were asking, how can we make game cinematic? The answer was use a lot of resource-intensive resources

and build little crappy mini-games and stitch them together in the best way possible. You know, I think part of the reason is fact that if you look at, you know, the 90s, especially the early 90s, I feel like there was kind of a malaise in the horror genre because I feel like after the 80s had been sort of taken over by slashers. And I feel like by the early 90s, everyone's like, oh, God, horror movies are so dumb. And you also have what you explained, Bob, like the boomer, the boomer effect of people who grew up watching like 50s and 60s kind of way out their movies that are just like, you know, giant monsters, giant bugs. and they grew up like, oh, wasn't that so silly? And then they have the, you know, suddenly they're in a position to make, make TV shows or make movies about how these old things they laughed at were so silly. So I feel like a lot of the games from this era are looking back at horror and saying, isn't that ridiculous?

Whereas, you know, actual graphic, this is dangerous, this feels dangerous. This feels, this feels actually frightening. I feel like those games are few and far between. Yeah, it's the first time around this time where there have been funny adventure games by 1991, but this is the sort of, we can make something kind of bad on purpose. They're realizing what they can get away with in terms of emulating the bad acting choices, the bad writing choices, the silly sound effects and concepts powering these movies. And I like the original concept for this game because it's really a time management game because in the original version, not the one we're talking about, you have 15 days. to get to the bottom of this giant ant problem and everything you do eat at sometimes

you have to decide where to go driving places takes time every action you do takes time and you are doing these little mini games based on what choices you make you are doing these very limited first person shooting segments you are doing

knife fights for some reason I don't know why and so on you're just engaging with the game in ways that are moving the storyline along this all changes though because when the

Turbographic 16 CD version comes out Cinemaware finally has access to CD-ROM something that will be a great boon to them but I think also kill them completely because they go out of business after making this game now if you watch the

the playthrough of the Amiga version or the DOS version you can kind of see what they're going for and it might not all work out but it's a very neat sim game with some crappy mini games thrown in it I like it as an ambitious mess. In the CD-ROM version, some of those elements are included, but it's really just putting live-action actors right in your face for as much time as possible, because it was very

impressive to do that at the time. And also writing original music, because in this version of the game, you are, the first thing you're met with is this Roy Orbison-style song about it came from the desert and the person you're playing as. It's abuse of the multimedia format, but it's what cinema wears. was created to do, I think. Is it weird if, like, when I clicked the link for the long play of this and that song started playing, I was like, the song is really good.

It's not the right song for this game, even considering this game's kind of uneven tone. But I thought it was surprisingly good. I actually looked up who did it. And his name is Ken Melville. He's a co-founder of digital pictures. Oh, yeah. And I think he's the guy who wrote the game or helped direct the game. I recognized his name in the credits.

That would make sense. But also he's like, oh, by the way, I write my own music, and I put it in the game. And they did. And it's not the right vibe for the game, but it's actually quite good, I thought. Yeah, actually, I'm not complaining about it. It's just weird to hear that song. Yeah. When you start it came from the desert, which should be going for a more 50s B movie vibe, you know,

but you're not getting that from the Roy Orbison style song. And in this version of the game, they're trying to console things up by making it a little more streamlined. Well, they're consoling things up by changing who you're playing as. In the original game, I think you're playing as a scientist. This time around, you're playing as a rebel teen biker. And it's not the cool biker dude, you think, because you never see this person, but whenever he talks in the game, he sounds very whiny. He's getting into arguments with his parents that you are a party to. It's actually kind of embarrassing. So I'm not sure if they're going to make him a biker, why not make him a cool James Dean type? But they went in an unexpected direction.

They didn't go James Dean type. They went James Hurley rip-off from deadly premonition type. Yes. Yeah, that's the James they were going for. Yeah. So I really like this game for PC, not in a way where I've played it and beaten it. Like is the wrong word. I admire this game for PC.

Playing the Amiga port, there's a version of this that's available on Steam as part of a cinemaware collection. I had never seen this Torbographic 16 version before. This is a nightmare. It really is. I mean, just in terms of like, they didn't need to replace all of the beautiful pixel art with incredibly kind of dithered and washed out FMV.

They really didn't need to. If you look at the, if you look at the high-res art on the Amiga version, this is like it has a really coherent, aesthetic. It feels really deserty. And that, in addition to kind of the time management side of things, actually does make this feel like it is something entirely different than what you were seeing, you know, on PC horror even at the time, right? To just kind of get rid of all of that unique cohesion and take away the connective tissue of the time management and getting around and just make it a minigame collection with an FMV biker. Everybody hates. is a wild own goal, and I'm going to say they deserve to go out of business for this. They ruined their own game. Yeah. Now, I think that I remember this game because it was a market, sorry, it was aggressively marketed to me because I bought a turbograph to 16,

which means I got all the literature in the mail, I got all the VHS tapes in the mail, and it was, it did look captive in because I had never seen full motion video before, especially in this context. And there's a lot of it in the game because when you watch a playthrough of the game, Only a very small portion of the screen is actually the full motion video content. So they squeeze in a ton of cinema scenes with all of these great actors who you have never seen before or since. Although Diamond, I think you said that at least one of the actors did stick out to you as just a journeyman character actor. Yeah, I just, I had to watch and then I had to look it up.

And, you know, the one that stood out to me was a guy named Robert Miano. And he just, you know, he's here playing the sinister sheriff. and he, you know, he stands out because he's playing the sinister sheriff, and he's, he's really kind of unsettling to look at, and he's, like, he's casually carrying his gun in a threatening manner, but most of the time he's playing, like, uh, like mobsters and tough guys kind of thing, you know, he's got, uh, you can really just picture this guy in a suit and like a fedora and, you know, telling you, he's, you know, making an offer you can't refuse. I mean, the first thing I thought of is he appeared in Star Trek, D-Space 9 as a holographic mobster who was threatening another holographic character. So that's how you get a guy like this on Star Trek. You just put him in the holodeck, and it works just fine. He seems like the guy who would go on to play a hologram. Yeah. And he's, I looked up though, by the way.

He is still working like feverishly. He has like three or four credits a year, you know, recently. So good on it. Good for him. Good for him. I have one too. I have one too. My example of someone that got out of this and had a real career is an actress

named Museta Vander, who is a South African actress who played Sindel in the second Mortal Kombat movie. but like she's gone on to some other stuff though she was in oh brother where art thou she was in wild wild west which I was not a successful movie but I'm sure she got paid pretty well for it and she plays a evil mantis woman in Buffy that tries to mate with and eat Xander so I was like you know what and I she's the one you see at the end I watch all the way to the end

where she's like I'm just going to go to big sir and she like invites you to go to big sir with her she's like the sexy mystery girl wait that means this is the woman who's to deliver the infamous you know, too bad you will die in Moral Combat Annihilation. That's cinema history. So, yeah, this gets rid of the more ambitious elements of the PC game in terms of its design. It's more of a streamlined adventure where you occasionally make choices and it is very much choose your own adventure.

Like, do you want to go to the caves next or you want to go to the bar next? Oh, you chose the bar. You weren't supposed to go there. So now go back to an old save or restart your game. So it's all about making the correct series of choices throughout the game. And some of the mini-games have been changed to take advantage of the console format. Well, because console gamers are more used to side-scrolling games, there are side-scrolling shoot-em-up sections, which look pretty bad.

And also, there are very silly-looking sections where someone is wriggling around on the ground. And you are shooting ants as they are approaching the victim, and you're trying to knock off the ants before they can reach the victim. If they reach the victim, they tear off a huge chunk of flesh. So you can be left with a skeleton in a screaming head if you're not careful. And I remember seeing that image in those promotional videos and thinking, I am nine. I don't know if I should be seeing this. And one of the victims is a little girl.

So, like, you can watch that happen to a child if you're bad at this game. Yeah. Yeah. Again, I forget who said it, but maybe they should have gone out of business. I think it was cool. Yeah. I do think the inclusion of so much FMV really accentuates the difference between here's what we spent money on and here's what we didn't. Because the actual gameplay segments are so simplistic that they, you know,

So to contrast them with actual actors Delving Lines and it's like, oh, and now here you control like an almost stick figure in a small hallway shooting zombies and ants and zombie ants. I do give them credit for that. Someone decided, oh, wait, we need to have ants and we need to have actual zombie

ants. That's outside the box thinking. I think that guy with the beard, that guy with a huge beard in this game, was really playing hardball with his salary, and that's why they're out of business. Let's blame him. I'm sure he's dead. But if not, I'd be very surprised. So, Yeah, they went defunct right after developing this game, which is a real shame, because it feels like this was the part they were born to play baby being in the FMB world

and playing with these tools. But I have some shocking news. It's even more shocking than Stuart Jip writing a Decap Attack comic. This game became a movie in 2018, and yes, it is a kind of a real movie. This is not a fan film. Although they get it completely wrong. It's not a period piece. It's not a send-up of B movies.

It's just called, it came from the desert, and it's about giant ants. And it does advertise proudly based on the hit PC game. So that was shocking when doing research for this. I had no idea this would eventually spawn a game. I guess enough people played it or just you can't make anything if original IP does not exist first. It might be a case of the latter. It is shocking. This was a movie.

But when you look at where it was released, it was released in Finland, the UK and Canada, and that's it. And it makes it slightly less shocking. It's believable. Yeah. Yeah. I saw that it was like a Finnish Canadian co-production. And this must be one of those weird games where, oh, This has a huge audience in Finland, and we're just unaware of it.

