Retro Rewind - Be Kind and Lose your Mind!

 Back in the hayday of movie rentals, back when Friday nights were prime time for movie rentals, you were given the keys to the movie kingdom. The joys of going through those sections of your favorite film genres cannot be described in words. You just need to have some coin and a rental membership, and you could discover a new favorite. Of course, you could also find a movie that you turn off immediately because it plays to your worst fears, but those just happen. This game captures the feeling of working at Blockbuster, much like I did in the mid 2000's before its inevitable death. It has all of the charm and only some of the pitfalls. 

You are given your own movie rental store and you need to build it up from scratch. In true simulation fashion, you start with small facilities that can be expanded, and with limited options for decorations. The most important thing in the start is just gathering up as many movies as you can and getting shelves with which to stock them. You start out with horror and drama, but also have the option to purchase adult movies from the strange guy in the back alley. That's not as scummy as it sounds. At first, I thought that dealing with him could land me in some trouble, but I never saw any... well, not directly, but we'll get into that. 

The new release days are some of the best sections of the game. It's just fun to get a good 5 or 10 of them to begin with and see them disappear off the shelf as you gain more and more customers. The more time that elapses, the more genres and new releases that come your way. You need to get at least a few of the new movies on your shelves the day they come out, because customers will ask about them quite often. Once they become regular movies, falling out of their first week, you can keep a couple of them, but it's best to get rid of the excess by putting them in bargain bins. You need to make way for more movies, which will be coming very shortly. 

Designing your store and coming up with the section placement is not very important in any other way than space. With a smaller space, getting the shelves right will open you up to getting more movies and that means more money. You don't need to worry too much about decorations to begin with, because getting five new releases at a time means that you get a poster along with them. As you go along, you are able to play around with the style of each section, giving them a lot of character that goes to your taste. It's very easy to over-decorate, but once you get it right, it will draw more customers.

Customers don't shoplift, thankfully, and I hope that never becomes a mechanic of this title. They will, however, break the movies that you go through in your returns. Some of the movies are late as well, and both of these elements will cause an extra charge to your customers. It is best if you charge every customer for breaks and late returns, because even if they don't end up paying, you will get that money back in some form or fashion. As you go, they will multiply before you know it. You go to sections to recommend movies to them based on genre, age and whether they have a good rating from critics. It's a charming little tidbit to recommend titles, but you also don't need to get too involved with it. Sadly, you're not able to watch the movies other than a small trailer-like video on your decorative TV screens. Even then, it only shows the horror and sci-fi short movies. 

Employees are a mixed bag. Once you get to a certain level, you can employ one person to either work the front counter or movie returns. You want them to handle the cash register, that is definitely one of the more mundane aspects of this game, much like it is in real life. Go figure. These employees could fall asleep and you'll need to wake them up. Sometimes, they'll straight up call in sick and you need to pick up that extra slack. If it gets too blatantly obvious that they're misusing that privledge, it is up to you whether you want to fire them and hire another one. One of the employees actually blackmailed me into giving him a raise or he would tell the police I was dealing in the blackmarket videos in the back alley. He was given the raise, but immediately fired. Whether that was a real threat and they could actually call the cops, I didn't have any repercussions in the whole ordeal, so that's up in the air. 

Along with the movies, you also deal in snacks and drinks. This can be a simple snack shelf at first, but then you get drinks, slushies, popcorn and even cotton candy. All of these things enhance your profit margin. Each is a small hike, but once you put them all together, you see the difference. Selling your previously rented games in the bargain bins will also draw in a nice hefty profit, especially after all of the income from the initial rentals. 

The real meat of the game comes from both the cash register and the movie returns. At first, without employees, you need to shift between these two jobs. You have extra time in the beginning and end of the day to do the returns, but they keep coming throughout as people drop them off. Whether you like sectioning these movies or not will ultimately dictate your enjoyment of this title. If this is your bread and butter, this game can get rather addictive. 

Another great part is how quirky the world is around you. You could see a UFO abduct someone outside your window. On Friday the 13th, there will be weirdos outside and sometimes inside your store, staring in at you with hockey masks on. I think it's a movie reference or something, who knows? The little interesting tidbits like this are a ton of fun to observe while you work. With the weather change and the seasons passing, it can become a nice little ambience game at the same time. It's just all around pleasant. 

There are glitches here and there. Sometimes the word bubbles don't go away and sometimes your employees will walk through you while you're working and screw up your flow. None of this is a deal-breaker. This game is easy to figure out and it's all just fun busy play. It will either resonate with you or it could be a snorefest if this isn't your thing. It could even be fun to stock the sodas and make the slushies, but always remember to drink water.

Layers of Fear - Play the Scary Pictures

Happy Halloween, Virtua Ghosts! The Ghostly Month of Virtua SPOOOOOOOOOOOOOKIES!!! nears its end, but it's been a fun ride thus far. We're looking at horror in its rawest form today so let's SPOOK OUT!

