Splatterhouse in Australia?

[runedeadthA]

:uts on pedant hat::

It's not "Attorney Generals." They aren't the Generals of Attorney. They are the Attorneys General. Think in terms of, say, the three Billy Goats Gruff. They aren't Gruffs, they're Billy Goats who all bear the name "Gruff."

::Takes off pedant hat::

I think a problem with making the gore and violence more involved a la Fruit Ninja is that it's difficult to pull that off with the given means. A controller would make it hard enough, even if you basically just tied slashing movements to both analog sticks, but the third person perspective chosen for the vast majority of games in the action-splatterfest genre fails to make things super-conducive to a high degree of control. Which isn't to say you can't have magnificent control in action games, but the controls will almost always be within the context of canned animations, because you simply couldn't exercise the kind of control needed to pull that off. I hate to say it, but a better means of this might actually be a ::gulp:: motion control interface of some sort.

Anyway, these are still pretty neat design concepts. Maybe they'll make it into Splatterhouse II: Splatterhouser.

Maybe for the the accurate control it might be hard for consoles with their controllers, But Penumbra did a kind of mouse controlled swing. As I recall it was a little unwieldy, but that sort of worked in the type of game it was (i.e survival horror).

As for the inclusion of gore, Left 4 dead 2 seems to have dropped out of peoples skulls (though for the Aussies its understandable, Poor bastards). The gore in the game is probably one of the more detailed I've seen. Limbs blow off at different points leaving bloody ragged stump. Chests can be blowned open, stomachs ripped out and leaving the zombies staggering with their intestines trailing. Heck even the head has deformable features. Shoot them in the face with a highish, but not to high, powered gun (like a weaker shotgun) and instead of blowing it off you leave a blood messy crater where their face used to be.
Makes pipe bombs fun *Beep Beep Beep BOOM* Body part rain!

 

[Lord_Gremlin]

You've described my dream game. That said, I like Splatterhouse. It's gory, and it's fun. But there's definitely room for solid improvement, and should such improvement be made in a sequel - a masterpiece would appear.
I definitely agree with Blanq and generally think such game should have lot of bosses. That's a bit of a problem in Splatterhouse - not enough bosses. And don't recycle it. For a 15-20 hour game take your time and create 10-15 different bosses with 100% unique animation and models. Surprise is always welcome "Yay! It finally lost it's huge missile-firing arm! Shit, it picked it up and now firing rockets twice as fast..."

Another idea (Painkiller did that to a small degree) is enemies using other enemies. For team attacks including sacrificing an enemy. In Painkiller certain skeletons decapitate others, making them go berserk for a short time and then die. In Splatterhouse Teratiod picks small monsters up with his tentacle and throw at you. In Dragon Age the Harvester rips off it's own arm and use it as a club and tears bloody skeletons from it's own body, resurrecting them. What I suggest as the best thing for a gory game is an enemy who picks up others and ters them to pieces, using those pieces as projectile weapon.

 

[ewhac]

That one Peter Jackson movie is Dead Alive.

Only if you're American and fat [/videos/view/zero-punctuation/57-Painkiller] (seek to 2:20).

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

The surprise with Splatterhouse, quality aside, is that it was even released in Australia, what with our notorious problem with a lack of an R18 certificate for games (meaning games that need them have been refused classification and essentially banned.) The gore could be written off as "fantasy horror," but then there's the tits, and if there's one thing that terrifies the puritans at the ratings board more than violence, it's a sexual thought entering their chaste, self-flagellating heads.

You might have it a little backwards there, the OFLC themselves have acknowledged that there is need for an R18 classification, and that a lack of one is only hurting us long term. They have stated that they themselves hate how constricting the classification rules are.

Over the last few years, more and more games have made it through largely because the OFLC have loosened their interpretation of the laws.

