A Round-Up of the Seasonal Foodstuffs of Halloween 2017!

Yep - it's time for our seventh annual wrap-up of the best, weirdest and ickiest seasonally-appropriate, limited-time-only foods, snacks and drinks of the Halloween season. Warning: your eyes may get diabetes from reading this.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

It's officially Halloween, which means I am required by Internet law to wrap up the month of October with an article highlighting the miscellaneous, seasonally-appropriate foodstuffs I've been chewing on and slurping up since late August. 

I've been doing this pretty much every year since 2011, and at this point, I'm kinda' burned out on the concept. For one, there just doesn't seem to be as many out-there, limited-time-only Halloween foods making the grocery store rounds these last couple of years, with many manufacturers simply pumpkin spicing their regular products instead of giving us something worth going out of our ways to try, like solid black Whoppers and Starbucks drinks modeled after Dracula.

Still, there was no shortage of kooky and kitschy seasonal products glutting store shelves and fast food places this Hallow-season, and it would be a disservice to the Internet as a collective to not recap, recount and reminisce on the wacky, whimsical foods and drinks that were. Pry open those trick or treat bags, kiddos - it's time to chow down on last slice of Halloween ephemera 'til next year.

Brach's Football Candy Corn!

OK, so maybe it's not technically Halloween-related, but come on, football and Halloween are pretty much inseparable aspects of the same season, and if we're going to include a whole bunch of random pumpkin spice flavored shit on the list, we might as well include these, too. Some people have a deep aversion to candy corn, but I've always enjoyed it, and for my money, nobody makes it better than Brach's, whose LTO football-shaped candies are certainly no deviation from the brand's overall quality. What's really cool, though, is that each candy tastes different; the brown ones have a milk chocolate taste, the dark brown ones have a dark chocolate flavor and the orange-looking ones have a noticeable caramel tinge to 'em. The visuals are pretty impressive too - I mean, just look at all those divots embedded on the candies, just like a real football! 

Sonic's Pumpkin Pie Master Shake!

So this is an annual seasonal offering from the brand, which I've somehow missed out on the last few years. I've never really tried a pumpkin pie flavored ice cream that tasted even remotely authentic, and this, unfortunately, is no exception. It does, however, get some bonus points for the extra layer of whipped creme and those crunchy, pecan-like flakes up top. All in all, it ain't a bad little shake, even if it is a little bit too subdued - conceptually, aesthetically and nutritionally - for the season.

Apple Pie Oreos!

To be frank, I've gotten tired of writing about LTO Oreos, and I have no earthly clue how apple pies directly tie into the fall theme, but I will be goddamned if these aren't some of the best special edition Oreos I've ever tasted. I'm not sure if I would call the interior creme an authentic apple pie facsimile, but it's nonetheless one of the better tasting twist-top cookies I've tasted in a long time. If these things are still on shelves near your neck of the woods, definitely give 'em a try - Halloween gimmick or not, these things are just A-plus junk food.

Cookies & SCREEM M&Ms!

So I take it these things are supposed to taste like Oreos-flavored M&Ms, right? Eh, I didn't really feel it, but I definitely dug the LTO product's aesthetics. While there is this thin layer of cookie wrapped around the interior chocolate core, the overall taste is actually kinda' negligible. All in all, it pretty much tastes like your run of the mill M&M, only it looks more like a scuffed up bowling ball than usual. Which, yeah, is probably worth the slight up-charge in price. Maybe.

Starbucks Dark Mocha Frappuccino!

Starbucks actually released a number of limited-time-only drinks for Halloween this year, so it's not really surprising that the Dark Mocha Frappuccino kinda' fell to the wayside. I mean, there were drinks released by the chain this fall that were supposed to mimic fuckin' zombies (yeah, more on that in just a bit) and something like this just can't compete in today's Instagram-driven culture. As you'd imagine, the super-sugary beverage was one part iced coffee drink, one part whipped creme orgy and one part crunched up Oreo cluster-fuck. Which, for what it's worth, isn't that bad - 'tis a shame the whole thing devolves into a hyper-saccharine mush by the time you're halfway through it, though.

Starbucks Limited Edition Bottled Pumpkin Spice Latte!

