7 Sorta Spooooooky Saturn Games!

 Happy Halloween, Gamer heads! On this installment of the Month of Spooky Spooks, we're going to take a look at games that are not getting any real recommendations. Either the game's quality is rather subpar or their attempts at being scary fall flat. Either way, they're Saturn titles, so they at least get the minimum recommendation.

                                                                Deep Fear

Of course, we would see at least one Resident Evil clone on this list. There are those who enjoy this title and you can roll with that as far as it will go. I never found its creatures all that scary, nor did I ever feel any real atmospehere radiating from this title. The voice acting and glitchy graphics pretty much killed my immersion on that front.

                                                            Battle Monsters

If you told me that I could dress up in a Halloween costume and becone immortalized in video game form, I would be 100% on board! So, there's no judgment to the people posing as characters in this title. The game itself, oh yeah, plenty of judgment. The monsters aren't scary, the controls are horrific and you can win once you find that perfect spam attack. Go nuts.

                                                            Death Crimson

Probably the worst railshooter on the system, and probably worse than a lot of other genres on top of that. This game is notorious among old school gamers for some of the most terrifying graphics, atrocious hit detection and all around nauseating gameplay. So, if you looking for a bad game for Halloween, it's worth a look.

                                                            Alien Trilogy

Probably one of the least bad games on the list but still not really striking that horror chord. Alien simply made some levels, put aliens in it with some guns and called it a day. Okay, that's pretty harsh, but this title invokes more boredom than it does terror. It's an alright title, it just needed a bit more spice.

                                                                Horror Tour

You've probably never heard of this title and there are many reasons for that. For one thing, it was released only in Japan. For another, it can hardly be considered a game because there's really no gameplay to speak of. Like the name suggests, it's more of a point and click site seeing tour around a gothic castle. There's some talking paintings, some big spiders here and there and there's a witch that speaks Japanese. Beyond that, there's not much. But it's SPOOOOOOOKYYYYY!

                                                Alone in the Dark 2: Jack is Back

A recent addition to my entourage of games. This one is just bad. I dare say you pretty much need to learn fire is hot by getting constantly burned here. You die in pretty much every scene because without knowing what's happening, things can kill you from off screen because of the sluggish tank controls and slow movements in general. The game is boring, but as stated earlier, giving zombies tommy guns is quite the novelty.

                                                                    Casper

Movie tie-in games are thankfully a thing of the past but they did have their gems. This was not one of them. It is immensely boring. Floating around the house as a ghost who can't fly through walls, you will be hard pressed to figure out the control scheme and apply it in an effective manner. The ghostly trio lack any of their jerk charms from the movie and Casper is just as dull as ever. Good luck getting a remake.

So, there you have it. Halloween is here at the time of writing but it is time now to wait for next year's Month of Saturn Spookiness. No matter what day it is, it is time to plan for the next year. Halloween is the best time of the year for a lot of reasons and this is no exception. Remember to stay safe, enjoy the season, stay with family and friends and drink zombies.

Back 4 Blood after being Left 4 Dead too!

 

Welcome back to the Month of VIRTUA SPEWWWWWKIESandKNEES! The month continues with some titles that are either loved or hated, depending on which side of the spectrum you sit! 

Sometimes, there comes the best intentions when it comes to the more thoughtful developers. Sometimes, it seems like they know what people want and know that people will be willing to pay money for it. Left 4 Dead had two amazingly therapeutic games when it came to killing miles and miles of zombies. Using the Half-life engine along with a random numbers generator, you're basically going through a post apocalyptic world where zombies roam the streets unchecked. You need to get to the safe points and escape routes to survive. 

The best part about L4D and its sequel, is that you get some very nice weapons with which to do so. You can go guns akimbo with the pistols, use an awesome magnum and some assault rifles that truly shred! The zombies give off plenty of blood and there are hordes of them to get through. Then there are the special zombies, and they can be something of a problem in more ways than one.

Special zombies tend to do a bunch of damage, which normally isn't a problem. When it comes to Jockeys, tiny zombies that jump on you, Hunters, big zombies that jump on you, or Smokers, smoking zombies that use TENTACLES, the problem is that they do a lot of damage because they don't get off. The charger in the second game bashes you against the ground and can't get off of you either! All of these special zombies require a second player or CPU to get them off of you by killing them or breaking their hold. 

These annoyances can be a very large problem because sometimes they could actually kill you in a big hurry if you somehow accidentally got away from your partners or something like that. If this is all happening during a zombie raid, the same problem emerges. It would have been nicer if we had an actual chance to fend them off ourselves with a threat of more damage rather than it being a death sentence if we're left alone. There are too many opportunities to be blindsided and the unfair advantage can be very frustrating. 

When you put all of that along with random zombies and horde triggers, you get a nice satisfying conclusion with a tiny bit of giant zombies and one-hit kill witches scattered through-out. Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 have been celebrated for many who love the video games based around zombies. The second game came out with new levels, new characters and weapons! People loved it! You could customize it with wonderful mods downloaded from Steam! Yes! Now for Left 4 Dead 3!

