Halloween 2018 on the Saturn!

Well folks, it's that most wonderful time of the year! The time when the undead walk the earth, when ghosts, goblins and vampires roam the woods and zombies wait patiently for their dinner at the school yard gates! Halloween! Time to let your ghoulies hang out! Time for you to get in touch with your inner witch/warlock! Time for you to let your cos play fantasies run wild!

Or maybe not...

Anyway, the month of October is an excuse for unashamedly watching horror movies, hollowing out pumpkins, stuffing your face full of sweets and decking the halls with orange, black, purple and green! The Southern Sega Gentleman also declared it a whole month for indulging in horror themed gaming, so let's see what's been scaring us shitless here at the Saturn Graveyard...

This is not going to be a review article - more of a personal jaunt through each title, so I've included a few links and videos to cover the factual shizzle - Instead, it is simply a suggestion of a few games that might tickle your scary bone over the next few days... So sit back, relax, line your underpants with something absorbent and be prepared to encounter some of the best horror themed games available on the Sega Saturn...

So let's start with the quintessential horror experience for the Saturn, the House Of The Dead!

The House Of The Dead (Sega 1998)

The House Of The Dead, was for a long time, the most expensive Saturn game I owned. At a time when you could (genuinely) pick up Sega Rally for the princely sum of  20p, HOTD cost me £25:00.
I had become aware of this Sega classic, through playing HOTD2 on the Dreamcast, a game for which I had bought my Dreamcast light gun. At the time, the Dreamcast was my system of choice, the Saturn simply an out of date "also ran" in the console stakes. I still loved it, but the Dreamcast was the console that gripped me, in an almost obsessional way. Still, the chance to play a different iteration of the HOTD franchise appealed to me, and despite the prohibitive price tag, I picked it up. From the same store, I bought a 'Stunner' for peanuts, and was ready to kick some putrid zombie butt. Besides, my acquisition of a Saturn light gun, meant I could play Virtua Cop as it was intended to be played... i.e. not with a pad, as I had been playing it for years previously…

As I fired up the game, a zombie with blinking red eyes greeted me from the screen... so far so good, but then the story started and the game play began, I was immediately conflicted. The story looked ace, in a b-movie style, with cheesy dialogue and the same protagonists as HOTD2... RESULT! But the game itself looked underwhelming, rushed, dull, jaggy and pixelated. It was a visual horror show. I don't know whether it was my gun, the game, or me, but I wasn't having the same degree of success in zombie slaying, as I did on the Dreamcast. Still it was HOTD and I loved every minute of it! The game is still prohibitively expensive for a PAL or US copy, so a repro or a Japanese import is the economic way to play. Don't forget you'll also need one of those old fangled CRT TVs as well...

For a fantastic review of the game from the awesome Andrew Rosa of  Master-Cast TV, just click this link!

Alien Trilogy

Now as a proud owner of a Saturn back in the nineties, I dismissed 2D games as old fashioned and uncool. With a swish of my arrogant thick skinned skinhead, I dismissed all of the classic shmups and 2D fighters I now adore. I also dismissed the genre of first person shooters as being for solitary, geeky, PC nerds with only a mouse and keyboard for friends... I wanted arcade experiences, preferably those I could play with mates, so my Saturn collection consisted of Actua Golf, Sega Rally, Virtua Fighter and Virtua Cop,  At the time, despite it's tie in with a movie I had enjoyed, Alien Trilogy would have been sneered at. In a way, it's great that I was such a dismissive knob, because I now get to experience these genres with new eyes, and a they are a beautiful revelation.