Thanks to the PSL, Halloween has more or less turned into three months of companies making every product they manufacture taste like pumpkin spice. And while Starbucks has been producing bottled pumpkin spice frappuccinos for wholesalers like Costco and Sam's for quite a few years now, I'm pretty sure this is the first time the company has sold bottled versions of its' PSL as standalone offerings at gas stations and big box mart freezers coast to coast. Unfortunately, this cold-version of the iconic Starbucks drink doesn't taste anything like the marquee, season-defining beverage. Instead, it tastes like chocolate milk with huge chunks of cinnamon and nutmeg in it, and I'll be Allah-damned if the soup itself doesn't look like liquid diarrhea with pencil shavings in it. Seriously, once you see it, you can't unsee it. 

McDonald's McCafe Pumpkin Spice Latte!

This PSL imitator has been around for years and years now, but I didn't get around to trying it until this autumn. To be perfectly honest with you, I thought it wasn't that bad. In fact, it's probably one of the better PSL wannabes out there, a beverage that's quite clearly above grade for most gas station pumpkin spice coffees and maybe only a notch or two below the stuff being hawked at Dunkin' Donuts. That, and it goes WAY better with Buttermilk Crispy Chicken Tenders and Sriracha dipping sauce than you'd expect. Significantly better, actually.

Pillsbury Grands! Pumpkin Spice Rolls!

First off, apologies for not including a shot of the can - I forgot to take a snapshot before I exploded that motherfucker, and I am NOT rummaging through the garbage like a raccoon just to show you people the fragments. These things were pretty much what you would expect - sumbitches were extra flaky, and the proprietary cinnamon dipping sauce was gooey as all hell. Oddly enough, the sauce itself didn't taste all that pumpkin spicy, while the rolls themselves had a very noticeable Starbucks-esque cinnamon kick. Anyhoo, it's good stuff all around, if not a bit boring, aesthetically.

Aldi's Lunch Buddies Halloween Fruit Flavored Snacks!

You know it's a weak year for Halloween-themed comestibles when you've reduced yourself to scouring the aisles of Aldi for decent-ish, seasonally-thematic goods. Anyhoo, these artificial fruit chewy snacks are all modeled after miscellaneous Halloween iconography. You've got grape witch hats, lemon spiders, cherry skulls and my personal favorite, the orange Jack O Lanterns. Overall, these were quite a bit better than I thought they would be, and the sculpting on the individual snacks were pretty impressive. That said, it took me forever to realize that one piece was supposed to be a cat - I spent about half an hour thinking it was some kind of half-man, half-monkey hunchback at first.

Pumpkin Patch Orange Pop Rocks!

I've been seeing these things at every Dollar Tree in a 50-mile radius for the last four Halloweens, and oddly enough, that seems to be the only time I see Pop Rocks (or as Sonic and Taco Bell have to call 'em for legal reasons, "popping candy") on store shelves at all these days. It's been years since I've tried the candies, and I have to admit, that tingly sensation is still one of the most idiosyncratically unique experiences in the wide-world of junk foods. These "pumpkin patch" candies came in a pseudo-citrus combination of orange and green, although each seemed to have the exact same off-orange artificial taste.And yes, I know dumping them atop a geode makes them look just like a big old pile of crystal meth, but maybe that was my intent all along. Really, the flavor is negligible, and it's all about that foamy, tingling sensation - which makes me wonder what it would feel like to get a hummer from my girl with a packet of these in her mouth. Anybody out there already tried it and want to give me the lowdown before going all 50 Shades here?

Starbucks Zombie Frappuccino!