Silence followed. Steam came open and the company basically stopped making video games. Valve stopped making Half-life 3 as well and we have a lot to be thankful for as a result, but so many have lamented what could have been. The Left 4 Dead series has been dead for a very long time, but then there came a beacon of hope!

Back 4 Blood was obviously meant to be a spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead, but it just wasn't very good at it. On the surface, this new title came out and it was everything we ever wanted. There were team zombie matches, co-op sessions connected together, PvP with zombies and shooters, upgrades! While the upgrades were all free with gameplay, this new game was not without its paid content in the ways of cosmetics. 

The game, overall, felt completely off. Left 4 Dead wasn't without its staged sections of combat in the ways of burning fences and opening garage doors, but this felt much more tedious. Back 4 Blood's weapon system and supply purchase felt like it was trying to be different without adding anything new. The problem is that the weapons have turned a lot more into looter shooter rewards. 

Left 4 Dead better weapons because they were constantly good quality, rather than straight up having a damage system like Borderlands. Some people liked this mechanic, but it seemed to distract a little from killing the actual zombies with the bullets. There didn't need to be a lot more thought put into each hit. Complicating everything about this game was somewhat offputting, especially with how fast paced it was supposed to be. 

Grinding in such a fast paced game is not so good a look. Roleplaying games need to be a little more languid in their pace so that you can concentrate on your armor and weapons. Games like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy have a much more constant pace because this is what is presented and it gives you time to put more thought into it. Back 4 Blood gives you time to concentrate on this between killing zombies, but sometimes you need to deal with the items and stats with a horde nipping at your heels. 

The card sections were a mistake. Let's call it what it was. All of these things about powering up your character and hyping up all of your numbers for the biggest numbers distracts terribly from what matters. The modern touches on this game were already bad, but I'm going to be absolutely honest, I didn't even touch the cards for the most part. I just put on some of them that sounded good and that could have affected my gameplay somehow. It could have made the game harder or nerfed the zombies, it probably didn't matter.  

Losing your weapons and items is a far bigger problem here with such a strict system where keeping it loose and simple with L4D proved far superior. B4B wasn't outwardly bad, it just wasn't worth putting more time into. It skated in with better graphics and bigger zombies but brought nothing actually interesting to the table. Sticking more to the old system of the Valve RNG zombies and adding something new on top of that would have proven more beneficial. As it stands, they added more layers to the cake and now it leans awkwardly and cutting off a piece is more worrying. Left 4 Dead 2 is far simpler, you don't need to worry about stats and items every time you want to play a level and you don't need to worry so much about competing with other players. 

They had some good intentions, it was just a poor execution. Killing zombies is a lot of fun, but it also doesn't need to involve a great deal of brain power. When you're trying to replicate an old game, try and pay more attention to the elements that people actually liked. A longer gestation period could have helped a lot with the overall mechanic structure. There were some cool giant zombies and some change could have been very beneficial to a 3rd Left 4 Dead game. Not to mention, an awesome magnum pistol selection wouldn't go amiss, while we're talking style. Break the zombies to pieces, zombie horde pieces! 

Castlevania Resurrection - Dead Before Dreamcast

 

As we continue the Virtua Month of SPEEEEWWWKIES!!!!! 2024, we come to talk about a game that never made it to an official release. Castlevania Resurrection was meant for a Dreamcast release and for one reason or another, it never happened. Then, for some strange reason, out of nowhere, the developer comes out and gives everyone the game files that were actually complete. We were given a few levels to play through and I'm here to tell you, if you don't mind some jank gameplay with some terrible glitches, this is actually a pretty fun ride. 

Pretty much, imagine playing Legacy of Kain, a nice fantasy third person. Sonia Belmont has had a game of her own once in Castlevania Legends for the Gameboy, and this was supposed to be her advent to the 3D world. Well, it's nice to know we got to see her journey there in some form, even if it's not the way it was planned. Pretty much, these are unfinished levels and they can easily be burned onto a Dreamcast CD. Is there any real point to them? No, but is it entertaining? Very much!

The worst thing that happens in this game is you get to the end of one the levels and you accidentally fall through the wall or the floor. It happens on occasion. Obviously, there was no QA testing and they made these levels as solid as they could before someone pulled the plug. It's kind of amazing the stuff that did get done, though. Some of these levels are fairly well detailed. 

These mages are probably the worst enemy they have, aside from the random bat that pelts you at the beginning of a level. These guys will fly around you and continuously bombard you with energy orbs. You can only fight one of them at a time and they take forever to kill! Seriously, then one of them will randomly inflate into a giant size. 

Why does he do this? I don't know, but then he stops moving. I think these guys were given some sort of growth transformation and it just never took full form? If that's the case, that's probably the strangest use of an enemy I've ever seen. It's bad enough that they attack you in such a coordinated fashion, but then transforming like that just seems a bit excessive. 