 If there was ever an influence to first person survival horror, it was PT in all of its cancelled glory. The Playable Teaser for Silent Hills, which Konami seems to regret bumping off now, brought us into an actual world of creepy terror and showed us that games did not need to be especially long in order to get under your skin. While we lament its passing, we have been gifted with many in its wake. Layers of Fear took that premise and put it to some good use. Here, you're looking over a mansion that seems to have belonged to a painter, and as you find clues around this very creepy mannor, you begin to uncover just how obsessive one can get in order to create art. 

Layers of Fear brings you into those hallways with a sense of dubious caution, but there is a refreshing hesitance to it at first. This starts out as a slow burn horror game, making it to where the truly horrific things don't occur until you unfurl the painting that you will be putting together. Every single item on the list has something to do with creating the painting. There is skin with which to make the canvas and there is blood with which to create the red. 

It doesn't just go for jump scares, although there are a good number of instances as such. There are also burning and rotting rooms that you watch decay in front of you, sounds in the many crevices of the house, pictures that suddenly move and puzzles. Yes, this is a puzzler, but they don't get out of control with how to solve them. Usually it just takes walking around the room to find the instructions or it's just a common sense puzzle that brings you one step closer to the next item for the painting. 

The story behind the painting is interesting, but it does kind of out stay its welcome after a while. After about the seventh or eighth instance of someone being drawn to misery or killed in some horrible way it's basically "we get it, he was crazy, get on with it." The third act of the game is where this game starts to take a dip. The atmosphere has already reached its many peaks and valleys by the time you make it to the end. Some of the puzzles get monotonous in that they're not hard to solve, it just takes up precious game time in order to move on. One good example of this is when you're walking around one of the upper levels and phones keep ringing. The creep factor is hindered a bit by the fact that the same thing keeps happening over and over again until you start predicting the sudden scares of the game.

There are some brilliant instances of scares, like when hallways suddenly disappear behind you and now there's a wall with a tiny painting on it. The room with the record player that you need to play backwards is also a memorable addition to some of the better parts of the game, the earlier levels. It's also a lot better when you don't know what the painting is at first. As you bring colors to the canvas, the artwork begins to paint itself and you're left guessing what it could be. These are the better aspects of the game and the ones that work well with the story and scares. 

The DLC, however, only gets worse. You've already done the painting and gotten through the house, and now it wants you to complete a story book. These are some of the most mind numbingly boring segments of the game. By now, Layers of Fear has given you its best in the ways of survival horror, and these on-going scares and cinematic puzzles just stop doing it after a while. 

Layers of Fear is worth playing through to completion, but dealing with everything after that is a bit of a chore. It's worth revisiting the earlier levels to get the game's full effect, but after a while, you'll figure out which parts of the game are your favorites. There's still a lot of good horror material here and it successfully can be considered one of the better haunted house survival horror. That is much trickier than it sounds because many have attempted it. Give Layers of Fear a try, especially in the Virtua Month of Ghostly SPOOOOOOOOOOOKIES!!! Hope you all have a safe holiday and are ready for some of the colder temperatures. Remember to visit haunted houses responsibly and bring holy water. 

DUSK - Twilight to the Dark Side

The Halloween season is thick in the air now as the Virtua Ghosties Halloween SPOOOOOOOOOOOKIES!!! continues. Let's take a look at an instant classic that will make you want to fall asleep with a shotgun close at hand!

Very few games can perfectly emulate the game style of the late 90's and early 2000's. Dusk does this seemingly without even trying. With the leather headed badguys wanting to kill you for their ritual cultist sacrifice. You survive the sacrifice and quickly gain the upperhand with some sickles cleaving into them. Soon, you gain an entire arsenal, much like Doom's, and you go to town on some chainsaw leatherheads and scarecrows that come to life out of nowhere and attack you with a double barrel shotgun. 

This title is far darker in scope than its peers, and it should be noted that this is a very good title to play around the season. DUSK brings about a darkness that has not been seen since Quake or Blood. It's much more recent, but this title brings about the soul of the original 3D shooters. The monsters are actually quite creepy, especially the Wendigo. The only way you can see them is if you shoot them or they take damage. Besides that, you need to see their bloody footprints or hear their breathing. The darkness in the tunnels and the skulking enemies all around you can bring about some feelings of terror. There's even a tornado of blood! DUSK should be on your list this Halloween, far and away one of the best retro style FPS games.

Dusk gives you hordes of enemies while also giving you small puzzles to figure out in order to find secrets that may lead to stronger weapons. The rivet gun is the strongest weapon, which really doesn't count it for a BFG type weapon, but it does some very hard damage that can take care of some of the stronger enemies. 

Cowgirls are some of the worst enemies in the entire game. They take several explosions to finally kill them, and their exploding mortar shells do almost just as much damage to you. Then there are the zombie alligators, yes, I said zombie alligators. There are so many weapons that go better with so many of the different types of enemies you face throughout the game. On top of this, you're searching for their most powerful being, Jakob, who is the one you must kill in order to get him off of your back. 

