Speaking of not feeling empowered, the difficulty in this game is very uneven and in my (and many others) opinion is difficult in a cheap way. The visceral fun of blasting zombies to pieces from the mainline games does not translate at all in Zombie Revenge. Gunplay, which is actually a large part of the combat-it's still House of the Dead after all-is similarly unsatisfying. The combat feels stiff and repetitive I don't feel that each character's arsenal is varied enough to really empower the player. On the other hand, the gameplay leaves me cold. The presentation side is flashy, goofy and well done. There are lots of arcade style gimmicks, such as rescuing civilians and pulling the brakes on an out of control train while your partner holds off an endless wave of enemies. There's even a stage in the latter part of the game where you revisit Curien mansion from HotD 1, complete with the classic stage 1 theme and the iconic run through the mansion courtyard!ĭisappointingly, the bosses do not follow the trend of being named after tarot cards here, other than our pal Magician Zombie Revenge is a sharp looking game, with detailed character models and decent looking environments (mainly grimy urban areas) and a few sick boss designs. Per the HotD Wiki, Zombie Revenge was originally titled Blood Bullet: The House of the Dead Side Story and Zombies Nightmare, two way cooler names.
Control the excellently named Stick Breitling (the standard man character), Linda Rotta (the standard woman character) or Rikiya Busujima (a ki wielding force of nature who resembles a 1970's Japanese crime movie archetype, specifically actor Yusaku Matsuda) and prevent the confusion in the city during a zombie outbreak. The light-gun theme (and first-person viewpoint) is dropped in favor of a beat-em-up style of gameplay similar to Sega's own Dynamite Cop, released the previous year. Unfortunately, Zombie Revenge is the weakest spinoff of the franchise.
The game is full of setpieces and novel situations, like this deathtrap room
There's still a whole lot of shooting for a beatemup However, once in a while Sega likes to mix it up and we'll get a strange spinoff title such as the The Typing of the Dead, The Pinball of the Dead, the odd minigame collection (featuring two zombies in love!) House of the Dead EX, and today's exhibit, 1999's Naomi/Dreamcast title Zombie Revenge. Every one of the light games absolutely rules. Most of the franchise plays it straight move through a variety of locations on rails, clowning on zombies and mutants with a fun and satisfying selection of firearms. Think of it as a good version of Crypt Killer (does anyone besides me think about Crypt Killer?). Known mostly its over the top horror atmosphere, location-specific enemy damage and absolutely ludicrous voice acting, HotD is one of the elder statesmen of the light-gun genre. Perhaps Namco quickly saw how limiting the style was and how little it did to actually market the game to potential buyers? Pehaps the plan all along was to have only these three games share a similar cover, but what would tie them together? Other games like Air Combat would have been a perfect candidate for Man In Helmet style.** In fact, Ridge Racer only used this cover in the version of the game that came bundled with the Playstation console subsequent standalone releases had the standard car cover. However, concurrent with these releases were other Namco games (such as Tekken and Air Combat) that did not follow this short lived trend, and after the release of Starblade Alpha in late April 1996 Namco seems to have abandoned it entirely. While "Terrified Person Wearing Headgear while tiny renders of in-game vehicles float in their eyeballs" doesn't exactly explain to me what the game is about, you knew you were getting a Namco product when you saw it.
Yes, like Nintendo's celebrated "Black Box" launch titles and Capcoms "gridline screensaver" cover art, it seems like Namco was angling to establish a House Style for their western releases. Can you detect the subtle pattern in the cover art*? Here's something I've never seen anybody talk about: In the young days of the North American PS1, Namco came out kicking by releasing ports of their early-90s arcade games.