The return of Splatterhouse!
Apr 23rd, 2008 by Bryan White
I was in Canada, an arcade in the CN Tower (Canadian Space Needle) the first time I ever saw Splatterhouse and being an avid fan of both video games and horror movies, you can imagine my elation when I discovered such a gory freakin’ video game. Maybe you’re familiar with it, maybe not. It was actually a really stupid game. You play this nameless brute in a hockey mask that smashes his way through level after level crawling with monsters that explode into a burst of blood and guts upon defeat. Apparently, you’re trying to find your girlfriend who was kidnapped. In one of the console ports of the game, they create this back story about a Mayan mask and some guy named Dr. West. It’s all quite ridiculous but in spite of its gratuitous gimmick, it is one of the first video games that really took advantage of the advances of 16-bit graphics to make something that was easily identified as a horror game. If you want to get technical, Wizard Video released a couple of games based on Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the Atari 2600/VCS but those games fucking suck. Trust me.
Details are pretty slim but 1up.com is teasing potential buyers of Electronic Gaming Monthly with the cover of their latest issue featuring a gore-soaked Rick, the masked “hero” from the original Splatterhouse games with a feature touting the return of 35 retro-gaming revivals. Exciting news? Ordinarily, no. A new Splatterhouse wouldn’t be anything to sing about but the current generation of consoles and trends in game development could make for a REALLY fun game sans all those early side-scrolling cliches like “save the princess/girlfriend”. I’ll be keeping an eye on this. Details to come.
Whatever happened to that review of Condemned 2 that you were gonna do?
I got a third of the way through and wound up sidetracked by all this other stuff we’re working on in meatspace. It’s more of the same, don’t much like the story but the forensic part of the game is greatly improved and easily the best part of the game.
Rick was the original name of the dude. I remember seeing that game for the first time at this huge arcade that was in the basement of a building. The intro video always used to freak me out when I was 10 or 11.
I saw they they were remaking this and my first thought was “I hope they don’t mess this up like 90% of the other retro games that get remade.” I’m all about nostalgia and what not, but I wish that people could take risks, orcome up with original ideas instead of playing it safe and using old franchises. Unfortunately, today taking risks costs too much without a gaurantee of a payday - for major game and film studios at least.