 

[proghead]

Cannibalism to restore health, obviously. *coughfallout3cough*

 

[Nocta-Aeterna]

Spoiler: This description sounds like the ideal next-gen Berserk game, minus character development/internal conflict

Let's count the way in which it works:
1) Protagonist has a ridiculously over compensatory sword which he swings in wide arcs and usually leaves non-demonic foes in a mushy pile of intestines.

2) Has a prostetic left arm which also doubles as a blackpowder cannon (cannot be seen in this picture due to magic armour).

3)Magic armour deadens the pain (and other senses), enabling the protagonist to use moves that otherwise would hurt way to much use ánd can take more trauma before fainting/dying.

4)Magic armour occasionally enables a berserker-modus, removing any sense of pain from the protagonist, and greatly increasing his strength ánd automatically sets broken bones straight by piercing the body with metal shards to reinforce his skeleton.

5)Using the berserker-modus eats at the soul more or less: with each consecutive use, the Protagonists loses some control over his inner beast.

EDIT: In fact.. they already made it... twice. Once for the Dreamcast and once for the Ps2, neither of which got an export.

Spoiler: Intro cinematic to the ps2 game

 

[Yahtzee Croshaw]

I stopped doing splatterkills once I got sick of them over and over. And then I started to enjoy the game a lot more. Too bad the game turned to easy at that point...
I loved Splatterhouse, but I also think a lot could be improved with little dedication.

 

[FollowUp]

How about being able to choose and customize your weapons and (own) character design? Like in AC:B multiplayer? That´d be awesome.

This is more so about the gore.

But different weapons should cause different effects.

 

[braincore02]

I agree with most or all of your points regarding gore. It definitely is less fun to gorify something that already looks like a bloody mess before you touch it.

Kudos for the Tintin mention lol

 

[chopperman]

a Fine list you have there I would only add to the body destroying part the face should have various parts to damage like the jaw, when its hit hard enough it should break and leave the mouth open and blood oozing out, also if enough damage is done it can be removed all together and the enemies tongue just hangs out which you can then cut off.
The eyes should able to go black, be stabbed and removable. The nose should be break able as with the cheek bones so the enemies face looks sunken in
The back of the skull should be a large target that when hit with a weapon hard enough takes and holds the shape of that weapon

that and add the corny deaths physics from fallout 3 so they bodies fly around on death

 

[KDR_11k]

So something like stuffing Prototype, Painkiller and Zangeki no Reginleiv [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI4K6hVURpg] into a blender? That last one is a Wii sword combat game with strategic dismemberment, e.g. do you aim for the giants weapon to get some rare extra gems or do you lop his arm off at the shoulder to make sure he doesn't hit you? Some enemies get much more painful if you de-leg them since that means their hand is much closer to you while you work on sawing their head off...

 

[ProtoChimp]

Didn't Dead Rising 2 already do all of this, except the grappling hook? Maybe thats part of why he liked it so much.

 

[Magnesium360]

I felt that something Dead Rising 2 got right was how you can carve through hordes of enemies like death incarnate. For me the combat worked well, despite how easy it was, because it was fun. It was fun because you could pick up a shotgun and a pitchfork and run into a nearby tool shed, only to emerge five seconds later with a vicious weapon complete with unique animations. It was fun because every weapon was different to every other weapon, and not just in that it looked different and did more or less damage. The spear may not be as poweful as the defiler, but you can throw it further, and nailing a zombie to a wall is just funny. It was also the only game I'd ever played where weapon degredation was actually enjoyable, usually it's a challenge or it's just annoying, but in Dead Rising 2, seeing your machete is going to break is just an excuse to hurl it through some guys head.

 

[squidbuddy99]

I think blood and gore should be better put into the game mechanics. When the floor is literally caked in human Kool-Aid, the enemies should react; weaker fodder would run screaming, while others would become slowed down by the excess. I also enjoy games that use human remains for weapons, as it's more satisfying to kill an enemy with his own arm than any ordinary stick.

