SEGA Dreamcast: Illbleed

Those wacky nuts who brought us Blue Stinger are back and this time they’ve upped their game even more when it comes to crazy. Crazier than Blue Stinger? If you played that one, then you know it was tough to beat when it comes to their rather unique flavor of insanity. Illbleed is a fresh take on the Survival Horror genre, where the main objective is to keep your character from getting scared to death, by investigating and tagging potential shock points before they can spring on you. And these are not all just about jump scares, as some of them can really hurt you.

The titular Illbleed, is the name of a theme park, set up to entice young people inside with the promises of big cash winnings if they can survive the park’s unique horrors. With the help of a trusty Horror Monitor, the player can monitor all their senses: Smell, touch, sound, sight, all of which work together to help warn you when something scary or dangerous, or dangerously scary, is nearby. By carefully exploring the environment and paying close attention to these monitors, the player is tasked with tagging shock points before they can spring. Scares will raise the player’s heart rate while physical attacks can cause you to bleed. So it’s not only important to keep track of your health, but if your heart rate gets too high, you can drop dead of a heart attack. It’s a unique system to be sure, but sometimes hunting those shock points got tedious, and I often wound up relying on memorization rather than the Horror Meter when replaying the levels. I’ll also note that tagging Shock Points is not an unlimited activity, so the player can’t just run around tagging everything.

But Illbleed isn’t just about tagging and avoiding Shock Points. There are enemy monsters to fight and some puzzles to solve too. There are a total of eight areas, all reachable from a central hub. Each area has its own story and title, making Illbleed feel like one of those late night horror anthologies. Battling enemies should be avoided at all costs, but when these fights do happen, the player is inexplicably trapped in a small area until the foe is vanquished or enough time has elapsed for a helicopter to fly in, drop a rope ladder and conduct a rescue. And yes, this happens even if you’re inside a building.

Items and clues scattered throughout the levels will eventually lead the player to the area’s boss. Beating each area rewards the player with cold hard cash, which can be used to purchase additional recovery items and some of these are pretty funny. Need to lower your heart rate? Try a relaxation CD. Heart rate too slow, buy some porn. Need something more drastic? How about some ghoulish experimental surgery to boost your stats?

The graphics engine is pretty good. although the character models themselves could be better. They look blocky and tend to have ugly joints. They work fine for the actual game, but not so much for the cinematics. I do, however, like how damage is reflected through torn clothing. Still, it feels like a lot of the character modeling effort may have bee siphoned off to design the wonderful levels and creepy atmosphere. The textures show some pretty good detail and the creepy lighting effects helped to keep me on edge through many ares of the game.

All this is well and good, but how does the game play. Weeeell, it has some problems. Control often feels sluggish and imprecise. I found it to be mildly annoying while exploring, and downright frustrating while fighting enemies. I engaged in battle always as a last resort. There was never a moment in Illbleed where I wasn’t aware of how uncomfortably the game controlled. Another big problem is the lack of a decent save system. The individual areas are quite large and one bad step sometimes got me killed and sent all the way back to the beginning of the area. There were several times when I wanted to quit, but the game’s quirky personality kept me around to endure more punishment.

Illbleed gets my recommendation solely on the basis of how fresh, original, and bat-shit crazy it can be. I can’t say I had a whole lot of fun playing it, but I will say that the experience was worthwhile. I literally never knew what the game was going to throw at me next, and that’s what kept me going. I had to see more. I had to experience all the weirdness this game had to offer. If you have a taste for the bizarre and are willing to work for it, Illbleed is definitely worth a look.

SEGA Dreamcast: Evil Dead “Hail to the King”

I can’t think of any movie franchises that I wanted to be made into a game more than Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series. Hell, with the films’ over-the-top action, distinctive designs, and Bruce Campbell being the king of video game voice work, the project was already half made. Of course, that’s far from true. A good game needs more than just a killer premise and a great star to make it work. It needs functional game mechanics, clever level designs, and above all it has to be fun to play. I’m sorry to say that Hail to the King has none of those things. It starts out with plenty of promise, but after just a short while after taking up the controller, I realized I was in for a pretty torturous ride. If you come away with one thing from this review then let it be this: You can be the biggest Evil Dead fan in the world, but it won’t make this game any more tolerable. I won’t spend a lot of time on the story here, because it’s not important. Your Ash. There are Deadites that need killing. Groovy.