Well, you knew this was going to make an appearance at some point on the countdown. This is the limited time only beverage the chain chose to replace the Frappula, which - as we all know by now - is one of my favorite seasonal, LTO gimmick products ever in history. So naturally, I'm going to be just a smidge bitter about this thing bumping my beloved Dracula-themed frappuccino off the menu, but on the whole I'd consider it a pretty enjoyable little drink. The combination of mint green creme and sludgy brown chocolate syrup immediately brings to mind Frankenstein's monster, and the humongous purplish-pinkish swath of whipped topping mimics exposed brain tissue way more accurately (and disturbingly) than you'd have imagined any dairy product doing. More or less, it tasted like a fusion of the chain's cult favorite Unicorn Frappuccino from earlier this year and McDonald's Shamrock Shake, which, yeah, is a bizarre combination of flavors, but one that's nonetheless fairly palatable to this reviewer's tongue. It's not something you would want to chug down on a daily basis, but for a one and done seasonal tie-in drink, it ain't too shabby. And as an added bonus, by the time you're almost done with the beverage, the purple, green, brown and white juice all merges together into this ghastly water-logged corpse-like hue. I'm almost certain the suits at Starbucks didn't plan on that, but if they did? These motherfuckers are on the goddamn ball.

CVSHealth Pumpkin Spice Cough Drops!

And lastly, we come to the moment in time and space in which the long, long-running pumpkin-spice-everything trend officially jumped the shark. At this point, the only way to top CVS' pumpkin spice cough drops is to roll out pumpkin spice flavored birth control apparatuses, which hell, might be right around the corner, considering the way our modern Sodom and Gomorrah society is headed. I actually bought these things in early September and kept 'em in the back of my car for the better part of two months, and I expected the cough drops to come out looking like heat-mutated pieces of glass candy. Thankfully, the individual wrappings kept the package from amalgamating into a giant orange blob, and I will be god-damned if these things - around 60 days after I purchased them and drove all around the coastal southeast, with temperatures in excess of 80 degrees Fahrenheit most of the damn time - STILL packed a palpable PSL flavor. In fact, this is one of the best imitations of the trademark Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte flavor I've ever tasted, which makes me wonder if I can create my own offseason PSL by ordering a regular latte and dropping about three or four of these fuckers in there as home-brewed flavor add-ins. And yes, the menthol-coated drops (which are about 10 calories a piece) do indeed work as efficient and effective cough suppressants, just as advertised.

So, after doing this stupid round-up for seven years now, I reckon I've finally hit the apex of limited-time-only, seasonal edition foodstuff journalism. Not only did I test taste the veritable zenith of the PSL cultural tsunami that's been rolling around for the better part of the decade, I actually managed to conclude my annual round-up of Halloween foods not with an actual food or drink, but a motherfuckin' over-the-counter pharmaceutical product. If that's not a perfect sign it's time to abandon ship, I don't know what is. I mean, by this time next year, CVS could buy out Aetna outright, which means, retroactively, these pumpkin spice cough drops would be a novelty Halloween candy (sorta) produced by a fuckin' health insurance company.

And in a world getting more and more insane every day, if you can't accept health insurance provider-designed, mass-marketed autumnal cough drop gimmicks as the point of no return, you're just living a lie, my friend. A terrible, terrible lie.

H A P P Y  H A L L O W E E N

F R O M  T H E  I N T E R N E T

I S  I N  A M E R I C A , Y O U  

M O T H E R F U C K E R S!

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An Ode to SNK's 'Beast Busters!'

Long before The House of the Dead, the fine folks who brought us Metal Slug and Samurai Shodown gave us the original gore-soaked, arcade light gun zombie blast-a-thon. But does the 1989 coin-op still hold up all these years later?

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

I don't know if you folks have figured this out yet, but I'm really, really fond of SNK. While just about everybody worth a damn remembers them most for their Neo Geo offerings, the company actually had a pretty extensive background making both arcade and console games before their iconic coin-op/home console hybrid went online - in fact, they were making them as early as the late 1970s. 

The absolute last arcade game SNK produced before migrating to the Neo Geo platform is an especially interesting little oddity called Beast Busters (not to be confused with the totally unrelated pinball game Bone Busters, Inc., although it's probable that both games were named such to cash in on the success of a totally different kind of "Busters" license.) Although essentially nothing more than Operation: Wolf with monsters, Beast Busters nonetheless has a very idiosyncratic feel to it, with some very detailed (and extremely colorful) sprites for its time. And on top of that? Good lord, is this thing violent, even by late 1980s standards. We're talking showers of arterial explosions in this one, complete with meaty chunks of sinewy zombie guts splattering the screen.

All hail the patriarchy!