This game has so many fascinating game mechanics throughout its entire runtime. There are entire levels that rotate along with a strange square mechanism. It changes the entire outlook and playstyle of the game because now you have a completely different set of obstacles to overcome. It has some awesome Endless Mode levels and it's just fun to play. 

It's one of those games where you can wander around entire levels in order to find all of the secrets. The story is also interesting enough to keep you occupied throughout the duration. It's not a lot of story and it doesn't get in the way of the gameplay at all. There's still a ton of running and gunning as you attempt to survive through waves and waves of cultists and dark creatures. Play it and see how it stands up to the likes of the First Person Shooting legends that came before it. Just remember to quaff some water.

Reliving D - Back to the Horror Mind Mansion

 Next on the Ghostly Month of Virtua SPOOOOOOOKIES!!!! We're taking a look at one of my all-time favorite scary games on the Sega Saturn! Let the haunting festivities begin!!!

Of all the games that deserve a new life, it is comforting to know that D was seen as worthy. If you happen to have a Steam account, there is a small chance you know that this Sega Saturn gem was given a new port that can work on modern computers. Faced with the engine speeds of a Sega Saturn, Playstation and CDO, D had a strained performance. This slow execution actually did a little bit to help it in the ways of atmosphere. The slow movement speeds do get a little monotonous, but now this port has improved all of it. SPOILERS for D ahead.

Not only does it look cleaner, but most movement just takes about a second. It looks a lot more stable now while not getting rid of its crude charm that we fell in love with. D was a little hard to get to remember. The last time I played it fully was to review it back in 2019, so this was a little harder to get back into than was expected. The heightened movement speed did a lot to help in ways of going the wrong way as well. If you accidentally made the wrong move and had to go back, it was a lot more annoying back when movements took three to five seconds. This may not seem like much, but when you move in a point and click like this, those few seconds make a lot of difference. 

This is how a game should graphically clean up. If you remember in the Daytona Champion Circuit review, the graphics looked sterile. Sometimes, they look entirely too clean and change what made the game look so cool in the first place. D, on the other hand, keeps the grain, but there's just not as much of it. This keeps its identity as an older game while keeping itself fresher for the new systems and computer engines. 

Not going to lie, I had to use a guide more than once when I couldn't remember where to find certain answers to certain puzzles. It was better to revisit it through text so you didn't give away the visual of finding the puzzle piece in the game itself. Sometimes you'll find answers in blood and sometimes you'll find evidence in some secrets that are fun to find throughout the Crazy Mind Mansion thing you're going through. 

I made it a point to find all of the scarab beetles that bring about the flashbacks. Everyone loves finding completions and this was one of the more satisfying. It shows images that your dad erased of your mind when you kill your mother by stabbing her to death. There was only one other time I was able to do this in the game, so this was a nice little welcome surprise. 

It really isn't a long game once you know what you're doing. Take that with the enhanced movement speed and it's almost a shame the game is so short otherwise. It's short because of the game's limitations and they used that to tighten up the scare sequences throughout D. Now, it is a graphically enhanced game for the mid 90's. It's obvious that I talk about D a lot with it being in my top 10 favorite Sega Saturn games. I only thought of it as having been reviewed before, in one of my first Sega Saturn articles ever written. It turns out that I have talked about this through favorites list, the sequel comparison and game comparison. I have mentioned it in several others as well as a statement on how to do horror correctly.  There really will never be a substitute for these 32 bit games and how crudely charming they look. The new port looks great and if you're interested in playing some old games, this is one that shouldn't go overlooked if you're looking for something different. It's best played in the dark, here in the season of Halloween. Just remember to break it out during the Virtua Month of Ghostly SPOOOOOOOOOOOKIES and everyone will finish the night with both of their wings. Bring back the Saturn Spookiness this season and don't step in the spikes.

Laura!!!!

Doomverse #22 - The New Quake

Welcome back to the Virtua Ghostly SPOOOOOOOOOOOOOOKIES!!! once again! We're rolling this out for 2025 and taking a look at one of the most awesome horror based First Person Shooters ever made. With Nine Inch Nails at the helm of the soundtrack and monsters at every turn, get ready to blast through the one and only Quake!

Quake has been covered a lot on Planet Virtua, and there are several reasons for this. It was a landmark game for the first person genre and opened up all new layers of gameplay and reality through unlocking the third dimension. Doom was much more limited in scope because of its 2.5D approach to FPS. Quake changed everything. It was hard work, but it was also a labor of love. This is why it is very refreshing that the game is still very alive to this day. People still play it, and that is obvious when you just open the game, get into a DM server and start lobbing grenades at N000000000bs!!!! 

