Freddy Vs. Jason - Nightmare On Elm Street & Friday The 13th Games

Yes, in today's selection of Gruesome Games I take a look at some video games based around two of horror cinemas greatest villians, a Mr. Freddy Krueger and a Mr. Jason Voorhees! Who will come out on top as the winner and have the best games? Read on to find out....

A Nightmare On Elm Street (C64 / PC DOS) :

First up, we have a man who has probably helped keep the coffee industry booming since the 80s,  that devious dream -demon Freddy! This 1989 game from Monarch Software is based around Nightmare On Elm Street 3, and has you controlling the Dream Warriors from that film...

The first thing you'll need to do is find Krueger's house , and so you guide your little white stick figure character through the streets, looking for a house with all the lights on! Freddy is chasing you all the way, and if he catches you he'll drain your Soul Energy, which you need to survive! Once you find the house, you'll have a quick chat with Sister Mary Helena, and pop inside to rescue your friends....

 The game now changes to a top-down view of inside the house, and you'll get a better look at whatever character you picked at the start of the game. Each character has their own special dream power that they can use in the fight against Freddy! Kincaid has a power punch that can break through walls and Taryn can use her special knife throwing ability! These use up power though, and you'll need to use them sparingly...


Various items can be picked up like baseball bats and daggers to kill enemies with, coffee to keep you awake and coins with which to buy upgrades and stuff. Enemies trying to stop you from reaching your friends include skeletons, ghosts and even killer wheelchairs taken straight from the movie! There's also fire, slime and deadly spike traps to avoid, so you'll have your work cut out trying to reach pizza-face and put an end to his nasty nightmares...



Handily, the bar at the side of the screen lets you know what level the rest of your gang of warriors are currently residing on, so that makes it a lot easier to find them and insures you won't waste too much time hunting for them on every level and can just concentrate on trying to find the exit until you reach the area where they're at!




Obviously, the PC version looks a lot better than the C64 version, and runs a bit smoother too...but they both play more or less the same and have pretty much the exact same layout. I've tried to include similar screenshots from both games here, so you can see the differences for yourselves, and you'll see that the PC version also has some nice little extras like floorboards, little rugs with eyes on and actual slime on the ground on the slime levels (complete with smothered bodies) !

 These extra little touches make the PC version the one to go for, but the C64 version is far from awful, and I would have been happy to have owned it back in the day!  The C64 also has a nice little rendition of the Nightmare on Elm Street music on the title screen, so it gets bonus brownie points for that too! But yeah, both games use the licence to good effect and are pretty enjoyable adventures worth giving a go!

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A Nightmare On Elm Street (NES) :

Also using the third Nightmare On Elm Street as inspiration, LJN's game for the Nintendo Entertainment System has a similar plot, but plays quite a bit differently. In this you have to find Freddy's bones which have been scattered around the levels, take them to the furnace in the High School and burn them so Freddy is put to rest and can no longer threaten Elm Street's teenagers!

As one of these teens yourself, you'll find yourself on Elm Street outside various buildings, only one of which can be accessed from the start. Annoyingly, you have no idea which, so you'll have to fight your way past enemies such as snakes, bats and zombie-types and push up on the controller at every door until you find the one you can enter!

Once inside you'll be faced with platforms to jump around until you reach a boss at the end of a level, who'll drop a key for another house, and you'll be dumped back outside, searching once more for the right door...which is the most annoying thing about the game really, but I suppose it adds some longevity.

What keeps the game interesting is the whole sleep mechanic..If your sleep bar falls too low by getting attacked, you'll enter the dream world and the various snakes, bats and spider enemies will become twisted skeleton or phantom variants of themselves! You'll need to collect coffee to try and keep yourself awake then, and if you do doze off there's a stereo that can be found to waken yourself up again!

Special dream power pick-ups can be collected, and this lets you switch to a special souped-up version of yourself and use abilities like Shadow Warrior (Ninja), Acrobat or Wizard. These aren't as impressive as they sound, but make for some amusing illustrations in the game's manual!