HttK draws from the very popular survival horror formula as laid down by Capcom in their Resident Evil franchise. You run around pre-rendered environments fighting enemies, collecting ammo and other items, and solving some pretty simple puzzles. And while Resident Evil’s formula of punishing saves, backtracking, and stiff controls can be hard to work with in its own right, there’s still enough done right in those games to make them worthwhile. That isn’t the case with Evil Dead, mainly because it brings a whole bunch of new problems to the mix.

Let’s start with combat, because it had the potential to be really cool. For starters, Ash has a chainsaw on one arm, and you can equip all sorts of weapons in the other hand, including an axe and Ash’s beloved boomstick, the shotgun. Unfortunately, I found using the chainsaw to be a chore. I had to keep it full of gasoline, and while that might not sound like a big problem, keep in mind that it doesn’t just use gas during fights. Every moment the chainsaw is idling, it’s burning gas. Sure, I had the option to switch it off, but that just meant that I needed to take the time to fire it up every time I get surprised by an enemy.  And fighting with it just a sloppy mess, thanks to the terrible collision, forced camera perspective, and sluggish controls. What could be worse? How about enemies that constantly re-spawned, not only when I revisited areas because of all the backtracking, but also if I lingered in the same area for too long. I found that if I didn’t choose to cut and run at some point, I could have spent eternity fighting the same enemies over and over again. Besides being just tedious, it really taxed my gasoline and ammo supplies, not to mention my life. Granted, nearly every felled enemy would drop a recovery item or some ammo, but was never enough.

The game’s puzzles are mostly comprised of the typical step-and-fetch-it type. I found myself roaming the game’s pre-rendered screens on a scavenger hunt, collecting items to take to locations and use them so I can acquire another item, open a barred path, or advance the story a bit. That’s great, and as uninspired as the “use this item here” style puzzles were, at least it helps to break up the tedium of the horrible combat.

The graphics and sound are also a bit of a mixed bag. The Dreamcast version looks sharper and crisper than the PlayStation rev, but don’t expect any beefier polygon models or other extras for SEGA’s little white box. The pre-rendered screens look good, and they even feature some looping FMV in the background to make them look more alive than the static screens of the early Resident Evil games.  Ash himself also looks pretty decent in the actual game, but his likeness in the CG cinematics is rather rough. The Deadites, on the other hand, look terrible and their designs don’t feel like they were inspired by the films at all.  Ash cracks off some decent one-liners, but ironically I found this to be one of Campbell’s weaker efforts of his voice acting career. Some of his most classic lines sound like they were delivered while reading the morning paper.

Man, what a letdown. I came into this game with eager anticipation. I was pumped to play this one. I didn’t expect a masterpiece, but I did expect a fun game based on a great line of fun horror flicks. But Hail to the King is just an unplayable mess that feels tedious and broken. About the only really nice thing I can say is that at least the story tries to pay respects to the lore laid down in the films, and I suppose does a pretty good job of it. But what difference does it make if the playing the game feels like torture?

Gampelay: The animated backdrops are pretty cool, but everything else looks rather sub par. Technically it looks better than the PSX version, but not by much.

Audio: Bruce Campbell is on board, but he also sounds bored. He scores a few comedic hits, but his performance sounds like it was phoned in. 

Control: All the frustrations of your typical survival horror game multiplied by ten thousand. Dispatching Deadites is a chore.

Overall Value: This game is crap and you should be playing something better. I wanted to bail on this game in the first hour, and things didn’t get any better. 

SEGA Dreamcast: Carrier

No doubt, publisher Jalico brought this survival horror game Stateside hoping to cash in on all those fans waiting for Code Veronica to hit SEGA’s little white box. The comparisons are justified as Carrier is, without a doubt, a Resident Evil wannabe, but that doesn’t mean it’s without merit. The game could definitely benefit from some more polish, but then you could have said the same thing about Resident Evil when it debuted. Carrier serves up fans with an experience that should be familiar, but with just enough of its own unique spin to keep it interesting.

