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Splatterhouse (Arcade Retrospective)

Posted: August 23rd, 2020, 8:39 am
by Zack Burner
While Chiller back in 1986 got it wrong, Splatterhouse 2 years later got it right. A highly playable gorefest in side-scrolling beat em up fashion with some weapons to lay down the carnage and blood. Like Chiller, this game wasn't around in a lot of arcades and for good reason, blood/gore, and some disturbing content. I've beaten this game thanks to MAME and there's stuff that's still disturbing today as it was back then, such as boneless slinking babies, rows of rotting meat, an inverted cross boss (this is a blue ghostly head in the TG-16 version), and a giant with a sack over his head and chainsaws for hands. If you're a gore fan there's plenty to love here, from chopping off heads with a cleaver, smacking them against the wall with a 2x4, impaling zombies with harpoons, and shooting with a shotgun. My favorite boss fights are the Biggy man (the giant mentioned above) where you can use the shotgun against (forget using your bare fists, way out of the question), and the inverted cross boss (you use an axe on this entity, while in the TG-16 version you use a golden cleaver on the ghost head). Besides the Biggy Man there's the possessed room, monster girlfriend in stage 5, and the ultimate evil in the 7th and last stage which is a giant partially submerged in the earth with flesh stretched across it's malformed face and arms with nailless hands. The stuff of nightmares. The graphics hold up quite nicely today and the sound definitely chills your spine with the music and effects even the necromancer sub-boss ("I'm the ghoul, HA!). If you're a horror or gore fan, check this one out.