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The House of the Dead |
| Platform: Saturn • Developer: Sega • Genre: Light Gun • ESRB Rating: M • Words: Man9child |
| You shouldn’t need anyone to tell you that Saturn House of the Dead is a shitacular port of an otherwise outstanding arcade game. But this many years after the game’s original release, it almost doesn’t matter, as even the arcade original is heavily dated. The fact that the team responsible for the Saturn port cut a few corners in the conversion doesn’t help, but in hindsight, really doesn’t hurt that much either. |
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| Yeah, the character models are blocky. And some of the textures are hideous. The quasi-cut scene that plays when your character hangs onto a ledge during the second boss battle is particularly embarrassing, what with the camera swooping in through textures like it was nobody’s business. It’s just ugly, any way you look at it. It was then, and still is now. But that’s okay. Shaky aesthetics don’t detract as much from the overall experience as you’d think. Sloppy presentation aside, the House of the Dead remains, in my mind, the definitive gun game. SEGA just put together an altogether amazing experience with this game, and this much is evident when you stack this game up against the other shooters of the era. |
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| Your generic Area 51 clone would feature enemies that popped out of the surroundings, holding a gun in your general direction or doing something similarly menacing. The way they popped up and down behind barrels…It was like a perverse game of hide and seek. Target practice, really. The House of the Dead is less about hitting bulls-eyes and more about surviving against an onslaught of the undead. And that’s awesome. More often than not you’re just jamming on the trigger, blowing holes through zombie rib cages, trying to survive. It’s this frenetic intensity that the HotD series has always managed to maintain that keeps it at the top of the light gun heap. |
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| The series trademark hostage type scenarios add another level of depth to this intensity. Instead of simply not shooting the good guys, as in a typical shooter, you have to save them from gory death at the hands of the game’s motley assortment of enemies. Aside from the incentive of possibly getting a reward for your efforts if successful, your path through the game might actually be altered by saving these people. Years after playing the arcade version for the first time, I’ve actually seen something new this time around. It’s little things like this that keep the game fresh; the possibility of discovering something in this otherwise linear game adds to HotD’s replayability in the long run. Also extending the amount of time you pump into this game is the all new Saturn mode. While a mostly unnecessary edition, what this is, essentially, is a mode that lets you play as other characters from the game’s plot. To make a long story short, this boils down to having different health/weapon attributes. Still, certain characters mimic having machine guns, others rifles; it provides a new spin on the game after you tire of the standard six shooter from the arcade mode. |
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| Having already discussed the numerous graphical blemishes of the Saturn port, the one flaw I see with this version as actually being of any real consequence is the mid-level load times. At one point in the first level, for example, your character will open a door, and the game will start to load. Your grip on the cheap orange pistol in your hands relaxes. Maybe you reach over to wipe the sweat out of your eyes. And then without warning, the game resumes, and an animated corpse swoops down from behind the open door and axes you in the face. This shit happens all the time. If these little interludes couldn’t have been avoided altogether, they certainly could have used better placement. Regardless, The House of the Dead is a classic, and despite what you’ve probably heard, the slipshod port that this game received does little to change that. If you liked HotD in the arcades, there’s no reason for you not to like it at home. |
Rating |
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5.5 |
 - Blocky, grainy, in a word…ugly. + The monsters are endearing nevertheless. |
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6.0 |
 - Some of the worst voice acting ever recorded to disc, music is mostly filler. + The screaming/monster moaning is actually pretty good though |
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8.0 |
 ++ Light gun gaming at its finest. |
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7.5 |
 + HotD is an excellent take on the undead/zombie archetype. |
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7.0 |
 + Incredibly difficult and features some extra modes tacked on, if that’s what you’re into. |
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6.9 |
 +/- While a little rough around the edges and not as good as it should have been, that’s now mostly beside the point. Worth owning for the kick ass gameplay and little more. |
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