You remember the skull stacks, right? Well, they're here too, and they are used quite a bit. They're a great callback, but there's also a portion of a level (the START of a level) where there's three of these stacks guarding an entrance like prison bars. BIT excessive!

Next, we move onto this one temple level with some of the worst level design I've seen in a very long time. I say that because the entire thing seemed to be custom built to make the player very angry. You start off by unleashing this big huge three headed snake. Well, obviously, it's unfinished, so you can go back and push it back into its passage. So long as you don't mind getting pelted a few times by the snake heads, you can manage to push it all the way back.

Well, that's all well and good, but then, when you run away from the snake thing, it's toward the camera. So you're running blind, much like the Crash Bandicoot rolling boulders of old. This is bad enough, but then they had to put HANDS in the floor to grab you and slow you down while also hurting you. Seriously? What? Obstacles are one thing, but grabbing the ankle? It's bad enough when you have to duck and jump. Well, the good thing is that the snake isn't very fast. But either way, the level seems deeply flawed on a design perspective. It really seemed like the weakest of the bunch.

Now, do I think this game had promise? Absolutely! There are some very good 3rd person platformer/hack and slash games out there. Castlevania could have made a very good 3D platformer before the whole Lord of Shadow business. Do I think this would have been an award winning Game of the Year? It was possible, but that's a bit of a stretch. There would definitely need to be some QA on some of the concepts they attempt in this game. They could have introduced a story in there, but it really doesn't look like there's a place for that.  It all starts in front of a castle's plaza and enemies are all around you from the very beginning.

The game has its promise, but it also looks like it could have gone very wrong very quickly. There are questionable elements aside from the three-headed snake that warrant a little attention. One of them being the enemies, namely the final boss battle. The gorgan (it could be Medusa, I don't know) is a decent boss battle, but not for a FINAL boss. The only reason I give this credit is because this level could very easily be just another level. Just because there is a boss, does not mean she is the final one. If she is only one of a few bosses, this could definitely have worked. 

It's just that she has one form, then a head form and then you kill it and she dies, turning into an orb. There's really not much else to it. You need to open her chamber by whipping the candles around the cathedral and that's the level. It was funny this time around because I fell into the lava and it didn't kill me. It was still a little annoying because there was no way out and wraiths kept coming down and attacking me relentlessly. Still, I could live down in lava and that's pretty cool.

Do I wish this game was made? Yes, but I also would not get my hopes up. Castlevania had its flaws from the beginning, as anyone who has played the lineup will tell you. I simply love the fact that someone who made this game came out and gave it to the public as a show of good faith. Castlevania Ressurection honestly could have done with a bit more creative enemies though. There's only so many ways you can work in "Acolyte of Darkness" and make it work so many times. 

With a bigger lineup of enemies and a few more levels, this could have been a good, even great game if they worked out the bugs and polished it up. It didn't NEED Dracula, but it could have done with a few lesser vampire enemies. There were ghosts and skeletons, and they're always nice. There isn't much of a chance that this was going to be better than Symphony of the Night, but it definitely could have been a contender for the best of the 3D Castlevanias. There's really not a whole lot of strong contenders there, unless you count Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Even then, that's more 2.5D. Still, what we have is a nice little snack at no extra charge. If you want this, you're welcome to find it and download it at your own leisure. It's free. Thrown a Virtua Bone.

Casper (Saturn) - The Friendly Lump

Welcome back, Virtua fans, to The Neptune err Virtua Month of Saturn SPEEEEEWWWWWBOOBOOBOO!!!! Get ready for the worst scare of all! The horrors of the movie tie-in games! Nuu! 

The Sega Saturn was in its hayday during a strange period in gaming history. It was a very experimental period where large corporations and movie studios were a lot less tentative. While movie tie-ins were not new by any means, Casper came out when these games were released on every single port they could get their hands on. Anytime you looked at a game ad in a magazine or a comic book, you would see several different cartridges and/or CD's with the various coverarts for every system. Casper was released on the SNES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Playstation, Sega Saturn, 3DO (strangely, the final game for the system) and PC! This was the norm for back in those days, but this was around the time when they stopped doing that and started releasing them on just two or three instead. With the 3D era coming in full force, games were becoming much harder and more costly to make. 

Casper didn't seem to have the problem of having an expensive development, though. While it does boast a semi-unique isometric puzzler gameplay, it is still very much considered a 2D game. The graphics do what they set out to do, the graphical art is quite nice and the ambience of the level works, that's about the most credit you can give the whole game. 

Beyond that, this game is a lot of fluff with a whole lot of no content. You fly around the levels looking for puzzle pieces, keys to get to said puzzle pieces and find secrets. While resistance to get these puzzle pieces is rather scant, there are places in the game where you need to contend with the uncles. 