What’s the key ingredient to a good survival horror game? Isolate the main characters with lots of ravenous monsters and give them just enough weapons and ammo to barely keep them alive. Carrier fits that recipe perfectly. As a member of an elite rescue team, you land on an isolated aircraft carrier, in the middle of a stormy ocean, with your only means of escape shot down and no hope of communicating with the outside world. The story itself, which sadly resorts to some hokey futuristic elements, is basically centered around an ancient organism called Ark, which was being transported on the ship when it managed to revive itself and slowly assimilate the ship and crew into killer veggies. That’s right, folks. Forget about flesh eating zombies, because the primary threat in Carrier is mutant vegetation. Granted, I’m partial to zombies, but I have to admit Carrier does sport some rather interesting enemies.

Carrier also brings to the table a special scope, which adds a pretty cool new play mechanic. The scope allows you to detect the presence of the veggie-virus in the human survivors that you encounter. It basically switches you to a first-person mode by holding down the appropriate button, and also happens to show off the game’s 3D engine quite nicely. In addition to detecting which characters you encounter are infected, the scope can also be used to see in the dark and detect objects you might have otherwise missed. A prudent player can even use it to peer ahead down a corridor for a better look at what’s waiting before proceeding onward.

Like Capcom’s Dino Crisis, Carrier uses a completely 3D environment, which looks almost as detailed as the pre-rendered stuff we’ve been seeing in other games of this ilk. For the most part, the game makes use of a fixed camera, but it will occasionally resort to camera pans or sweeps to show off the game’s engine and create atmosphere or tension. The game also shows off some nice lighting effects, and uses them to heighten the creep factor and keep the player on edge.

The quality of the voice work in Carrier varies so greatly that it’s tough for me to make a final judgement on it. For the most part, the characters sound pretty good, although sometimes the emphasis on certain words just sounds awkward. Also, the characters that I talked to throughout the game mostly just sounded like bad impressions of various ethnic stereotypes. The music is virtually non-existent, which is fine because the game makes excellent use of ambient sounds.

With all that having been said, there are definitely some things that the game could have done better. First off, the camera is rarely on your side in a fight. It seems as if more times than not, my target wasn’t even on the screen, which left me to either fire blindly and hope for the best, or wait until it was dangerously close before I tried to pop him. One method wastes ammo, while the other risks wasting life. It was commonplace for me to run out of ammo, but you can always fall back on the welder pistol, which never runs out of ammo. When I encountered the first boss with only this weapon available to me, I was sure I was doomed, but to my surprise I was able to make quick work of him. Carrier just doesn’t have all that many soil-your-drawers boss encounters like Titan or Nemesis from the Resident Evil games. A lot of times, I felt like just the act of navigating the environments was my worst enemy.

Overall, this isn’t a bad game. It’s got some problems, but nothing that really hasn’t been seen and endured in the games it tries to emulate. If you’ve gone through Resident Evil or Dino Crisis, you’ll likely find yourself more or less at home here. The game manages to create a creepy and tense atmosphere and hold it throughout the game, even if it never rises to the same level of challenge as Capcom’s spookfests. Jalico predicted we’d be happy to have a survival horror fix before Code Veronica shipped, and they were right.

Graphics: A fully realized 3D game engine with loads of detail and atmosphere. Too bad the camera hates the player so much.

Audio: Not much music, but the game made good use of ambient sound to creep me the hell out. Some of the voice work is pretty scary too, but not in a good way.

Control: It’s typical survival horror fare. You just have to cope with it.

Overall Value: This is not a huge game, but beating it does unlock a short second scenerio that’s playable with a new character. 

SEGA Dreamcast: Blue Stinger

The SEGA Dreamcast has plenty of genres covered: Fighting games, racing games, arcade ports, you name it. OK, maybe not RPGs, but they’re coming! But at the moment, Blue Stinger is the only game that comes close to filling the Survival Horror slot. As the story begins, a strange meteor has hit the Earth forming a strange dome of energy around the curiously named, Dinosaur Island. You take on the roles of Emergency Sea and Rescue Agents, Elliot Ballade and Dogs Bowser, as they find themselves trapped on a research base and overrun by bloodthirsty mutants. Superficially speaking, Blue Stinger is something like Resident Evil in that you spend your time exploring environments, fighting monsters, and searching for keys and pass cards. But where this game sets its own path is in the totally wacky game design and bright, colorful graphics. This is one really bizarre game, sometimes hilarious, other times frustrating as all hell.

