Splatterhouse

Back in the 80's, games were usually labelled as children's toys. you had mascots like Mario, link, Zelda, samus, and donkey Kong, and not one of those games talked of blood and gore. Welcome Namco's Splatterhouse. Released on the Turbografx 16, Splatterhouse might very well be the first survival horror game ever released. it's a horror-themed game, obviously, and the title even brags of it's violence and gore.

Rick and Jennifer and students who are exploring west mansion. While inside, Rick and Jennifer and both knocked out and separated. When rick awakes, he's covered in blood, Jennifer is nowhere to be found, and he's wearing a mask he can't remove. now it's different. he's not leaving with the mask and without Jennifer. now the player takes over, as rick explores west mansion, slaying weird creatures, and avoiding grotesque things, to get his girlfriend back, and to get the mask off his face.

As mentioned on my summary, this game had to have paved the way for games like resident evil (mostly Resident Evil, They're both survival horror games) doom, and mortal kombat years later. Being one of the first games to openly depict gore is one thing, having a parental advisory warning before the ESRB is another.

I suggest you go find a copy or download this for Wii's Virtual console, you will have fun with it.

Remember the movie Re-Animator, based on the short stories by HP Lovecraft? Remember the crazy Doctor Herbert West, played so wildly by Jeffrey Combs? Well it seems that Doctor West has been dabbling some more into bad science and has created an army of freaks and monsters. He's long since vanished but the monsters still live in his mansion. You play a college nerd called Rick Taylor who has to rescue his girl (a popular feature in beat-em-up games at the time) from this house of madness. Rick is aided in his mission by a special Aztec sacrificial mask which gives him superhuman strength and powers to go zombie-bashing.

Splatterhouse is a very hard game to across. Either you play the arcade machine (now very, very hard to find) or you buy a Turbo-Grafx PC Engine and get the home-console version, which is so horribly censored that it even deletes the cut-scenes. Thus making the game completely storyless.

Still, it's a cool-looking game and one can really tell where a lot of Resident Evil's influences came from. At one point in the game, the character of Rick walks through a giant vagina and battles evil foetuses. As a side-scrolling beat-em-up it's pretty weak. There's no real impact to the fighting and the controls feel somewhat sluggish.

Seriously, the Arcade is the only place to go if you want to have a go at Splatterhouse. The Turbo-Grafx version neuters the game to the point of no-fun-ism.