We once again find ourselves in an unexpected place, but nothing too unexpected. This did start as a video game criticism blog, after all. I haven't done that at all this year since the masochistic nightmare of Final Fantasy II, but what the hell? A quick one for old time's sakes... and I do mean old times. We previously looked at Splatterhouse on the very first iteration of the Halloween marathon, in 2016. Holy Christ that's a long time ago. It's a bit of a messy post, but what do you want from me, I was banging out 31 of these things back then. They can't all be winners. Let's try and give this one some craft to make it a winner, though, and give it some context. To wit, then: Splatterhouse was a 1988 arcade game from Namco, a sidescrolling beat-em-up game with a sense of the visceral to it. Instead of just punching dudes in the face and making them fall down, you punch ghouls hard enough that they burst into pools of bloody guts and gore. It's a neat little arcade game with a lot of depth, creepy atmosphere, and enough gross bloody stuff to interest any gore hound who loved Freddy and Jason at the time. In 1992 a sequel came out, this time on the Sega Genesis. It fits at home there, the Genesis having originally been marketed as this graphical powerhouse that could give you the gaming ideal of the time, Like The Arcade BUT AT HOME! 1992 feels a little late for that sort of thing, being post-Sonic for the Genesis, but whatever. What is happening with Splatterhouse 2?
It really does boil down to more of what made Splatterhouse great. A big bulky dude in a spooky mask who for legal reasons bears no resemblance to a certain hockey mask wearing serial killer who is a registered copyright of Paramount Pictures scrolls from left to right punching ghouls and making blood and guts come out. It may sound basic, especially compared to the advancements of beat-em-up games like Double Dragon or even Streets Of Rage on the very same console, but it's in perfect fitting with that arcade mentality. It's only a 20 minute long game, but it makes up for that brevity by being pretty damn hard. As far as I could tell on normal mode, you get unlimited continues and a password to pick up and play from where you left off, but that still just gives you infinite tries to get through the game. I had to put in a little Hard Game Beater elbow grease to see the end of this one, is what I'm saying. What I particularly love about Splatterhouse 2 is its attention to detail and macabre sense of humor. They bring back the bit where you swing a two by four at the ghouls to splatter them against the background, but doing so in level 1 shakes the building you're in and drops down killer worms. Or the stage 1 boss where a ghoul's hesitant to go into a room because other ghouls got killed, but you arrive and scare it into going into the room where it gets killed and then the boss comes out. Or in level 3 where there are pits of water you can knock the ghouls into. It tapes into some kind of primal urge for viscera, but there's more to the game than just that.
Splatterhouse 2, you see, is a story about love. In the prior game, protagonist Rick and his girlfriend Jennifer were separated in a spooky mansion and Rick taken over by a scary mask. To make a long story short, Jennifer turned into a fucking monster and then died. It was very sad. Splatterhouse 2 has you going back to the source of the horror, fighting ghouls and enduring difficulty, to save her immortal soul from demons and bring her back to life. Yeah, you could close your eyes and throw a rock back in the 90's and hit a game where the goal was "save your girl", but there's something about the nobility of this quest that strikes me a certain way. It's a tale as old as time, told over and over again. Izanagi and Izanami. Orpheus and Eurydice. Rick and Jennifer. Did I really just compare mythology to an old Sega game with blood and guts? You bet your ass I did, just like I fought tooth and nail to get that girl back to the land of the living. I punched disembodied hands and heads, jumped into a portal between the living and the dead, fled out a collapsing elevator shaft, flung spikes at a tentacle beast in a lake, and then beat the living shit out of a giant pulsating flesh sac to save her. It took me many tries, but I did that. Splatterhouse 2 was a great time, and perhaps the perfect ideal of this specific type of game. I know Splatterhouse 3 becomes more of a belt scroller with a bit of exploration and other innovations in there, but for now I'm comfy resting with the job well done of defeating Splatterhouse 2. What a disgusting little video game with a heart of gold.
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