Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 61: Splatterhouse at MGC

Episode Date: May 19, 2017

Live from a very noisy Milwaukee stage, Jeremy and Bob are joined by Splatterhouse experts and world record holders Caitlin Oliver and Kevin Bunch to contemplate the complete history of Namco's gross-out brawler franchise.

It said it's the splatterific splatterhouse. So I am legally required to tell the first four rows you're in the splash zone. So without further ado, the retronauts. Hello, everybody. It's your mic on, Jeremy. It says, oh, no, there we go. Hi, everyone. He was kidding about this.

Splash Zone. We're more Gallagher. Hey, did you just think of that? I did. That was great. That guy's shirt right there, says Gallagher. I like it. I like it. I can borrow a pun. Hi, Ken. Nice shirt. Are we ready to go? Yeah, should we introduce ourselves

to everybody in case there's any newcomers? Well, we'll do the podcast thing. Yeah. We'll do it up like an episode. Okay. So, this week in Retronauts Splatterhouse, the music is in your head and your hearts. Just imagine it right now. Welcome to the second ever

Welcome to the second ever Retronauts panel at Midwest Gaming Classic We are Retronauts, a video game podcast about, yes, classic games. And this week, or this year, I guess, we're talking about Splatterhouse, because we have some experts here. So we'll just do a quick intro for ourselves. I'm Jeremy Parrish, one of the co-hosts of the show. I am Bob Mackie. I'm here to make the Splatter House a Splatter Home. I'm Kevin Bunch.

I think I'm talking too close to the mic. He's the Turbographic 16 high score. world record holder for Spatterhouse. I'm Caitlin Oliver. I broke the world record for the arcade version of Splatter House about seven or eight times. So Bob and I are basically idiots when it comes to Splatter House, but we thought since we're here in the presence of two world-class players of the game, we should pick their brains and let them tell us you all about the series. They're so important they have to travel here separately. They're not allowed to be in the same car or plane. That's right. We can't lose both at the same time.

So, let's just go ahead and kick in with this discussion and talk about the original Splatterhouse, which is an arcade game developed by Namco, debuted in 1988. And actually, why don't I let you guys talk about it instead of me droning? He's going to pass that one on me. Yeah, it was developed in 88. It did actually have a US port, but it wasn't widely distributed, so it's pretty rare at this point. It kind of be an expensive PCB unless you get a good

deal. There were minor changes made to the U.S. port, mostly regarding removing religious imagery, but that didn't happen until it got ported to the console. It's a brawler, a side-scor we need him up. There's seven levels.

And the scoring game mostly revolves around level six. and on because the rest of the game is a giant pattern. If you're willing to learn it, it's not really that bad. It can beat the game in about 20 minutes, but a score run takes about 45 minutes to an hour straight.

We should probably point out it's a very gory game. Yeah. It's a horror-themed game. So the whole premise is your character, Rick, his girlfriend, Jennifer, went into a creepy mansion.

The West Mansion? The West Mansion. of which there is also a resource website run by Rob Strangman yeah but yeah so she they like let the lights go out she has a scream and he wakes up with a creepy mask on his face

and just goes forth and beats up the terror mask and beats up gross little monsters I mean I think we're bearing the lead in that this is sort of the Friday to 13th unlicensed game you know spun out of the 80s exploitation horror and you have some examples there Jeremy right Um, no, not really, but you have it.

I thought you had, you literally have a bunch. I have a lot of notes, but nothing really about 5013, because I'm not really that familiar with the movies. Well, I mean, he is based on the design of Jason in his, I mean, he looks like he's wearing scrubs in this game. Right. But it's more of a blue jumpsuit. It's Dr. Jason Borges. Yeah. Dr. Borges, to the manner, please.

It's a little bit reanimator, as in the, uh, Stuart Gordon adaptation of the, you know, HP Lovecraft story Herbert Westry animator? Yeah, so the context of the game itself is it actually feels a little bit like a game out of time because it is a very sort of linear

belt scroller as opposed to the three quarters perspective double dragon final fight style game that most people think of when they think of beatem ups and double dragon had launched just the year before so it hadn't quite become widely cloned yet. So you kind of had this change

happening in the beat-em-up genre. And Splatterhouse feels a little bit like, you know, sort of the old guard, the last of the old guard. And Namco had actually produced a few games in that style up until this point. There was Wonder Momo, which I don't think came to the U.S., but it was an arcade game in Japan. And then there was the Ginji and Heike Clans. And both of those were also that sort of 2D belt-scroller, very memorization-based, beat-em-up kind of brawler. But they all had different themes. Gingi and Heiket Clans was sort of like Japanese medieval horror were loved to be yokai and spirits. And Wonder Momo was more like a, like a Power Rangers, Sailor Moon, stage play, Sentai, yeah.