Alien Trilogy is a corridor FPS based on the movie franchise. I did wonder whether or not to include a science fiction title in a Halloween round up. I mean does Science Fiction really have a place at the Halloween table? HELL YEAH! It does when it's as pant-soilingly scary as this particular franchise, which owes as much to the horror genre - with it's shocks and atmosphere of claustrophobia mixed with despondent isolation - as it does to science fiction. The game consists of level after level, of seek and destroy missions, involving the hunting and dispatching of xenomorphs, face huggers, gut busters and other aliens, as well as soldiers, synthetics and mutated crewmen. Your ammo, arsenal and inventory can be replenished as you progress through the level, much of it hidden in crates, which you have to shoot open. The only problem is the fact that they also hide those pesky face huggers... The music is integral to the atmosphere and despite it's twenty two year old graphics, this is still a great looking game. The xenomorphs are still creepy as hell and the frequent jump-scares have left my underwear with more skid marks than Brands Hatch after a Formula 1 race... Have a look at the Master-Cast review here!
You can pick up this game pretty cheaply and I cannot recommend it highly enough!

Deep Fear (Sega 1998) 

I was going to resurrect my Biohazard gaming for Halloween, for the first time since the game gave me a truly horrific experience  - by freezing three quarters of the way through, when I played the Saturn version, as a newbie last year... Instead, I grabbed my copy of Deep Fear, sent to me in a bundle of burned discs, by Junkyard Facebook Admin and all round top bloke, Daniel Turner. Boy, am I glad I did!

Deep Fear is an underwater adventure produced by Sega in 1998. It is essentially a Resident Evil clone, suffused with the atmosphere and themes of the movie The Abyss. It has the dubious honour of being the last PAL release before the demise of the Saturn and was only released in limited numbers in Europe, not at all in the US. SHAME!!! This is a great game! To my mind it surpasses Resident Evil, as the game is much more forgiving than it's inspiration, in terms of ammo, health and saves. There is, however, an added fear factor, in the limited air supplies that an underwater setting facilitates.

The characters in the game are pretty shallow and the acting is hammier than a hamster, but Deep Fear has a great plot, full of jump scares and mutated monsters. There are genuinely horrific cut scenes and real shocks within the game. One such scene left me so shocked, that I dropped my controller to post this fact on the FB page, only to die as the monster I thought had drowned, came back to rip my spleen out with it's crab-like claw...

Deep Fear costs a ridiculous amount for a PAL version. But a Japanese import is largely in English and very playable. If you love Resident Evil, but are looking for a new twist (and the ability to walk and shoot at the same time) then Deep Fear is for you. Master-Cast TV Review here...
The game gives us a look at what could be achieved on the Saturn given the right development team and is crying out for a "Gamecube style" re-vamp for a modern console... And talking of Vamps, that leads me very cheaply into my next paragraph...

Vampire Hunter (Capcom 1996)

Not all horror games need to be of the adventure variety, as Capcom's 1996 effort Vampire Hunter proves. Vampire Hunter (or Night Warriors; Dark Stalker's Revenge - Banpaia Hantā Dākusutōkāzu Rebenji in Japan) is a quirky 2D brawler with a roster of horror, mythical and sci-fi inspired characters with awesome moves and stunning backdrops. Fighters include the Dracula-like Dimitri Maximoff, buxom bat-winged demon Morrigan Aensland, the "Eddie-from-Iron Maiden -alike" zombie, Lord Raptor, Victor Von Gardenheim (who bears a passing resemblance to Frankenstein's monster) the Egyptian mummy, Ankaris and  paradoxically foxy feline "Were-cat", Felicia.

The game has some amazing fighting moves, pulled off with ferocious flare and fluid animation. The game has a quick "pick up and play" element to it, but of course mastery takes time. Combos can be used to stunning effect and the backgrounds are themed around the characters and fully animated. This is perhaps the best looking of this year's bunch and still looks fabulous on a modern TV. If I have one gripe, it's the absence of the machine gun wielding Little Red Riding clone, Bulletta, but other than that, it's a Halloween winner. My apologies if your favourite horror themed, or spooky Saturn game didn't feature, but as I reminded my Graveyard colleague Brian Vines, we have to leave some available for next year... until then, Happy Halloween one and all! 

No Bulletta (B.B. Hood) in Vampire Hunter sadly...