Splatterhouse is a beat ‘em up game developed by Namco and
released in 1988 on the TurboGrafx-16 video game home console. The game on the
console included a parental advisory warning which read “The horrifying theme of this game may be inappropriate for young
children… and cowards” due to the gory graphics it included, like melted
flesh and bloated corpses.
In this 2D side-scrolling game, the player controls a
character named Rick, a student who has to fight creatures to save his
girlfriend. The game was inspired mainly by the western horror movies Friday
the 13th and Evil Dead II. In fact, the color of the mask of the main character
was changed in the United States version so that it would not look too similar
to the mask of Jason Voorhees, the serial killer in Friday the 13th.
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| Figure 1 - Splatterhouse gameplay |
The screen orientation of the game was horizontal having a
288x224 pixel resolution and a 24-bit RGB palette. When ported on the home
console the game lost some of its graphical detail and some sounds were removed
due to the less powerful hardware.
The game also had some changes when it was ported on the
home console from the arcade game, such as the arcade game starts with an
animation of the characters to narrate the background story, where as in the
video game it simply shows the exterior of the mansion before the game begins.
Then there are some minor changes, such as different weapons used and some
death scenes, like in stage 6.
In 2007 the TurboGrafx-16 version of the game was released
on the Wii’s Virtual Console and a remake was made in 2010 to be ported on
iPhones and iPads.
Bibliography:
Imdb.com, (2015). Splatterhouse (1988). [online] Available
at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0457486/
[Accessed 5 May 2015]
Wikipedia.org, (2015). Splatterhouse. [online] Available at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splatterhouse
[Accessed 5 May 2015]
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