And so, you know, you kind of had all these different themes happening. Spiner House then was sort of the Hollywood, gory, you know, Evil Dead Friday the 13th kind of game. I don't mean to slander the game by saying this, but it feels kind of like altered beast with how you're on one plane, things explode in one hits and there's a lot of violence for the most part. But in this one you get a cleaver. It's not unlike Altered Beast.

That's true. The shotgun. Good, I didn't agree with a shotgun. You know, Altered Beast, if that had a shotgun, it'd be much better. Yeah. But, uh, yeah. And it's, I mean, yeah, it's not a long game, like Caitlin said.

You can plow through it if you know what you're doing. It is, there is a fair amount of memorization to, it's not as bad as some memorization heavy games like our type or something but it's not a schmub level of memorization it's the enemies legitimately spawn in the same place every time short of maybe two or three places

yeah and if you know they're coming you can prepare for them the bosses they all tend to have sort of the same pattern that you can exploit yeah so it's worth mentioning that this game was really sort of pushing the envelope in terms of what was acceptable in terms of

gore and violence in the arcade. I mean, it was probably the most gruesome game to come out in arcades since Chiller, which was a game specifically designed to be disgusting and gross, and you're like using a light gun to dismember people. This wasn't quite like that,

but it sort of took the sort of prevailing body horror theme that was showing up in a lot of games around that time, and sort of pushed the envelope a little further and made it even more gruesome, very bloody, like there's guts splattering everywhere. I mean, there's a reason it's called Splatterhouse. It's a very, very literal sort of name. But if you look at something like Contra or Abadox, you had a lot of these games where it was about like walking inside of giant monsters and

beating up their corpuscles and punching their organs and that sort of thing. And this was very much along those lines, but sort of presented in a slasher movie kind of style. Yeah, encountering this game as a kid, I was afraid of the box. Sort of just like walking by the horror aisle in the movie theater and the movie, sorry, video store. Just like, I'm sure if I watch any of these movies, I would literally die of fright. So I assumed I would die if I played Splatterhouse. I rented this game, I had the kid, because I love the box so much. My dad let me pick it.

My dad got me a turbo graphics when I was young, and that's my toe. But no, he got me a turbo graphics when I was young, and I remember renting it from the local video store. I never got it until I was older, but I was obsessed with the game. I figure if a kid like me could get pretty far. I couldn't regularly beat it, but if I could get that far, if you're willing and you're ready to learn how to play the game and memorize it, you too can pretty easily beat that game. And, you know, when you're speaking of the body horror,

what springs to mind is a few of the different bosses. Like you've got Biggie Man, who is this giant with a burlap. Sap sack over his head and chainsaws for hands. You've got Jennifer is a boss. I don't know if that's a spoiler at this point. But she mutates into this hideous monster with claws. And stage six is basically a giant womb of the house and you're fighting little monster fetuses.

I do think it's a bit cute with how they did the most low effort change to protect themselves from lawsuits for the home version. They basically just made Rick's mask perfect. and that's kind of like making a movie called Nightmare on Oak Street with Eddie Krueger the stripes on the sweater go a different way so you can't sue us so one of the reasons

I wanted the two of you to come in and talk about this is because I'm honestly curious like why did you two pick this game to be sort of your expert level project like what inspired Splatterhouse specifically?

With me I always loved horror movies I've been obsessed, unsurprisingly, since I was a little kid. My mom claims that when I was three, my favorite movie was Night of the Living Dead, and I'd cry if they turned off the channel. I don't remember that, but I don't see why she'd make it up. But ever since then, I loved the horror genre, which is why I picked up the game as a kid. I obsessively played it as a kid,

and when I went to Galloping Ghost in 2012 or so, that was the first time I had seen the arcade machine in my life so I decided I was going to keep playing it somebody asked me if I was going to go for a world record I said no I hadn't been planning on it but then I decided why not and I did it it only took like three weeks because what I did was I started to memorize the patterns I was missing from the other world record holder

Anthony Paparo who I went back and forth with several times great guy, and I watched his video to get some techniques, and then we have built upon each other's techniques since then to push the score from around 375-ish thousand to, right

now it's just at past 700,000. So, in the last three years, we've about doubled the old record. In the past few weeks, you said? Well, in the past three years. Oh, years. Going back and four. That makes more sense.

