War of the Monsters (PS2/PS4)

 

War Of The Monsters (PS2/PS4) :

Big giant monsters! Ever since King Kong climbed the Empire State Building and Godzilla first rose up from the sea, huge creatures have been stomping all over our on-screen cities. Naturally it wasn't long before such creatures met up to battle each other to find out who was the best, and cause even more destruction! Once video games appeared on the scene, they also didn't wait very long before giving us control over these mega-sized monsters! 

This game then is similar to a few other monster beat-em-ups, but it is a very good example of the genre! There are eight characters unlocked at the start of the game, with a few more available to unlock. These characters will look fairly familiar to any fan of the aforementioned sci-fi flicks too, with a giant ape, a giant lizard, a huge robot...you get the idea! The game knows it's target audience and knows what they'll want to see!

Once you've listened to the 50's style music, watched the spinning newspapers of the intro and picked your favourite monster, you can play against a friend in fully 3D environments, smashing buildings, picking up cars or sharp pointy pieces of metal to throw at them, and using your characters unique abilities (radioactive breath, for example) to defeat the other player. You can also add an extra couple of fighters, although sadly these can only be computer controlled. If you can't find anybody else to play with, there is a fairly decent solo mode too, with the added feaature of slightly smaller monsters to battle in between the big fights!

The environments are pretty cool, often hiding little discoverable easter eggs such as extra weapons to use, and the way the buildings fall apart and add more things to lob at your opponent is pretty cool. There are apparently also a few mini-games to unlock, but I've never managed to unlock any of these yet, so can't really comment on those.

It all makes for a pretty enjoyable, suitably sci-fi, beast-filled brawler that's a bit of a hidden gem on Playstation 2. It took me a while to find a copy, but Im really glad I did, and would recommend it to anyone looking for a slightly unusual addition to their collection of fighting games!

ZXombies and ZXombies - Dead Flesh (ZX Spectrum)

 

ZXombies (ZX Spectrum) :

1983 - The year the dead started rising from their graves....Poor Magenta has had her entire family wiped out by a zombie horde, but through fighting these evil brain munchers she has become a bad-ass zombie slayer on a mission to rid the world of the undead and look damn good in the process!

That's the premise of this simple little game by Xenopunk, where you move your little character around the screen attacking zombies as the pop up from the gravestones littered around. It's a slow moving affair, and seems to have been programmed in basic...and there seems to be a bit of luck to getting your hits on the zombies...but somehow the game manages to be quite addictive as you try to better your score each time you play.

Not really a gamethat does anything spectacular then, but one that should still bring you some brief enjoyment if you do decide to load it up...you can find it by clicking here!

 

ZXombies - Dead Flesh (ZX Spectrum) :

I'm not sure if this is a sequel, a spiritual successor or just a game that shares a similar name to the previous ZXombies, but this game by James Broad certainly has a lot more meat on it's bones! This time you play as an army Major who has lost his squad to the zombie menace, but who finds new purpose as he hears the cries of help from stranded survivors. Armed and ready, you search for these poor individuals and try to escort them to safety while blasting your way through the waves of the undead.

You have a few weapons you can flick through to help out, and you'll find ammo and health and other pickups scattered around as you flick from screen to screen. Once you find a camp of survivors you hold down an action button to get them to follow you, and then you lead them past the monsters to try and get to a safe haven. This gets harder as you go, and occasionally, bigger and nastier zombies appear, like the multi-limbed monstrosity you can see in the screenshot above..

As well as looking out for the flesh eaters, you also have to be careful not to be standing to close to the explosive barrells that litter the screen too, although they are handy for clearing a lot of enemies at once. Also hindering your walk to safety are locked gates, and to open these you'll need to keep the action button pressed for a few seconds until the gates are unlocked, whilst also having to protect the suvivor tagging along beside you.

It all makes for a pretty fun and addictive game, with a nice tune to bop along to as you go! I did find it  a bit trickier once I had rescued a few of the survivors and the bigger zombies started appearing, and sometimes had an issue with the gates, but thats probably more due to me playing on a laptop and pressing the wrong keys than anything to do with the game! It's definitely a great little spectrum game, way more interesting than the first ZXombies and well worth a download and play! You can find it by clicking here...

The Last Guy (Playstation 3)

 

The Last Guy (Playstation 3) :

So at the end of last year I finally got myself a PS3, and hurriedly started gathering up as many of the games that were exclusively released for it as possible, both physical copies and digital games that until then I had never heard of, having been tied to the Xbox 360 for years. One such game was this bizarre but brilliant masterpiece from Sony's Japan studio....

The best way to describe it would be to ask you to imagine if you had the game Snake on your mobile phone, and it somehow malfunctioned and merged with both Google Maps and that weird japanese zombie film you downloaded to watch later. Okay, so maybe that isn't the best way to describe it, but it's about the best that I can do....