 

[bobthedeadly]

A lot of those points fit perfectly with what Fallout did. Honestly, the gore in Fallout 3 & New Vegas is some of the most terrifyingly realistic shit I'd seen in a video game. It left an impact, particularly because of it's sheer realism. The thing is that people didn't just randomly explode when you shot them (unless you had the Bloody Mess perk), their arms and legs actually came off in a realistic manner if they take enough damage. Shooting some dude's leg off and watching him topple over is some of the most terrifying and satisfying violence in recent memory.

 

[mothmantis]

I've always found the most satisfying violence, although not necessarily gore related, involves wielding obscene amounts of power.

This happened more in older games like Rampage and Blast Corps, which still stroke the conquering barbarian part of my brain. The challenge in those games didn't necessarily come from being overwhelmed by bad guys, but by time limits, logic puzzles and strategy.

I've seen this done more recently to varying degrees of failure with games like the new Transformers and Front Mission. I say 'failure,' because they feel like little more than Final Fight 10: Giant Robots Edition, and not Holy Crap I'm A Giant Robot!

I also like the investment idea, although maybe use it to unlock new attacks, a la Double Dragon or River City Ransom. For instance: tearing off 50 arms allows you to choose between wielding severed limbs as clubs OR grabbing an enemy by the arm and throwing them at something. Seems like it would help with the whole 'repetition' problem.

 

[DanDeFool]

Cortex Command, an indie game packaged with the Humble Indie Bundle #2, does this (for the most part).

It's currently in beta, its AI is currently shit, and the controls (at least the mouse and keyboard controls) are way too clunky to effectively handle the incredibly realistic physics.

However, its dynamic sprites do almost exactly what Yahtzee lists in his hypothetical fun-with-gore game. The surrogate bodies the game's protagonists control get shot and dismembered realistically, if a humanoid body gets damaged it bleeds and loses health, and parts of your body can get shot off and the rest of your body can still work (although you'll start to lose health very quickly).

I once had a basic soldier body that had its legs shot off. I jetpacked it, torso oozing out the last few bits of its health, over to a healing bot. The body recovered all its health before it died and stopped bleeding, but its legs didn't come back. Therefore, I flew the dismembered torso over to the enemy stronghold, picked up some grenades that had been left lying around, and suicide-bombed a bunch of zombies (which also splatter into giblets, and if you don't get them in the head, they keep crawling towards you).

Bottom line, Yahtzee and other readers, I'd recommend you check out Cortex Command. It's still in development, and (due to the AI and gameplay issues mentioned above) isn't quite ready for prime-time, but it's still fun to dick around in and the dynamic sprites and realistic physics are fascinating to say the least.

 

[RollForInitiative]

I've got to be honest, Yahtzee...as a designer, I cringed repeatedly at the thought of the underlying tech some of those bullet points would require. Not that they don't sound interesting, mind you; just grossly unfeasible.

It's an interesting exercise you've put yourself to, however, and I applaud you for taking the time to do so. It's one thing to fire shots across the bow of every game you see and quite another to stop and think for a while about the nitty gritty details of what constitutes "fun" in one sense or another.

Good on you.

 

[RetroMenace]

I had a thought, what if your character's power and concenquentley his ability to kill enemies was influenced by momentum. Sort of in a Mirror's edge like fashion, running or scoring succesful hits increases your momentum, higher momentum allows you to move faster and get in stronger attacks, so it will easier to take out enemy limbs. However jumping, dodging, or getting hit lowers you momentum. Higher momentum could also lead to gorier finishing move / attacks. Like say when you have low momentum you regular punch is just a regular cross punch or something, then with full momentum it becomes a haymaker or another punch which lets you gain additional range. Also a regular grapple kill would be just punching their head off, while a full momentum one would have you rip off their head and kick it through their torso, while the head comicly rebounds off of several enemies damaging several more and adding to the fun gore / addition range with momentum ideas. Also if he killed enough enemies he could get a power that would allow him to completley fill his momentum, probably using the same bar as your invincibility idea, but costing far less.