Sort of like certain adventure games are huge in Germany, like Zach McCracken, and there are all these fan-made sequels. Meanwhile, I would not stop if Zach McCracken was in front of me and I was driving. We need a on-the-ground report from Jess, who's now up there. She's got to find out what's going on with the It Came from the Desert fandom. Void Burger needs to infiltrate the It Came from the Desert fan groups and tell us what's going on there. We have to move on, though. So let's give our creepy quotient score.

We'll start again with Diamond. This is going to go a lot lower for me just because it just doesn't hit for me. Some of the actors are doing their job, but the game isn't doing its job as a video game for me. So you're right about the occasional graphic violence, and I do like zombie ants, but three. We're going to move on to Drew. Also three, we should say that it's a takeoff on them, which is a real life giant ant movie. And that's a fun thing to do. but the only real scary thing about it

is some of the pixel art they give the queen aunt. She's kind of scary, I guess. And your score, Drew? Three. Three. And Cole, how about you? If this was the Amiga version,

I would give it a higher score because of the actual gameplay pressure of needing to do stuff in time, figuring out how to save people and stuff. As it is with this FMV that feels designed to lean into comedy cheesiness, even with the you know, ripping off, you know, whole like 9% sections of people's skin, uh, kind of thing going on.

Yeah, like, I'm, you know, I think I'm going to give this like a four, um, just because of that, just because of the skin ripping, but nothing else here is, is, is hitting at all. Yeah, and I'm going to echo what Cole said. I prefer the, uh, the original PC game, Amiga and Doss. I like the sense of urgency and dread that's hanging over everything. And I prefer the, the, the more B movieish send-ups and characters. This, it feels like they might be kind of going for that, but they're not hitting it. And while I appreciate children being skeletonized, it's not happening enough in this game.

So I'm going to tally up the score here, and it looks like it came from the desert, is going to get a 14 out of 40. So this is going to be a pretty low-scoring game. Let's see where it ends up when we get through the additional seven on this list. So we're moving on to a game that has been to a game that has been kind of over discussed, but it fits into this discussion. So I'm not going to exclude it. It is Nighttrap. It's infamous. And this game, and I believe Seward Shark, were produced for what would have been Hasbro's VHS-based video game system control vision. That was scrapped.

The executive producer of this game sat on the footage until the dawn of the CD-ROM era. And that is when he made his vision happen when the CD-ROM era launched, and he could actually have a platform to shove all this footage onto. And I need to read up more on this. I didn't have time, but I really want to know how something like that. like this could have worked in the VHS format. It seems impossible, although who knows what they were capable of. I feel like the design got more elaborate when digital entered the production. Yeah, I can't imagine a way to have a physical tape actually display, like, feeds from

different places at different times. Like, that doesn't sound possible. So maybe once they realize that, you know, you can have more than one file at once, like, oh, great, now we can actually have, like, a security wall. So players can actually have a sort of a quick scan of like what's happening around. the house. The idea of trying to represent parallel events on a linear VHS tape, which is necessary for the way this game is designed. It had to have been entirely different. I feel like VHS board games barely work. I don't know how this ever would have. But what I find the most charming about this game is that because it was filmed years before it hit the market, this is 80s as hell. And I find that just so charming. And I think the titular song was written and performed in the 80s as well. It sounds like dead. Debbie Gibson, right off of her old record. So, I mean, we won't talk about it too much here, but that makes the whole Senate subcommittee freak out even funnier because they were clutching pearls over what could have been on Nickelodeon in 1992 on Are You Afraid of the Dark?

This kind of kooky slumber party episode where vampires can't actually bite people. It's not allowed. Yeah, there's not even, I mean, they may be, you know, if you read the official materials and the gay, the characters, the game, they talk about people, you know, having bad things happen or blood, you know, they're taking their blood, but like, when you actually look at the game, the actual game, the text, if you will, it's like all the bad guys are just wearing, like, these really big, kind of bulky costumes that don't really look like anything. Like, you know, they're not, you know, like, you're going to have a stereotypical vampire idea in your mind. You can have a

stereotypical monster idea in your mind. These guys are going for none of that. They're just like, they're you know they're practically dressing up like like power rangers extras like they're very it's very bulky and just all dark and even when they capture someone it just you know it doesn't look threatening in the slightest and certainly when they're walked by themselves they don't they look they look bumbling you know sick yeah yeah yeah i mean most of the game's footage is stuntman uh falling through trap doors are going down slides it's it's not like a uh evil dead two style like blood shooting everywhere

kind of event here. Yeah, and I wonder, chicken of the egg here, I do wonder how this happened. Because I remember, when the game came out to me, I assumed it was going to be at least kind of racy. Or at least, you know, somehow, like, you know, sinister in its approach, maybe even, like, sexual. And I don't know if the commercials did that or if just the fact that there was a huge Senate hearing about it and it got rated M and that maybe put the idea in my head. but, like, when I first saw it, I was like, wait, this is, what the hell? What's going on here? Like, this, like, also, I guess part of the fact is that Dana Plato, you know, they made, you know,

Dana Plato is probably the biggest name in this, in this production. And they shot in 87 when she was right off of different strokes, so she was actually kind of a name. But by the time it came out in 92, you know, her star had fallen a lot. She had been arrested for, I guess, attempted robbery, like, things had gotten bad for her. So I guess, I think her image had really gone in the toilet, and that maybe, hit the impression that someone might have had of this production

I think if you saw her in a poster in 1992 you might assume this was gonna be some kind of like you know Cinamax movie whereas like that's not what it is it just really isn't

yeah I mean when I read about this game when it was new it's how I learned about different strokes because I think I was like a little too young to have seen it

or maybe it just was off of my radar but everyone was making the joke she was arrested for armed robbery I think she robbed like a video store with a pellet gun

for maybe $100 so that happened the year before this game came out so people really couldn't get beyond that and they really couldn't get beyond the what I feel is them being a little tongue in cheek with the premise this this very tame vampire story I don't know if that was their intent but that's how it comes off to me they're not really being too serious about it especially when in the middle of your narrative someone sings the titular song of your game it's hard to take that seriously it's also we're thinking about this being um creating such a uproar when it came out so much after the slasher boom when like every slasher movie that came out in theaters that like teenagers were watching left and right were seeing like tits and like gore and this just doesn't have any of that and the only difference is that like you have a very like tentative level of like agency in this narrative but not even that much honestly yeah i mean if

anything the mature rating made consumers think if i buy this one of these girls might get naked or maybe i'll see a severed head i feel like the rating really misled people into knowing what this game was about. And then, you know, it has been rehabilitated lately thanks to certain re-releases. But at the time, it was considered, oh, this is the worst game of all time. Nighttrap was a punchline. But looking into the design, watching playthroughs of it, I really appreciate what they're doing with the full motion video format. Because oftentimes you saw full motion video just uses cutscenes.

We're going to talk about a game that just does that and that's it. But here they're figuring out, okay, what can we do with only this much video available to us? on a CD-ROM. Okay, well, we can make it so you're switching to different feeds. Maybe some things aren't happening in certain rooms and you sort of have to stitch together the narrative in your mind through various different replays. Yes, Nighttrap is a soul's-like.

We're going to go that far. But I feel like, oh, go ahead, cool. I'm being sarcastic. Okay, pump the brakes on that. I don't want it to get lost, though, that this is really far ahead of its time. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've always liked how inventive

this is going so far is to have like a diagetic reason for, you know, you know, why you're watching this video, uh, why it is not specifically interactive, you know, um, and I don't want to steal anybody's point, but like for the goofiness of the subject matter, like being so disempowered in this and also being feeling a little bit like an invader yourself by looking in on these people just having fun. That is an unnerving kind of thing. The whole, the whole deal is farcical, but I think that, like, even if it's by accident, they are playing in some spaces that are way more interesting than just the punchline that this game was. Yeah, it's a little kooky, but the voyeurism aspect does make it creepy at times.

Like, if you're playing this game and you switch to a camera and there's nothing happening, that's a little unsettling. Or if there's just someone moving from one room to the other, you're like, oh, I shouldn't be seeing this. They created this footage, but it feels like I shouldn't be here because nothing of value is really happening. but yeah, I do like games where you are a fly on the wall and events are happening without your intervention. You're not the actor in every scene. Games like Hitman and Majora's Mask and things like that. I kind of like just, you know,

getting to know the events that will happen and trying to be in certain places at certain times and that is sort of what's going on here. In reference to like the voyeurism aspects of it, I think it's interesting that like when you fuck up, you get a stern talking to from hot mustache cop daddy. and that is not the reaction I was supposed to have

when they were creating this game but it is a very specific reaction to have I honestly I've never spent much time with Nighttrap before this because I just thought it'd been so overexposed that it wasn't worth my time looking into but I found one of those versions of it where you see all the feeds running simultaneously and they're cutting the audio between them

so you're getting the most of the plot that you can I had no idea this game did this like it is eight different cameras and when you see someone running from one room to another you see them moving in the intervening cameras that is actually quite hard to do and when you watch it all play out at the same time you're like oh like they did a pretty good job with this

we were really hard on the people who made this game and I think they did something really cool but it took me in all 2024 to realize that yeah it's a game where replaying it over and over is part of winning because if you want to watch certain narrative scenes play out you have to avoid, you know, capturing the augurs in certain locations. So it's all about paying attention, knowing the in-game events when they will happen and where they're help.