In 2023, Quake got a whole new makeover. It's a win-win for all of the Quake fans, because they can still play the old version on Steam. Much like Doom 1 + 2, Quake opened up all of its maps and even offered up playing the fan made mods as well as the official mods. This new version is dirt cheap, even the PS5 version is available for 9.99 at the time of this article's writing. This includes the mod QDoom as well as several others that change the entire experience. 

The game looks amazing, even with a slightly shinier shell, it still retains the old polygons we fell in love with. Quake now has all of the official add-on levels and lets you select which level from each expansion you want to go. The movement is smoother and there's a lot less graphical lag. This includes whether you want to split screen and play a second player in Death Match or Co-op. You can play through the entire game with a second player and have access to all of the death match maps if you feel like blowing their head off. 

This also opened up internet servers that allowed players to go back to the Death Matching days of old. Quake has always had a great culture of multiplayer, and it's refreshing to see them open back up to a whole new crowd. This allowed old friends to get back in the ring and test their skills in blasting through metal! 

This is just the tip of the iceberg for the entire package. The add-ons you get with all of this and the downloading capabilities are through the roof. One game that uses the Quake engine, while giving it a complete makeover, is Slave Zero. This game is an entire different game, but it's still a good little first person shooter with some rather unique settings. They give the entire game new purpose and the levels are a lot of fun to play through. 

Quake was do for a bit of a remaster and this brought it about in style. If you owned Quake on Steam already, you got this update free. Yeah, ID Software games have been pretty generous with their newly refurbished games and I mean that in more ways than one. The downloadable content is free, you get to explore the entire game through level selects and it gives you a whole new outlook on how to play in Quake Multiplayer. 

Five Nights at Freddy's (2023) - The Video Game Horror Movie Ever

The FNAF franchise has been outside Planet Virtua's scope. This is mostly because those games just aren't the #1 horror games when it comes to interest. Yes, the lore is vast and interesting and the game itself is interesting in its gameplay mechanics. However, getting jumpscared every five minutes and building anxiety through cameras and impending doom just seems stressful over a long period of time. This didn't stop me from watching playthroughs and getting some good commentary thanks to Youtubers. Spoiler Alert for the FNAF movie.

I'd taken enough of Five Nights at Freddy's in order to be considered the FNAF movie demographic. The results of this movie's opening scenes are obviously more of a horror movie setup for our character to get the job of the security guard you play as in the game. This didn't bode particularly well because then there came the contrived plot involving his child who is also going to the pizzaria with the scary mechanical mascots. 

The first image we see in this movie is Freddy's brigade of mascots killing off a security guard. Now we get to see how they go after the child. Well, it turns out that these mascots are all children reincarnated, and the security guard has been having dreams about these particular children. Why this is happening is also quite contrived but they at least make an attempt to make it make sense. This man's brother was kidnapped when he was a kid, and somehow he is forcing himself to relive the same dream for ten years. Yes, it gets worse. 

So, these mascots are kids in spirit, so they end up connecting with the child and the father just kind of goes along with it. We see these animatronics kill other people, especially some strange sideplot where the man's ex-wife is trying to get him fired, so some people come and try and sabotage the entire pizza place. We know they're dangerous, but I suppose the father doesn't really know that. 

There are just so many horribly built story elements in this movie and the worst part is that they take the scare factor out of Freddy and his gang. We see entirely too much of them and they stop being scary after we see them chum about with the kid. There's something about some drawings being linked to their connection to being controlled by Springtrap, who turns out to be the guy who hired the security guard. Did I say contrived? I meant fated by the gods. 

So, the guy who hired the security guard turns out to be the man who kidnapped his brother. He also happens to be the guy who made the animatronics murderous in the first place. He kidnapped kids and put their souls into these robots. This whole time, these kids were speaking to the security guard in his dreams because they were kidnapped by the same guy as his brother. They didn't think this story through on several elements. They overthought the areas where they should have thought less and vice versa. They could have come up with a more stable plot than this. Thinking that a guy can relive the same dream over and over for so many years is just beyond suspension of disbelief. The stars align a few too many times for the taste of the story. The Freddy and crew kills are somewhat entertaining, but they are just not menacing enough to be considered scary at all. 

This movie has some good points in it. Matthew Lillard is good as the hiring manager, and there are some good scary scenes here and there. It's just a problem of too much exposure to the so-called scary entities. If they could make it more geared toward actual scares and maybe get out of the PG-13 comfort zone, it could be done. Why they decided to do away with the blood is a conundrum for a franchise that has such an obviously more mature demographic. This movie isn't terrible, but it certainly didn't impress FNAF fans. Even as a normal horror movie, it fails to turn any heads.

This article begins the Virtua Month of Ghostly SPOOOOOOOOOOOOKIES! Happy October, everyone! Get ready for an entire month of Halloween Mayhem!

Doom 3 (PS3 BFG Edition) - Darkness and Demons and Cubes. Oh My!