The level with Uncle Fatso, if I may be frank, startled the life out of me, pun intended. After going through rooms of nothing but stillness and finding pieces of a painting, Fatso came out of nowhere and began chasing me. This level became some of the most fun in the game and was something of an iconic moment, because after that, it was more bland, lifeless level. The puzzle pieces take a while to find if you don't know where to go or what key opens which door. This is one of those games where they had to make it cryptic and slow-going to elongate it and make it "worth your while".

If you've read my Top 20 Worst Games of the Saturn list, you'll know that I have placed this game in a rather dishonorable spot. There's really no other way to put it. This game is a slog to get through and playing it over a long period of time can very quickly become the cure for sleep deprivation. Aside from a few places where you need to deal with the uncles, there's very little to get excited about. Even the uncles aren't anything. Aside from Fatso, the others are just slow death traps that follow you around. 

You've got the mansion and you've got the hedge maze in the backyard. Those are the two primary locations in this game and the levels are dizzying. Keeping up with where you've been and what samey room you've been in to get what puzzle piece is enough to make you go crosseyed if this is not your prefered genre. If you're looking for a scary puzzler with lot's of intrigue take this out of your Saturn immediately and put in D. This game is bland, tasteless and reaks of bad punny one-liners and vague ties to a movie that may be nice to watch on Halloween once in a while. This game should be tested before selecting as a common haunt. Virtua Ghost Flies!

AAA Gaming Publishers - An Industry with No Accountability

 

The face of the gaming industry has become bruised and battered over the course of the past few years, and they have no one but themselves to blame. Individuals have come out of their shells, taking to social media in order to berate and shame their own customers in some feeble attempt to guilt them into buying games that are clearly undercooked and under developed. These individuals think that, just because their games feature "represented characters" and "forward thinking ideas for a modern audience", they can hide behind a shield of identity politics in order to shame anyone who would point out their flaws. 

It has been proven time and time again that these people have bought into an idea that has nothing to do with gaming. They accepted money from a certain company or companies that push agendas that have nothing to do with the game and they are willing to steer their titles in some new direction that undermined their previous efforts. The games have become shallow shells of themselves and characters we once loved have become nothing but symbols of a narrative that has no place in escapism. These beloved characters will now gladly step aside for brand new characters to take up their mantles and replace them as the new poster child for their properties while the originals fade into the background. 

Such an idea that games would accept these ill-gotten millions of dollars just to preach a message to the audience is akin to Popeye eating spinach when a fight is going bad, only to start punching himself in the face. Rather than trusting the game designers to push out a decent product, publishers trust that all of this money would bolster their chances of gaining new fans of a new audience that does not really exist. Once the game becomes ill received, it now becomes publishers' and developers' jobs to run damage control. They proceed to call their fanbases and audience names such as "racist", "sexist" or any other word with "ist" or "phobic", in order to play the victim and make people think they are under attack. What is actually happening is fans of the intellectual property are not liking what they are seeing in game trailers and abstaining from buying the games because they have tastes that are not being met. 

It is not a hard concept to hire writers to write a story that goes along with the lore and the plot of the original and continues it in a natural way. It is not difficult to imagine developers working toward a goal of making a game with controls and graphics that suit a certain standard for the game they are creating. In many cases, it sounds more like games either run out of money or do not have the budget they were aiming for, so they turn to people that offer them the money at the expense of the game itself. 

Suddenly, character designs will change to a more watered down version or unappealing rendition of what they once were. Characters that fans loved suddenly needed to cover themselves from head to toe, get breast reductions and gain a holier than thou attitude toward any want of sex appeal. Characters are race swapped in order to go along with trends and many of them are gender swapped, resulting in becoming unrecognizable. This is not because this company actually cares about this demographic, but because they think that they will be praised with sales from pandering to a more widespread audience. Instead of creating something new for their narrative or creating a whole new property, they feel the need to change what is already there to suit the points they didn't need to make in the first place.

The simple fact is that the ones who were once willing to pay for these games are left scratching their heads at these decisions. The more they look into these changes, the more it becomes obvious that companies have gone out of their way to please a minority that never wanted the game to begin with. Then, when sales go bad, it is suddenly up to everyone involved with the project to either to run interference on this trending failure or go completely silent as they struggle to meet expectations with their patches and/or downloadable content in order to try and bolster interest. 

When you stand back and look at the forest for the trees, you can see the blatant detriment that this has had on the industry. Audiences are now left wondering why these companies are not seeing it for themselves. The heads of the company are not listening to their own player base and the ones at the management level take all of the flak because they need to be vocal in their disdain to any opposition and even their own clientele. They are unwilling to have any self-reflection and only look at the numbers as they dwindle into the red, hoping that throwing more money at it will fix the problem. They are only feeding the fire that is burning the industry down while continuously accepting large amounts of money in the name of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Beloved characters have become shells of their former selves. Now they wholly embrace the idea that they talk in ways they never did. They make decisions that go against the very foundation with which they were created. Characters can suddenly be changed however the "creatives" want them to be changed and anyone who questions any of these changes are no longer allowed to speak on the fans' behalf. Fans who question it with logic are instantly labled as "toxic fans".