And I think it's very innovative. And I like to see, I think games have incorporated these kind of ideas into their design. But I like to see something just kind of go for a spiritual sequel to this. And as far as I know, that doesn't exist. So let's give our scores for Nighttrap. Let's start with Diamond once again. I mean, I've got to go even lower, frankly, because the costumes are absurd. And I don't think that, you know, I mean, to their fair, I really don't think they're trying to scare you.

They're trying to just, you know, build a game around the tension of, you know, following so much information at once. It's not really about frights. So I would say one. Oh, wow, wow. Ouch. And Drew, how about you? I'm going to go seven. I think this is good.

And I've seen, I haven't seen every 80-slash-a-movie, but I've seen more than most humans have. And I've seen things that were so much worse than this. so that helps a little bit and also like I would actually probably score it higher if the object of the game was to prevent murder because it's sort of weird to appeal

to a slasher audience and then have the objective of the game be to prevent people from dying because that's removing the slasher element otherwise I would probably score this even higher I am very pro night trap it turns out spiritual sequel from the augurs point of view

no take it Cole how about you I think I'm going to do this one a six you know I'm putting it at about average you know, thing about a lot of the games that we're talking about here is really not, it's not particularly scary. There's only one that I think is like super effective when it comes to actual frights on this. In terms of taking swings, though, I appreciate this one. And that

mechanical factor of the voyeurism and, you know, searching around and finding nothing a lot of the time, you know, your mind can make, can make its own fun when it comes to reading creepiness where it's not there where nothing else is there. Yes, I'm going to say six on this. Okay. And I will give it a seven. For as goofy and silly in 80s as it is, I do think there is some subtle horror there, especially like I said before, and you said as well, Cole, when you're just jumping around and you're seeing remnants of things that could be happening or just nothing and you're wondering oh did I miss something or just if you are invested enough in the game just kind of seeing an empty room is creepy enough it feels like I shouldn't be seeing this I shouldn't

be here so I'm going to give it a seven and the creepy quotient for this one is 21 and I have a fun fact about this game right now Joe Lieberman is playing it in hell is that a live feed that's him right now yeah he's got a he's got a rescue all the girls and he still hasn't done it. It's my time And then by my mind You're going to We're going to move on to zombies ate my neighbors.

Hell yeah. I think it's going to be a favorite on this podcast. So LucasArts, they're at the height of their PC adventure game powers. They branch out and decide to make an overhead arcade console shooter, which is then published by Konami. And my response to that is, sure, go for it. Because it ended up being a very good game. And this is really of a piece with 1993's day, The Tenticle, a game I love. and it's not just because Purple Tenticle is in the game.

They are both very kitsy send-ups of sci-fi horror tropes with this mid-century Americana vibe. And like Data Tenticle, the graphics, the animation, and music, all great, all serving what they're trying to do here. Anyone want to jump in? It seems like we have some zombies at my neighbor's super fans on the podcast. I'll jump in. I love this game so much.

This has huge nostalgic value for me. This is a game that my dad and my uncle played a lot on their S&S. And so, like, basically from right when it came out, like, this was, like, the communal activity in my family when I would go over to my dad's house. So I got to see this one very young. I don't know that I was especially scared of it at all.

But just the, like, variety of the locales you could go to, the fact that everything, most things, are, you know, suburbia, that kind of deal. You do go to pyramids and you do end up in like nuclear waste sites and stuff, but close enough that all of your weapons are household things, holy water and whatever aside, I should stop saying absolutes. Anyway, yeah, I think that this is just a fundamentally really good game and the fact that it is playing in this them just gives them a lot.

to work with when it comes to enemy space and weapon variety. I think that a ton of good decisions are made in this even before you get to like the scoring system and the rescue mechanic. Yeah, I will say in terms of being scary, it has a great sense of humor. I think there is a

vaguely creepy and threatening element of the game too that just like under the surface that I like. But also I remember playing this when I was 11 it came out and huge coward about horror games. and movies and I was okay with a lot of the content but this game was getting me to confront horror ideas I was not comfortable with like let's say a guy with a chainsaw chasing you

through a hedge maze that is a silly fun you know level design idea for this but it was genuinely tense in anxiety inducing when you're 11 and you purposely are not watching Friday the 13th or anything with Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the title that to me stands out as one of the most memorable sequences from the game the fact that you have you know a lot of these stages are maize like, and so to have an enemy that can essentially cut through the maze and do what he wishes means it's harder to get away from him, but you also still have to find your way because you can't break through the maze yourself. And that, that to me was one of the, you know, I think without that this game almost wouldn't be scary to me at all, but that presence

definitely lingers with me 30 years later. I'm trying to think of another video game where you're trapped in a maze and you have to fight an enemy who's not bound to the maze the way you are that's a really like there's a lot of amazing video games i can't think of another example of that but it's a really good idea i'm glad they put it in here i mean yeah it's really cool first thing i can think of is evil auto and berserk it's not really a maze but the fact that he can go through walls and you can't is uh is can be a problem something i love about this is you know they introduce you know that chainsaw maze um uh level is really early on most of the stuff that gets a showpiece level to introduce it where you're incredibly on your back foot by like the third time you see them uh

If you're playing from the beginning and you've got up a lot of, you know, items and stuff, suddenly it becomes trivial, right? You know, like, you know, there's a hidden bazooka in the, you know, in the level where you first meet the chainsaw guys. But later you just get potions. You can drink that turn into, turn you into big monster and you can punch them to death. And that's the case for most of this stuff in the game. Yeah, the lead developer on this, Mike Ebert, was a big fan of Smash TV and Robotron. So he was doing an upgraded version of that. And the gameplay is very simple.

You're in these maze-like levels. Overhead's perspective. You're defeating enemies based on horror and sci-fight tropes. You're rescuing all the neighbors to move on. This definitively tells you that teachers are worth less than cheerleaders in the grand scheme of human mathematics. So that's just the message of the game is putting out there. And I really love this game. And I love what it's doing.

And I haven't played it a while. Maybe in the past 10 years I haven't played it. I watched some elements of a play-through. for this podcast. But I found that I always hit a wall about 10 or 12 levels in because at a certain point it becomes about item management and resource management. And you get a lot of items and weapons in this game. And sometimes you need to know like this enemy really can only be defeated with this item. And you're often cycling through and trying to get to that. So it's a little in elegant in that way. But it's doing the best it can with the technology available. So maybe it's

just me. I never made it that far. I wasn't very good at this game when I rented it back in the day. but I did dig it. And so I can't comment on the actual plane mechanics. But I do want to point out that it's doing accurately the thing that it came from the desert is failing to do, which is harkening back to that retro, like, monster movie aesthetic, whereas throwing everything in a pop culture blunter and making it sort of a mix of corny and hokey and scary, but like not that scary. This is nailing that vibe perfectly.

Yeah, it really feels like in a non-condescending way, the statement is meant to be intended. A kid designed it. Like a kid, it's like, I want this in it, I want to throw soda cans, and I want to shoot a squirt gun. It feels like all of these very fun, childish, carefree ideas, but then, you know,

brought to life by adult developers who have experience with game design. So I just love the carefree spirit of this game. And there is a sequel to it that I feel like nobody likes, and I'm going to say, objectively, it's not that great. It's Gool Patrol. And it's just like playing a worse version of this. There's no real reason to play it outside of pure curiosity.

And apparently a lot of the development was farmed out on that title. So maybe that's why it's not as good. But really the true sequel to this game is Herc's Adventures for the PlayStation where same sense of humor, but with mythology and, you know, fun 2D graphics and fun music and sound effects. It really is playing off of those tropes the way zombies ate my neighbors. Great title, by the way, is playing off of horror and sci-fi. I'm surprised Nintendo This seems like Nintendo would have been a little squeamish About Zombies, Ate My Neighbors,

but that is a great title for anything. I'm glad it's a title for a video game. Yeah, I guess in the UK it was just called Zombies because the Ate My Neighbors part, too offensive, I guess. Maybe. Yeah. So, yeah, if you want to play this game, there is a tool dual, there's a dual packout for most modern consoles.

And I was looking into something, Diamond has an update on this. I just thought, did somebody make a spiritual sequel? I recall some sort of like Xbox live arcade game, but I couldn't find that. But there was something kickstarted in 2020 called Demons Ate My Neighbors. Apparently it was going to release in 2021, but I guess things happened. What's going on with that time? Well, I looked it up.

So there was a Kickstarter and then the Kickstarter was canceled. And as part of the cancellation, they said, oh, there'll be another Kickstarter. Don't worry. And I don't know if there was a second Kickstarter, because it certainly wasn't on their their account. But then in 2021 they said, we're going ahead with the game anyway. So I guess they didn't get any crowd money, but they got

someone's money. But then a few years later, we still don't have anything, but they are updating. I did find updates in this year. They have a Facebook page. They have a Twitter page. They are promising something called a prolog because demons ate my neighbors. Demons ate my neighbors does make

the acronym Damn, which is pretty good. I like that. That is good. Oh, my gosh. Their prolog is called Damn Nation, which is supposed come out by the end of this calendar year, you know, will it be ready? I don't know, but they are, there is signs of life for this game that, you know, went silent for a couple years. Fingers crossed. Let's go around and talk about our scores for this one. Again, we'll start with Diamond. See, it's a really fun game, but there is, there is an undercurrent of spookiness. So I guess I'll probably go five, middle of the road here in that, you know,

I remember playing it and being, you know, feeling tense, even though it's, it's very silly. and it knows it's silly. You know, I was just thinking about how the little boy in the game is wearing like red and blue 3D glasses, which even in the early 90s was already seen as old-fashioned, even though we, you know, that was like the rage in the actual 80s, and the 80s were not that long ago, but still, we already knew it was done. And true, how about you? So it's not scary, scary, but it's goofy scary, and it's nailing it.

