Illbleed
Category: Sega NightmareCast
Developer: Climax Graphics
Release Date: April 25,2001
Time Played: Around 11 hours
Dubiosity: 4 out of 5
Quality of 20-year-old GameFAQs walkthroughs: terrible and amazing
Would I play again? Could be convinced to do a true ending run if I were to ever make something resembling money doing these silly streams.
“I can’t believe this is a real video game which was released on store shelves and sold for money” is a phrase I uttered multiple times during my playthrough of Illbleed. As the follow-up to Blue Stinger, it’s an ideal companion piece. The former was released at the start of the Dreamcast’s short lifespan, while the latter heralded its demise. It’s also with great fanfare and appreciation I announce it’s somehow weirder and more deranged than even Blue Stinger. It’s games like Illbleed which make features like this worth doing. Is it a good video game? No, probably not. But is it a great video game you should see with your two own damn eyes? Yes.
The game part of Illbleed follows the trend of its predecessor by being “weird” and “maybe not especially good” but it deserves points for originality if nothing else. It’s a level-based structure where each mission is a take on a different kind of B-horror movie. Most of them involve detecting traps moreso than solving puzzles or managing inventory. Instead, most of the challenge in Illbleed surrounds not wasting your limited pool of adrenaline on things which aren’t traps using a series of unhelpful UI bars at the top of the screen. Oh and there’s also combat, which is generally terrible and maybe not great, but at least deserves kudo points(?) for trying something different.
The real prize aside from novelty, however, is just how fucking weird Illbleed is. It’s worth noting that multiple lead developers from Climax Graphics left the industry after the Dreamcast went under. If they had stayed, would we know their names in the same way we know the Suda 51s or (god forbid) SWERYs of the world? Its tone is inexplicable. If I had doubts about how self-aware Blue Stinger was, then Illbleed made it abundantly clear that the people making it and localizing it knew exactly what they were doing. Probably. Why is there an extended, deeply deranged Toy Story parody which feels like a presage for half of Adult Swim’s programming in the early 2000s? Why does the devil look like Sonic the Hedgehog? Why does the true ending involve the main character sacrificing all her friends? It’s a lot to unpack and I can’t say enough about it. You should play Illbleed. Or maybe just… watch someone else play it.
Doctor Hauzer
Category: Respect the Classics (or else!)
Developer: Riverhill Soft
Release Date: April 29, 1994
Time Played: An hour and 15 minutes
Dubiosity: 4 out of 5
“CD ROM ENERGY”: Immaculate
Would I play again? No, but now I have working 3DO emulation so that’ll probably result in something stupid. Well, more stupid than when I played it for charity.
While the Dreamcast will continue to be this feature’s unofficial mascot, I must give the 3DO endless credit as the most “dubious” of video game consoles. Unlike the other failures of the early 90s (Jaguar, 32X) it actually has some redeeming features among the truly baffling multimedia nightmare trash it tried to champion. In addition to a certain level of misguided first-party support from the 3DO company, it has some solid console ports of contemporary PC games and perhaps more surprisingly, a lot of support from Japanese devs. Now, admittedly, a lot of the system’s popularity in Japan had to do with the number of porn games ported over from the PC-98, but even then you have weird experimental shit like D, or the best home port of Super Street Fighter II Turbo. It’s a weird piece of hardware, and you can likely expect me to delve more into it at some point in the future. Who could’ve imagined that a *true pioneer* of the survival horror genre was a Japan-exclusive 3DO title? Me. That’s who. Me.
As one of the earliest games of its type, Doctor Hauzer is absolutely trying to break new ground. Unlike those namby pamby wimps over at Infogrames giving the original Alone in the Dark trilogy “pre-rendered 2D backgrounds,” Doctor Hauzer dared to push the hardware with fully polygonal, textured environments. Sure, that means it runs at an especially chunky sub-10 FPS at pretty much all times, but was this quality which truly activated the “what the fuck am I looking at, how is this a real video game” part of my brain. Besides, if you run the emulator at approximately four times the clock speed of an actual physical 3DO console, the game runs totally fine. It’s fine.
What you’re left with then, is an experimental attempt at a horror adventure game with full 3D movement and the crustiest of tank controls. There are no enemies to threaten you, no ammo to manage, just a spooky mansion full of traps, items, and the same 30 second horror stinger playing on loop*. It turns out Doctor Hauzer is a remarkably short, straightforward game when you’re following a guide, as its main venue for challenge is just putting a bunch of death traps everywhere. It controls like butt, moves like molasses, and As my time played will indicate, I beat the game in a little over an hour and found it a slight, if interesting, piece of history. I have higher hopes for Riverhill Soft’s later games, including the infamous Overblood and the “so good it never got released in the US” Overblood 2, so look forward to those at some point.