People once devoted to a gaming franchise are being silenced for their devotion. Their loyalty to a wide spread franchise is being over-looked. AAA Gaming Publishers needed a pay raise and didn't care what kind of commity they were inviting into their writing room. This has caused their games to become unrecognizable in a lineup to previous titles in their respective franchises. The tone deaf beaurocratic big wigs of these companies keep telling their teams to go full steam whilst never listening to a word of criticism from fans who once paid their bills. 

If any of this sounds familiar, then you know what I'm talking about. Audiences are no longer allowed to negatively comment on the look of characters, nor they allowed to comment on any of the changes. Fans of long-running intellectual properties are only supposed to praise them for their physical identities and anything they don't like about their personalities are nothing but white noise in the eyes of whoever is pushing this way of thinking. Whether they're pushing it for money or some shallow need for opposition is irrelevent. This is a trend that is killing brands that fans once loved.

This is an expansion of the previous article that stated you should never bow down to this idea and surrender your sense of standards. If it is obvious that the greed and hubris of a company has stepped in a direction not to your liking, you have no obligation to humor them. Point out what is wrong with these changes. Give your opinions of how a story could have been better and what plotholes they so obviously ignored. If you don't like a character, it does not matter why you don't like that character, reject them. That is your perogotive. You do not need to scream and shout at people who disagree with you. If they are unwilling to coexist with you because of your opinions or your stance on a subject, then they are not worth your time and most certainly do not deserve your hard-earned money. 

Companies will churn out whatever they want in terms of how a game is made and very few of them will compromise with logic and/or reason. If someone is sitting there defending these large corporations in opposition to their middle class customers, that sounds like a big bag full of not your problem. They can cry about people taking to youtube and podcasts, picking apart their obvious agendas all they want. In the end, it is up to you to make the call of what side you're on in this fight, even if that means you are not part of the fight. You don't need to be there to defend either side, you can make your own decisions and pick who you trust. If AAA companies really think online reviews are brainwashing you or controlling your opinions, it honestly sounds like they are bitter because they were unable to do so. Do not accept undercooked games that are below your standards and do not change your mind just because a game publisher says you should do so because, "just trust me". You have a brain and you are fully capable of using it, unlike certain individuals that think they can sweeten your "babyish mind" while hiding behind a coporation. Save your money for the game you truly want and remember to drink water.  

House of the Dead Remake (PC) - Zombie Nightmare Fluff

Next in the Virtua month of Virtua SPEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWKIESOUR! This time we have something new and horribly gory! Please enjoy!

Over the years of posting reviews on this site, there has been one title that has gotten a constant mention throughout. This was not on purpose, but on a small glance at my past articles. It has shown up on multiple top 10 lists and gotten held up as one of the examples of railshooters done correctly. It has been compared to many of its genre and come out looking very favorable, at least in this subjective reviewer's opinion. This subjective reviewer's opinion also seems to gravitate toward keeping the graphics blocky, sketchy and blurry as they were upon their implimentation to the Saturn or Arcade cabinets. 

Guess what, sports fans, this is a very good example of just that. The House of the Dead was remade for modern consoles in April of 2022 and you can count it among the remakes that did its best. It is by no means a terrible remake, nor does it look "bad". The graphics actually look quite detailed, but there is something wrong with them. The movements of the zombies and something about the movements of the screen seem so unattached. It's like they tried to keep the blocky, slow movements of the original port while implimenting them with new, polished graphics and the mixture is like a 1970's movie played on Bluray. It looks off. 

That's pretty much all there is to say about what is really wrong with this port. It seems so out of place. Like they told every single original actor of a movie to wear a full body suit of themselves, with new cameras and equipment. It doesn't wholly affect the gameplay, though. You can shoot zombies and have fun, and there are some nice darker tones to the game. 

There are good things here. I found myself really enjoying shooting things in the background and either finding a secret or just destroying something randomly. They did a very good job detailing the game with breakable stuff. That enhances the game and gives you a good sense of satisfaction. They also added a few more little items that improve the difficulty. Like, with the first villain, the Hangedman. He's also known as "That annoying bat dude that flies around and maybe sics a giant headless armor suit on you". A long title, I know. Instead of just shooting him in this version, though, he has a weakspot on his chest. Since he's slightly larger and more detailed, this actually worked. 

There were little tidbits here and there that made this game more fun. I loved how they made the blade jumper guys much darker and blend in more with the shadows. It made me feel observant when I spotted them and attacked them very early. There's good, grotesque violence to be had here and the game is far more accessible than it was. 