I'm going to say nine. This is like a perfect version of the kind of horror I want to see in video games. and also I shouldn't factor this into my score but I will. You have the option of playing as a boy or a girl which is not something that many games have and also there's no physical difference between them. The girl is just as good at shooting gun as a boy is.

She's not like the faster one. And awesome though they did that. So I'm going to give him a nine. I like that. And Cole, how about you? I adore this game. I love it so much. So there's going to be a high reviewers tilt on this or whatever.

Though this is not, you know, blood and guts, frightening kind of scary. This is a really stressful game. You know, the the eight by neighbors part of this is you are trying to get to your neighbors before all of these monsters get to them and finding them in these mazes

is, you know, it can be a little bit panic-inducing. You know, add to that the kind of scrabbling around and searching through your inventory to find the right item to fight whatever's there. Like, there's an awful lot of this that just in your hands does make it a stressful kind of game to play.

So, you know, all of that factored out, I'm going to say this is like an eight for me. Okay. You know what else is stressful? A lot of untended babies in this neighborhood. I don't know what's going on in this neighborhood. Especially the huge ones. Yeah, giant babies. Babies also worth more than teachers.

Giant babies need the most attention. It's true. They need the most weaponry launch at them. Although, can you kill the giant babies? I forget if they're just a giant hazard or if you can murder. them. They do not die. They just turn back

into small babies. I see. Okay. Yes. Well, it was, honey, I blew up the kid was just the previous summer.

So we all wanted to see that again. So our final score for zombies ate my neighbors. That's a 31 for zombies ate my neighbors. So we are going to move on to a game I want to like. I love the concept. I wish it was done better.

It is haunting. Starring Polter Guy. That's the full title of the game. Developed and published by Electronics. Arts for the Genesis in 1993. So we are all currently living in a Beetlejuice Renaissance. It's happening right now.

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice just came out in theaters. In 1993, there was a Beetlejuice drought. So Electronic Arts asked the question, what if Beetlejuice was here? And what if he was a cool teenager? Well, the answer, my friends, is haunting starring Polter Guy, where you play as some sort of dead Bart Simpson-style

cool dude. You know, you brought this to my attention, Bob, when we talked about Beetlejuice on the podcast. I had not heard of this game before that. And I don't want to repeat myself, but let's be honest, as you said, it's a Bart Simpson-type ghost, but they make him green. And when you have a character that's green with a very long head, all I can think of is broccoli.

I'm sorry. It looks like broccoli to me. I guess kids would find that more terrifying in the 90s before we can dress up broccoli properly. Now, this game is very ambitious, very unique. It's a game I messed around with constantly via emulators in the late 90s early on, just because It was such a great concept. And this, I think the only thing that's similar is Tecmo's Deception, that series, where you're setting up traps and leading characters into them, although the concept is a little different than that.

But ultimately, it's the case of the horsepower for the Genesis is not good enough to make this game not feel very finicky, and it's not good enough to make these AI-controlled characters move in convincing and predictable ways. So that's what's going on here. And really, I feel like it's all a display of what cool scares can we show you on the Genesis. How much cartridge space can we devote to just a bunch of cool unique animations? Because the premise is you're this cool Beetlejuice Jr., killed in a skateboarding accident, and now you are going off to haunt the head of the skateboard company, the skateboard mogul, who was happily making these defective skateboards. And you have to scare the family out of four different houses.

I guess that's what skateboard money could buy you in the early 90s. You could just move from mansion to mansion. And that's essentially the overall concept of the game. And it's very beetle juicy. The family is a bunch of irritating rich people, very similar to what we saw in the Timbert movie. Except they're Italian American. I want to ask, is this game anti-Italian American? I say yes.

You know, you're not like haunting their spaghetti or anything. So I feel like if you became a giant pizza monster and the dad was like, It's my worst to fear, come to life. I think that's, then we'd have a problem here. But instead, it's just, it's a funny name they give them. And I don't see the Italian flag anywhere. They're not eating a feast of seven fishes on Christmas. None of that's going on in this game.

I find the human beings one of the most, one of the more creepy aspects. They all have like this sort of introductory like panels in between stages. And like, I find them to be kind of ghastly looking, especially the little boy who's like pulling on his sister's hair. Like, I think it's right up there with like the evil kid from toy. story like oh geez yeah we're supposed to hate them yeah they're supposed to be like a very stock you know a mid-century family the wife the father the two children the dog uh and so to scare the humans they're walking around their house doing their own thing you can track them via map and you have to uh activate these traps known as frightums i think that's a trademark term

and you jump into the frightum to activate it and they're either one of three kinds one is a kind that activates when the human comes nearby. One is activated at your command once activated, and one is the thing you possess to scare the human away. And your goal is to scare them enough that they all leave the house, and once they've all left the house, you move on to the next stage. Although all of this is very resource-based,

so you have to make sure you're doing it effectively because once you lose all your ectoplasm, you have to go through these dungeon stages, which is the real padding of the game, and gain it back through these very ugly, and tedious dungeon stages where you're just picking up green goop so you can go interact with the more fun creative part of the game. Yeah, they've got a real theme going on with the green slime, like, because all the text

in the game is made of green slime, and you have to watch it drip down from the top of the screen to form all the letters, and you're just, you know, you're just like, you're looking at your watch, like, okay, what do you want to tell me? Hurry up. It's getting us ready for the advent of the ooze coming in 1995. I also want to like this game very much. It's a cool idea. They get creative with the gags.

of the things that you can do your little ghost trick on. I just think that this is completely sunk by how unresponsive the family is. They do not behave with any particular reason. They cannot be let around into, you know, into more fright-rich kind of places. There's nothing to account for like setting up combos or anything. I feel like they just had this idea of presenting, you know, an upper class suburban house with all of these fun little, you know, Sims dollhouse-ask details. They had like the framework for this, but just didn't have a way to make it more fun than going around and seeing what each little objects did. Anything that involved waiting for them to walk over near where you could be doing anything is just boring.

Yeah. Yeah, it felt like a lot more fun to design on paper than it was to actually try to implement this and make a working game. And if you're interested in this game and you want to load it up and emulate it, I feel the best way to interact with it is to treat it like a toy. Because if you try to make progress, you're just going to be frustrated and not have fun. But if you just want to jump in and see like, okay, what are all the cool scares, what are the fun animations? I want to be impressed by what they're doing on the Genesis at this time. That's the best way to roll into haunting starring Polter Guy. unfortunately the only game starring Polter Guy

because I feel like this was not a big hit Would it be better if you could do chain reactions of stuff Or like you could like set up combos or something To like try to like make them go from zero to 100 And like run out of the house instantly Would that fix it? Yeah I mean that feels a lot more like deception

And I love deception I love those games I love the way you can chain together your traps And the elements of the house That are also deadly themselves So I think that'd be a great a great upgrade for the haunting sequel, but we don't have

anything like that. Apparently there's a there's no indie spiritual sequel. I think this could be a really cool game to make with modern hardware. There actually is. Oh, there is cool. Yeah, I just do not know the title of it. While we're talking, I can try and look it up, but somebody brought it to my

attention. Because for the life of me, I could not find anything similar to this, although I did stumble upon a 2003 UK PC game called Ghostmaster, where if you watch video of it. It's basically like the Sims interface, but you're choosing different objects to haunt. It's more of you not

having direct control over a character. You're sort of in a god game mode and clicking on things, which feels like a better way to do this sort of game. But I've never played Ghostmaster. I don't know if it was available to me as an American. The game that I am thinking of is called Haunt the

house terror town. It is too simplistic. I remember playing and being a little bit disappointed. We are waiting for the haunting sequel, Drew. Also, another awkward title. I don't like either of these titles. Haunting starring polter guy is a bad title.

And then what Cole just said is also a bad title. Haunt the house. What is the subtitle? Haunt the house. Haunt the house terror town. You should be the other way around, if anything. Terror Town, Hunt the House. I mean, I want to learn more about the house before the entire town gets involved.

Let's just, let's narrow things down for this first game. Unfortunately, this genre seems to be played by bad titles because Tecmo's Deception is also not a good title. I love that game, too. And it's like, no, what does that, what does that even mean? You know, it doesn't make sense. Yeah, I guess it doesn't really indicate what the game itself is about. Let's move on to rate this, though. Let's start with Diamond again.

Haunting. Some of the scary stuff is actually kind of unsettling to me. Like, you know, those like spiders that come out of nowhere or things that melt. And as I already said, I do not like the human beings in this game. I do not like them. So I'm going to go with six. I don't, I'm definitely creeped up with this, but also like in a way that I don't want to actually touch it. And Drew, how about you?