Yeah, something like, that um shoot i was going to say something about the game oh the biggest problem i see with people who pick up this game is they try to pray it like other brawlers and uh proactively attack enemies it's something you don't do yeah so you mentioned that uh a straight play through of the game takes about 20 minutes but a high score approach takes 45 50s so can you talk about what's going on there sure uh so in the spirit of waiting for enemies to come to you and get into your range to hit them, which is a huge mechanic in the game. You spend, since all of the enemies spawned in a pattern, the game largely has a set number

of points that are possibly achievable on your way to stage six. Stage six is one of the first and only places in the game with randomly spawning enemies that will endlessly spawn until the actual timer runs out. So you use that to continue padding for points. And the reason that's not considered an exploit for this particular game is because there are a limited number of lives, which I discovered by pushing the score to 450,000 points because that's the last point at which you actually get an extra life. So it's 11 lives total, I believe you have.

And then going through stage 7, you get a 100,000 point bonus from the boss. There's also a method to farm that particular boss for points, but that's considered an exploit because you're not supposed to be able to get that bonus multiple times. disagree or disagree. Those are just the current rules. So the finite number of lives, basically you're farming for points on stage six and then dying and then doing it again. Yep. So that's not like super riveting to watch, I'm assuming. No, it is boring to tears.

I feel bad for anybody who really wants to watch anybody else play it. Playing it is hard enough. I mean, it's not that it's so difficult to learn in general, but pushing the points at high can get really. difficult and time-consuming, and you learn when to start cutting off runs and just killing yourself off to save yourself time, because you know it's not worth the time to finish. So I never actually grew up with Splatterhouse. Like, I read about it in magazines, but I didn't have a turrographic, so I never had to play it.

And then I think around 2000, 2001, I remember reading about it, and thinking, oh, hey, I could try it on an emulator, except all the turturb. Herbographics emulators at the time were terrible. So I just kind of forgot about it again for years. Finally picked it up in 2010. It was terrible at it. I think I got up to stage three and kept dying. He said, all right, I'll just come back to this some other day.

And then I met Caitlin through a mutual friend of mine who, this was right about when you set the record for Splatterhouse. Shortly after that. And then I remembered, oh, yeah, Splatter House is a game. I should see if I can figure that out again. So I was able to pick her brain to actually figure out how to play the game, like, effectively. After a couple of weeks, I managed to finish the game. And, you know, I had a lot of fun with it and thought, well, what the hay? I'll see if I can go for the turbographics record.

It's not too bad. And a lot of the same strategies do carry over. It's a pretty good port. like the only major difference is some of the stages are a little easier the hip boxes are a little more generous for Rick like you can hit enemies further away

and you don't get hit as easily you get two hearts back when you finish a stage instead of one heart for your life meter and I think most weirdly is there's no timer on the stages like you can just sort of hang back and nothing will force you to move forward to kill you

As far as I can tell, there's only one boss, and that's the stage 6 boss, where you can't just hang out forever without the timer happening. Yeah, it's an interesting port. I mean, they did cut the religious imagery, like Yacht mentioned. Yeah, it's solid. Yeah, there's a few crosses. They took out an upside-down cross at the stage four boss. and the religious altar in the church.

You can't pick up this version on the Wii virtual console still, I think. You can pick it up on virtual console, or you can get it on the 2010 copy of Splatterhouse because it does have the arcade port on it. You probably want to get it on virtual console, though, because then you don't have to buy the 2010 game. But you can get it so cheap, and it has all four games on it. That's true.

It's like $15, $17, and it has Splatterhouse, Splatterhouse 2, Splatterhouse 3, and 2010. So the turbographic port was not the only home version of Splatter House. It also came to FM Towns Marty. Are you guys in contact with the world record holder for the FM Towns Marty version? He has to be in prison, right? If ever wants to see his little dog again, he'll do what I say. So I'm taking that's a no.

So, okay, Caitlin, you mentioned that Anthony Paro, I think you said his name was? Yeah, Anthony Papparo. Paparo. Okay, he's sort of the other guy who has the record, and you're competing with him and collaborating with him. Yep. Is Splatterhouse like a hotly contested game in terms of the record chase? It was hotly contested between myself and Anthony,

but not really otherwise. But that doesn't... Actually, there was another man at the arcade who was picking it up, and he got to around 650 in place, because he didn't think he could push it further. but there's definitely room for improvement I've thought out

approximate caps of scores like realistically speaking I don't think you get it for too much further past $850,000 but maybe a miracle are you disappointed that no documentarian ever followed you and Anthony

to create like the King of Kong for Slaughterhouse, the King of Manor? No I'm not at all because I've dealt with documentarians and I don't like them one bit. They were some shady people. I do want to see what kind of barbecue sauce that Billy Mitchell of Splatterhouse makes.

