Videogame Review, The House of the Dead 2 for the Sega Dreamcast (w/ European Dreamcast Controller)

Videogame Review, The House of the Dead 2 for the Sega Dreamcast (w/ European Dreamcast Controller)

The Sega Dreamcast was a great replacement for the Sega Saturn on the House of the Dead series.  Here you’ll find creatures which reflect themselves well in gross effects- deadly frogs, headless knights, heart-opening lizards, predatory owls, brandished weapons, hairy zombies, and so much more.  Horror is presented with brilliant elements, images, and complete, utter destruction.  Of course a lot of Sega fans would’ve grown up enough by 1999 to play violent games with sheer understanding of good and evil between the lines on the Sega Dreamcast’s powers for its entertainment-producing engine, 4 times as much as the Sega Saturn’s.  It’s neat when a book pops up in an enemy boss’ sky and flips to a chapter about the monster’s weakness.  Attention span for House of the Dead 2 must be very high or else a boss fight will be played in confusion.  But I’d rather play Virtua Cop on the Sega Saturn.  Why?  Although the Sega Dreamcast produces the monsters in nice visuals with a great flow of 128-bit information difficulty in general is too high on the normal side.  At times I have to shoot a zombie over 10 times before he goes down!  When I’m constantly shooting at worms and worm-dragon bosses in their heads and not seeing them go down, something appears to be wrong.  Really?  Putting dozens of bullets on a worm-dragon’s heads has no effect?  Maybe the difficulty would be better and easier to handle on the lower side, but I was hoping that the normal side would be… well, “normal”.  It’s as if a mindless expert tried to define normal difficulty.  Sega by this point in 1999 was really trying to make up for the Sega Saturn’s original entry to their home console series for House of the Dead; I suspect they wanted to pull the difficulty at all stops where visuals and gameplay can be remarked on with a higher touch of excitement.  While I agree that House of the Dead 2 is better with a Dreamcast light gun I was pretty flabbergasted from these enemies who just didn’t seem to want to fall down and give in.  At some points a zombie’s head would’ve been half gone and disappeared and he still was coming after me; not only that, but the collision detection seems off as the boss fights drag on whenever a third of the bullets touched an enemy without power or fiery result, so honestly I believe Sega was just taking too many steps ahead while the gameplay wasn’t exactly fullproof with House of the Dead.  Virtua Cop has extremely fair collision detection on the Sega Saturn console- I can shoot, lead, and move and observe enemies at a distance in that game while House of the Dead 2 is like waving around a fish pole I can’t quite grasp.  My honesty here has to amount to great perception now since we’re no longer so biased about the Sega Dreamcast console’s visual/graphic/sound power, as the old white console has aged considerably and newer games have popped up into the market.  Visuals may be better on the Dreamcast than on the Saturn, but what do we care about that for?  Both consoles are vintage now!  It can still be nice though to go back and play some retro stuff from the past as we could use a blast every now and then.  House of the Dead is on my list for the Saturn.  The Dreamcast sequel offers terrific art with lots of inexplicable values and details adding up to the doomed city’s horrorscape.  And yet, the difficulty modes in House of the Dead 2 are running on the wrong system of fairness, challenge, and goals.  Sega needs to let us just shoot zombies a few times and achieve more body count from the deadly living herd.  Boss fights typically are twice as long as they should be; the general art would be improved from an enemy’s prone status to defeat as opposed to nearly limitless possibilities.  Is there such thing as the #1 game?  I don’t think so.  But if there is such thing, the #1 game doesn’t involve the greatest size of every aspect and every aspect added onto the greatest size; some features and effects (or aspects) need to be avoided and other characteristics require smaller proportions and sizes for a desired presentation.