Same. Also six, actually. It's a really great premise, and it would be cool if someone could do something awesome with this, but I'll also make it look less gross. Cool. I'm going to put this at like a three. Yeah, just none of this really hits for me. The gags are more funny than scary, and kind of not having anything mechanical to kind of back it up is, yeah,

it just doesn't work. Although I'm surprised nobody has brought up the, classic Nintendo game Geist in talking about this. Oh, yes. Please go on, Cole. Oh, Geist is a first-person shooter that was made

for the GameCube. This is kind of an also-ran from that era. It was a first-person shooter, but you could, like, jump from thing to thing, like doing scares and stuff in order to, like, get the energy that you needed.

The thing that people were joking about when it came out was you could haunt a dog bowl and scare a dog by doing stuff to the dog bowl while the dog was eating from it. So you could haunt a dog bowl. You know, you don't need to be a ghost to scare a dog. It's fairly easy to do.

So I'm going to give it haunting, by the way. I'm going to give it a six because it's a real chore to play, but I really like the spirit behind it and not the spirit. I don't mean polter guy. I don't like him. But I like what it's doing. and I like the original sprite animations but again it's more of a toy for me

so in total the score for haunting is a 21 so mid-range so mid-range We're going to move on to briefly talk about this game. There's not a lot going on here. It's corpse killer, which came out in 1994, for the Sega CD and many other systems.

So, good, good name, not quite decap attack, but we're getting there. It's telling you what's going on in the game, at least. so this is another digital pictures production though they're not using FMV here to experiment with game design instead this is a light gun shooter with FMB backgrounds and cinema scenes in FMV

and the zombies are just these animated gift loops of digitized actors slapped on top of the full motion video the Sega CDs limitations really cover up how poorly integrated these two types of graphics are but if you look up the recent release of this game it plays out like a Tim and Eric sketch Actually, I feel like Tim and Eric would go one step beyond this to make sure you knew.

We actually kind of tried to make this look a little good within our sense of humor. But here it is just like click and play level bad graphics zooming at you. They're very muddy looking that the zombies, like to the point that they're not, they can't scare you because you can't really see what's going on. You really hit it, Bob. When I first watched the original game, footage the original game, was like, okay, I see what they're doing here. And then I looked at the remake and I was like, Oh, my good. I just started laughing right away because everything's so smooth, but things just vanish and, like, things are like, or zombies are falling down, but the screen is still moving, so the zombies falling down and moving at the same time and fading away.

It's, it's absolutely comical in a way that I don't think, I don't think they intended. No, the frame rate was so low. The color choices were so limited and the resolution was so low. It kind of worked for Sega CD, but now you're just playing it to laugh at it. So go ahead and do that. There's not much to say about it. It's just a light gun shooter on Rails. But we could talk about a few of the actual people with talent. Digital Pictures got to put together this game.

So the director of the footage is John Lafia or Lafia. I don't know how you say his name. He was the co-writer of Child's Play, which means he's the co-creator of Chucky. And he was the director of Child's Play 2 in the horror dog movie, Man's Best Friend. So they chose a good guy to direct this very cheapo horror footage. and the small cast is mostly a lot of character actors with a lot of credits.

The Jamaican guy, I forget his name. If you look him up, he's got like 300 credits, and he is just scoring roles left and right all over TV and movies, so good for him. I don't think he's actually Jamaican, though. No, I don't think that that accent's fake. Yeah, Hermes on Futurama had a better, has a better Jamaican accent. But Vincent Chevelli is the guy in this God-tier character actor.

He looks iconic. He sounds iconic. He was best known for his breakout role in ghost as Subway Ghost. But if you see him, you know you've seen him before. And he plays the villain. I think his name is Dr. Hellman in this game. That's what they called him. He's having fun.

He's having fun. They're all having fun. But he is the face of corpse killer. In fact, in the final encounter, you're shooting zombies just in front of Stills of Vincent Chevelli's face. I know. Vincent Schiavelli's name because I read an article about corpse killer I think in GamePro back in the day

and I was like oh apparently I should know what his actor is and then proceeded to recognize him and everything I've ever seen him and ever since Yeah the FMV agreement was If we make an FMV game We're going to get one person you might have heard of Or at least you'll see oh yeah I've seen that guy and stuff Like Dana Plato was the I know that person for Nighttrap

What's funny is his eyes are just like that He has his kind of like really sunk in you know like just a, you know, I haven't slept for years kind of look on his face. That is not especially played up for this character. No, no. I'm sure he was a well-rested gentleman. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2005. We do miss him.

But really iconic character actor. And there is not a lot to say about Corpskiller because it's a very shallow game. I will say personally, I don't like the whole jungle zombie genre. I don't like hot daylight zombies. I need crunchy leaves. I need kind of brisk temperatures.

That's my kind of perverse zombie vibe. And I know the idea of the zombie, as we know, came from Haiti. And so jungle zombie should feel natural, but this is just too much hot weather, too many sunny days for me. I don't care for that. I thought it was very strange that most of the zombies

look like they're like white suburbanites. Like, what are these people doing in the jungle? A lot of flannel shirts in this tropical region. I think it was a lot of, you're going to come play a zombie. Bring some of your own clothes. Yeah, yeah. Bob, have you not seen

the movie zombie two directed by lucio fulci i have not okay so this might be your least favorite movie ever based on what you just said i gotta say it does it really well and there's like a i'm gonna say like seven minute long fight scene between a zombie underwater and a shark and it's a real live shark and i don't know how they filmed it to this day i don't understand how the shark just didn't eat the man in the zombie makeup but um if you're gonna watch one zombies in the jungle movie it should be zombie too okay i i have heard about the zombie versus shark, and I forgot it was in that movie, but I'm adding it to my letterbox watch list as soon as we're done with this podcast. I have to see that one myself, yeah.

That's like the unofficial sequel to the dawn of the dead, right? Which was called Zombie in Italy. Yeah, it's one of those things where in Italy they fucked up the titles and made things be the sequels to other things. And it stars Mia Farrow's little sister, Tisa, Tisa Farrow. It's good, though, I swear. I got to say, as far as like light gun games go with, like, scariness in it, I got to say, this to me seems below, like, area of physical.

which was not FMV but like CG backgrounds but they had like some actors and some puppets I guess as aliens and like that to me is way more frightening than these sort of you know shuffling zombies that don't really feel like they belong anywhere I totally agree let's move on to the scoring let's start with Diamond well basically what I said yeah it's pretty low for me

I just don't I'm not frightened I'm not I'm not excited I'm just like what's going on here I do like some of the actors behind it but otherwise three yeah three okay yeah just so three for diamond drew how about you two there's i i hope that vincent chevelli they filmed on location so i hope vincent javeli got a nice vacation out of this yeah yeah uh what was your score again three or two two okay even lower even lower than that uh cole how about you i you know i'm gonna be the odd one out on this i played this game way too young. So it was kind of the first time that I saw, you know, zombie horror movie, just kind of

footage put into a video game. So this loomed large in my mind forever. Obviously, looking at it now, it's a farcicle, but it's hard to, it's hard to take, to take that first impression away, playing this on the Sega CD. Or maybe it was the Saturn. That was where I played it back in the day. So I'm going to give this one a six, especially because, I don't know, Sega CD we're here what three years after night trap they actually tried to make it scary yeah yeah you know I guess I guess more effects

you're on location they're doing they're doing a lot more in terms of filming yeah makeup or costume yeah I'm also thinking about I believe it's 89 maybe 90 Beast Busters S&K Beastbusters is a game that is very much about shooting zombies

and it's much more intense because it's all it's all just big sprites and the big sprites It's actually look frightening. You're killing so many dogs in that game. Yes, that is true. Left and right. As for me, corpse killer, I'm going to give it a two.

I like Vincent Chiavelli. I think he is accounting for all two points in this score. This game is hard to watch. And, again, I don't like hot zombies. I feel like it must be the extra irritating to be a hot zombie, especially if you're wearing flannel in or around the equator. So I'm going to give that a two. And our final score for corpse killer.

Excuse me. is 13, so pretty low on the list. We're coming down to the last three games here, and I'm going to move on to NOSFARATU, developed by SETA, published by SETA. And one notable thing, to me at least, is that this game was announced as coming soon in the 1992 S&ES Players Guide.

It's a very iconic Nintendo Power publication that had coverage of all the early Super Nintendo games that was released in the second year of the console in America, and I just thought, oh, this game looks creepy, being cool. What happened to it? Well, it never showed up in any of my rental stores or a Toys or Us near me, but it came out in 1994 in Japan in 1995 in North America. So I feel like there were some problems behind the scenes at Nosephiratu, or maybe it was a project that kept having to be put on the back burner for Seta. I wonder if they ran into problems with the

like slew of video games that were based on Bram Stoker's Dracula, all of which kind of looked like this, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Because there were so many games. and, you know, obviously, the battle between Bram Stoker's Dracula and Nosferatu is like a hundred-year-old story by now because that's how NOSFratu exists. They basically, they wanted to make a Dracula movie. They didn't want to pay for it, so they just made it up Nogafiru.

And it's funny that here we are in 2024, and we're recording this before a very prominent Nosephratu movies coming out. I haven't seen it yet, obviously, but it's, I saw a trailer for it. And I was like, oh, hello? What's this? I didn't know Count Orlock was returning. I had no idea. Do you think that this is called Nosferatu specifically to distinguish from the crappy Bram Stoker's Dracula video games that came out?

