989th played so far
Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 1996
Developer: Wow Entertainment
Publisher: Sega
We’ve had a couple of light gun games left and The House of the Dead 2 is the last one left. We’ve played House of the Dead: Overkill somewhat recently, where we saw that the Wii port worked really nicely as a replacement for the light gun. For The House of the Dead 2, we first assumed using the Dreamcast edition, but the light gun doesn’t work with modern games. Instead I tracked down the PC port of the game, which will let me use the mouse to point and shoot instead. It should make the game a bit easier, but I’m fine with that. I might actually get to see more than the first level.
Our Thoughts
The House of the Dead: Overkill, as I said, already says a lot about how the game works, just with a light gun as we’ve seen in Point Blank, Virtua Cop 2 and a bunch of others. The enemies – possibly more palatable to worried parents of the day – are mostly zombies and similar horrors. It means we get to see both quite reovlting creatures as well as the gory death that comes as you kill them. Sure, it’s fairly primitive 3D, but it’s good enough.
The story is fairly sparse, but it gets told well enough. You can save humans that are around and if you do, they’ll either give you a bonus of some sort, such as an extra life, or access to a short cut or alternative path through the level. It works better to set the atmosphere though, with some idea of what’s going on, rather than just the cut scenes in between that feels a bit more generic.
Final Thoughts
I have to admit that I’m looking for the odd edutainment adaptation The Typing of the Dead, but it’s been fun enough going through this world, using my mouse to kill zombies where I could. It does what it does well, though perhaps not that much beyond that.