Well, he makes pretty. Well, I tell you, Billy Mitchell makes pretty good hot sauce. I have some from him that he gifted me because I beat Billy Mitchell at Pac-Man. It was Pac-Man Battle Royale. It's not that cool. But it was pretty cool. You know, before we move on to the rest of the Splatterhouse

series, is there anything more to say about the original game? What specifically would you say is your favorite element of the game, both as a high score competitor and just someone who plays the game for fun? I love the music for that game. It's a really good soundtrack.

Yeah, it's really atmospheric. I was going to say the atmosphere to the game is just really oppressive. There was nothing quite like it in 1988. It was just fascinating. Because even with Chiller, as we mentioned the game exit he made before it the graphics are so

rudimentary to put it nicely that the gore element is there but it just looks so it's like a child's It's like Torquamata playing around an MS paint It's not attractive I mean think you know Texas Chinatown Massacre on a Taurus-2600

We're not talking super gory So the first time you see this I was like, are they allowed to do this with video games? Can they do that? Is that cool? Which is why you could only really find it in bars and, you know, establishments that didn't let kids play games because that wouldn't be suitable for a kid, no, sir.

Yeah, the home version even has a little warning on it, not suitable for younger children, which is prior to any sort of. of rating system existing. No ESRB. Which is funny, since the home version's, it's still kind of gory, but they've toned it down a lot compared to the arcade. But graphic restrictions more like,

more than just toning down for the sake of toning down. So any final, I guess we have done our final thoughts on Spelterhouse, in which case, that means it's time to move on to my favorite Spider House game, which is also probably the least real splatterhouse game. Maybe the LCD handheld game would be a little, like the Tiger Electronics version.

But there's a Japanese version, or a Japanese game that came out for the Famicom, family computer, called Wanpaku Graffiti Spatterhouse, which means naughty graffiti. And you don't actually spend that much time inside of the splatter

house? No, you are inside. A few times, but you're also in Japan at some point? And I would say relative to the other games in the series, this is actually the least naughty Splatterhouse, despite the title. It's silly. Yeah, the, okay, so Spider House came out in 1988, and nothing really happened with the series aside from some ports until 1992, and all of a sudden there were two games. There was Wanpaku graffiti, and then there was Splatterhouse 2 for Genesis. But before we get on to Splatterhouse 2, which is kind of more of the same, it's worth talking about this weird game because I picked up.

a copy of it recently and discovered it on a video stream and it was not what I was expecting. I was thinking more like a horror game but it's more like a parody of horror movies. It's really fast-paced unlike Splatterhouse. It's not so much

about memorization and precision. It's very goofy. The first boss you fight, you don't actually fight him. He's a vampire who pops out of the grave and then there's four zombies who pop up and this disco light comes on and they start dancing and they do a thriller routine

and then the zombies come down while the vampire keeps doing the thriller routine and you have to fight the zombies and then once you beat all the zombies you don't fight the vampire he just descends back into his grave and gives you like a victory sign there's a similar boss where you basically

just watch a geisha dance and you hit the buttons to like cheer and then I guess you're so rude she gives you one of the crystals you're looking forward that's not quite correct I didn't find that superiors. You can cheer by clapping but the other button allows you to fart and if you continue to fart

that's when she'll call you very rude but she'll still give you the crystal ball so farting is the pro tip here yeah so it's a very cutesy cartoony kind of game and like I said it's very fast-paced Rick always has an axe

instead of having to punch things with his fist you can't pick up a shotgun which has a great piercing effect it's like super powerful and awesome and it's very exciting to use because it's so powerful but yeah it's pretty much you know kind of like a

a more traditional home-style game. And then it's really the bosses that are sort of the highlights because each of them is a different horror movie parody. You get to a place, like you've been fighting these things that kind of look like spiders, but then you're like, maybe those are supposed to be, you know, the little head crab guys from aliens. And then you finally get to this table

where there's like a schoolgirl laying on the table and her belly or chest starts to kind of like pulsate. And then the boss of that section is just, an endless stream of those head crabs coming out and once you finally defeated them all she sits up, yawns and wakes up and like she's just been taking a nice nap

and yeah I guess you kind of have to see it. It doesn't really explain so well. I was watching a let's play of it today and strangely enough the fly boss looks like a California raisin which is even more terrifying to me. It's clearly Jeff Goldblum but Jeff Goldblum as a California

raisin. That is somebody's fetish so don't laugh. By the way, the pro tip there is to go into the transformation pod. Once you go into the transformation pod, that's how you get to the geisha with the crystal. And you have the giant green rat that you just have to get through an obstacle course to hit once, and then he just sort of splits open and the little mouse runs away. Wasn't there like a wizard boss? In the cute game.