Because there's no reason to use the name Nosferatu since it was all public domain well before any of this came out. And I just wonder, like, someone made that decision to name it after the knockoff rather than the real thing. I think maybe if this game was going to come out in 92 or 93, you might want to distance yourself from the movie, even for maybe legal concerns, although there are probably to be no. real grounds for that but yeah I'm not really sure but obviously this did not come out when they wanted it to and looking at what set of makes they were mostly known for puzzle mahjong and golf games and they never really had a big hit in america and one of their most notable games is one that never came out that's biopforce ape a legendary unreleased game that just seems completely bonkers but yeah this was not their bag but i feel like somebody at the company

really wanted to make this horror action game and it kept being delayed because of other more pressing projects. Like we need to make this year's Mahjong arcade game all hands on deck work on level two some other time. I mean, I think this would have been a lot more impressive in 1992 had it come out then. You know, I feel

like if you compare it to other games of that era, it's got a lot going for it. But I feel like if I had played this in 94 or 95, I would have already been like looking my watch like, oh hey, when's that place that should come real soon, right? Yeah, it might be.

have even been out in America when the time by the time this game launched. I'm not sure it went in 1995 at launch, but yeah, it came out 95 in America 94 in Japan, and if you look at the game design, it is so chasing the trends of 1991 and earlier, because the game is, essentially, to be very

reductive, it's Prince of Persia meets final fight. You're doing Prince of Persia style platforming in these very dense trap-filled deadly levels that are kind of unfair, and then when you fight enemies, instead of doing the sword fighting in Prince of Persia, the classic games, you do straight out brawling, and yeah, there are

boss fights that are pretty brutal. This guy didn't think to bring a weapon to rescue his girlfriend. He's just going to punch his way through the Legion of the Undead. I wish there were weapons. Maybe that accounts for how long this game was in development and how little time they had, but it feels like you should pick up a knife or a sword or something because you have to be

fighting with just raw, bloody fist by the end. They feel like hamburger meat. And why you have to fight a rock golem with your fists. Yeah. Yeah. Seems like a bad idea. This is before Chris Redfield punched a boulder. or or Galaxy Quest when they joke about the idea of how do you fight a rock there's no weak point it's a rock

but this game if you watch play-throughs of it if you watch the Game Center CX episode of this which I really recommend you'll see just how unrelentingly difficult it is it's one of those games that has six levels and they make every one count maybe you can beat the first one but progress will slow to a crawl after that because it's all about intense health resource management you know making sure you don't actually get hit in these very long and drawn-out boss fights and kind of memorizing where all of these different traps are

because these are extremely extremely dense levels. Although I will say this game seems like a tedious chore to play. I don't think I would like it, but the vibes are completely nailed. This is a very creepy game that nails the Gothic atmosphere. There is no fun, catchy music. It's all dread and horror and blood and spikes and traps. and it really nails that at least. Rendered really well.

Like that opening cinema scene looks beautiful. Even it would have looked better when it came out when they were supposed to come out. But yeah, I was the only thing I really knew about this game is that what was beautiful but hard to play. And even then, I was surprised by how good it actually looks. The only thing that kills it for me when I fire this up to play it

is the combat does not feel additive very much to me. Yeah. You can work in the monsters as set pieces, probably that you had to figure out how to get around, how to navigate, but just making it into a brawler, it's working against the rest of the rest of what's here. Yeah, I just, I don't see what it adds. It just takes away.

Yeah, the friction there just feels like a speed bump just to make you spend more time with the game. And it's not fun. And I feel like there's not a lot of strategy to fighting individual enemies. There's, frankly, too much strategy to fighting the bosses. But, yeah, it's just, it's not all coming together, but it feels like someone at Setta believed in it. Otherwise, we wouldn't not be seeing this game. This could have been five Mahjong games.

This budget could have gone to. But they decided, we're going to publish Nosferatu in America. And by the time they did, I don't think anyone showed up. Or I think the print one probably was just so small that nobody could have had a chance to play. I never saw this game in the wild in 1995. There are other beat-em-ups that have you fighting zombies that works. And to me, the beat-em-up combat here feels so incongruous, what you're actually seeing and what you're hearing.

So it's kind of like, it's almost like, it's like throwing an ice cube on, on what should be a very steamy, hot. I got the, I got the metaphor wrong here, but like, the horror stuff,

I'm so into the horror stuff and the music and the look of it. And then it's like, oh yeah, what are you doing? You just do it, you're doing, give them the old one,

two, one two. I'm like, okay, okay, thanks. Yeah, it's like if Keanu Reeves a sweep kicking guys in Bram's Dracula. Like,

I can be a little bit stressed out by somebody coming at me. but it's hard to be truly horrified of something I can defeat with my bare hands. Right. And the last boss is Dracula. How do you beat Dracula? You punch and kick Dracula. Like, that's it.

Like, if Dracula can be beaten by just one man and some modest martial arts skill, I feel like Dracula is not much of a Dracula. Okay, so maybe the reason they made this decision, which would all agree is bad, and to the detriment of the game, is that they were very conscious of they didn't want to make a Castlevania. And for what it's worth,

this doesn't feel like Castlevania. It doesn't feel like Castlevania. Even though it's like side scrolling, clunky side scrolling, and you're going to fight Dracula, maybe they thought that adding weapons in would make it too much like Castlevania and the punching is what was going to set it apart. I don't know.

Yeah, it just feels like, like you said Cole earlier, the enemies don't add a lot. This could have just been a pure platforming puzzle game, but we weren't really making those at the time. It would seem odd if there were no enemies in a game like this. So I feel like those two elements are at odds with each other, ultimately low. it's just very very hard so we'll go around and give our scores for this one let's start with diamond once again

again there's so much good stuff here but it's actually but the the the fighting stuff is just not doesn't fit that at all but i still can't ignore what's good so i'm i'm gonna go seven because i feel like the the the the layouts and the music and and overall overall it really does you take one look at this game and you're going to say oh cool that's actually a cool looking horror game but then once you play like okay and Drew how about you? Also six for similar reasons

like the vibes are straight on but the it's not fun to play and Cole how about you I'm gonna give it five I agree that the vibes are carrying this most of the distance it just feels like it chickened out by trying to be a little bit more

standard I feel like even Prince of Persia and another world slash out of this world are actually scarier than this based on what I've played but the pixel art is beautiful so that gets it

that gets it something also not the first Nosphiratu game there was a microcomputer game for like 1986 it's like an isometric action RPG with some puzzle stuff in it

yeah probably better than this one and yeah as for me I like the vibes for the most part but the punching and kicking really clashes with what's going on here and ultimately

based on watching the game center CX episode, which I really recommend, it seems like it's really, really punishing and not fun to play. But I do respect whoever believed in this game enough to put SETA out of business to make it. So I'm going to give it. What did I give it? I wrote it down here. Oh, okay.

I'm giving it a six. So the total score for Nosferatu is going to be a whopping 24 total. So you will hear that sound effect twice more in this episode. getting old for you. It startled me every time you've played it. I don't know why my brain forgets that you're going to do this again. Last, it's to keep all of us awake. It's a later the normal recording. So we're going to move on to the highlight of this episode, which is why I'm saving it for the last.

It's the penultimate game we're talking about. And that is Clock Tower, developed and published by Human Entertainment. So I love Human in theory. They made a lot of interesting games that didn't always work, and this is likely their greatest creation because it's an adventure game, but it's essentially an interactive horror movie that completely steals the the setting and the main character from Dario Argento's

1985 movie Phenomena and also the gigantic scissors from Exorcist 3. I have not seen phenomena in probably a decade but I watched it because of Clock Tower. I think you recently logged this on Letterbox Diamond. I did. I loved it. Isn't it great?

And it's got the Goblin score and everything. And with the Goblin movie score, it is one song they play about 19 times throughout the course of a movie, but it's always the best song you've ever heard that day. Yeah. I was trying so hard to buy it on Blu-ray in the States this summer. I kept going to one store. I'm not going to shout out to them because I'm sure it's just a stocking era, but I went to one store and they kept having, it was on the shelf every time. And I go to the front desk and I'd like to buy this movie, please. And then they couldn't find the disc, so I couldn't buy the movie. So I'm still hunkering, hankering for a physical copy of phenomena because it is. I love it. But it is also, it is shocking how much, you know, there's a lot of video games that borrow a lot of. of stuff from pop culture, especially in the 80s in Japan. But this

is really another level. They really, they really like trace some Jennifer Connolly action here. It's just like, wow. You play as Jennifer Connolly, a character named Jennifer. It's totally her. And unlike the movie phenomena, I don't remember a lot about it. I remember she could talk to bugs.