I suppose you could try listening to the guys in this next video, who are the 'developers' (not really) of the game...

So yes, a giant purple beam has struck the Earth and created yet another zombie epidemic...you play as The Last Guy, a hero who has the ability to move quickly and use infrared vision to see what buildings have survivors inside that he can rescue by taking to a landing zone, where they will all be rescued by helicopter. There are also special VIP survivors who will boost your score and stamina levels, so you can move even quicker...

The more people that leave the building and join your group of survivors, the longer the chain of people becomes, and you have to wind your way through the top down citites, which have been created using actual satellite map data, avoiding various types of nasty zombies. Luckily you can boost by using some energy that rises the more people that join your line too...and there are also special VIP survivors who will boost your score and stamina levels, so you can move even quicker!

The monsters are a weird bunch though! There are zombies who charge at your group, giant insect zombies that rush through and disperse the group rapidly....there's a even a giant zombie that appears as a gaint pair of eyes and a mouth on the map, whose roars deafen everyone and make them all rush back inside instantly too!

There are various pickups that can help you out, such as extra energy or those that make you invisible to the monsters breifly, but the game is still really challenging, and it will have you tearing your hair out as much as it will have you laughing at the weirdness of it all...

But it's addictive as hell, and it's definitely an exclusive worth checking out, especially if like me, you're a fan of Japanese weirdness in games!

Skull (ZX Spectrum / Commodore 64)

Skull (ZX Spectrum / C64) :-

The plot for this 1984 title from Games Machine is pretty much what you read on the front cover (see above)......Enter The Catacombs, Hunt The Treasure, Avoid the Traps....Watch Out For The Skull!

So with this straightforward set-up, you start with your character in a first-person view and wander through the 3D catacomb maze, in the hunt for said loot to boost your score! The traps that you have to avoid come in the form of gaping holes in the ground, trapdoors that open up randomly to reveal more gaping holes in the ground, portcullises that will sometimes trip when you walk past and trap you...and of course, the giant wandering Skulls Of Doom!

Portcullises can opened or closed by using keys, which you'll find lying around in the maze too, but if you get trapped behind one without a key you'll have to wait until a trapdoor opens up beneath you and kills you, resetting you elsewhere in the maze. You can trap the skulls with clever use of the portcullises and keys too though!

If you hang around above a trapdoor, they'll open up and plunge you to your demise, so it's best to hurry past those! Whenever you fall through a hole, you get treated to a psychedelic, multi-coloured screen flash before you kick the bucket!

The skulls can be attacked, but not got rid of, by picking up green crosses that are also scattered about, and these work like the power-pills in Pac-Man, giving you a short amount of time (about 15 seconds) to chase down the skulls and collect the gems that their eyes become when you collect the cross! You'll need to be really quick though, and careful that they don't suddenly change back just as you reach them!

To help you out, you also have a lucky charm bracelet that you can see below your view. On this you'll see any skulls that are nearby, and you can tell how far away the are by the colour of the skull...

CYAN - 4 or more steps away

GREEN - 3 steps away

MAGENTA - 2 steps away

RED  - 1 step away

There's also a map at the side of the screen, but that quickly becomes obscured by some sort of dark magic, so if you want to view the map you need to fork out some of your cash for a plan! This shows you where the treasure is, your position on the map, the position of all the skulls and traps and also any ladders that will allow you to descend to lower levels of the maze safely...

And that's pretty much the gist of the game! I played the Speccy version first and whilst finding it to be quite enjoyable, it was a bit tricky at first due to the key layout. But once I set up my joystick as Cursor it became a lot easier. I'd still probably pick the Commodore version over the Speccy one though, as it has more spooky sound effects and the trippy drop-sequence is even more psychedelic and noisy! 

The game won't blow you away with it's amazing-ness, as it doesn't really have any! But if you fancy a fairly-standard-if-sometimes-awkward-to-control  jaunt around a 3D maze avoiding giant skulls this Halloween, you could do a lot worse than this! 

The Evil Within (Xbox 360)

The Evil Within (Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3. PS4. PC) :-

It would be safe to say that Detective Sebastian Castellanos is having 'one of those days'....thinking his work was done and looking forward to relaxing with a nice cup of cocoa and a read of his favourite self-help book "How To Sound Like A Gritty Video-Game Character", he and his colleagues, Detective Joseph Oda and Junior Detective Juli Kidman, are diverted from their journey home to go and investigate a multiple murder at a nearby asylum...

A grisly scene of mutilated bodies and blood-splattered benches awaited at Beacon Mental Hospital, and after witnessing some very odd happenings via the hospital security cameras, he now finds himself hanging upside down from a hook, surrounded by similarly hanging corpses, whilst a large, disfigured-brute-of-a-chap with a cleaver starts hacking away at one of the aforementioned deceased....

