House of the Dead 2 – 1999

House of the Dead 2 has to be the most iconic light gun shooter out there, when l say Light Guns Game you say ‘House of the Dead’, which House of the Dead? This one. And we’re gonna be playing it with the original house of the dead Mac 10 arcade gun, converted to Blamcon.

House of the Dead 2 came to Arcades in 1998 as the first game using Sega’s new Niomi hardware and was a smash hit, just like the first game. It’s hard to walk past the machine and hear that iconic ‘The House of the Dead’ ring out and not put a few quarters in, After its release in the arcades was ported to almost every system out there, Dreamcast, Xbox, Wii, and oddly just a few weeks ago a remake was released on Steam , but here we’re playing the original Niomi arcade port. I’m also playing this as a cold play, first attempt, and seeing what it takes to get to the end, and how many quarters lighter my jeans will be after.

House of the Dead 2’s gameplay focuses on fast and accurate shooting. With 6 bullets in the chamber you have to nail your headshots to bring enemies down quickly, and that’s not an easy thing to do. Enemies protect their face, move quickly, and spring up out of nowhere making shot placement and reaction time critical.

I love the art style in this game, everything has a grungy aesthetic, from the run down buildings to dead trees and gloomy skies. There’s a lot of care that’s gone into the environment, little things like bike racks or newspapers on tables, reflective puddles of water everywhere, It just makes this look like a place that was lived in before everything went wrong. There is a certain self-awareness, or at least I hope it’s self-awareness, about the cheese in this game. My favorite horror movies are always the ones that know what they are and lean into it, ala the Evil Dead series. If it’s not going to make sense anyway, don’t justify it, just lean into it and take your audience along for the ride. This is the game version of that mantra. Just listen to a few of the awesome voice acting lines and tell me nobody was aware of how this sounded:

The story revolves around monsters overtaking some rando unnamed city that reminds me of Venice, down to the canal system. You’re responding to a distress call from Agent G gotten into trouble investigating what happened. You start the game being confronted with a flying imp who sicks a bunch of zombies on you. You soon find G in a library and he gives you a codex that will help you during boss fights and then fighting your way through the city to the source of the monsters.

And it’s the variety of these monsters is where this game really shines. Rather than filling the game full of repetitive similar enemies, every monster type has a unique moveset, attack patterns, and vulnerable points. There’s small hard to hit enemies that leap out at you, fast moving acrobats that throw things at you you have to shoot out of the air, and of course hordes of slow moving zombies that are best brought down with headshots. Don’t get too head shot crazy, some protect their heads, or have head armor, so learning weak points of each enemy makes the game a lot easier.

Mixed in with this are quick shooting challenges, like rescuing civilians, or hitting objects as they move past you or thrown at you. There’s a lot of ‘rescue the civilian’ challenges in each level, just be careful because shooting civilians costs you a life. You get 5 lives before you die, represented by these flaming genie lamp things, which is an odd way to show them. Shooting objects like crates or barrels can give you health items or bonus points and sometimes rescuing civilians can reward you with health. Saving or losing civilians will also determine what path you take through the level giving the game some really cool reliability as saving civilians. Depending on how many civilians you save you’ll face the boss in a different environment, which affects their phases and attacks.

And then we have the bosses, the bosses represent tarot cards, Judgement, Hierophant (the fish), Tower, Strength, Magician, and the final boss the Emperor, At the beginning of each boss fight they at least have the courtesy of telling you their weak point with the codex you got from G earlier. Where did G get the codex from? Don’t know, but it’s much appreciated. The bosses go through different attack patterns exposing their weak points, briefly.

Shooting bosses during their attack cycles cancels their attack. I don’t know if it’s possible to cancel all attacks, this is an arcade game and it’s never going to let you beat the game on one quarter, but you can cancel most of them.

Co-op in this game is a lot of fun, there’s no special advantage to having a second player but it’s always a good time blasting zombies with a friend. If you have a second gun and a friend to hold it this makes an awesome party game, but with the great atmosphere and gameplay single player still rocks just as hard.

If I had to level a criticism, some of the attacks are pretty cheap, enemies will jump you with almost no time to react. Since this is my first time playing since the arcades I don’t really know what’s around each corner and even with super-human reactions I think some of these enemies are impossible to bring down fast enough unless you know they’re there first.
The end of the game is a boss marathon, you’ll face all the bosses again one at a time and you can try and top your previous attempts at them. The final boss is the Emperor, who’s a really cool boss but has the same attacks as all the other bosses as well as his own modes. There are three different endings to the game, depending on how well you did. Honestly I stopped at the credits, you only see which ending you get after.

Overall it took me 40min and a ridiculous 30 quarters to beat the game and I had a total blast. I’m sure if I played through a few times, which I will, I could get a lot better. Finally getting to beat it after all these years was immensely satisfying. But now I know how many quarters it took me, I’m glad I waited.