House of The Dead
It's always nice to find yourself in the household of a fellow gamer. By far the best bit is perusing their game collection and is also why we hide Shadow the Hedgehog from public display, at the back, in a box re-sleeved with a CoD insert. It is also is a prime time to play those game you wouldn't have bought yourself but are mildly curious about. Hence how we ended up playing House of the Dead 2, 3 and Overkill.
Way back when, our family had a Mega Drive and so I grew up on all things SEGA. Sega at home is fine. Arcade SEGA though? Ugh. Unlike rigid and structured games for the home consoles Arcade games are noisy, flashy and 'loose' a bit like your mother. Arcade games are a Waquila suicide* to home games single malt whiskey. Created to rinse your wallet they lack the structure I need to not go foetal and I still shudder when I have to choose 'arcade mode' from a game menu. It's why I'd been avoiding HoTD.
I got over it though and HoTD is fun if not a bit batshit crazy. Overkill is a bit more forgiving and I can't work out if I like the series more when it is pretending to be serious but coming across as nonsense with hackneyed plots and poorly translated 'dialogue' that make Resident Evil look like [google literature and find out the name of something that is wrote well] as in HoTD 2 & 3, or whether it is poking fun at itself as in Overkill. In this rare occasion I was keen to play through Overkill because I'd read that something 'nasty' happens at the end. It is nasty but then I watch a lot of Belgian films so I think it could have been worse.
Measured against Wii light gun stablemates Resident Evil Chronicles, Link's Crossbow Training and Dead Space: Extraction, HoTD's arcade pedigree is apparent. There aren't periods of inactivity to build tension or files to hunt or a central story to progress. This is wall to wall rounding the corner, unleashing a storm of bullets with the occasional nonsensical cutscene to push the the half chewed and dessicated piece of cartilage of a plot along to the next level. Unlike the other light gun games on the Wii the only way to play HoTD is with the hand cannons (or any other third party gun peripheral, of which there are 100,000 for the Wii). Unfortunately, we didn't have the official handcannon to hand but I was surprised at how good the pair of Venom's I had performed. Yes it is mindless but sometimes, putting down pretense for a while and feeling the visceral URGGGH of violent video games in the base of your ballsack reminds you that gaming doesn't have to be intelligent to be fun.
The NUMBERS BIT Who are we kidding? We're probably the last people on earth to play these games so any illusions of this being a useful review........ 7/10.
* A shot of the cheapest Whiskey and Tequila you can find, snort the drink, drink the lemon and rub the salt in your eye.
I got over it though and HoTD is fun if not a bit batshit crazy. Overkill is a bit more forgiving and I can't work out if I like the series more when it is pretending to be serious but coming across as nonsense with hackneyed plots and poorly translated 'dialogue' that make Resident Evil look like [google literature and find out the name of something that is wrote well] as in HoTD 2 & 3, or whether it is poking fun at itself as in Overkill. In this rare occasion I was keen to play through Overkill because I'd read that something 'nasty' happens at the end. It is nasty but then I watch a lot of Belgian films so I think it could have been worse.
Measured against Wii light gun stablemates Resident Evil Chronicles, Link's Crossbow Training and Dead Space: Extraction, HoTD's arcade pedigree is apparent. There aren't periods of inactivity to build tension or files to hunt or a central story to progress. This is wall to wall rounding the corner, unleashing a storm of bullets with the occasional nonsensical cutscene to push the the half chewed and dessicated piece of cartilage of a plot along to the next level. Unlike the other light gun games on the Wii the only way to play HoTD is with the hand cannons (or any other third party gun peripheral, of which there are 100,000 for the Wii). Unfortunately, we didn't have the official handcannon to hand but I was surprised at how good the pair of Venom's I had performed. Yes it is mindless but sometimes, putting down pretense for a while and feeling the visceral URGGGH of violent video games in the base of your ballsack reminds you that gaming doesn't have to be intelligent to be fun.
The NUMBERS BIT Who are we kidding? We're probably the last people on earth to play these games so any illusions of this being a useful review........ 7/10.
* A shot of the cheapest Whiskey and Tequila you can find, snort the drink, drink the lemon and rub the salt in your eye.
I'll just put this here...
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