In the early emulation days, I remember this game in Zero Wing being singled out for having really good, bad English, and the line that will stick with me for life is Be Garbage of Cesspool. So I guess that is the game taunting you or saying that you are garbage-obsessed pool, but who knows, but I love it. I mean, to be fair, Rick is pretty garbage-obsessed pool. He really is. I haven't actually been able to finish this game because I've only played it the ones, but I got much further in that game than any other Splatterhouse game I played. So there's something to be said for that.

And I think at the end, you find out it's just like a play. It's not actually... They're actually filming a movie, so you're on the set of a movie. There you go. And by getting the crystals, you get a different ending for the movie. But it's actually, in a sense, the most sophisticated Splatterhouse game to that point, more so than one or two, because it has an upgrade system built into it. Kind of like Bionic Commando.

As you beat enemies, you gain extra life, so you can take more damage. Which is, you know, kind of like a, you can definitely tell that it was a game designed for home play. And it was also designed for younger players. It's not, it's not gory at all. It's maybe a little gory. Cartoon gory. It's not. Yeah, there's a lot of poop jokes thrown in there, too.

So you get a little, a little poop. It's a healthy mix. That's pretty standard kids media fair in Japan. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's like a peronious game or something along those lines. I remember finding this one when I first started with emulations. I was just sort of fascinated at how bizarre this game is. I would call it secretly the best Splatterhouse game.

It's also probably the least, I guess it's not the least accessible, but you have to go through emulation or find a Famicon card to play it. And caller number nine for one million dollars. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate.

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Yeah, but I definitely recommend this one just for people to try out because it is, like Kevin said, the least accessible and the least known splatterhouse game, and it's a very different experience. So if the guts and gore don't really do much for you, try out one pocket graffiti, and it's, It's a different experience that still kind of has that Spider House vibe. On the other hand, Splatterhouse 2 for Genesis was much more of a traditional Spider House game, which is to say it feels very much like the continuation of the first game. And the sort of origin of this game is a little weird, because there were a couple of Namco series that started in the arcade, and then for whatever reason just continued on Genesis.

This was one of them, and Rolling Thunder was one of them. And I don't know exactly why this happened, but it is this kind of odd little quirk of fate that, you know, these Namco sequels appeared on Sega Genesis. But I would say that Splatterhouse, too, is much more authentic, much more in keeping with the design and aesthetics and overall feel of the first Splatterhouse than Rolling Thunder 2 was. I know you guys don't play this one for World Records, but do you have much to say about this one? you might have more to say about it than I do I don't have a whole lot to say because I didn't really have a Genesis growing up so I came into this one pretty late I still like 2 and 3 which were both the Mega Drive sequels

but I'm just not quite as knowledgeable about them as the rest they're still Duke games though and the second one is certainly the most faithful to the original in presentation and style and method I found a splatterhouse too I think it might be my least favorite of the old ones just because it, I mean, it does the exact same thing as the arcade version

except it seems much more memorization heavy. It's a lot harder to make any progress in it. You know, they do some cool things. Like you have some really creative bosses like the one murder shed where little creepy babies

come down from the ceiling and vomit on you and you have to take a chainsaw to them. But yeah, it's It just doesn't work for me very well. I fully endorse taking chainsaws mutated infants. It is also on the way. Yeah, it really feels like they were kind of trying to push the limits of what you could do on a console with this one.

Not in terms of technical limitations, but in terms of taste. The murder shed is definitely sort of the pinnacle of that. It starts out with a pair of gardening shears and a chainsaw flying around at you, and you have to punch them out of the air because apparently you can punch chainsaws in this game. And then once you punch the chains out of the air, then you use it to cut the fetuses that descend on their umbilical cords from the ceiling until a face appears and you have to, like, punch it to death. It's terrible, it's horrible, but it's also kind of like a little cool in the audacity of it. Like, I can't believe that they did this. And surprisingly, this game didn't show up in the congressional hearings about video game violence.

They weren't thinking Joe Lieber one was really asleep with the switch for this. I didn't want to mention, though, they did change the mask in both versions. In the Japanese version, it looks sort of like Fanto, but all whites. And in the American version, it's like this grinning skull. So they were trying to step away from Friday the 13th, even with the sequel. Yeah, definitely. Marginally. He was still dressed in the Jason Scrubs, though.

