![]() ![]() This Silver Bear winner, which centers on an overweight, heavy-metal enthusiast working the night shift as a mall security guard in Montevideo, is already quite well-traveled, and while its popularity with festival audiences is understandable, I couldn’t get past the essential contradiction at its core. Presentation counts.“An open mind is advised,” claim the (typically, very funny) trailers for this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival, but I will admit that I brought my preconceptions – and a nasty case of jet-lag – to the screening of Adrien Biniez’s Argentine-Uruguayan co-production Gigante. You know what, though? Bare bones throwback that it is, I’ll still reach for this over any Streets of Rage title on a blustery October eve. You need look no further than its cutting edge Genesis contemporary Streets of Rage 2 for proof of that. Next to no effort went into tinkering with the old formula, resulting in a ’90s console release that could have come straight out of an ’80s arcade. While these small improvements are appreciated, Splatterhouse 2 remains about as unambitious a sequel as can be. It’s certainly not much, but it’s nice to not have to rely entirely on an instruction manual for context. There’s a proper prologue where the voice of the mask sets up the idea of resurrecting Jennifer as well as a smattering of between-stage dialogue from Rick. We also see a slight increase in the quantity and quality of the in-game storytelling this time around. It manages to be tougher than its predecessor even without the threat of forced restarts. I died more frequently in Splatterhouse 2 and it took me a good couple extra hours to finish the first time. As if to compensate, however, levels are slightly longer and enemy patterns, particularly those of the bosses, are a tad more complex. Splatterhouse 2 offers both unlimited continues and a password feature. The TurboGrafx-16 home port of the first Splatterhouse gave you finite continues to work with, meaning that you’d likely be forced to restart from scratch several times before finally memorizing enough to finish it in one clean go. Let’s start with the difficulty balancing. That would be a cop-out, though, so I’ll dig a bit deeper. It’s tempting to simply point you to my own prior Splatterhouse review and call it a day. Stages have the same “trudge right and whack monsters while jumping the occasional trap” flow to them. He lashes out with the same small array of punches and kicks, supplemented by rare and fleeting weapon pickups. Rick retains the same pokey walk speed and floaty jump. On the surface, it really is just more Splatterhouse. ![]() The zero risk expansion pack nature of Splatterhouse 2 makes it a surprisingly tricky game to assess. I’d venture to say that you could swap whole sections between the two and an inexperienced player would never spot the change. Apart from that one little tweak to our hero’s motivation, the two games look, sound, and play incredibly similar, right down to minute details like the layout of the status bars along the top and bottom of the screen. Think the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, except with 1000% more chainsaw mayhem. This requires literally trekking to hell and back over the course of eight side-scrolling levels. Rick is on a mission to retrieve Jennifer’s soul from the underworld after ultimately failing to save her life last time. Rarely, if ever, has a style over substance exercise paid off so well.ĭespite being a home console exclusive for the Genesis, 1992’s Splatterhouse 2 is a virtual carbon copy of the 1988 arcade original. It helps that they capture the mood of the Halloween season uncannily well with their pitch-perfect blend of gruesome imagery and adolescent glee. On the contrary, their artful layering of macabre atmosphere on top of simple yet solid mechanics lends them a certain timeless appeal in my eyes. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy playing through these suckers. ![]() What follows feels like a gore-drenched extended homage to ’80s horror cinema with a basic beat-’em-up game tacked onto it. Each installment has everyman protagonist Rick Taylor donning a haunted Terror Mask that imbues him with supernatural strength and setting off to rescue his sweetheart Jennifer from the clutches of demons. Namco’s Splatterhouse must rank among the most consistent franchises in all of video gaming. ![]()
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