You're going to hear a lot about Doom 3 from a lot of people. What you can expect is, it's going to get very dark. Now, whether you prefer a flashlight or not is up to you, or the version of the game you're playing. Among the other Doom titles, this has always been seen as a black sheep, and for good reason. Where Doom began with fast paced action, heavy weaponry and tbe goriest blood, Doom 3 hiked up the franchise in a few ways, but it certainly wasn't the fast pacing. 

Doom 3 was obviously a showcase of ID's power. This was a peak in graphics technology. Not only was it fully 3D, but the detail was now brought to limits we never thought possible. Now, the problem with this at the time of its initial release was that conventional PC's in normal homes did not have the power to run this bombastically huge game. Not only did it take hours upon hours to load into the computer but loading up the game for the first time was the equivalent of suddenly pushing your computer into a 10K run. 

The graphics have aged quite well, especially for a game that wanted to remain very creepy and full of sudden attacks in shadowy spots. The pacing was brought way way down, and while the light was very limited, the flashlight was originally only selected as a separate weapon. You literally could not use another weapon with the flashlight, but we will be playing the BFG edition on the PS3. It is shoulder mounted and can be used with any weapon. A lot of people took issue with this, saying that it wasn't as hard and the mechanic was a good challenge in strategy and hand-eye coordination. I don't care, I like to see with flashlight, so flashlight good.

Doom 3 starts outs like Half-life did, with the day-in-the-life approach, like you're going to work. Only this time, you're reporting to a new station on Mars. After you go through some talking sessions and report to your new station, you start to see that things are wrong. Pretty soon, someone who talks very suspiciously opens a portal to Hell and demons begin to invade the entire ship. Sadly, this invasion involves lost souls. They're rather weak in this version, but they are equally as annoying. Imps in this version go well with the horror element. They gave them a very detailed monstrous form. The Mancubus is given a new, very body-horror inspired design. 

People will argue whether they like the new slow mechanics, where there aren't so many monster closets and there's more sneak attacks and small things coming to claw you or shoot you with fireballs. Pinkies are probably the ones that got the most sinister appearance among the others. Navigating your way through the space station, having to go outside airlocks and into the dead of Mars space, while occasionally taking on one or a small pack of demons. 

Your guns are up and down. The shotgun in Doom 3 is notoriously disappointing among its peers. The shotgun is a proud heritage to the franchise that originated the FPS awesome shotgun heritage. The missile launcher and the chaingun, they're both good and up to par with Doom's standards. The plasmagun is not among my favorites but it's not bad, especially when you first get it and have a whole new pocket for lot's of ammunition. Ammo is kind of scarce, especially at the beginning of the game. You need to be able to melee some of the demons or even just count on the pistol, which is a hard ask, I understand. The BFG is back and this time you need to power it up. If you power it up too much, it will explode and kill everything, including you. 

The imps have a nice visceral character design this time around, and seems much more like a horror movie monster. This is probably why this is the design the Doom horror movie leaned into this look for their imp. The pinky also has a much more organic look, even having a much more sickly, gangly look with a whiter color to it. Everything in this title has been shaped more into something that would come out of Clive Barker. The gore gushes much like the original, only this time it's much more realistic and running with a hot new engine that allows some very interesting shredding of demon meat.

Might we also take a moment to appreciate the design of the Hellknight. This is the time that the game separated them from their Baron of Hell roots. It made them into more like a gorilla and has them leap at you and punch you. In Doom 3, they are pretty deadly, and usually require a good rocket at a distance and a chaingun up close. The fact that Doom 4 used the same character design for their game is a statement of good taste. 

Dr. Betruger has come out as the one who summoned the demons onto the base and used its human souls to fuel the demon's take over. Basically, now you need to kill all of the demons on the base and you need to go to hell to make sure they stay dead. You come across what is known as the Soulcube, and you use it to kill monsters and get their souls. Once it is fueled, it is the most powerful weapon and the only weapon that can kill the Cyberdemon. Oh, yes, the Cyberdemon has made a return and he's... not great. Honestly, I consider this one of the lesser Cyberdemon designs and the Soulcube makes the final battlle way too easy. 

Going through the science labs throughout the game and opening the safes with all of the medical and ammunition stuff you could need is a lot of fun, for a while. This game isn't overly long, but with the pacing, it does seem to deag in some areas. Some people will say that this is a great game, just not a great Doom game. The levels in Hell are much more Doom focused, and there's more demons to fight with more ammo, but that's basically at the end of the game. This is good when you consider it an offshoot rather than a full on Doom game. Many consider Doom 64 more of an installment to the franchise than this one. Now that computers and consoles can handle the game better, it's far more manageable and good for a small bit of FPS survival horror. 

This is especially true when you're entering the season of the virtua SPOOOOOOOOOOKIES and Ghosties and Boo!!! It's always fun to bring Doom into the fray, and now the Halloween season continues. Now, spread the season and the thrills! Just be careful who you startle from the shadows, some people carry chainsaws. Virtua VROOOOM!!!! 

