Nato – CarnEvil
Ugh, I hate clowns, so of course I love a game that lets me pump countless amounts of lead into their creepy, all-too-happy faces – with gruesome results I might add. Thanks to Midway, CarnEvil plopped us smack in the middle of the world’s most hellish big-top show ever, led by ringmaster Ludwig Von Tökkentäkker.
Just like any good cheesy horror story, the game starts as two dumbass kids named John and Lisa ignore local folklore and insert a gold coin into Tökkentäkker’s tombstone slot, awakening a night full of pure evil. Trapped in a possessed attraction inspired by the 1962’s Carnival of Souls, Lisa and Joh fight a slew of baddies including always smiling bumper car garage workers, giant spiders, a Barney the Dinosaur-type mascot, and maggots with human heads – among so many more grotesque creations.
The fun in CarnEvil is that it plays like a campy, B-Movie type 80s horror flick, focusing on fun and dark humor over true scares. It’s got a very tonge-in-cheek delivery, one that provides horrifying carnival creatures through the funniest methods possible, and parodies numerous cultural references such as Marie Antoinette, Santa, Jason Voorhees, and other pop-culture bits throughout this raucous shooter.
It’s entirely too much fun fighting your way through this bloody, violent, “for mature audiences only” type adventure, engrossing me for hours at my local arcade. It’s like being stuck in your own grindhouse flick – except you decide who lives or dies. You know that answer though – everyone dies.
Remy – The House Of The Dead
Come on, huge shout-outs to Sega on this one, because there are some off-shoots to the original arcade games that are still REALLY good games. The grindhouse feel of the most recent The House Of The Dead: Overkill proves the series still has some balls, but I am kicking it old school here. I am talking about the stand up arcade game that had the two guns, the horrible voice acting, and the even more horrible graphics. Thing is, as a horror fan, and having not played a horror gun game at this point in my life since Chiller, The House Of The Dead was like comfort food for me. It was silly and creepy and bloody and a really great way to spend a week’s allowance.
Also, because I HAVE TO mention this, The House Of The Dead spawned one of the campiest and most under appreciated games of all time, The Typing Of The Dead, which was The House Of The Dead, but it taught you how to type. The faster you would type words, the letters would act like bullets and kill the creatures. To say it was insane and awesome is to undersell how brutally amazing it made learning.