Mr. Krueger will pop up for a ruck if you fall too deep into slumber...an incident that's preceded by a scary "Freddy Is Coming!" message flashing up on the screen! You should see him off with a few hits though, as he's disappointingly non-scary once he appears. The boss versions are better at the end of the levels, with you facing off against Snake Head Freddy, Big Knifey-Glove Freddy and a few other incarnations!  (Names above are what I called the incarnations of Freddy...these are not official....obviously...)

Anyway, it's a fun enough little game, and should keep you entertained for at least a few goes on Halloween! And while you've got the NES out you can give this next game a bash too.....

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Friday The 13th (NES) :

At Camp Crystal Lake, six counselors are looking after the latest batch of kids who are their for the summer, and everyone's enjoying the peace and tranquility of the lake and its surrounding countryside. Unfortunately for them, one child who had a particularly bad experience at the camp a few years back has returned, all grown up and with an axe to grind!

For some reason, the place has also fallen prey to all manner of spooky nasties like zombies, angry wolves and crows! Must be something in the water! Anyway, you take control of the counselors and can switch between them as they try to stop Jason murdering all the children and/or other counselors!

The counselors have differing abilities, and the faster ones are better used as scouts to look for items.Others are better at crossing the lake in a boat. A couple of them seem to be completely useless, but I'll leave it up to you to discover which ones for yourselves...

Using a map, you can see where you are and at moments of danger an alarm will sound and you can check to see where you have to head in order to stop Jason hacking someone to pieces! Unfortunately if you enter the woods, the map becomes pretty useless and it's easy to get lost among the maze of paths and find yourself bombarded with enemies.

All you have to defend yourself at the start, y'see, is a bunch of rocks! Throwing these at enemies isn't always that successful as they travel in an arc and sometimes miss wolves completely. Thankfully, there are other weapons to be picked up such as knives that fly in a straight line and are much more effective.

If you manage to make it past the enemies to the area where someone is being attacked in time, you'll receive a rather premature "Thank you!" from whoever you saved, and then discover Jason lurking in the cabin right beside them! You'll then have to lob rocks, knives or whatever else you have at him whilst dodging his attacks and hoping he gets bored and leaves!

Once he does, he'll be gone for a little while and then he'll attack somewhere else..so you'll need better something he's scared of to truly beat him! Apparently he's really scared off big, flaming torches, so if you light all the fireplaces in the cabins with lighters that the enemies drop, a flaming torch will eventually become available..as will a flashlight that will help you see your way in the caves, which is a place I never found during my few games. Apparently the severed head of Jason's mum awaits you in there too, so I'll need to keep a look out when I go back to playing again...

When night falls, the enemies become a little tougher so watch out for that, but if you manage to fend them and  Jason off for 3 full days you'll win and everyone will be happy except for poor old hockey-head. Hurrah! 

Well, I went in to playing this having heard this was one of the worst games of all time, and having played it for at least 40 minutes I can say that I find that analysis totally wrong! Sure, it's by no means a great game..but it's not that bad! Once I worked out what I was meant to be doing I actually had quite a lot of fun trying to save everybody and I'll definitely be going back to play it again in the future and try to find Mrs. Voorhees severed head! 

So don't believe the naysayers...give it a go and see what you think yourself! Of course, maybe you'll hate it anyway, but that's half the fun of playing games you haven't played before! One man's Arkham Asylum is another man's Rise Of The Robots! You'll never know until you play 'em!

Oh, and one thing you can definitely thank the last two games for are these wonderful things...

Yes, NECA  have made action figures based on both the LJN games and they come in the same colours as the characters in game! They'll look great on your shelves and are a perfect Halloween gift either for yourself or a friend! Oh, and they also come in replica boxes based on the game ones too! 

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Friday the 13th (Spec / C64 / Amstrad):

A few years before the NES game, one appeared on the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 & Amstrad CPC computers. In this one, the main aim is to gather all your friends in safe spot that you've secured by placing a a huge cross in it!

Jason has disguised himself as one of your friends and won't show himself until he's ready to attack, at which point you'll have to confront him and use one of ten weapons that you've found lying around to bash him with!