Phasmaphobia vs Demonologist - A Haunting Spectrum

We've had our stint in the horror genre here on Planet Virtua. We've talked about what to do and what not to do when it comes to the scary stuff in video games and it has been a nice ride as such. Well, here recently, I have found a group of friends that enjoy the horror games that you play online. Our first journey into the spooky stuff was Phasmaphobia, released in 2020. While it is titled with the word that means "Fear of Ghosts", there is a bit of a problem with that. 

Phasmaphobia can be described as darkly toned. That's about it, honestly. It has a good dark tone with a haunted setting. Beyond that, it has little tiny experiences that differ here and there, but not a whole lot. You go and investigate scary haunted locations together, bringing in a few Ghostbuster type gadgets that give you indications of what kind of ghost you are dealing with. A lot of the time, it's mostly just breathing steam when the temperatures get cold and the lights being turned off. When all of the light sources turn off, you just go to the fuse box and turn it back on. 

If you are lucky, you will see a specter of some sort. That occurrence is so rare, though, and I played through at least 20 whole rounds with only being able to take a picture of one ghost. The normal experience included the lights turning off, the doors suddenly closing and maybe something falling from a table. The ghost activity is so scarce, sometimes you'll just start yelling at the ghost through the speaker. You can insult them for hours and nothing will happen. 

Then, you're dead. Oh yes, the ghost will kill you if they feel inclined and that will be the end of it. This can be privy to absolutely nothing and no one. You will just see hands come around your neck and then a little image before you're dead and talking to your friends as a ghost. I was the Kenny of the group and died the most times by far. Sometimes, I wouldn't even see anything outside of the lights turning off every so often. They didn't even think to add scary sound effects, it all just get so mundane. The worst experience out of everything was in the camp ground. 

This is based on a money system and you need to pay for flashlights and other equipment. You NEED the flashlights and everyone will want one of their own. If not, you'll see black. You'll see a void of dark empty space and you'll run into things the whole time. In the camp ground, with the wide open area, add a truckload of lag on top of all of that, while not being able to decipher where you're going. It took me about six or seven minutes just to find my way back to the camp ground with the van to get out of that level because we were so sick of seeing camping tents and the game chugging to a TERRIBLE game-breaking framerate. If I am complaining about the framerate, something is horribly wrong. 

Now, take all of the good things of Phasmaphobia, with the flashlights, scary tone and setting, lights turning off and occasional ghost sightings and turn it up to 11! That is Demonologist. This game has better graphics, more customizable characters and SCARY THINGS. You are another 2 - 4 players (with a singleplayer setting!) but this time, you actually have horrific events, scary sounds and actual tangible things to do.

In Demonogist, you can walk into a room, get a dimming flashlight while the ghost starts laughing and appearing in a wedding dress. This, on top of scary babies appearing all over a room and some haunting laughter coming from nowhere. This freaked all of us out and made us want to hide in the cabinet, which can only hide two people. In this version, there are still sudden deaths, but at least now you get to have some tension where you think you're going to see floating objects in a room, a TV turning on and off along with a fireplace turning on and off. 

You feel the menace by these ghosts, and some of them are more aggressive than others. These ghosts have actual characteristics that differ from one another that range further than simple cold temperatures and maybe more than just a flashing light on your ghost detector. Sometimes, they can be a child running across the hall and making you wet your pants. Not that that happened to me at any point. It was a friend... MOVING ON!

Demonologist isn't without its own faults, obviously. One major downfall it has is that the only map you can get to in the first level and it takes a long while to level up in this game. Even with that in mind, this game walks all over Phasmaphobia by a very long margin. There were so many more instances where you feel like you're in a haunted house with a very nefarious spirit trying to make you leave. 

Another problem they both have is that the ghosts don't always differ all that much with how they give evidence to what they are. In both games, one of your objectives is to figure out what type of ghost you are dealing with. It's not always clear, but to Demonologist's credit, it's mostly hard in the beginning because you don't have a whole lot of items to decipher the puzzles. 

Phasmaphobia had some good points here and there, but they were so few and far in between, it became a bit of a slog to get through a lot of the locations. With just one level starting out in Demonologist, it was already ten times the experience with all of the images and dread you feel from the haunting entities. It's a clear winner between the two, but by all means, try them both. Just remember to bring your flashlight and a full canteen of water.

Dark Seed (Saturn) - You Put Weird in My Weird!

 

There come times in our lives when we truly never knew what to expect when we got into a game. The internet has said things about this game, but experiencing it for yourself is a trip and a half. If you enjoy Alex Grey or Salvador Dalí, then you may also enjoy the work of H.R. Giger. This is an artist who has a very distinct style that many have attempted, but few have successfully replicated. If you look closely, you will notice that his art has details upon details to a very minute degree. His art is very surrealistic and strange, and he is also the only reason anyone talks about Dark Seed to this day. 