They filed off the serial numbers with a little more enthusiasm at this time. But, yeah, I've played some of this recently, and it doesn't really do that much for me, because, like Kevin said, it is extremely memorization-based. and I got to the part, I guess it's like level four where you're trying to escape across a dock while this giant squid comes behind you and destroying the dock and there's enemies coming at you from the other direction

and you have to take them out with like a perfect rhythm by doing jump kicks and things and if you screw up even once then you'll kind of fall behind and the squid will kill you and it's an instant death which I basically burn through like two continues trying to get past that included So maybe I just don't know the magic technique, but it was extremely difficult and unforgiving,

which, I don't know, I guess, you know, some people enjoy that, but it doesn't really do much for me. Okay, Kaelin's giving the thumbs up, so clearly it's her kind of game. Splatterhouse 3, I think, is more my speed, because it does feel like a real Splatterhouse game, but one designed more with the console market in mind. And this one came out just a year after Splatterhouse 2. It was like four years between 1 and 2, and then one year between. between two and three. So it seems like they kind of, I don't know, Spider House 2 was really a throwback in 1992, doing that sort of belt-scroller,

very limited 2D design, whereas Spider-House 3 is much more in the sort of mode of popular beat-im-ups at that point, the sort of three-quarters perspective, final fight, streets of rage, you know, move around, that exploration and multiple endings and all kinds of extra goodies. So maybe someone else can talk here. I actually really enjoyed Splatterhouse 3. If not for Juan Paco Graffiti, I think it might actually be the best one. So like Jeremy said, there is a time limit on each stage, and if you don't finish the stage within that time limit,

you get one step along to a bad ending, because there's what, four endings, I think, depending on whether or not Rick's wife and son live or die. They changed up the terror mask again to make it look. I think Rick is still kind of weird. wearing the scrubs to a degree. No, it's more like, well, I guess you can still call it the scrub pants, but at that point it's just like he's walking around in jeans.

I was going to say, after five years, I actually don't think three as well pretty bad. And you know you never walk. I don't think three is that great. I like two more. But I'm the outlier here, so clearly you may not agree with me. I never said I had great taste. But it's got that sort of 3D brawler perspective, like Streets of Rage, and you're going through floor by floor

of Rick's Mansion this time and you have to clear through a room and then you have a few different doors open up. You have to pick which one to go through and you have to sort of find the right path to the boss to beat it in enough time to get the good ending. And there's like bonus stages

if you beat the game quick enough. At the very end you fight the terror mask if you get the good ending and you have destroyed it for good. And you have a power. up mode, too, where you find items, and when you pick them up, you fill up this meter, and once it's got any meter to it, you can push a button where it gets into, like, a mutant form, and can hit enemies harder, you can choke them out, you can do some weird, like,

body horror, stretchy limbs out of his torso. Yeah, the changes that they made for Splatterhouse 3 remind me a lot of Double Dragon 3, where they took sort of, you know, a simple beat-em-up and then tried to add this sort of not quite RPG-ish but adventure-ish element to it. You know, you can travel through the mansion, you're not just walking from left

to right, but you're moving and kind of like following a map and trying to figure out where to go. I know if you lose your weapons, then you can go to a specific room on each floor and find the weapons again. So there's persistence and, you know, you have to kind of balance like, is it worth hunting down the weapons

versus finishing the level within the the set amount of time and getting the proper ending I don't know it all seems pretty interesting to me and it's I think it plays really well but I guess my question is you know you two are I would say Splatterhouse traditionalists

so do you think that this game defies like violates the spirit of Splatterhouse or do you think it's you know a valid take on the concept I think it's a valid take on the concept I personally just don't quite enjoy it as much but that doesn't make it bad nor do I actually think it's bad

I just wasn't so into the changes, but I applaud them for deciding to innovate and try to change up the formula instead of repeating the same thing at infinitum, which can definitely happen these days. I really enjoyed it. You know, I really liked the first Splatterhouse. I didn't like two so much because it was very slavish to the first game's sort of style and rhythm. But three, I mean, it doesn't succeed in everything. it sets out too, but I really appreciate what it's trying to do, and I think it does a lot of it really well, and it's, I mean, it still keeps the weird goryness. It's got some kind of messed up digitized cutscenes, like a boreworm eating Jennifer's brain, which is pretty gross.