Now this game is a lot worse than the NES version! well, the ZX Spectrum version is at least. It looks terrible, controls terribly and is just well...crap! The C64 at least has some spooky music, and when someone dies you'll hear a blood-curdling scream, which I imagine at least freaked out some kids back in the day! It controls a lot better too, and also looks far nicer....although for some reason Jason looks more like a random guy in black jeans and a black top than the knife wielding behemoth we're used to seeing on screen!

Apparently, the best version of the lot is the Amstrad version, but as I'm still struggling with trying to get an Amstrad emulator to work so I can sample its games, I've yet to play that one. So although the C64 might be fun for 5 minutes, I can't really recommend you play either, when there are so many more gruesome games to eat up your time....if I ever get round to the Amstrad version, I'll keep you posted!

So there we go! I think in this particular battle of the baddies, Freddy wins hands down! His games are a lot more fun than Jason's, but there's still room for someone to make a truly great game based on either series, as none of the games could be called amazing! 

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ADDENDUM

Since posting this on the Blog Of Stuff, a new Friday The 13th Game has been put in to production after successful funding on Kickstarter and Backerkit...

Players take control of Camp Crystal Lake counselors trying to escape and defeat Jason...but one player will fill the somewhat sizable shoes of the man himself and be able to teleport around the map, using heightened skills to hunt the other players down....

It features input from Sean S. Cunningham, Tom Savini, Harry Manfredini and Kane Hodder, all of whom are integral to the success of the movies.... 

Developers Illfonic and Gun Media plan to release the game in Spring of next year on PC, Xbox One and PS4, with a possible single-player mode coming in the Summer, despite the stretch goal for that mode not being reached.

It all sounds rather interesting, will undoubtedly upset the censors, and might finally be the game Friday The 13th fans have been waiting for....I guess we'll find out next year!

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As another little side-note, both Freddy and Jason have featured in Mortal Kombat games as downloadable characters! 

Both have moves based around their special skills, and both are pretty fun to play as....with their moves being way over the top in suitable Mortal Kombat style!

It's just a pity that they don't appear in the same MK so we could pit them against each other to settle this feud once and for all.....

Welcome to the Gruesome Games Blog!

I've been covering horror games on my other blog for about 5 or 6 years now, but there's also a whole load of other stuff on there too! So I decided that to make it easier for anyone who's only interested in the Gruesome Games to find what they were looking for, I'd set up a blog where I repost, and sometimes revisit, all of the games I previously covered in the Blog Of Stuff!

Every game will get it's own post to make it easier to find, unless it's part of a special post..like the Evil Dead or Gegege Kitaro specials, and I'll also be updating any old photos or videos that have lost their source and adding a few more pics and videos to some of the skimpier posts...

Anyway, enjoy the blog, whether this is your first time reading about these games, or if you're revisiting them! And thanks for checking out the blog! 

The Evil Dead Special (Various)

Animation by Gary 'Army Of Trolls' Lucken

I first saw Evil Dead 2 at about the age of 10, on a loaned pirate VHS from one of our neighbours.. It wasn't my first horror film...I'd been watching old horror triple bills, 50s sci-fi and other random things that had made it on to TV for years...but it quickly became my favourite. Its mix of humour, silliness, gore and proper outright freakiness just seemed to click with me. The fact that the neighbour who lent us the VHS looked slightly like Bruce Campbell in my eyes, and lived at the end of our row of cottages just across from the biggest, oldest tree in the area, helped make the experience even scarier when my brother and I went to return the tape...

Eventually I saw the original Evil Dead, which was even scarier despite having plasticine entrails and things wriggling around the place...and I waited patiently for a new sequel. Then Army Of Darkness appeared, and was disappointingly more fantasy orientated, but still had enough charm and groovy-ness to make me want more of Ashley J. Williams adventures against the Deadite hordes....

Of course, if you're a fan of the Evil Dead series, you'll know that we've been waiting for more adventures on film ever since, and that until the reboot and soon to be screened Ash Vs The Evil Dead TV series, the only way we could get our Deadite dose was by playing the severed-handful of Evil Dead video games.. (Well, apart from the comics, T-shirts, books, references in other films, tv shows, etc....look, just go with me on this, okay?)..