That was her power. And also there was a, was there a chimp in the movie as well, Diamond? Yes. There's a chimp. There is a lot of, so the one thing I want to say about Clock Tower is like if you have not seen Phenomenet and you think that like well I know Clock Tower so I think I know what this movie is there's so

much more wacky stuff in the movie it is bursting with ideas not all of them great but like she does psychically control bugs yeah and it's Jennifer Connolly who is great to see in anything and yeah this game it's a point and click adventure game very streamlined there's no verbs you have a very limited

inventory and for most of the game you're just wandering around in a mansion in absolute silence looking for clues that will move the story along but you're also being stalked by Scissor Man who is like this demented little boy character with giant scissors who he can either run or hide from. So

it's very interesting in forward thinking in that it's kind of predicting survival horror because you're playing as this character who can't actually attack anything and there is only one real enemy in the game. There is an antagonist outside of that, but there is one enemy you're interacting with that you can only really

repel them or get away. I'm sure other games might have done this before but this is the most successful version. of that to date in a video game. Yeah, like prior to this, you know, in terms of like disempowerment kind of stuff, like alone in the dark, people forget that that had like a like a melee like fighting system. Like there's like a boxing system in that, which is which is kind of kind of weird. Something that is very specifically like pursuit based like this, they're only like sequences,

something like Project Fire start on this on the Commodore 64, you know, but even that I think gave you some limited uh you know like limited limited gun ammo uh for a couple different things yeah no this definitely feels like uh it's you know its own singular expression up to this date you know in in horror games i'd like this game a lot i just wish the puzzles were better yeah yeah fortunately though i remember when i played it so i played this game live it's on our abandoned retronauts youtube account you can look at my playthrough from 2013 and i got some help with it and i think I had played through it in the past. It's not, I feel like there are not a lot of dead ends.

You just get different endings and you can figure out what to do based on those endings. It's a very human entertainment style game and there. You get ending A, B, C, D, and E or whatever, and you can figure out, like, what led me here. And then you can try to get the other ones. Yeah, that, like the iteration loop is way too long, I think for that, specifically just because you move very slowly. Yes. You know, a lot of what you are doing with Jennifer Connelly just feels like a suggestion.

you know, which gets in the way of some of their pursuit kind of stuff. But, like, the core of the idea is here, and they could have veered from it, you know, and flinched from it, but they decided to stick with it the entire way. I'm so excited that this game is finally coming out, because it is, it's kind of a curious situation in that it came out in 95 in Japan. It did not get an American release. I think it used the S&ES mouse in Japan, actually. I think it was actually literally mouse driven. so at that point they weren't going to release a mouse game in America because the Nintendo 64 is right in the corner

but this game had sequels so when the sequels came out for PlayStation they were in fact releasing them overseas but they did the old you know oh well we're not called no one knows the sequel so we're just going to change the title so Clock Tower 2 is Clock Tower in America much like Kingsfield 2 is Kingsfield in Japan in America and then there's like a spiritual sequel that Capcom sort of made because Capcom bought the rights. It's an advancing story. I honestly believe that, you know,

despite your opening, Bob, I'm sorry to defy you here, but despite your opening, I do believe Clock Tower deserves its very own episode because there's so much to say about so many of these games. Oh, no, this game is the outlier in terms of what we're discussing here. It doesn't belong in this episode, but we can't not cover it in terms of 16-bit horror.

And yeah, I didn't, I thought the way forward release coming up, I think, this month in October, I thought it was a remake of the game. but I guess I never watched a trailer. This time I did, and I realize, like, oh, they're just porting the Super Nintendo game, but to not get sued, they are redrawing the cutscenes so you're not looking at a photo of Jennifer Connolly or, you know, somebody redrawing an image of Jennifer Connolly and putting that in as a cutscene.

So that is really what they're doing with this re-release. It's anime Jennifer Conno. Yes. Leval distinct. This series is super interesting, and I think Haunting Ground deserves its own episode. Like, Haunted Ground is part of that. PS2 golden age of thematically rich

and incredibly off-putting and unsettling horror games. Yeah. I feel that as this series went on, maybe I'm just thinking of Clock Tower 3 in Haunting Ground, a related game. There is like a sexual assault element that is not present at all in this

and that can be an addition to horror and some of those games it does feel exploitive, especially in Haunting Ground. But it is still very effective. but this game does not really incorporate that element. Yeah, which is good. This music and the lack of music is very interesting in this game.

As far as making it something, it's extremely scary. And I am someone who's very jump scare prone for someone who loves horror movies. It's kind of a bad thing to be. But just watching a playthrough of this game, the way the music can start did actually make me jump, which is, I guess, a new thing for, I guess a video game finally did really, Jeremy. Yeah, most of the game is a lot of silence, a lot of footsteps. And when you hear music, it's never because something good is happening. You hear this, I will call like a John Carpenter gobliny score come in. And the music in this game is very memorable and very catchy. But yeah, it is always to signify something bad is happening or being chased and event is happening. But the music kicking in is supposed to surprise you. And like you said, Cole, there is a lot of, I guess, shoe leather in this game in terms of you're just walking through a big house. And upon further plays, through as you know like well there's going to be a lot of walking in this section so it's

time to maybe put on a podcast or something until I know something is going to happen next but they are really committed to this vision and I will say that human uh went to funkton 2000 but everybody from that company they went on to fund the or went on to form the Japanese adventure game industrial complex so things like spike and nude maker and grasshopper they all went on to do cool and weird and innovative things and unfortunately the creator of this game came back and he kickstarted a spiritual sequel.

I think I interviewed him for U.S. Gamer back in the day. I didn't know what this game would entail. But, I mean, look up a let's play of this. It's very fun. It feels like it has the same kind of deadly premonition style to it,

but with none of the fun or interesting gameplay ideas or characters. It just is, it feels so enough for someone who seemingly had a lot of experience with game design. Diamond. I was at TGS when they announced Night Cry.

Night Cry. The eventual title. I think when they announced it, they called it Project Scissors, but the actual title, when they kickstarted it, was Night Cry. So I was there, TGS when they announced it. It was a very late announcement. I was there, like, after a party, so I was already a little tipsy. But I was there.

I met them. We took some pictures together because, like, we were just hanging out. It was pretty empty as in the press room that day. Because, again, it was very late. Everyone else was out and celebrating. So I, you were looking at number, I'm the number one backer of Night Cry. I'm literally the number one backer. I'm so sorry.

I haven't played it yet. I haven't played yet. I'm sorry. I will play it. Is your name like a book on a shelf somewhere in the game or you are a portrait in one of the hallways? I don't think I paid for any extra. I'm just saying like I'm literally backer number one. Okay. Wow. Nightcry didn't end up being good, did not spawn its own series. But yeah, now I think soon this will be very playable. It is, it's a two-hour game, but it's very unique. And you can really appreciate this came out in 95. Here's what it was doing on the Super Famicom. And it'll be legally. available to everyone. But previously there was a fan translation of this game. Now we can play it for real. So thank you way forward for that. And now we'll go to our scores. Let's go around the horn here and start once again with Diamond.

Oh, I mean, I got to say nine. I find this game incredibly intimidating. The fact that I haven't beaten it yet is what stands out. It's actually kind of it reminds me of the old Resident Evil and that that was a game that I was so scared to play that I never played it alone. I only played

with my friends. And I've since matured to the point that I can't handle that, but this game to me still sort of holds power over me, and I'm still very intimidated. But I did see phenomena this year, and I love phenomena, so I think I'm going to have to get on it. I've probably already ordered this, the new version, so hopefully when it comes out, I will enjoy it. Great, so Diamond gives it a nine, and Drew, how about you? I'm going to say 10, because if we're really, if the criteria is scaring me, I know this will scare me when I finally play it, and that's just kind of a dream situation for me. Also, riving off

the movie I also think is good. A plus. So in Cole, so you gave it a 10, Cole, how about you? Oh, it has to be 10. You know, if we're looking at everything here, I think that if we're talking specifically consoles in the 16-bit era, this is like the landmark

title. It did so much stuff that like we're still seeing the follow on today, you know? Like, I don't think you get amnesia panumbra, any of those

without this introducing the pursuit-based mechanic kind of deal. It's also beautiful. Yeah, yeah. There's so much detailed there's so much detailed sprite art in this, pixel art.

It feels like no room reuses anything. Yeah, if I could go higher than 10, I would. Yeah, I'm going to give it a 10 too. I love the singular vision and the fact that nobody was doing this on consoles at the time. We were doing narrative games, but not with this level of vision. And yes, it is heavily inspired by other media.

But I like this recontextualization of the Argento vibe. So I'm giving it a 10. And tallying things up here, we're going to give this one in total. 39. Did I scare you that time, Drew? I forgot. I was thinking about whether we should bully Diamond into raising a score to 10. It could be a perfect famitsu.

240, if not for Diamond. I think Diamond is just holding night cry against this game. I haven't plenty yet. So we're going to move on and talk about our final game. The Oos, developed by Sega Technical Institute, STI. Unfortunate abbreviation these days. Published by Sega.

Actually, their games are a lot like STIs at times. Sonic spinball makes me itchy. So I'll say that much. So, yeah, a Genesis game in 1995? No, you're not seeing things. This really came out. And because it's happening so late in the Genesis lifespan, there's really a lot of great technical tricks happening here.

And it feels like they built a game around this tech demo where you are playing a corporate whistleblower who has turned into ooze and you are undulating throughout these levels in this overhead perspective. Unfortunately, it's mostly about hitting switches and avoiding traps in these intentionally hideous industrial areas. So it is just like kind of a offensive game in terms of just hitting your senses with these images that are neither fun nor silly

they're just harsh in artificial and gross I didn't see that much of the game but like from what I what I viewed of it I couldn't up but notice that almost all the things you're fighting are just like either robots or like just other monsters like do you ever fight people in this game or

I think the last boss is the corporate guy who turned you into the ooze so that's it that's it but it's mostly monsters and then there's these like little side levels where you skeletonized test rabbits, which I didn't like No, come on. I didn't like that at all. And this is such

a 1995 Dennis's game because I feel like the kind of guy you would play this game with, he would be 12 basketball shorts, no fear t-shirt, and just soda, orange soda stains all around the mouth. And this is the perfect consumer for the U's. He would be into this. Me seeing this for the

first time at 42, I'm not a news fan. I know about the secret of the U's, that's a little better, but the ooze offends my sensibilities. And it's got the I think it's made by Sonic Spinball People, so the music is kind of that same dentistrial kind of vibe to it as well.

