The Gamer's Quarter

[dessgeega]

as far as holiday-related videogame ambiences go, halloween is probably the one i like best. it's got autumn, night, and ghosts and ghoulies scampering about, sowing mischief and trickery! games that feel like halloween are games that i like.

however! a couple of ghosts and skulls do not alone constitute a halloweenish game experience! for example, though i find the makaimura theme very halloweeny indeed, you spend as much time in those games fighting giant insects in lava caverns as you do tromping through spooky woods slaying hooded skeletons.

to be truly halloweeny, a game needs SPOOK, CAMP, and maybe PUMPKINS. some games just have parts that are halloweeny - paper mario's haunted mansion, earthbound's threed. but some games exude lots of halloweeniness! let's attempt to catalog some of these!

haunted house on the atari vcs. probably the most compelling use of the vcs's graphics, in this game the player is a pair of eyes on a pitch-black screen, able to see only what falls into the tiny circle of light the player's match provides. (unless you play on level 2 or 3 - don't play on level 2 or 3!)

the game takes place in a four-story mansion patrolled by a spider, bat, and SPOOKY GHOST. the great part of the game is how it FRIGGIN FLIPS OUT whenever a monster finds you. your match goes out and you have to scramble around in the dark trying to flee through the rooms, trying to remember which doors are locked and which aren't. there's an item you can carry that'll make you invisible to monsters, but - haha! - you can only hold one item at a time, and some doors require you to be holding the master key. and the item you're trying to find, the creepy family heirloom vase, is in three seperate parts that must be gathered and brought to the front door! RATING: TOTALLY SPOOKY.

splatterhouse: wanpaku graffiti. this famicom splatterhouse game stars a chibi devil mask, and has plenty of halloween paraphenalia - you collect candy for health and fight horrible pumpkin-headed demon children. but that's not all! this game pays homage to a huge variety of horror flicks - there are scenes based on aliens, the fly, and friday the 13th! there's also some parody of splatterhouse itself - the sinister poltergiest room has been replaced with a POULTRYGEIST ROOM.

but the best part, of course, is right in the first stage. in the middle of a creepy cemetary, you fight a legion of zombies who dance to thriller. a++ would play again (on halloween). RATING: BE GARBAGE OF CESSPOOL HAHAHA.

atic atac. an old spectrum game that's similiar to haunted house in premise, but takes place in a huge mansion of many, many screens. you can shoot in this one, but the emphasis is more on finding the right items to use, dizzy-style, in the right places. for example, the cross will keep the vampire from coming near you, and keys will unlock doors of their color.

this game was fabulously remade for the pc recently! aside from being very pretty and having a very spooky score, there are lots of nice touches. when you enter the vampire's room, for example, the game goes black and white, old-film-scratchy, nosferatu style! RATING: I KEEP RUNNING OUT OF FRIGGIN FOOD.

dr. chaos. this nes game alternates between side-scrolling platforming (in a scary house hub-world or short sub-stages) and first-person click-searching. the great part is that while you're carefully investigating every object in the rooms of the house, monsters will jump out of closets and behind doors and drag you back to the hub map to fight to the death!

one time i was investigating a sofa when a window swung open and in jumped a tiny, hideous man while the screen flashed and went crazy! i was much like EEK! RATING: NO REALLY, WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH THOSE PASSWORDS?

other games of note include the interactive fiction scary house amulet!, which has the best use of boldface in any game ever, and hugo's house of horrors 3D i guess?

what spooky games grab your ghoulies?
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[Shapermc]

[dhex]

silent hill (the first)
fear

and haunted house vcs for the win. i was such a wuss as a little kid i would give up. my mom was very good at it, though.
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[Shapermc]

Oh, shit, Half-Life 2 gave me a good startle a couple times.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[ApM]

[OtakupunkX]

[FortNinety]

No mention of Luigi's Mansion?

[OtakupunkX]

I can honestly say that I've never played Luigi's Mansion.

I might play the zombie level of Moonwalker later. J.Goodwin's not here anymore though so I can't have meaningful discussion on that game anymore.

What happened to that guy?

[GSL]

[ApM]

Oh, shit yes! Monster Bash is a way better example. Strike Halloween Harry from the record.

Now I've got that awesome music in my head. Second-best score ever written for the Adlib? Perhaps!

[friedchicken]

Fatal Frame 2 scared the piss out of me. So much so that I could hardly play it.

Too bad I have to set up my xbox to play it.

EDIT: Oh, and I've always had my eyes on Mahou no Pumpkin, but it's too expensive (and the domestic release is too hard to find) for me to justify getting it. There's also a Gamecube version. It looks pretty cute.

[chompers po pable]

I'll play some necronomicon later. mebbe.

NiGHTS? it's got that Carnival of the Grotesque feel to it.

[Shapermc]

[helicopterp]

[wourme]

How about some little independent games?
These are all made with Game Maker, and some are more polished than others.

Outbreak


Haunting Hospital


La La Land 4


Mr. Pratt's Haunted Mansion 2


Friday the 13th 3

[xvs07]

Nothing could ever replace Ghost House for the Master System, though Belmont's Revenge for the Gameboy is close runner-up.

[Lackey]

[Swimmy]

Porky Pig's Haunted Holiday!
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[dessgeega]

oh, luigi's mansion is a good one!

halloween harry, as i recall, has nothing to do with halloween.
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[Redeye]

I remember Captain Blood for C64 and especially Forbidden Forest.