Is this game worth buying now? Yes, very much so. It is not a bad port at all, it simply has its off points and, as always, I am of a mind that the original is just a more fulfilling experience. That being said, the ambience, the higher graphics and the gameplay all have their ups and downs, but overall, it comes out ahead. What would have made this game far more edible is if, like in Nights Into Dreams Remake, they included the original game in its entirety. They didn't do that, but they did add a whole bunch of extra game features. 

The problem I had with these extra features was that Horde Mode could not be played without erasing your save game. That was a very strange decision on their part because it meant I had to beat the entire game to actually test it out. If that were the case, they may as well have made it an unlockable feature. Either way, it's your standard basic affair of minigames and none of them are especially noteworthy. They're not great, but good for a distraction. 

It's easier, obviously, because it doesn't have limited continues. That is actually a good thing, because the finite deaths did limit the original game in many ways. This is especially true whenever they were not getting paid for their labors in our hard earned quarters. Either way, this game is worth getting, playing and enjoying but it is not exactly worth celebrating. If this is your only way to play this game, you could do far worse. It is a game they built from the ground up. Though I question the use of Unity, I will not get into that. Just know that it is a new game from the Saturn and we should be grateful that we're still getting some classics to this day from our old friend of yesterday. Kill zombies, but play nice and drink water.

X-Men Sega Saturn Update! 0.3!

Well, it's good to see that HotRodX is still at it and doing the work we so desire! It's nice to see a programmer who listens to fans and strives to do more work to achieve a set goal. Since we last visited this port of the Saturn version for the X-men Arcade game, there have been two updates! The last update was back earlier in the Spring and Storm was added along with level 2! Storm became a playable character and now Nightcrawler has also been added to the roster. With four playable characters, you can also barge in with 3 whole players to take down the sentinel menace! 

Once again, we find ourselves spellbound by this game's amazing progress as our developer is hard at work behind the scenes, churning out gold! Nightcrawler is definitely a fan favorite character, but I'm personally waiting for Colossus, as he has the power and the brawn to take down these malicious machines with brute strength and a battle cry known to many! 

Until then, though, we find ourselves with a new third level, which is the jungle level! After taking down the sentinel factory, you'll find that the difficulty spikes quite a bit, like the arcade days of old. It's still a real challenge, as you only have three lives to get through all three levels and this is a real chore that gamers will find invigorating and a tiny bit frustrating! It's beautiful! 

What I love the most is that he sees the difficulty and softens the blow a little bit with the first level. Rather than having to take down the sentinels with two beat downs, it only requires one. In the second level, he spikes up the difficulty by requiring you to either beat them twice, or beat them once and stomp them on the ground to make them explode! The explosions hit like they're supposed to and the mutant powers are a potent tool that you can only use in limited quantities. 

Consider us a cheering squad! We're here to make sure that this game gets its due diligence and praise from all who would behold it! HotRodX, we hope you continue the hard work and we wait with baited breath for the next update, whenever that is. Just remember to take breaks and don't overwork yourself. Patience is a virtue that we should have learned long ago, and working as a single developer in a game made from scratch, the workload can be very cumbersome. So, please, all of you X-men and Saturn fans, be sure to give this game a try and give the feedback! Make sure to make it constructive and accept that the game is not finished quite yet. The polish and the full game will come when it will and we need to make sure that HotRodX continues in an environment fit for programming. Just remember to enjoy the game while you drink water!

Horror in Gaming - Survival Checklist of Death (Pt 3)

 Happy Halloween, Gamerheads!!!!! We're almost to the finish line, so here's  the finish of this particular feature on Horror in gaming. I hope you're ready for the season to come to a head, because The Virtua SPEWWWWWWWWWWWWWKINESS is gonna keep on keeping on!

The tropes we know and love/hate from the horror we love/hate have been used and abused to great and terrible effect. What you do and what you don't do can be very situational and very fickle. A lot of things work off of something else. 

Weapons

If you have a gun, being able to shoot every single enemy once CAN make the game boring. How do you fix this? Left 4 Dead made their one-hit zombies extremely plentiful and added very tough zombies sprinkled in among them. That brings about satisfying gameplay as you mow down the small-fries while also filling a Tank Zombie full of bullets to bring it down like a mammoth. It's satisfaction and it's of the good kind. 

Giving the shotgun a good, heavy sound and damage output will make your player happy. The melee chopping and hitting hard with good reaction will make them okay with low ammunition. Making your main character Doom Guy and equipping him to the teeth will require many demons of different types and stages keeping you guessing and looking for secrets. Interesting gameplay and scary strong monsters make awesome guns okay. 

Setting up the Scares

What made PT so amazing was the scare factors and the visuals. You literally have no defenses against these things. If you do one thing wrong at the wrong time, something will kill you and you may get lost and need to backtrack. All of this evokes fear, along with the setting, which grew steadily darker the more you went. Setting off with jump scares from the start is annoying. Waiting it out, keeping the setting dark, foreboding and unsettling, then unleashing the jump scares and other scares will keep your customers happy. 

