About a week ago I asked the lovely people on the r/consoles subreddit to choose one of five games that I'd had Selectron pick out for me.
They chose this, House of the Dead 2, and what with the Space Harrier showdown, the snowboarding face-off, and a couple of games I really didn't bother with, I’m playing it today, on day 44 of lockdown, as the 50th game of this project.
There are probably only three bone fide classic IPs in the light-gun oeuvre: Time Crisis, Virtua Cop, and House of the Dead. Obviously there are many more favourites around, and many of them will actually be better than certain entries in these series', but they are definitely the three biggest brands in this genre.
Which makes it all the more surprising that House of the Dead has the absolute worst voice-acting you will ever hear.
There's one NPC, Harry, who genuinely (and I promise this is no exaggeration) sounds like the Japanese developers have got the English script from Google translate and then typed the answers into a Speak 'n' Spell (look it up, kids).
There are several innocent bystanders who will back away from the undead and, in an assumed mistranslation of “stay away”, scream: "Don't come!" repeatedly... I, just… Wow.
It is impossibly bad. Bad enough to be funny, luckily, otherwise it would probably be unbearable.
Fortunately everything else about HotD2 is as polished and impressive as you'd expect from a Naomi board Dreamcast port. This is true arcade gameplay in your home and, poor voicework notwithstanding, you’ll want to crank the volume right up to get that true coin-op feeling. I was tempted to turn on some other consoles for extra noise and then have my wife dress like a chav and aggressively ask to borrow 50p to complete the full end-of-the-pier vibe, but it wasn't necessary in the end; House of the Dead does a fantastic job of that all by itself.
The core gameplay is your standard light-gun affair: Zombies pop up, you shoot them down, you fire off screen to reload, rinse, repeat.
HotD2's first embellishment to this formula is the introduction of branching paths. As this is very much an on-rails game, these are activated by meeting certain criteria. The first I found, for example, was after saving a pair of townsfolk from zombies and one of them pointed out a shortcut.
You get a clue as to the whereabouts of these alternative routes when you die (don't worry, it won't take long) at which point your final position is shown on a map with all the routes detailed.
Another additional piece of dressing on the bones of the arcade game is Original mode.
This version of the game plays out identically to the original but adds the opportunity to pick some power-ups at the start of your run to make it easier. Perhaps you want more powerful bullets? How about a larger magazine? These are only small changes but more become available the more you play.
And finally there's Training mode. This offering creates vignettes to be beaten within certain criteria; saving all the humans, killing all the zombies with only 30 bullets, or clearing a screenful of barrels in ten seconds. I'd love to tell you about more of these challenges but I don’t know what they are as I'm convinced that barrel shooting one is actually impossible - which, much like Bot Vice yesterday, leaves me asking myself whether this game is too hard. And I think the answer (again) is no.
With the obvious exception of those sodding barrels I got a little further into HotD2 on every play - it's very much a 'learning' game. Reacting to what's happening will get you only so far, true progress will come when you start to memorise and pre-empt the locations from where the zombies/owls/swamp monsters/undead piranhas will emerge. This is not unusual for a light-gun game, but House of the Dead 2 does seem to have hit the sweet spot as far as this balance act is concerned.
When people hear the name ‘The House of the Dead” I think this is the game they imagine - even if they don’t realise it. The series highlight remains the (intentionally) hilarious and action-packed ‘Overkill’ from 2009, but this second installment really embodies what the franchise is all about.
They chose this, House of the Dead 2, and what with the Space Harrier showdown, the snowboarding face-off, and a couple of games I really didn't bother with, I’m playing it today, on day 44 of lockdown, as the 50th game of this project.
There are probably only three bone fide classic IPs in the light-gun oeuvre: Time Crisis, Virtua Cop, and House of the Dead. Obviously there are many more favourites around, and many of them will actually be better than certain entries in these series', but they are definitely the three biggest brands in this genre.
Which makes it all the more surprising that House of the Dead has the absolute worst voice-acting you will ever hear.
There's one NPC, Harry, who genuinely (and I promise this is no exaggeration) sounds like the Japanese developers have got the English script from Google translate and then typed the answers into a Speak 'n' Spell (look it up, kids).
There are several innocent bystanders who will back away from the undead and, in an assumed mistranslation of “stay away”, scream: "Don't come!" repeatedly... I, just… Wow.
It is impossibly bad. Bad enough to be funny, luckily, otherwise it would probably be unbearable.
Fortunately everything else about HotD2 is as polished and impressive as you'd expect from a Naomi board Dreamcast port. This is true arcade gameplay in your home and, poor voicework notwithstanding, you’ll want to crank the volume right up to get that true coin-op feeling. I was tempted to turn on some other consoles for extra noise and then have my wife dress like a chav and aggressively ask to borrow 50p to complete the full end-of-the-pier vibe, but it wasn't necessary in the end; House of the Dead does a fantastic job of that all by itself.
The core gameplay is your standard light-gun affair: Zombies pop up, you shoot them down, you fire off screen to reload, rinse, repeat.
HotD2's first embellishment to this formula is the introduction of branching paths. As this is very much an on-rails game, these are activated by meeting certain criteria. The first I found, for example, was after saving a pair of townsfolk from zombies and one of them pointed out a shortcut.
You get a clue as to the whereabouts of these alternative routes when you die (don't worry, it won't take long) at which point your final position is shown on a map with all the routes detailed.
Another additional piece of dressing on the bones of the arcade game is Original mode.
This version of the game plays out identically to the original but adds the opportunity to pick some power-ups at the start of your run to make it easier. Perhaps you want more powerful bullets? How about a larger magazine? These are only small changes but more become available the more you play.
And finally there's Training mode. This offering creates vignettes to be beaten within certain criteria; saving all the humans, killing all the zombies with only 30 bullets, or clearing a screenful of barrels in ten seconds. I'd love to tell you about more of these challenges but I don’t know what they are as I'm convinced that barrel shooting one is actually impossible - which, much like Bot Vice yesterday, leaves me asking myself whether this game is too hard. And I think the answer (again) is no.
With the obvious exception of those sodding barrels I got a little further into HotD2 on every play - it's very much a 'learning' game. Reacting to what's happening will get you only so far, true progress will come when you start to memorise and pre-empt the locations from where the zombies/owls/swamp monsters/undead piranhas will emerge. This is not unusual for a light-gun game, but House of the Dead 2 does seem to have hit the sweet spot as far as this balance act is concerned.
When people hear the name ‘The House of the Dead” I think this is the game they imagine - even if they don’t realise it. The series highlight remains the (intentionally) hilarious and action-packed ‘Overkill’ from 2009, but this second installment really embodies what the franchise is all about.
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