Play it in the arcade
User Rating: 4 | Splatterhouse TG16
Remember the movie Re-Animator, based on the short stories by HP Lovecraft? Remember the crazy Doctor Herbert West, played so wildly by Jeffrey Combs? Well it seems that Doctor West has been dabbling some more into bad science and has created an army of freaks and monsters. He's long since vanished but the monsters still live in his mansion. You play a college nerd called Rick Taylor who has to rescue his girl (a popular feature in beat-em-up games at the time) from this house of madness. Rick is aided in his mission by a special Aztec sacrificial mask which gives him superhuman strength and powers to go zombie-bashing. Splatterhouse is a very hard game to across. Either you play the arcade machine (now very, very hard to find) or you buy a Turbo-Grafx PC Engine and get the home-console version, which is so horribly censored that it even deletes the cut-scenes. Thus making the game completely storyless. Still, it's a cool-looking game and one can really tell where a lot of Resident Evil's influences came from. At one point in the game, the character of Rick walks through a giant vagina and battles evil foetuses. As a side-scrolling beat-em-up it's pretty weak. There's no real impact to the fighting and the controls feel somewhat sluggish. Seriously, the Arcade is the only place to go if you want to have a go at Splatterhouse. The Turbo-Grafx version neuters the game to the point of no-fun-ism. 