Throwing a monster and/or body horror guy straight from the first scene is robbing your audience. You are trying to jingle keys in front of their face and it is insulting. This can't be done at the very start, in broad daylight, it simply kills it from the very start. If you start at 10 and keep it at 10, how am I supposed to feel unsettled? Agony had nothing but blood and guts and spurting red stuff everywhere from start to finish. Just because we don't live in that in real life does not mean it is interesting!

Breaking the Tension

Comedy and romance can work in a horror story. In fact, it is good to keep a bit of every genre in your story. The problem is, you need to stick to it and not derail the main draw, which is horror! If you cut the tension with a joke or some sudden girl wanting to be kissed, it kills the suspense completely! Having the horrible creature jump out and juggle eyeballs, without proper context and character concept, is jarring and assassinates any chance of being scared of your horrible creature.

By the same concept, seeing your horrible creature in full view while also cutting and stabbing with gore had better also have some good build up. If we see the creature kill a bunch of people, little by little, come out of the shadows and stare your character down while also attempting to kill them, builds fear of the creature. Nemesis did this to tremendous effect in Resident Evil 3 while Alien: Colonial Marine glitches the Alien Queen while also killing the gameplay by not having the proper gameplay to begin with? What? Build up your villains, get me scared! Stick to your mechanics! It's not a hard concept.

Resources

How much do you starve your player of health, ammunition and other items? What is too much or too little? Some games will get it so right that you will naturally conserve your resources while keeping a steady flow of death. Other games, if you shoot one bullet out of line, you have already used too much and you need to backtrack to get the bullet back into your gun. Deep Fear took this concept and said, "no, I'll just put a place where you can replenish health and ammunition infinitely", this broke the tension as a whole. 

This concept needs to work throughout the entire game the same way each time, or it will not work. This is a very delicate game mechanic, but it can be so beautifully pulled off as to make your game one where the player will return time and time again. 

The Ending

Yes, your game needs an END. It does not need to keep going for decades upon decades upon however long as a series/loosely strung together bunch of games. D took a good way about this, in that each game was a separate concept. The problem there is that some of the games could have benefitted from taking more of the first game's idea. When games have endings, with stories today, you can bet they're either going to retcon the last ending to continue the series or just ignore the lore and continue regardless. Neither of these are a good idea, but happens so wearily often! 

The story is one of the hardest parts to get right. Resident Evil 7 did this concept a lot of justice all the way up until it gave you a choice between saving two ladies. One breaks the story entirely, the other only breaks the story a little bit. The choice should have never been in the game, as the story was already a little convoluted, but that's just how it goes. 

This is also a good place to draw this Saturn SPEWWWWKIES!!!! 2024 feature to a close. It is a lot of fun to explore but it is vast and there is so much to talk about. Halloween is fun to celebrate and fighting off horrific creatures is a fantastic way to spend the holiday. Invite over some friends and play some local multiplayer or LANs. Share some scares this season and remember to jump out when they least expect it! VirtuaAAAAHHHHH!!!!!

Horror in Gaming - Try Not to Die (Pt 2)

The Horror Genre Article continues in the Virtua Month of Horror SPEEWWWKAAAAA!!! Now we're talking about the games that got it wrong and a deeper look at what makes and breaks the concept! Try to keep your brains! 

As amazing a concept as it can be, there can be plenty that can go wrong with Survival Horror at its very core. There are games that get their weapons and the feeling of shooting completely wrong. Sometimes, the targetting system can be awkward on purpose to enhance the scare effect of helplessness. Some games take this to mean they can make the targetting system as rubbish as possible and that will work. No, do not do that.

Where Alien Isolation got this concept to a near perfect, if somewhat languid experience, Agony took the concept of running and hiding and shat it right out. You need to be able to hide. Agony glitches so badly, hiding is utterly useless more often than not. When you are running and hiding from the farmer guy, Jack Baker in RE7, you feel the horror! If you have a knife against his shovel, you feel raw terror when you see him bust through a wall saying "There you are!" That sort of real feeling of helplessness is what you need and it goes so far when you can do nothing but run and hide. If you can't even run and hide, however, what can you do? Die! That's what! Then you'll probably turn off the game!

Running and hiding was a concept that put Five Nights at Freddy's on the map. While it dropped the ball on the concept of jump scares that aren't annoying as all hell, it still garnered a following from sheer gameplay and building challenge. That, plus the lore and the characters. 

There we come to a core that can also make or break a game. The story and the characters can bring your game from good to LEGENDARY and that is no exaggeration. FNAF has a great lore when it's not walking all over itself and forgetting whole chapters. Cut out your own square of Silent Hill's story, if you'd like, because it also gets choppy after the first few games, but what is there is very well crafted with subjects of psyche and the subconscious. 

