The House of the Dead Trilogy

*The House of the Dead Trilogy*

The House of the Dead is a 3D Arcade light gun shooter from the developers at Segaported over to the PC. Your mission is to shoot your way into a house of horrors filled with genetically mutated monsters and zombies and rescue the DSC laboratory members of a government funded operation headed by a mad doctor.

The House of the Dead offers a total of eleven hideously mutated undead creatures to kill with a number of different kinds of zombies as well as four evil bosses. The game also features a total of four chapters, each with 3D cut-scenes and multiple branching paths.

Game modes include Arcade (original Arcade mode), Boss (fight the game's four bosses without having to pass the levels), Ranking and the newly added PC Mode (five characters can be selected, each with different attributes). Options include color of blood, difficulty, auto reload, amount of life, number of continues, sound balance and full configuration opportunities for both player one and two on keyboard, mouse and joystick.

Visually, The House of the Dead is extremely gory with details of blown off heads, splitting guts and spouting, spurting and gushing blood. The game comes with full 3D support.


THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD II
Released as an arcade gun shooter in 1998 and ported to the Dreamcast the following year, the PC version of The House of the Dead 2 offers a number of features not available in the original. Included is a practice mode for honing shooting skills, the option to play the six stages in arcade or original mode, or simply fight bosses in boss mode. While levels, characters and spooky content are intact, a variety of power-ups not available in the original are also available.

A stranger, Goldman, has resumed the evil Dr. Curien's twisted experiments of genetic manipulation that were thwarted in the original House of the Dead. Reprising the role of AMS agent James Taylor, you must clean up the town infestation of plodding, clawing undead zombies. Whatever happened at the Curien mansion two years previously has started again, and your expertise is once again required.

In the arcade version, you completed levels by shooting zombies with a gun controller. The Dreamcast port allowed you to use a regular control pad to play in place of the gun controller, and the PC version lets you control the targeting cursor using either mouse or keyboard. You can suffer three hits from zombies and monsters during each continue (life).


THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD III
Sega's zombie-blasting light gun series makes its PC debut with the exclusive release of The House of the Dead III. Taking place 20 years after the events in the second game, this third title has Lisa Rogan and Agent G investigating the disappearance of Lisa's father, who vanished while searching an abandoned industrial depot two weeks earlier.

As before, the on-rails action involves blasting wave upon wave of undead abominations from a first-person viewpoint. For the first time in the series, an auto-reloading shotgun is the weapon of choice, which eliminates the need to shoot offscreen in order to reload. Instead, players must wait a few seconds as their character's onscreen hand automatically replenishes the shells by loading them into the barrel.

Gone are the hapless innocents of past games in the series, replaced instead by the character's partner, who must occasionally be saved from precarious situations. These predicaments generally involve groups of zombies swarming around the partner. Quickly shooting them down will earn players bonus lives, but failed attempts are not punished. A separate Time Attack mode offers a slight variation on the basic formula.

Eliminating zombies in this mode adds additional seconds to a time limit, while taking damage depletes it. Fans of the series will be pleased to note the Dreamcast version of The House of the Dead 2 can also be unlocked for play, which comes with an additional set of bonus modes. A trailer for The House of the Dead movie is included as well. The game can either be played with a third-party light gun or the Xbox controller, and two-player simultaneous action is supported on the same screen.

Tested on Win 8 Pro 64-Bit.