Being chased by those skeletons was really creepy, and getting speared by one at just the right angle was very graphic.


There are some spooky, possibly halloweeny Fallout Tactics maps.
(Evil Dead, Dia de los Muertos, Army of Darkness.)


More C64 nostalgia: Evil Dead and Maniac Mansion.
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I felt sheer anarchic joy when I ran over my first pedestrian.

[dizzyjosh]

halloween for me was always a split between campy vampires and elvira and dressing up like a robot, and the thought that the dead were very pissed off about us ignoring all the important rituals meant to propitiate them, and that any attempt at humor or irony would you metaphysically vulnerable.

i was always strongly attracted to friday the 13th for the NES. it was brutal, man- rolling around on the sidescroller looking for the randomly dropped decent weapons, then all of a sudden, the screen stops scrolling. enemies would flee, and jason would roll up.

then there the kids. my god, the children. i thought jason's whole deal was that he didn't kill the camper children, because ***MPAA** although there were canonical explanations that made sense to me as a kid. but yeah, every now and then jason would stop picking on the teenage counselors deposited in the field or in the houses, and would walk out to the lake and just begin killing kids. and he didn't use weapons at the beginning of the game, just his fists.

i used to have nightmares about jason all the time, and he wouldn't stop just because i was kid. and, true to video game life (and the movies, as well), one death was never enough, i'd just respawn as some other character in the dream until everyone was dead.



in short,

[Harveyjames]

That sounds quite scary, actually.

I remember Atic Atac. It wouldn't fucking work. You know those game took like 20 minutes to load, right? And you'd get to the end of those 20 minutes to find the TV screen just blinking black and white. The net result of this was that Atic Atac got built up in my imagination to be the best game on the Spectrum. I'm not playing it now because it would ruin my memories.

Luigi's Mansion is one of the few Gamecube games I'm keeping when I sell all my Gamecube stuff to get a wii. It's so perfectly formed.

[a_plus]

there's also sweet home, the famicom proto-resident evil game. there's a translation of it out there somewhere. i haven't played it a ton, but by the sound of things, is gets pretty grisly.

(fun fact: i originally typed that as "sweet homo")

[kirkjerk]

[dessgeega]

sweet homos go bump in the night!

(see, i worked that joke into this thread.)

sweet home is actually pretty swell for a survival horror / puzzle adventure / jrpg game! i havn't played that much of it because, you know, random battles. but it's very well put together!
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[OtakupunkX]

[dhex]

hey how is this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Barker%27s_Undying

any ideas?
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[dessgeega]

i played the demo.

it was a first-person shooter?
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[OtakupunkX]

I had totally forgot about that game.

It was cool, for the time. Haven't played it in awhile though. They were selling it in a 2-pack with American McGee's Alice if I remember correctly.

[dessgeega]

zombies ate my neighbors, by the way.
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[OtakupunkX]

OMG, I CAN'T BELIEVE I FORGOT ABOUT THAT ONE TOO. I CAN'T BELIEVE I DIDN'T PLAY IT THIS HALLOWEEN EITHER. I HAVE TO GO CRY NOW.

Whereas most children played catch and such with their fathers for "bonding time" as children, my dad and I played ZAMN co-op. We never did finish the thing though.

[Cycle]

Someone mentioned a game called Hellnight at another forum, it sounds pretty interesting. Anyone play it? Should I get it?

[Harveyjames]

Lets not forget Gathering Of Developers' Blair Witch Project The Game.

One of the cleverest things about the film was that you never saw the witch, but how can you make a game where you don't see the opponents? So they let you see the witch. It looks like a kind of Giger-alien thing.

But what are you going to do in the game? Go around the woods pitching tents and filming stuff? BORING! So you get a gun with a laser sight on it.

What happens when you shoot the Blair Witch, though? Is that it, Game Over? No, that would be terrible! So there are thousands of Blair Witches.

I haven't seen the movie but if it's about a guy in a trenchcoat who goes around the woods with a gun shooting blair witches that jump out at him, then this is a pretty faithful recreation.

[OtakupunkX]

So, I should probably make this a different thread, but CHRISTMAS GAMES.

Are there any blatantly Christmas-themed games besides Christmas NiGHTS, the 8-bit Home Alone games, Elf Bowling 1 & 2 on GBA and DS or Santa Claus Saves the Earth on GBA and PS1? Because I can't think of any (Sims items packs don't count).

[ApM]

Christmas Jetpack!

[Cycle]

[kirkjerk]

There was a cute Atari 2600 rebranding of the homebrew Qb

[Lackey]

[ApM]

My Jetpack levels were always really torturous puzzlers that would just as soon kill you as look at you.

[ApM]

This Christmas-themed mod for Defcon looks utterly fucking brilliant.

[Mister Toups]

Pretty much all of Okage: Shadow King had this weird halloweeny vibe to it that I'm fairly sure was unintentional.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

[Shapermc]

[Mister Toups]

[Tim]

[Dracko]

[dessgeega]

on this dark autumn night, walk once more among the living o thread. wise from your gwabe!

nosferatu for the snes is prince of persia in castlevania with fisticuffs. and it's gorgeous. derek yu (whose work appears in issue 9 btw) wrote a guide to it.
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[aderack]

There's a fun moment exactly half through the first level of Monster Party.

DON'T PICK ON ME
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[wourme]

[Dracko]

Punching werewolves in the fucking face!
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Winged Assassins (1984)]