A little better than that, but they're not nailing that aspect at least. The vibe of this is like a sci-fi horror movie that came out in the early 90s that is airing it like Saturday afternoon after cartoons are over

and you're like, I guess I'll watch this even though you don't really like it and you're like, who is this for? Like something is just like like yeah like designed to repulse 12 year old boys but like also make them watch yeah it's not the fun kind of gross of decap attack it's just a big pudless lime that spits boogers at people and stretches out and kills rabbits it's not it's not appealing uh but i give them credit for doing this on the genesis it seems like it must have been difficult to figure this out and build levels around it effectively i just don't really want to play it

though i will say i put this in my notes that the 2020 game carrion is a much better version of this. It has a much better vibe and it is more fun to look at. And the gameplay gets a little samey at times, but I think it ends at the right time to not overstay it's welcome. So I recommend Kerry and play that and don't play the ooze. Yeah, I also wanted to highlight a Vita launch title in the U.S. called Tales from Space Mutant Blobs Attack from Drinkbox Studios. That's a lot sort of sillier, campier kind of sci-fi movie and that you play a little blob and as the game goes on you get bigger and bigger and bigger but it's it's mostly like platforming not this overhead thing but that's a really fun little game that they've since poured it to

I think everything so you can you can you can enjoy that game and I think it's it's a better take on this like control a control blob which is also kind of funny because you know obviously you know this is a 90s game I'm pretty sure they're thinking of the blob when they call it the ooze Whereas, like, the 50s, the 50s blob is like an infamous sort of, you know, scary movie. That's not actually that scary. It's just kind of intimidating to see this big sort of mass going on. But then we had the 80s blob, I think 88. And that movie is terrifying.

It's really, it's very intense. And this game doesn't really seem to go for either one of those. It just seems like... A lot of pipes, a lot of gears, a lot of industrial machinery and stuff like that. And it's so... I'm very adamant about this point. I feel like this legislation should be enacted. Whoever decided that the ooze should belch every time it consumes a monster,

that just the right to prison. Yeah. I mean, no trial. Even Booger Man had better manners than the ewes. And he's Booger Man. I would like a historian, I don't know, Drew or maybe Kate, maybe Kit Willard could nail this down. What is the first pop culture instance of a monster, like not a human, a monster eating, a person and then belching

because I feel like we got that in so many 80s and 90s projects and I'd never laugh but like where did it come from did the Sarlach belch in Return of the Jedi? Did that belch? I think there was a belch there but I've only seen that movie once so I do recall an iconic belch though happening in that scene

let's go around for our final game here I don't detect any good scores arriving so let's start with Diamond how about you Diamond I don't I don't enjoy the game first of all but also I'm not really that frightened by it when it could be it could be scary and I'm just not so two two so diamond gives it a two and true how about you I'm just going to say

one this is gross and I feel worse for having with yeah it's very it's just it's very caustic like the use itself and Cole how about you I'm going to give it a two it's way too abstracted you know the tech demo thing is definitely here I think that's there It's like 1995 tech, that volumetric slime or whatever, applied to like a 1983 game design a little bit, going and hitting those switches or whatever. Yeah, and just the only thing that I find to like about this is that at the center of the ewes is a laughing skull who looks like he's having a very good time. Oh, yeah. I mean, he's just constantly releasing gas. It must be like a relief to him.

It must feel good as hell for him to do that. But yeah, no, this is this is a trifle. I'd give it a two. It's, yeah. Yeah, I'm just giving it a two for its technical factors. The Genesis shouldn't really do this. So good for you, but I guess if you needed a new game in 95, this was probably it. So you might have had fun.

But, yeah, ultimately, not good and not really horny. So we're going to give this one in total. This one gets a seven. Now, I'm going to pause real quick. so I can calculate the total ranking here. So I'm back after some terrifying mental math to announce the winner, which should not surprise anyone. The winner, number one, is

Clock Tower. That's the sound of a man being very excited to play Clock Tower with its new release. Number two is Zombies, Ate My Neighbors. Number three is Decap Attack. Number four is Nosferatu. Number five is a tie between a haunting starring Polter Guy and Nighttrap. Number six is it came from the desert.

Number seven is corpse killer and number eight. Of course, we just talked about it. It is the ewes. That's the sound of someone not enjoying the ewes. That's when you didn't get a PlayStation for Christmas of 1995. And you open the ooze box and you have to play that around your family. So yeah, congratulations. To the Clock Tower, it's very appropriate that it won because it's going to be newly available this month.

So please go out and play Clock Tower. I'm not being paid for this announcement, although way forward, please send me a free game and I'll play it and enjoy it. So yeah, thank you everybody for joining us for this discussion of 16-bit horror games. This has been an episode of Retronauts. I've been your host, Bob Mackie. You can find us online in wherever you find podcasts. You've found us already, so congratulations. But if you want to support the show and get a number of...

podcast ahead of time in ad-free and also access to our exclusive podcast, I think probably close to 200 podcasts at this point or behind that paywall, head over to patreon.com slash retronauts and sign up at the $5 level. When you do, you'll unlock a lot of bonus content. We've been doing two bonus episodes a month every month since the beginning of 2020. We also have regular columns and podcasts by Contributor Diamond Fight on the podcast here. So yeah, please support us and we'll give you a ton of bonus stuff. And if you don't support Retronauts,

we will send you to hell because we need your help. So please give at patreon.com slash Retronauts. Now, I have been Bob Mackey, obviously. I will tell you what I'm up to after we go around the virtual room here. And let's start. Let's go in the order we've been going in the entire podcast because I crave stability. Let's start with Diamond, Diamond. What are you up to?

Well, as you said, I do a lot of work for Retronauts. So you can enjoy that if you back Retronauts. But you can also find me around the web by going to my website, which is fightclub. Dot me. So, F-E-I-T, that's my last name. C-L-U-B, that's a blunt object that might be in a horror film of some kind, or the guy in Nosephratu really should have brought that along with him. Dot M-E-Me, Fight Club is me.

So you can go there and see what other podcasts I might be on or what projects I'm doing. But, yeah, I've, you know, you mentioned 200, Bob. I'm pretty sure I've got over 200 columns on the, on the Patrions by now, For Retronauts. Oh, congrats. Enjoy. And there's plenty of horror games to be there, to be found in there, because I do enjoy horror games. And into 10 years, there might be 666 columns and podcasts.

Could be. Let's go to Drew. Where can we find you? And what are you working on these days? Real quick. I want to say, I just saw that Cole posted a link to the picture of the thing he was talking about, Legend of the Mystical Ninja. So I clicked it. And Cole, it does look like a panda.

I understand how you're like, oh, it's like a weird look of a little bit. Cole, that's a Tanuki statue. Oh, okay. Yeah. And that thing between his legs is his giant, wrinkly ball sack. Does that make you more or less scared of it knowing that you're looking at a ball sack all this time? I feel about the same. Yeah.

This is his face. He's got a weird little scary face. I mean, they're not attractive animals in statue form usually. Is it accurate rendering of the kind of thing you'd see in like a Japanese restaurant here? We're all sex positive when it comes to Tanuki and their public. nudity so we're just putting that out there and do what they want I don't care I am Drew Mackey if you want to read about

articles about like Tanuki I have a website called Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games and I did a thing on how Super Margaret Brothers 3 actually changed public perception of the Tanuki and gave it a stripy tail which it's not it's not supposed to have currently I'm in a street fighter mood and I'm doing stuff with like old street fighter lore

and that's a lot of fun otherwise I have a podcast about old sitcoms called Gayest Episode Ever and I actually have episodes with both Bob and Diamond Bob is talking about Daria and Diamond is talking about

Romo one half you can go find those wherever you find podcasts and listen to them. Cole, you're welcome to be on

the show sometime. And Cole, how about you? I podcast over at duckfeed.tv. It's a whole podcast network with way too many shows.

The primary show is watchopper fireballs. We have like over where we're approaching like 450 episodes, maybe 500 at some point here. I lose track.

But every October we, do a whole month of horror games so the whole back catalog has a bunch if people are curious to go and listen to in-depth dives on horror games don't normally promote this but because it is related to horror games i um stream horror games every weekend at the duck feed twitch channel that is twitch dot tv slash duck feed tv um by the time this episode comes out i will be probably deciding if i want to stream the silent hill to remake or not but uh yeah just a regular standing horror game appointment. Awesome. And as for me,

I'm Bob Mackey. My other podcasts are Talking Simpsons, and what a cartoon. You can find those on the Talking Simpsons Network or wherever you find podcasts. And if you want to support my shows over there and get a ton of bonus stuff, go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. We have over seven years worth of bonus content covering shows like Futurama,

King of the Hill, Mission Hill, Batman, the animated series, and the critics. Check it out at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. But that has been it for another episode of Retronauts. We'll see you again soon. And if you don't join us, this will be you. Yeah! Go!

Hey! I don't know. I don't know. You know what I'm going to be.