A Double Dose of Halloween Horror! Part 1

It's that time of year again. Spooky spirits encapsulate the media landscape, children dress in cut-up bedsheets for a chance of licorice loot and for a brief period people stop complaining about the earliness of supermarkets selling Christmas supplies.

Well, aside from this gem.

I have two particular topics to talk about today, both tangentially related to the horrific holiday so I'm combining them into a little duology of modern frights. One of vampires and one of zombies; one of fangirls and fanboys; both worrying and aggravating, yet surprisingly apt for the season.

Pew-Pew-Pew! RELOAD!!!

Our first tale is about a video game; the fifth in a series of horror inspired light-gun games. You might remember these from arcades of the nineties, The House of the Dead. An evolution of Namco's Time Crisis series, HotD was a cheesy, campy series following Agent G, and ever more ridiculous scenarios involving mutants (the Z word is taboo). One fun deviation from the series was 1999's spin-off/remake of House of the Dead 2 known as Typing of the Dead!

Why didn't I get to learn how to type like this?!

Typing of the Dead replaced the guns and ammunition with vowels and punctuation; you decapitated zombies by correctly spelling the words that appeared underneath them, and it was awesome. The cheesy story and setting meshed with the ridiculousness of killing zombies with a keyboard (which could be seen as subversive of all video game combat at the time), and since then the game has become a cult classic. Fast forward to 2013 and Sega attempts to repeat the magic by keyboardidying 2009's Wii classic House of the Dead: Overkill!

This game is Pun-tastic!

HotD:Overkill was always the weird-fish of the series. Its tone appears more serious, though the subject matter remains as ridiculous as ever. This game specifically pays homage to B-Movie, grindhouse cinema and goes all out with over the top action, gore and swearing. Until recently it held the Guinness World Record for the most F-bombs dropped in a single game, which for a game with single digit linear levels is quite a feat. For reference, I have played TotD:Overkill and it is an absolute blast; the disonnance of using spelling to defeat waves of the undead works even stronger with the B-movie style. Then I discovered a NeoGaf thread that almost made me weep in despair.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=706407

Typing of the Dead: Overkill's resolution goes no higher than 720p.

The Wii game, whose style is paying homage to terrible, cheap horror B-movies.

And it dares to not have eye-blisteringly high resolution?

It may not be obvious from the screenshot, but the game always has a film grain effect to add a layer of authenticity (and mask the Wii's lackluster processing power). Perhaps I am being a little unfair here; if you have purchased or built a mega-powerful PC, and you want a graphical powerhouse game to show it off, that's perfectly reasonable. That's why games like Crysis exist, and Battlefield 4 will be releasing tomorrow!

So many lighting effects

This situation reminds me of a movie that came out earlier this year, a prequel to a timeless classic movie that was released over 70 years ago. The movie I refer to is Sam Raimi's "Oz: The Great and Powerful". 

So so pretty

For all three of you who have never seen The Wizard of Oz, it tells the story of Dorothy, a young girl from Kansas, who is swept away in a hurricane to a mysterious and beautiful land named Oz, and she goes on a journey to the Emerald City to find the eponymous wizard so he can send her home. The movie is notable for a lot of cinematic achievements, and one particularly memorable aspect is how the real world is represented in black and white, while Oz is shown in full colour, symbolising how beautiful and full of life this place is.

Somewhere over the rainbow...

Oz: The Great and Powerful attempted to use a similar trick; the "Real World" scenes at the beginning are in sepia, and during the transition to Oz the film regains colour. It even goes further by having the aspect ratio change from traditional 4:3 to the current cinematic 2.35:1 ratio. While I appreciated the touch, there was one thing that was blindingly obvious while I was watching it; the old-timey sepia effect and aspect ratio were being undermined by how sharp the image quality was.

(Well, that and the thoroughly modern the cinematography and effects)

I remember lamenting at the time that I could see through this easy trick, and wishing it were filmed more authentically. As a movie attempting to be in the same chronology as a movie from the 1930's, the lack of attention to detail was baffling, especially from Sam Raimi of all directors. Say what you like about the story quality of some of his movies, this man's resume for aesthetics and cinematography in his movies is nearly flawless.

Still the best looking super hero movie in my opinion

So where does this lead into Typing of the Dead: Overkill? Well, I genuinely feel higher resolution does this game no favours; artistically, I feel it could even be a detriment. While the arguments about standards are being thrown about, people are entirely missing the point that the game is supposed to look like an old cheap horror movie; how many of those have had Blu-ray releases?

Finger clicking good

House/Typing of the Dead: Overkill is a blast to play; over the top, funny, crude and wonderful. If you have a Wii, hunt this down, you'll find it for a fiver. Same goes for the PS3 version if you have a move controller or two lying around. Typing of the Dead: Overkill is available on Steam (and is half price at the time of this blog). You can buy it here.

Part 2 of this Halloween blog post will be up a little bit later; After all these years, I finally saw the first movie in the Twilight saga. Cutting through all that has been said about the movie, is it any good? Well, you'll have to find out later.

Same bat time, Same bat channel!