But, yeah, I think it's a solid game. This might be next to Wanpockrography the most inaccessible, because I don't think they brought it to a virtual console or anything. I think you're stuck with the Genesis or the Splatterhouse 2010 version. So this would be the last Splatterhouse game for 17 years. Do you think that was by design? Do you think Splatterhouse 3 feels like it was meant to be the natural ending of the series? Or do you think it was just no one cared about it and they said, oh, well, the series is dead? Yeah, I think based on how they were ending it, at the end of the game where you fight the mask and destroy it,

I think they were looking at making this the last game in the series, and they just wanted to go out with everything they had at that point. I also think horror as a whole was changing. I mean, even in 88, this game was sort of a throwback. There had been eight or seven Friday the 13th movies, and by the mid-90s, horror is becoming self-aware, and less just like straight-up gore and, you know, body horror, and it would eventually become... More towards the scream. Yeah, like scream and new nightmare, things like that. And then we would go into torture porn, but that would be a decade off.

But, yeah, I feel like that... That's Splatterhouse 2010. Yes, that's actually just torture, but Caitlin would disagree, I think. So, yeah, why do we talk about Splatterhouse 2010? Because I think Caitlin is the outlier here as well. I am. She likes the game. I don't...

Well, I don't love the game, but I like the game. It's not a great game, but it's a good game. So tell us what Splatterhouse 2010 is exactly. It was a reboot for the 21st century or whatever of the Splatterhouse franchise taking into account

modern expectations of what Gore levels would be commensurate with like when they released Splatterhouse 88 that was extreme at that time so they were trying to push the envelope similarly and in some way succeeded and other ways failed

but they were attempting to push similar buttons with the envelope as they did before by adapting it for the current market. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a sense of like, you know, this is a very angry kind of game. You've got Mastodon on the soundtrack, so right there, that's kind of everything you need to know. They might have skewed a little too heavily towards prepubescent male teenagers. And, I mean, it's not that their market to be. ignored, but, you know, they added a system where you can collect pieces of pictures to get terrible 3D render pinups of Jennifer while you're trying to save her. And you're just lame.

That's very much in keeping with sort of... It's like Leisure Suit Larry kind of lame. It's kind of keeping in with games of the 80s. You know, Rolling Thunder had Lila being disrobed as you get closer to saving her. There was also, of course, Minnis Beach, that timeless classic by Color Dreams. Color Dreams classic. Yeah, so I kind of feel like a lot of Swatterhouse 20 Tim's problems came from the fact that it basically was created in the murder shed of video game development. It was originally developed by a company called Bottle Rocket, and somewhere along the way, I don't know exactly what happened, but basically Namco or Bandai Namco at this point, came in and they were the guy with a chainsaw and bottle. Well rocket was the fetuses hanging from the ceiling, and they came in with a chainsaw and cut

them up and I think finished the game internally, so I think you can really see that this was sort of like a project that had a turbulent development lifecycle and didn't feel quite complete. Yeah, they did these really fun throwback sections where they did like this 2.5D, it's still straight up 2D but 3D renders of 2D environments where you'd have the side-scrolling plat forming areas as a throwback to the original series. They kept them appropriately brief and not too difficult, so they didn't really interfere.

It was clearly a love letter to the fans of the series. They just missed the mark on certain points. But you can't hate everything when you can, well, rectally fist a giant monster to pull out its inside. You know, it's kind of fun. Fuzzy. if you're a fan of gore and whore in probably the torture porn films

which sometimes hit our mess but you can certainly find things to enjoy it and the great thing is that they still included the first three games entirely on the disc which is why whether or not you agree with my opinion on 2010 being at least worth of play especially when you can get it for $15 to $17 usually and you get the only really easily playable arcade port of the original

besides the Wii Virtual Console and it's not the worst value at all, whether or not you like the game. Do you know if the Xbox 360 version is backward compatible on Xbox One? I believe it is. I'm not 100%. So there is a reason to own an Xbox One. Do you want to Google that? But it should be.

And the 360 version is probably, Proble of the PS3 one. Better frame rates overall. Take your pick, but there's my advice. So that game had a very difficult life and didn't really review that well. I don't think it's sold that well. Do you think Spider House deserves another shot at light or life, or do you think that its time has come and gone and hey, the 80s and 90s were great, let's just leave it there and let our memories be happy? I think it might be. at the end of its life cycle but I wouldn't hate it if somebody did try

to reboot it but maybe without trying to really aim too hard for that teenage pre-pre-present boy market it's not that I mind it, it just didn't really fit in with the feeling of the series and it felt forced

like I said it felt kind of like a leisure suit Larry collectible item and not one you find in Spatterhouse Jennifer may have been a victim before but she was also a transformed monster and you personally killed her and now we've turned her into really ugly Uncanny Valley

3D fit-ups. It's not cute. I kind of feel like the game is it run its course. I mean it's very much a product of its time the sort of 80s horror scene and I don't even know why they bother bringing it back in the first place, but I think it's fine where it's at dead and buried in the murder shed.