Control in Blue Stinger is a lot more action orientated than Resident Evil. There are no tank controls here, instead you just push the stick in the direction you want to go. You can also fight without a weapon by punching and kicking. Indeed, there are times when this game looked and felt more like an arcade experience than anything else. You can switch between the two characters you control at any time. Elliot can arm both short and long range weapons, whereas Dogs can only use long range weapons. If Dogs runs out of ammo then he can only defend himself, but not attack unless he’s wearing a special T-shirt. Nope, I’m not kidding. I told you this was some bizarre shit. Also, each character can only equip certain types of weapons, because… game design! It’s all very contrived, and none of it makes much sense. The main reason for switching between characters is if you’re running low on ammo for one. But, there are also times when you will have to use a particular character to get past an area. Elliot, for example is the only one of the two that can swim. In addition to taking damage to your life bar, there are some areas of the game where you’ll have to watch other indicators, like air levels when swimming underwater, body temperature when in an extreme cold area, and oxygen reserves when in a hazard area.

Defeating enemy mutants pays off… literally! A dead creature will disappear leaving behind a shower of gold coins, which you can collect and use to buy items. The world of Blue Stinger is populated by all sorts of crazy vending machines that will dole out weapons and ammunition, as well as health restoratives like tasty sandwiches and refreshing colas. And Blue Stinger does indeed have some cool weapons. You’ve got access to a shotgun, missile launcher, bowgun, machine gun, and even some more bizarre and advanced stuff that I won’t spoil.

Did I mention this was a bizarre game? Well, you don’t know the half of it. Besides the aforementioned weapon vending machines, coins popping out of monsters and Christmas music… oh, did I not mention it’s a Christmas game? Well, there’s plenty more where that came from. One area requires you to compete at an arcade shooting game to win a stuffed animal. Another has Dogs running around in a Santa suit. And don’t even get me started on the dialogue. How’s this for an exchange: Dogs: “What’s wrong, Elliot?” Elliot: “I think I swallowed some of the monster vomit.” Dogs: “Oh, that’s not good.” Oh yeah, did I mention blue holographic fairies? You can’t take this stuff seriously, folks.

But while Blue Stinger is funny, it’s not necessarily always fun. Oftentimes, it felt like I was fighting the camera as much as the mutants. The camera rarely seems to be looking where I need it to, allowing monsters to take plenty of cheap shots at poor old Elliot and Dogs. Another problem is that the game requires a ton of backtracking and monsters are constantly re-spawning in virtually every room in the game. Sure, when I kill them, they pay up, but it isn’t always enough to replenish the ammo I just spent on killing them. As a result, I found myself often under supplied with ammunition and often low on health. Finally, the areas which required me to move quickly in order to conserve body heat or oxygen were the most frustrating. I’m all for a challenge, but here it felt more like a chore.

Can I recommend Blue Stinger? That’s a tough one. The game is quirky and funny enough to make me genuinely happy to have experienced it. But there were so many times along the way where I didn’t want to keep pressing on because I was so goddamn frustrated by it. The backtracking gets so tedious and while the fighting engine can be fun, it’s really tough to keep ammo and health in check while dashing from one save point to another. I’d say that if you’re the kind of person that doesn’t like to work in order to get through a game, this one might not be a good choice. On the other hand, if you feel that wackiness is its own reward, then by all means give it a ago.

Graphics: Bright, colorful graphics and 3D environments that show the power of the Dreamcast. The character models, on the other hand are somewhat flawed.

Audio: Do you like quirky Christmas music in your survival horror games? How about poor voice acting?

Control: The control is fine, it’s the camera that needs to be tamed.

Overall Value: If you’re like me, you won’t prance right through this one too quickly. But that’s because it can be downright frustrating. Once I beat it and saw all there was to see, I wasn’t in a hurry to head back in.