MONTHLY 5 - October 2024

Rise from the grave and party with the undead thanks to a whole bunch of horrifically spooky games brought back from the great beyond. 

Your mortal soul may not be in danger, but a bunch of video game characters are in my two highest recommendations of the month. Gast: The Greatest Little Ghost (2002 Mindscape & Idol FX AB) is a macabre adventure for all ages that has the titular ghost collect souls from those who have taken over an amusement park. The highly underrated survival horror Gregory Horror Show (2003 Capcom) has you do the same to the effed-up residents of a spooky hotel. Based on an equally weird and under-seen animated show of the same name, I'd say it pips Gast to the top spot by a wide margin. 

Beyond these soul stealers we have Dracula's Secret (1996 Corel Corporation), an entertaining adventure game for kids and Isle of the Dead (1993 Rainmaker Software, Inc) an under-loved if slightly wonky first-person-shooter with classic adventure elements that makes it utterly unique for its time. Finally, you can find out your own future in the fortune-telling application called Rosemary West's House of Fortunes (1993 Villa Crespo, Inc). No serial killers included, promise.

On another note, a lot more time has been spent away from the site than normal thanks to some real life events taking up much of my time. I've decided to not do a Monthly-5 for November, instead putting my focus on completing missing reviews, updating some of the older packages that most need it and preparing for December's Christmas Countdown. No idea how much I'm able to get done, but I'll update you all at the end of the month to let you know.

Until then, keep gaming!

ANIMANIACS COLLECTION

 

One of the few good things about this past year is that Animaniacs got a reboot. And because this past year was 2020 us Brits didn't get it. Nevertheless I got my totally insaney fix by revisiting the surprising decent collection of console games based on the original 90s show.

FRANK HERBERT'S DUNE

There was a time when Dune could've been a behemoth of a franchise. Alejandro Jodorowsky's early treatment from the 70s became a legend in its own right and even inspired the likes of Star Wars and Alien. After David Lynch's underwhelming adaptation, the SyFy channel brought it to the small screen in the early 2000s with a small budget to match. So far, it's the best there is (that is until Denis Villeneuve gives us his inevitably awesome take) but I cannot forgive it for siring Frank Herbert's Dune, Cryo's broken attempt at a video game on PC and PlayStation 2.

DIE HARD ARCADE: THE DYNAMITE COP COLLECTION

Hollywood iconography is a big thing in Japan, so much so that SEGA's AM1 R&D Division were heavily inspired by Die Hard to create Dynamite Deka (translation: Dynamite Detective). This early 3D beat-em-up was so indebted to John McTiernan's classic actioner that they gained the IP rights for the west. Thus we got Die Hard Arcade, the first entry in an incredibly underrated yet bat-shit crazy series.

POLAROID PETE: THE GEKIBO COLLECTION

Gekibo, a portmanteau of Gekisha Boy (translation: Photograph Boy) is at first glance just another of those weird Japanese games that YouTubers love to rag on about. First released on the PC-Engine in 1992, Irem's short-lived series is a satisfying mix of a shooting gallery with a platformer. It's a rather unique concept with only Pokemon Snap coming to mind that bears any kind of similarity to the gameplay on show. So why didn't we see this in the west?

RULE OF ROSE

Why are creepy kids so disturbing? From The Omen to The Exorcist, the perverted innocent trope has always been a controversial one, and Punchline's 2006 survival horror, Rule of Rose, is no different. Like The Exorcist before it, this twisted tale of juvenile depravity was banned in the UK.

ECHO NIGHT: BEYOND

Echo Night: Beyond may be the third (and last) entry to From Software's excellent horror series, but it was the first to get an official release in Europe. Released in Japan and the US in 2004, it would be another year before it reached our shores and it was worth the wait. The previous entries may have been set in a traditional spooky setting - a ghost ship and a haunted mansion - but Beyond relocates us to outer space. The Moon to be specific.

X-FILES:RESIST OR SERVE

The X-Files was a phenomenon back in the 90s and you couldn't step into any shop without some item of merchandise being sold. There was even an average FMV adventure game in 1998 which has some trouble running on most modern machines. In 2004, two years after the show ended, and after a lot of the hype had past, a survival horror interpretation of the series was rushed to market on the PlayStation 2...

POCKY & ROCKY COLLECTION

We're going Japanese again for today's review. It's a long running series based on well-known legends; Kiki KaiKai or Pocky & Rocky as it's better known over here.