I'm not kidding when I say this, but I think the spirit lives on in Resident Evil 7, because you are in a house of splatters, and you are often garbage of cesspool. But the non-joke part of that is I see a lot of the same ideas, a lot of the same inspirations, a lot of the same

gore, and now it's all in VR, so it's even more horrific. So I feel like that is really where the spirit lives on. And to just kind of wrap this up, if they did bring back Splatter House, what would you want to see? I personally would like to see Wanpaku graffiti, too, but it's just me. Yeah, I'd say you could go with a parody of the 2010 Splatterhouse. I mean, it's kind of a self-parody already, but I think that would be really funny.

I think I'd like to see it, but I'd like to see it come out of a smaller studio, and that would be almost impossible to get the IP away from Bandai Namco. And I love Bandai Namco. That's not it. It's just I'd like to see a smaller studio maybe. I mean, think Paul Robertson with Splatterhouse. And would you say no? I would say yes.

See, that's what I'm saying. So think maybe tribute games or a big of Yacht Club or somebody throw into Paul Robertson. And I think you'd have a pretty amazing throwback game, but it would take the right team. Yeah, okay. And Bob? Oh, boy.

I think, yeah, I mean, you kind of took the, right at my brain there, just after you said Paul Robertson, Spatterhouse. That's not, I want to see that. I think we should start a Patreon for that or Kickstarter. And just force him to do it against his will if he doesn't want to. That's how video game development works. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it wouldn't be a change in the norm.

Yeah, put him in the murder shed. Just, it always comes back to that. He can't leave the murder shed until he finishes the game. All right, so we are winding down, but we do have a few minutes if anyone has any questions or feedback and want to shout out to the team or the panelists. You're going to be like Phil Donnie here, Jeremy. This was rough up there for you guys. I actually had a question for the two of you because you're probably beyond maybe the team that developed the game have the most hours put into Splatterhouse in general. and at the end of the game

there is a there's a very fuzzy low bit rate sound sample from Jennifer and I'm wondering between the two of you if you've managed to figure out exactly what she is saying do you mean the help me Rick

or yeah I'm dying it's hard to kind of no I believe it's not dying that's what I think it is I've heard it so many times I know when I can start taking a rank during that game, stand up and stretch, do a little dance, because you can break

dance. But I can't break dance. I think it's, I'm dying. Because that's when she literally transforms into a hidey as beast and you have to kill her. So I'm dying is what I would say. If you need a second opinion, Rob Strangman would be a good choice. I know in the home version, she's saying, help me. But I think it's the different sounds sample than the arcade machine? Well, it said there's two. She does say, help me, Rick, and I'm dying. So, those are both

valid. Right. They probably didn't have the space on the H-Cube card. Probably didn't have space on the Q-Card. 2-50 voice sampling. Hey there. First of all, Bob, the

Lasertime Facebook community, says, hi. And, oh, boy, Bobby. but for you to so you said that the entire playthrough for a high score is only 40 minutes because that seems very short compared to other arcade games

where you could spend playing hours trying to point for the score that you want One of the huge difference is that you do have a limited amount of lives and each stage in Splatterhouse of the arcade version there's a purple wall of fog and lightning that comes up behind you and forces you to move forward at a regular pace.

And then once you get to the boss on each stage, there's a timer that begins. And once that timer limit is reached, a blue orb comes out, and it will continually come out, and they will deal one damage to you each until you're dead. So there's both an enforced time limit and maybe not a hard time limit, but as long as you can survive and you will die, time limit, as well as the game forcing you and you and long otherwise so there's a limited amount of time you could spend playing the game

the longest possible way to play the game would be to farm the last boss for points which is like I mentioned an exploit but the final boss timer I believe is something like 12 minutes until the blue orb spawns and you would have to wait out the 12 minutes each

time, each life on that stage to wait for the blue orb to kill you to kill the bus simultaneously and get the 100,000 point bonus. So that would be the longest way to play the game. Otherwise, you're looking at 45 to 60 minutes

realistically. And I think that wraps it up. So thank you everyone for coming out to see us this year. But thank you Kevin and Caitlin for coming in. Thank you. Thanks also Bob for coming in. Oh, you're welcome. There's no good away from Bob.

But yeah, I think that wraps it up for this year's Retron's panel, so thanks again, and we hope to see us tonight. Thanks, everybody. And call her number nine for one million dollars. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out.

your answer. Life is like a box of chalk. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy

to save. The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican

senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder.

I'm Ed Donahue.