The Evil Dead (C64 / ZX Spectrum / BBC) ~

The first of these video games was based on the original film, and appeared way back in 1984 on Speccy, Commodore 64 and BBC Micro. The Speccy version never actually got a proper release, coming instead as an added extra on the B-side of another Palace Software game, Cauldron....

Playing as Ash, you've got to run around the cabin in a top-down view, closing all the doors to keep the Deadites at bay and picking up any weapons you can find lying around. If the main Evil baddie gets in, it can possess one of your friends turning them into an enemy you'll need to defeat as well! If it touches you, it's instant death...

After you've fought through loads of baddies and slammed lots of doors, the Necronomicon will appear (see pic below) and you'll need to grab that, take it to the fire in the first room and fling it in! This supposedly stops the craziness, but all it actually does is  give you more points and the game continues exactly as before...

There's really not too much to this tricky little game other than that, and although fun for about 3 minutes, it's a bit boring and difficult to spend very much time playing. Of the two versions I played, the C64 is slightly better than the Speccy effort, but none can really be recommended. A disappointing start to the Evil Dead's videogames....

Evil Dead - Hail To The King (PS1) ~

It took 16 years for the next Evil Dead game to show up, with this one being a sequel to the movies! Taking place 8 years after the events of Army of Darkness, Ash is settling back into life reasonably well...he's got a new girlfriend, Jenny, and is back working at his job in the S-Mart. However, Ash is plagued by recurring nightmares of his previous run-ins with the Deadite hordes, and Jenny decides to try and help him by taking him back the cabin in the woods where it all started.....

This of course, is a bad idea...but Ash has never been known for his cleverness, and so they make the journey to Professor Knowby's cabin. Once there, Ash meets up with someone he used to be very, very close to indeed...his self-severed, demonically-possessed hand! It flicks on the old tape of Knowby's incantations, and before Ash can stop it, the ancient evil is back with a vengeance and wastes no time in kidnapping Jenny! Grabbing an axe, Ash is suddenly attacked by his evil twin from the mirror and falls into unconciousness...

And so when he wakes up, control is passed over to you as you search the cabin for Professor Knowby's notes, in the hope that they'll be able to help you stop the big bad and rescue Jenny! And it's here that your hopes of getting a decent game quickly disappear. Clearly inspired by Resident Evil, Hail To The King manages to completely ruin what could have been a great game with messy graphics and irritating combat.

There's just too many enemies, they respawn in seconds after you kill them and the controls are far too awkward to fight them effectively, so you end up getting frustrated very quickly. Quotes from Ash, voiced by Bruce Campbell himself, are wasted as you end up hearing them too often....mainly because the game awards you extra items from chainsaw kills where a quote has been uttered before you slay the enemy, and you'll be losing so much energy that you're pretty much forced to try and get those extra items by using this kill/quote feature!

It's a shame, as once you get a bit further in to the game, the exploration becomes a bit more fun, and the plot twists of the story make things interesting.....but you need to battle with the never-ending deadites and the broken controls to see the okay stuff, and all it is is just okay so it's not really worth the hassle...

I did complete this when I picked it up for my PS1 years ago, but I kind of felt like I'd been through almost as much pain and trauma as Ash would go through in one of the films to see the end of the game. Hail To The King is a  real missed opportunity, and now that you can see the cinematics on Youtube, there's really no point in playing it unless you're a massive fan of the series. Another disappointment!

Evil Dead - Fistful Of Boomstick (PS2) ~

Playing again as Ash, voiced by Mr. Campbell once more of course, you'll battle your way through yet more Deadites in this arcade-adventurey-shooty-shooty-bang-bang-type game, which plays quite a bit better than the previous two...

Ash's girlfriend Jenny from the previous game was apparently killed in a bus crash, and he has apparently spent a lot of time drowning his sorrows in local bars. This is where we find him watching TV at the start of the game, as journalist Trisha Pettywood interviews a Professor Eldridge, who has written a book about the Necronomicon. Somehow, Trisha has also managed to get her hands on the original tapes from the cabin, and to Ash's obviously well-founded horror, starts to play them over the airwaves...