It is very fortunate that I couldn't find the medicine that cures Mike of his headache. The entire first part of the game, he will complain of having a headache ad nauseum. He does not stop talking about this head ache and this review could have been three paragraphs long, had I not looked up a walkthrough very quickly. Apparently, the game cannot be played unless you read a walkthrough. Even watching a walkthrough for this game could make you miss very small details that you will need. Though, I did also watch walkthroughs on youtube for the English dub rather than the Japanese version I was playing on the Saturn.

This game is weird, creepy, and quite poorly made. It may be looked upon fondly for certain features, but the gameplay is quite distracting and drives a nail into its enjoyment factor. If you miss one single detail, or forget to put objects in certain places, then you will need to go and backtrack again and again! This is all under the clock, because you just so happened to have an alien fetus in your brain. In three days, and the game will keep close track, the alien will hatch and the horrific image of the alien hatching will rear its very disgusting head. Yes, this is really terrible gameplay, hence the walkthrough.

Mike has to be one of the worst characters you have the displeasure of controlling. His horrific dialogue grates against the ears. It can be rather hilarious in some cases. He is so awkward, and so are a lot of the townspeople, and sometimes that makes for some comedic scenes. Mike will talk to himself. This can be seen as a sign of brilliance, but it isn't and he does it entirely too much. His observations are really dumb, but did elicite a chortle at times. Some guy tells you that he wants to hang out with you once you buy a bottle of alcohol. This has the wonderful affect of him taking a drink of it and then walking away. The whole time, you were waiting to grab the stick he was throwing for his dog. 

Once you get to the Dark World, the artwork is rather impressively implimented. It obviously took a hit in quality, no matter what version of this game you play. Still, he was apparently happy with how it turned out and it does set a nice tone for its segments. That's not to say the game looks bad overall. As point-and-click games go, this one looks rather solid. It's clearly an older game and had a lot of limitations, but the developers obviously worked hard on it. The problem is that the Dark World, which is the most interesting part, is rarely in the game. Later in the story, it doesn't do a great deal to cure the slog that this game becomes. 

This is not a long game, nor is it a hard game if you know what items to get and what to do in each scene. Apparently, this was a very common problem for a lot of people. This calls into question, why is it on best horror games or point and click games? Apparently the development was something of a ridiculous maze of mice all going every which way, but either way, the end product doesn't justify it on any other list than, perhaps, the strangest. H.R. Giger's art is fascinating, though, and the world they portray really seems like it could have used some more exploring. While Dark Seed 2 does return to the world, H.R. Giger did not return with the artwork. That game is remembered for very different reasons. Either way, Planet Virtua stays away from the Dark World. Virtua Threat. 

Corpse Killer (Saturn) - Dead Inside Edition

Happy Halloween, Gamer heads!! This is our final review in the MONTH OF VIRTUA SPOOooOooOOooOOOOKIES! Get ready for some real horror! And I do mean horror because this game is horrible! So, just sit back, relax, and at least act scared.

It is no secret that Full Motion Video is the smooch of death for 99% of games "graced" with its presence. Myst still has a fanbase, but anyone will tell you that the acting in the game's FMV segments are so terrible they're great. The bad acting is infamous in these terrible parts of games. Developers normally just stepped in and did the acting themselves to nightmarish effect. Then you've got games that actually got Z-List movie actors in their games. Yeah, that's what Corpse Killer did. You would think this would improve the acting to some degree, but you would be very, very wrong. In fact, to some degree, it's somehow even worse. 

Among this cast of actors, they got the late Vincent Shiavelli, who actually has quite the long filmography, although most of it is about as low grade as you would expect. He is seen through a lot of this game and his scenes are a master class of bad. He fits right in with the rest of these performers and WOW there is a lot to unpack here. These cut scenes are very hard to watch. You will cringe your face into another dimension and you won't need Vegeta to do it (if you get that reference, you're officially in the cool club). It's obvious that these are all first takes unless something catastrophic occurred. The game developers should have worked a few more takes into the budget, because even the ZOMBIES are over acting here. 

That's just the FMV cut scenes! Believe it or not, all of it is technically full motion video! The characters in the gameplay scenes are still real people, they are simply cut outs that are slapped onto the background. They run toward you in a VERY unconvincing way while you shoot the screen with an ever shooting machine gun. You shoot the cheap looking zombies and they make stock screaming noises in an ever revolving loop. 

The zombies are just people in cheap makeup. Some of them just have regular clothes on and some of them look so cheap, the devs may as well have just reached through the screen and slapped you to kill your immersion. This is beyond awful! 

The game is also ridiculously easy almost 90% through it. Then the difficulty spikes to levels beyond reckoning. Lulling you into a coma only to inject this level of suck is a bit of a jerk move. Seriously, you would be hard pressed to stay conscious amid the constant gunfire, weird screams and terrible cutscenes. There are different types of ammo, explosives and a couple of other things to try and spice things up. Guess how well it works. Go on, guess...