Luckily, he remembers reading another self-help book, "How To Escape Cleaver Wielding Disfigured-Brute-Of-A-Chaps", and makes his escape! Unfortunately, he cancelled his subscription to these self-help books and missed out on the one he really needed to read....."How To Escape From Weird Disorienting Hospitals With Rooms That Seem To Lead Outside Or Through Time Or To The Insides Of People's Heads And Are Populated By Even Weirder Zombies, Monsters And Traps That Were Deemed Too Gruesome To Appear In The Saw Movies"...

And so it is that you'll have to take control of Sebastian through the magic of your game controller, and work out what the hell is actually going on and how to put an end to it all...navigating him through all these nasty traps and mind-bending portals to other places, and using the small amounts of ammo you find to try and defeat the swarms of mutilated monstrosities that are determined to see you fail!

Every now and again you'll hear Claude Debussy's Clair De Lune playing, and if you follow the music you'll find yourself at blood-spattered doors that open to rooms containing a cracked mirror. Examining these mirrors will transport you to another section of the asylum, watched over by the mysterious nurse Tatiana Gutierrez. She helps you out by letting you save your game, and by introducing you to the Upgrade Chair that lets you improve your abilities by injecting Green Goo into your brain!

This green gloop can be found lying around the environments in jars, or left behind after defeating enemies, and can also be used to upgrade weapons and give them more firepower, accuracy or ammo capacity. Another thing you can access in the safe haven of Tatiana's rooms are a set of lockers that hold various treats to help you on your journey. Keys for these lockers can be found hidden in Statues littered throughout the main game in obscure nooks and crannies...

Shinji Mikami, creator of Resident Evil, directed this game and you can really sense him trying to recapture the feel of those early survival horror games...Limited ammo, claustrophobic spaces, camera angles that don't quite show you everything you want to see..and for the most part this works wonderfully at creating feelings of panic and dread.

Occasionally though, you'll get frustrated at the camera or controls, especially when you come to the boss fights or brutally hard sections of the game. And there are plenty of those! I played through on the easiest setting, but I still found myself running out of ammo and having lots of near-controller-throwing moments when I kept running into the same traps over and over again.

Persevere though, and it shouldn't take you too long to get past these obstacles and get back to enjoying the twisted, topsy-turvey environments that may or may not be real, and get on with the quest to find out who the mysterious Ruvik is, what he has to do with all this and what part the other patient Leslie has to play in uncovering the truth...

The Evil Within is a proper survival horror game and was described by some as 'what Resident Evil 5 should have been'. If you've been missing the old feel of the Resident Evil games, this should be more your cup of tea, and you should enjoy working out how to solve the puzzles and squirreling enough ammo away to take out the giant, jaw-dropping boss creatures! 

I thoroughly enjoyed it, and having finally finished last Halloween, I'm lamenting the fact I've yet to purchase an Xbox One so I can enjoy the sequel.... Never mind, maybe I'll get to play it next year....but all of you with newer machines can revel in the fact that Sebastian also missed out on another self-help book, "How Not To End Up In The Entirely Same F**ked Up Situation You Found Yourself In Three Years Ago"......

Overblood (PlayStation)

Overblood (PS1) :-

I don't know how many computer game characters start off their games having lost their memory, but it must be at least in the triple figures...and that is exactly the predicament that the hero of Overblood finds themselves in when you load it up on your Playstation...

Waking up in a freezing spaceship from a cryogenic sleep, his first priority is getting a source of heat, and after hunting around he finds a jacket, and also a new friend in the form of Pipo the robot! After you get him started up and he gets done with his best R2D2 impression, Pipo can also be controlled, and turns out to be rather handy at opening doors and getting into spaces that our main hero (who has discovered his name is Raz) can't squeeze into...

After wandering around the spaceship a bit more, it soon becomes apparent that something has gone very wrong and weird zombie-type creatures are wandering around, seemingly infected with some sort of virus...a virus that Raz also seems to have contracted...

And so Raz, Pipo and eventually another amnesia-ridden playable character Milly, explore the ship to try and figure out what the hell is going on, whilst trying their best not to be killed by monsters, traps and the rather nasty environment they find themselves inhabiting!

Overblood was released only a few months after the original Resident Evil, and is quite similar in terms of tank-controls, viewpoints and atmosphere. It does have quite a few interesting differences all of it's own though. For starters, you don't have to stay looking at those spooky camera angles, as you can change the view to either being directly behind your character, or even a first-person camera that lets you move and look around from the characters viewpoint.

Also, rather than have you play through the game again as another character, the ability to swap between them is a nice feature that Resident Evil would borrow in later games. And instead of hunting around for ink ribbons, a voice recorder lets you save the game at any point that you're not in danger.