My recollections of the game are especially vivid. For one thing, I only played the game once when I was a kid, and it was during vacation in Florida. The cabinet was downright huge - not quite X-Men sized, but definitely bulkier than just about everything else - and I could barely see over the barrel of my gun, even when standing on my tiptoes (indeed, I actually had to hop up and down to target some enemies.) 

Considering the wanton carnage of the game, it always had a special place in my heart - especially because, try as I may to locate the coin-op in my geographical vicinity, no arcade anywhere seemed to have their own machine. Of course, by then I had totally forgotten the name of the game, and since Wikipedia or YouTube wasn't around back then, you couldn't just type a few random descriptors in a query box and find exactly what you're looking for in five seconds. So, for years, Beast Busters remained a super-mysterious relic of my early elementary years - a game I knew existed, although whose existence I could demonstrate no tangible proof.

I don't know ... to me, it looks like the kind of
people who actually use NYC's subway.

It wasn't until recently - as in, the last two years - that I "rediscovered" the game. Of course, it was totally on accident; I was watching some playthrough on YT, clicked a random thumnbail next to the video and holy shit, my brains were almost blown out upon realizing this obscure-ass SNK game was indeed THAT zombie-slaying kill-a-thon from my youth that I have long sought to re-experience. Even better? Thanks to the magic of the Internet Archive, I could play Beast Busters on my home setup any damn time I wanted. 

Recently, I decided to take an afternoon off and play through Beast Busters all the way through. Does the gooey, gory shooter from the George H.W. years still have that same kick I recalled from my ankle-biter days, or is it just another overvalued oddity from that sentimental miasma we sometimes call childhood nostalgia? Well, how about we dump some virtual quarters in this sumbitch and find out, why don't we? We begin by selecting one of three different avatars (not that it matters, since you never see any of them onscreen again until the very end of the game and they all play effectively the same.) Our choices are some blonde dude wearing a baseball cap, a black dude wearing an army helicopter helmet and a bearded fellow who sort of looks like the main character in Big Trouble in Little China. After that, we get a very, very brief (as in, just two scrolling dialogue boxes) synopsis of the plot: there's a boarded up town infected by some kind of zombie-mania, and you're there to solve the mystery of what went awry. And also, since this is a video game, you are also taking with you enough firepower to last the next five World Wars, because really, who wants to play supernatural sleuth when you can just shoot the shit out of stuff?

Oh, so that's why the team is called "the Eagles."

As soon as the game begins, you are just inundated with action. We've got blue-tinged zombies firing handguns at you from point-blank range, rabid undead dogs jumping at your jugular and holy shit, there are even some reanimated corpses in the background lobbing knives at you! Thankfully, it keeps raining more ammunition from the heavens, so you never really have to worry about running low on bullets. And if you are wondering if this game prides itself on pre-ESRB sadism? Well, the overweight ghouls exploding in a shower of meaty, undead blood and guts and the undead pooches whimpering like scalded pups whenever you pop a cap in 'em pretty much tells you everything you need to no, don't it?

Even in a zombie Armageddon, you just
can't keep women from shopping.

All right, so we find ourselves in a subway system, complete with graffiti-stained trains. Here, our zombies become a little more diverse, complete with a few female zombies shambling towards you in hoop skirts and huge-assed earrings. This segues nicely into our first boss battle - which, basically, is just you versus a million billion zombie dogs, unarmed (but definitely still deadly) zombies and a new foe, some vampire bats, before going toe-to-toe with a brazen clone of Iron Maiden mascot Eddie, who in addition to having some limited pyrokenetic abilities, also has the power to morph into a white werewolf and jump all over the place like a lone rolled up sock in an industrial dryer.

Up next, we've got that tried and true late 1980s\early 1990s rail-gun shooter staple, the elevator stage. Here, we're introduced to a new enemy - what appears to be a possessed golden owl, which periodically, likes to drop ZOMBIE FOOTBALL PLAYERS on you. Oh, and a couple of new zombie types make their debut, too, including some pistol packing brain-eaters with afros and these zombiefied guys wearing motorcycle helmets. Our bosses for this section are not one but TWO musclebound blue dude wearing Jason Voorhees masks and lugging AK-47s, In that, it's probably more a ripoff of The Road Warrior than Friday the 13th, but come on, is there any idea for a video game villain circa 1989 more awesome than fuckin' Jason with Rambo weaponry?