Anyway, this is one of the worst games on the Sega Saturn or any of the other systems it was on upon its original release. There's a label on the Graveyard Edition that says it's one of the top 20 games of the year. This is a blatant lie and I'd be surprised if they didn't get sued for false advertising. You may notice this game was on both of my top worst Saturn games lists. It's pretty obvious why FMV's didn't really stand the test of time and after the fifth generation of games, they became more and more scarce. Thank GOD! If you really want to play this game out of morbid curiosity, it is available on Steam at the time of this article's writing. By all means, it's Halloween and the terrible nature of this game is quite scary. Have a ball and make it spooooooooky!

7 Spooooooooooky Saturn Games!

 

Happy Halloween, from Planet Virtua! You want to know about horror? When you think of scary video games, you probably wouldn't look back to the 32-bit era. Whether it be the lesser quality of graphics or the overarching tone, a lot of people pass this off as nothing special. Do not listen to them.

There is a lot to love in terms of dark tones when it comes to the Saturn. Here in the Month of SpoooooooOOOOoooooooooOOOOOOoOoOkiness, we'll be looking at such games. Not all of these will be games that are meant to outright frighten you. Some of these are simply games that have interesting monster designs or a tone that fits the horror genre. I do solidly believe that some of these are genuinely devoted to a creep factor. These games are not in any real order, hence why none of them are numbered. Now that we've got that out of the way, on with the virtua blood!

                                                                         House of the Dead

We start things off with an action railshooter! It is not especially scary in its setup, but it genuinely has some terrible monsters in it. We're not just talking about zombies, either. These range from swamp beasts made of algae, undead piranhas and armored monsters made of sludge cream filling. The flavors of monsters range far and wide and you will be hard pressed to count how many different types there are. How scary is it? Well, not especially scary, all things considered. It does have that wonderful atmosphere, though and it makes up for a lot of that with gore! Shoot these monsters apart with a hand gun and watch their chunks fly! Just try not to shoot innocent people, that's not the kind of gore we're supposed to have.

                                                                         Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Another entry in the action genre, this time for a platformer. Anything from skeletons to strange flower monsters spitting acid are on display here. The bosses are especially horrific! The very first one you fight is Dracula in a formless, horrific transformation! This is another title with such a wide range of monsters and ghosts, that your horror quota will be met in just a few hours of playing, whatever that quota may be. There are even monsters here that either have no classification or just flat out doesn't matter because they'll eat your face anyway! The castle is full of heinous beasts and you must kill the lot of them. Oh, crap, they respawned. Now, do it again!

                                                                                         D

Cutting right to the heart of the matter, D encapsulates the genre of horror to its max level. Get yourself in a dark room with this game in the forefront and there is a very good chance that you will at least feel some unsettling vibes. While it may be light on the monsters, it certainly fits every bill when it comes to atmosphere. There is still a lot to look at and the place you're in still feels haunted as all hell. D is an all around fun time and it is short enough for you to play on Halloween if you're looking for something to do.

                                                                                        Doom

That's right, I said it and I'm not taking it back. Doom is a game for any day and Halloween welcomes it with open arms. With such a large array of demons to squash, how could you not add it among the ranks of horrific titles? It doesn't have the creep factor unless you find yourself in a dark area with imps and cacodemons creeping within. There's enough blood here to fill a lake and the river that runs through it. It's horror, alright. It's just the type of horror you can pump a shotgun at.

                                                                                   Quake

If we have Doom, we may as well have this gib-soaked title. It may have guns and explosions, but there's also a vast number of monsters throughout. Not only the monsters, but also the atmosphere and the sinister tones that the setting enhances just spells out that Lovecraftian, gothic vibe that let's you settle into it and rocket jump straight into its face! Just look 

                                                                                  Resident Evil

The first game to coin the phrase "Survival Horror" and for good reason. BioHazard has got to be one of the most influential titles to come out of the horror gaming genre. It has enough clones and copycats as such. It is known to the rest of the world for its zombies but it sports a number of different creatures both of its own making and ones you would see around the genre. You could be fighting a Licker, sure, but you could also be fighting a giant spider! Its list of terrifying crratures knows no bounds!

                                                                                     Hexen

With dark castles, monsters at every turn and a gothic fantasy atmosphere, you better believe this title belongs here. Hexen is a very challenging game, don't you doubt, but the level design and aesthetics make it look so sinister, especially with two headed brutes and winged flame creatures flying overhead. There is a darkness to this game that is fun to explore. Just try not to get gored by giant lizards.

Now, you may be wondering why you don't see titles such as Deep Fear or Battle Monsters. Well, those games are going on a different list. I simply need to work out the details of said list. Until then, these are the games I would suggest for a night in with either yourself or some friends to enjoy. "Enjoy" being the key word here. Don't worry about such menial details as to why Horror Tour isn't included here. Oh who am I kidding, you're not wondering that. Virtua Boo!