Even if the story and the characters only work in one game, that can catapult that game into the stars. Doom had the most minimal story and character, but somehow brought Doomguy to the mainstream in a way that cements him there still today. Dead Space, the first and only the first game, has a pretty decent story to pull you along the haunted space corridors to fight space monsters with a space spinal suit. It and Half-life brought about an amazing use of the silent hero because he is you and you are looking for a way out and a way to survive. 

Then there are plenty of games that dropped the ball on Resident Evil. Yes, Resident Evil was a genre all its own, basically, because no one remembers Resident Evil Survivor everyone needed tank controls, slow moving enemies, scarce resources and stupid dialogue. They took all of these elements of the game and spilled them over the pavement. This, plus the fact that there were SO MANY of them! Just look at my Worst Games of the Sega Saturn 2 you will see plenty of them. Not all of them are the worst examples, but there are some very horrible ones (not in a good way). Then there's Countdown: Vampires, Deep Fear, and I could go on for days listing them. Trust me. There are a lot. 

There are so many concepts that go into Horror in gaming, as stated before. I've scratched the surface of games that do this well and not well, but these gameplay mechanics and visual style cannot be overstated. So, let's keep this going and keep these articles from being novels! Virtua SPEEEWWWWWMOOMOOMOO!!!!  

Horror in Gaming - Survive or SurDie! (Pt 1)

 Welcome, one and all, to the month of Virtua SPEEEWWWWKIEKINS!!! Get ready for the scary, the spooky and the monstrous games you know and love! Perhaps, you'll find some you want to try and we are here to endorse this notion! Let the Virtua Spooky Season begin!!!

Survival Horror, Zombie Shooters, and Horror in general can make for some of the greatest and the stupidest games ever made! Hyperbole abound! People will spend their paychecks when they see that you're killing zombies, vampires, werewolves, monsters and sludge creatures. It could be a cardboard monster on a stick. If it's well placed, jumps out when we don't expect it and keeps us on our toes, it can work for this genre. 

                                   

The fact that video games are an interactive medium makes it very, very unique, if you have not noticed. Doing anything more customizable requires schooling and skillcrafting. Video games require practice and that practice is quite often the most fun in one person's life. Teaching your brain to play the game and dealing with the horrors for the first time gives you the horror experience as if you are there and you are facing down Jason Vorhees yourself, then you can BE Jason Voorhees. 

Well that's great! All of the blood and the guts that we want and we can make that happen! Games such as Left 4 Dead 1 & 2, House of the Dead 1 & 2, The Dead Rising Series, CarnEvil and any number of other games have captured us with the concept of mowing down zombies in ridiculous numbers and working with friends and family to do so. These simple shoot'em ups and run and gun games were not "easy" to make, but they were not rocket science in terms of getting the formula. A good, chunky sound effect, a good recoil of your weapon, repercussion of the zombie's reaction and splatter of blood all accumulated into an experience that is real and fake enough to trick your brain into thinking you just blasted something full force with metal shreds. 

The same thing is true for melee weapons on zombies. Half-life captured this concept with the crowbar and Left 4 Dead did it very well with the axe. Then there are the chainsaws from Doom and Gears of War. You need the blood and you need the recoil from the hit. It needs to feel like I have hit someone really hard with the intent to kill. 

Fairly simple if you work at it. In no way is game development labeled as "easy". This is especially true for another very well known of the horror gaming genre, Survival Horror. After Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil, this genre exploded with popularity and there is a very good reason for that. This is dynamic, this is also something that can be open to the most creativity and imagination as anyone can put into it. 

PT, Playable Teaser, AKA the failed Silent Hill game that never was, is a well known legend among gamers. Very few people have it on their Playstation 4 and it is well known as one of the greatest demos of all time. The gameplay, while slightly repetitive, draws you deeper into a world of darkness and dread that will keep you in the throes of horror with very little hope of climbing back out. This is mostly because the game was cancelled and this game art of a demo is nothing but a demo. There have been rumors that it will be unearthed some day, but those are just rumors until we see some digital gold and physical nirvana. 

Then came a glimmer of hope that was also quite thoroughly stamped out VERY soon after it was announced. Allison Road was going to pick up where PT left off and the gameplay it boasted was quite similar, along with its horror style and realistic graphics. The public took another hit, but after that, we grew accustomed to disappointment. 

The concept was finally picked up and brought to life by Capcom by none other than the Resident Evil Franchise. For the first time, the RE series got a mainstream first-person survival horror game in the form of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. It had the ambience, it had the scares, the gameplay was fun and somewhat challenging and it took the concept to the level we were waiting for. Was everyone happy with it? Obviously not, but it was still a breath of fresh air after some very loud blasts of methane. Though, it doesn't technically take advantage of the zombie concept, it does what it does well with scares and excitement. It had a rather weak third act, but there was plenty of game to love and it brought both the survival and the horror to the table. 

The greatness of this concept is vast and dire, so let's go ahead and say we're going for a Part 2 coming next week for the Month of Virtua SPEEEEEEWWWW all over your dad's shoes!