*so, a weird anecdote: my twitch archive for this game got flagged for copyright violation. The claimant was some weird horror atmosphere CD, which used the exact same music. The weird kicker is, the track in question is from a CD which came out in 1998, four years AFTER Doctor Hauzer. Did both things borrow from the same sample library? Did this random CD you put on in the background of your middle school halloween party steal music from Doctor Hauzer? The mysteries are unknowable!
Clock Tower The First Fear
Category: Clonk Tower, Respect the Classics
Developer: Human
Release Date: September 14, 1995
Time Played: Around five hours
Dubiosity:3 out of 5
Despite having its own self-contained category, I was surprised to find out how straightforward the original Clock Tower was. To be clear, this is the original Super Famicom game, not its PSX sequel which came out in the west as “Clock Tower.” That’ll probably happen at some point, but not today. This is the one with the girl who is clearly just Jennifer Connelly running away from the scissor man. As opposed to the one with the girl who is clearly just Jennifer Connelly running away from the scissor man in THREE DIMENSIONS. It’s also definitely not any number of Clock Tower imitators, 90% of which also involve a young girl or woman running and hiding from weird monsters wielding comically oversized sharp objects. There’s a type to this category, is what I’m saying.
Before your Amnesias and your Outlasts and your Bloober Team Steam Trashstravaganzas, Clock Tower was the series of horror games where you couldn’t fight back and had to run or hide. It’s not a subset of horror games I’m particularly fond of, as any tension that might come from being chased is quickly doused by the frustrating trial-and-error nature behind it. There’s a reason why most of the games I’ve covered for this feature are closer to the Resident Evil side of things, and it’s partially because I find the push-and-pull resource management angle to survival horror a lot more interesting than figuring out what the game wants me to do to avoid getting stabbed.
No amount of predetermined scissor man hide-and-seek can really change the fact that Clock Tower is more-or-less a traditional-ass point and click adventure game, albeit a very slight one. There are multiple endings based on fairly obtuse criteria, some of the room layouts are randomized, but for most of my time with the game I very slowly wandered between rooms wondering what the hell I was supposed to do while occasionally avoiding the scissorman via trial and error. It’s a game whose strength comes from vibes, and whose weakness comes from… literally anything else. It’s a little too easy for me to peek behind the curtain and see the mechanics at play and conclude they aren’t particularly good mechanics. So I guess I’m saying it’s really good there are at least three more Clock Tower games and numerous homages. Look forward to those.
X-Files: Resist or Serve
Category: Licenses of Death
Developer: Black Ops Entertainment
Release Date: March 16, 2004
Time Played: About six hours
Dubiosity: 3 out of 5
Duchovnyosity: He still doesn’t give even the remotest of shits
Would I play again? Probably not!
I don’t have a ton to say about The X-Files: Resist or Serve. In a lot of ways, it’s self-explanatory. It’s a licensed game from the mid-2000s based on one of the most popular television shows of the 1990s for the Playstation 2. You can probably fill in a lot of the blanks right there, especially when I tell you it’s “heavily inspired” by Resident Evil. Well, Resident Evil but you can play as dubious favorite David Duchovny or actual favorite Gillian Anderson sleep talking their way through what feels like a particularly dire multi-part episode of the series.
I haven’t seen a ton of The X-Files, but I certainly hope this isn’t what fans are talking about when they talk up the quality of the television show. I was under the impression it wasn’t a series where our protagonists shoot a bunch of zombies, alien hybrid monsters, and weird psychic clones every week, but I don’t know for sure. At least they got the obnoxious 90s nerd characters a fairly significant supporting role. They got their own spinoff? Really?
For what it’s worth, it’s not the worst game I’ve played for this feature. It’s pretty bad sometimes, but more often than not just comfortably mediocre. Given it was published by the shambling corpse of Sierra mid-death throes and developed same studio responsible for 2003’s Fugitive Hunter: War on Terror (which is most notable for being the game where you fistfight Osama bin Laden) it could’ve been far worse! In a nod to Resident Evil 2, Mulder and Scully have two separate but interconnected stories, with different puzzles, weapons, and playable sequences. How much of that is padding, asset reuse, and a way of extending the length of a $50 video game I cannot say firsthand, but I bet it’s a lot!
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