Obviously things go from bad to worse for our hero, as he sets off once again to try and put things right. Unfortunately, despite this being better than the other games so far, it's still not quite the game Evil Dead fans have been after. Developed by VIS Entertainment, this uses the same engine as their previous game State Of Emergency...an engine that was primarily developed to allow huge numbers of onscreen enemies to appear on screen at once!

And so it's strange that, to begin with at least, the numbers of enemies here are pretty thin. It's not necessarily that bad a thing, as we've seen that too many enemies can ruin a game...but it just seems like the graphics and gameplay could have been improved if it had had its own engine developed.  As it is, it plays like an average hack 'n' slasher with slightly annoying item fetch-questing, and feels like it can't quite make its mind up what type of game to be!

Combat this time is initially a bit more satisfying though!  Ash will deliver his famous quotes and aim over his shoulder to show off his trademark come-get-some shotgun moves, and there are spells you can learn to throw a bit of magic lightning and the like around. Sadly, due to the nature of the game, this gets a bit repetitive after a while too..

I often found myself not knowing where to go too, due to not knowing where to use a specific item. I eventually worked it out, but it's just another part of the design that taints the game. But at least with this one, I can actually recommend playing it if you're an Evil Dead fan, as it is fun to run around as Ash....and if you pick up the original PS2 release you'll get a copy of the Evil Dead II DVD to watch as well...so it does feel like a step in the right direction.It's just that it's still not the best game that an Evil Dead game could be..

Evil Dead Regeneration (Xbox) ~

Disregarding the previous Evil Dead games, and even most of the second and all of the third film, the plot of this game plays as a sort of  'what-if', with Ash getting sent to an Asylum after the events of The Evil Dead... After a brief tutorial section that takes place in the cabin, we learn that Ash's lawyer Sally has just discovered that he has been telling the truth about the horrors he has faced. She found this out by paying a guard to bring her Ash's file from his doctor's office, the file also containing Professor Knowby's notes....

Ash realises that these notes were right beside the Necronomicon in the cabin, and wonders why Doctor Reinhard would have them. Meanwhile, Reinhard is in the basement researching the Necronomicon and experimenting with its powers...however, with Knowby's notes missing, he accidentally unleashes the evil back into the world, and it rushes through the asylum possessing people, causing mayhem and luckily, freeing Ash!

Filling Ash's shoes once more, we get to finally play a game that's a pretty good use of the licence! The controls finally feel as they should, and finishing off the enemies with special moves is really enjoyable! Sure, these become repetitive, just as they were in the previous games, but somehow they're nowhere near as annoying.

It's not long until we meet up with one of the results of Reinhard's experiments...a living-dead little person called Sam ( voiced by Ted Raimi ) who as Professor Knowby's spirit tells us is integral to stopping the crazy doctor! As Sam can regenerate, Ash can kick him into mechanisms to open doors, onto enemies backs to control them, or into the many portals that need to be closed in order for Ash to stop Reinhard. He can also be possessed by Ash and used to access areas to small to usually progress through! Naturally Sam isn't a huge fan of this idea, and his complaints help add a little humour to proceedings....

Also helping Ash out this time, is his ability to control when he can turn in to Evil Ash after being possessed by a spirit. This works by killing enemies to fill up a rage meter. Once the meter is full, Ash can bring out the badness in him and go on a rampage until the meter runs dry again.

As you can probably tell, this game just feels more finished and enjoyable than any of the previous Evil Dead games. The only real complaints are that it can be a bit buggy or glitchy every now and then, and that some of the platforming sections could have played a bit better...but all in all, it's not a bad game at all.

Even Bruce Campbell seems more pleased with this game, giving a voice performance that feels a lot more natural than in the other games! So there you go, we finally have an Evil Dead game that although not perfect, manages to at least almost do the series justice!

There's still room for a proper, scary, less humorous take on it though! Oh and there are a couple of other Evil Dead games that I can't comment on as I haven't played them.....

There's the free Army of Darkness Defence for iOS which seems like it might be quite fun...

...and then there's this.....

And then there's other things that aren't official games at all, like my brother's game Dead By Dawn that I reviewed in this previous post..... and then there's things like Duke Nukem.......but I think that's enough to be getting on with for now! So much for my shorter posts this year! Hehehe.......

 Animation at top of page by Army Of Trolls!