Unfortunately, the game has a couple of other ideas that don't work quite as well. The biggest problem is that a lot of the items aren't noticeable on the screen...so a key could be sitting on a shelf, but you won't see it sitting there, you'll only find it by searching the shelf! And you pretty much have to be at exactly the right part of the shelf to examine it! Needless to say, this is very annoying and makes you get stuck when you really shouldn't be getting stuck.

This problem is added to by the fact that if an item is on a lower shelf, or indeed on the ground, you have to kneel before the character will pick it up! I can see what they were trying to make it more realistic by adding this, but again it just leads to a lot of frustration when you realise you've missed something and need to backtrack.

Another issue is with the 'push' function not having a button, and every time Raz or Milly go near anything other than a wide corridor, they start trying to push things that aren't there! Again, this is a bit annoying, but you could argue that Resident Evil also had this issue, but to a much lesser degree. And some of the animations can look a bit daft, with characters looking like they're constantly pointing their hands, hoping that monsters don't realise they don't actually have a gun sometimes, perhaps....

Having said all that, the gloomy, sci-fi atmosphere and odd story do mean that you'll want to keep playing, and when you add in the comical animations and some terrible voice acting that almost manages to top Resi  for cheesiness, it's a survival horror game that does show some rewards for perseverance. And when you finally get to grips with the mechanics of searching eveywhere and everything (and using the internet when you get really stuck) it actually becomes quite enjoyable! 

Worth a look then, and probably a lot better than most folks these days give it credit for!


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Please remember to go and check out the other groovy ghouls and boils that are taking part in the Countdown To Halloween, as they're posting lots of cool stuff on their blogs too!

Guns 'n' Ghosts (Commodore 64)

Guns 'n' Ghosts (Commodore 64) :-

I always like to include Homebrew games in my Gruesome Game recommendations whenever possible, as there will still be some people out there unaware that there are still games being made for their favourite old computers! And while quite a few of these new games are only available for digital download to play in emulators, there are also some homebrewers that release their games on actual cassettes, disks or carts so that you can load them up on the original hardware and experience them properly!

Psytronik & RGCD are a couple of groups that do just that, and this 2013 collaboration by both and by developers Georg Rottensteiner & Trevor Storey, can be bought either on disk or cassette, or from RGCD on C64 Cartridge! It is available to buy via digital download too though, which is the version I picked up a while back....

So what's it all about then? Well, Trev and Georg, as well as being a bit handy at programming groovy C64 games, also have a nice side-line going as Paranormal Investigators! After a series of reports of supernatural shenanigans come in from all over the country, our daring duo decide to get on the case and give these spooks a piece of their mind....

Especially Trev, who with his special psychic powers that give him a link to the spirit-plane, can send these demons back to the hell that spawned them just by thinking about it! Georg prefers to use his trusty boom-stick though, and blast the bogeymen to billions of bits!

There are a number of ways to enjoy the game, as it has several game modes....

1 Player Trev - As Georg with his shotgun, you start as a single player with two shots and best dispatch of the beasties at long range...

1 Player Trev - A single player uses Trev's freaky mind blasts to melt the monsters, and is best used at short range!

Brothers - A two player mode where you and a friend take control of a hero each, and use their powers independently to free the land of the paranormal pests!

Cooperative Play - A mode where player one is Georg, player two is Trev, and the baddies must be held in place by Trev's psychic power so that Georg can shoot them! This is the trickiest way to play, but probably the best fun!

Double Georg - Both players play as Georg and use shotguns!

Double Trev - Both players play as Trev and use psychic powers!

During the game there are also a number of power ups that help our pals defeat the hordes of zombies, spooks and failed lab experiments, such as special bullets for Georg and potions that increase Trev's psychic powers, and also the usual extra lives and invincibility power ups!

As you can see from the screenshots, the levels are lain out as a series of platforms, and the enemies appear on these various platforms and then try and make their way to you to stop you in your quest to be a paranormal party-pooper!

While it starts off quite easy and you'll have no problems defeating them, the game increasingly ramps up the difficulty, adding more enemies like the skeletons that rush at you when you're in their line of sight, or the bullet-spongy Frankenstein Monster type enemies that require several shots to destroy!

 It never gets so tricky that it stops being fun though, and if you've read my blog for a while you know that I struggle sometimes with the difficulty of some C64 games! Thankfully, I feel this is pitched just right, and I get a little further every time I play!

And so I can heartily recommend that you follow the links by clicking the Psytronik and RGCD names at the start of this post and purchase a copy for yourselves...and while you're there you should probably check out their other releases, look for other homebrew developers elsewhere online, and sample their wares and go shout about them from the rooftops too!