I wonder if skeleton bikers have patches
depicting screaming humans on their
jackets?

Before we begin section three, we get a very brief cutscene with our characters wondering aloud if all of the zombified corpses running around the place could be the city's living inhabitants who disappeared long ago? So yeah, in other words, our protagonists are dumber than special need rocks. This sequence puts us out on the rundown city streets of - uh, wherever this game is supposed to take place - and now we've got zombies driving around on motorcycles and what appears to be diseased garbage men cruising around in red convertibles. Following a mid-boss battle against a transfer truck full of zombie women (perhaps serving the same reproductive purposes as the truck load of women in Fury Road?), you haul ass through the torn-up roads of a ghost town, playing some automatic weaponry-infused chicken with oncoming vehicles commandeered by the living dead. Naturally, this culminates in a boss battle with three Molotov cocktail tossin' zombie bikers, who appear to be riding the missile-equipped choppers from the cult classic piece of shit Megaforce.

Stage four takes us down to the river ... not to pray, but to slay more undead cretins on speed boats, as well as some new enemy types, including - yes, you knew it was coming - ZOMBIE PIRANHAS, as well as a mid-boss I can only describe as a sentient piece of shit with a humanoid face. Eventually, you make your way down an aqueduct, where after a game of handgun-toting zombie whack-a-mole, you do battle with a flying eyeball that throws NAKED BLUE CORPSES at you as a projectile attack.

Told you I wasn't lying about their being a sentient turd-beast boss...

All right, now we're inside a factory, which seems to produce nothing but scrap heap. Oh, and also, there are now sentient, humanoid, orange cyborg beings shooting electricity bolts at you. Eventually, you will make it to a yellow corridor where you tango with five of the above-mentioned mechanical beings who manage to assemble, Voltron style into one huge assed robotic steampunk cybernetic clusterfuck of a mid-boss.

...or the naked blue gang-bang clusterfuck boss...

Following that, we've got another long walk down a zombie-littered hallway, this time with a whole bunch of cryogenic canisters everywhere ( if you accidentally shoot them, more cannibalistic corpses creep out of them, naturally.) This is a prelude to our first human enemy sighting, what at first glance appears to be a boss battle with a hostage-holding scientist. Of course, after you pop a few caps in his ass he reveals his true form, a giant one-eyed penis with teeth, arms and legs who gyrates back and forth and shoots really, really hard (read: next to impossible) to avoid fireballs at you. Following this epic battle, we are treated to a cutscene in which the penis monster scientist's hostage is revealed to be CIA agent, who cryptically urges you to "destroy the fifth one" with her dying breathe. Huh ... I wonder what that could mean?

...or the living tank meatloaf monster. 

Stage six (subtitled "Friend or Foe?") takes place in an underground parking garage. Honestly, it's just more of the same old, mindless zombie-shootin' shenanigans ... that is, up until the point you have to fight a LIVING tank, which is easily one of the greatest body horror abominations to never seep out of the nightmares of David Cronenberg. Say what you will about the formulaic nature of the core gameplay, when you have character design this fucking out there you can't help but appreciate the experience for all it's worth.

From there, we get to take yet another elevator ride, except this time around it's on one of them fancy-schmancy glass ones. Regardless, it's more or less a carbon copy of the sequence from earlier, only with way more enemies on screen and much, much more frantic firefights. Oh, and the boss battle in this one is against a giant meatball, which looks so much like the monster from Terrorvision that I am SHOCKED a lawsuit never came out of it.

"Were the missing scared to death then brought back to life?" the next cutscene poses. In a section titled "Last Battle," we find ourselves in a weird, very Lifeforce like chamber (meaning, the whole damn lair could be exposed bran tissue or something) and right out the gate we find ourselves rewatching with the Eddie wannabe from earlier. Uh-oh, we don't have the beginning of that old lazy game developer stand-by the boss rush on our hands, do we? Aye, sure enough, we get to fight our old friends Mr. Living Turdpile and Senor I'm-Actually-Made-Out-Of-A-Good-Two-Dozen-Indigo-Hued-Dead-Bodies one more time, thankfully.

