One of my favorite aspects of this game are the references to classic horror films. Rick soon sets out to save her, and it’s up to you to guide him through the various stages to finally face off against the pumpkin king at the end and rescue the girl. A second crash of lightning in the adjacent grave and the pumpkin king is brought to life as well who proceeds to wreck the happy reunion by kidnapping Jennifer. Jennifer is weeping over the grave of her lost love Rick when out of nowhere lightning strikes and he’s revived but still wearing his mask.

The game opens with a scene in a graveyard. I couldn’t be more happy with the results because this is an awesome game on its own merit. It seems that the developers over at Namco didn’t want to try and release a watered down version of the Arcade classic on the weak Famicom hardware, and so they opted to make it more of a parody. It’s more of a re-imagining, but it’s definitely an odd one.

Well, maybe the term ‘port’ isn’t entirely accurate. There were other home ports in Japan, but the most interesting one in my opinion is Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti. Unfortunately the only home port of the first title only ever came out on the TurboGrafx-16 outside of Japan. It was one of the early horror titles that was actually enjoyable, and it was one of the more gruesome releases we had seen to that point.

It’s no secret that the original Splatterhouse is one of my favorite games of all time.

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