Yeah ... admittedly, "generic old Japanese dude sitting in IKEA furniture in a space ship made out of Big League bubble gum" is kind of an underwhelming way to end the game.  

After all of that is said and done, we finally confront the big bad of Beast Busters, a bespectacled Japanese scientist sitting in robotic throne with five eyeballs atop it and these Doctor Octopus arms that keep launching rockets at you. By now, you should know how the video game logic works: you cna shoot at his little mechanical tendrils a million billion times, but he won't truly keel over until you blast out all of his eyeballs. You do that and he reveals his super-duper-true form, a giant metal brain with a cerulean blue eye that has the metaphysical ability to make heat-seeking missiles materialize out of nowhere and chase after your ass. Making it even worse, it also can temporarily make itself invisible, which - as I am sure you can imagine - makes targeting the sumbitch a real hassle and a half. After approximately five billion hits, the brain explodes and the eyeball scampers away, leaving you to do battle with yet another pair of sentient Dock Ock tentacles - and then, because the programmers had apparently run out of things to animate, a couple of boring-old spaceship rocket launchers, just 'cause. And after you anticlimactically shot a laser cannon a couple of times, the little Tribble looking eyeball monster tells you this ain't even close to being finished, then promptly dies. And then, because what good B-horror movie ever has the audacity to close on a note of resolution, all three of the titular Beast Busters tremble in fear as a humongous spaceship begins to lower from the heavens ... and scene.

John Cena's scared, black military man is terrified but bearded white tanktop
guy? Either he's ready to fight or he's straining out one hellacious dump.

Well, it's pretty easy to write off Beast Busters as a product of the times - and I mean that as both a positive and a negative. The no-frills, nonstop blasting action is definitely a nice throwback to the bleeding thumb arcade days, and the horror aesthetics are just awesome (really, it made me wonder what SNK could've done with other light-gun friendly properties, like that old trading card line Dinosaurs Attack!) 

The only thing gnarlier than a giant penis
monster?

By that same (arcade) token, however, the designers clearly took a lot of short cuts with the overall gameplay, with only slight mechanical changes from stage to stage. That, and a lot of the boss fights - in addition to being terribly repetitive - are also terribly overlong, which leads not only to a bad case of the much dreaded Lethal Enforcers finger, but unfortunately, quite a bit of player ennui, as well. 

Thankfully, it's a much brisker - and funner - game with another buddy or two playing with you, so not only is multiplayer encouraged, it's pretty much the only way to truly experience Beast Busters as intended. Granted, this is no all-time classic we're talking about here, but as a quick, throwaway seasonally thematic gaming experience, you could do a whole lot worse, to be sure (especially compared to some other horror-themed multiplayer coin-op offerings from the era, including a certain Smash T.V. precursor starring shitty facsimiles of Peter Venkman and Ray Stantz fighting spectral Klan members.) 

...naturally, it would have to be an
unauthorized cameo from the Terrorvision 
monster. 

Strangely enough, the Beast Busters property had a pretty long shelf-life. An honest to goodness sequel - subtitled, fittingly enough, Second Nightmare - was released in 1999 on the ill-fated Hyper Neo Geo 64 arcade board (which was used for a grand total of just seven games.) As you'd imagine, it was a fairly bland title, which looked (and played) like a really, really ghetto version of The House Of The Dead. That year also saw the release of another Beast Busters game - titled Dark Arms - on the criminally unsung Neo Geo Pocket Color handheld. Believe it or not, that game was actually something of a top-down action/RPG hybrid in the vain of the Game Boy iteration of Daikatana, and surprisingly, it was a really well-done little offering (speaking of, why the fuck haven't I done an article about the awesomeness that is the NGPC by now?) And just when you thought this ultra-obscure franchise had gone away for good, SNK decided to remake the original game as an iPhone shooter in 2014 - and starring the cast of The King of Fighters, no less!

I really can't call Beast Busters a great game by any stretch. It's repetitive, the level design is stubbornly staid and the boss battles, by and large, leave a lot to be desired. That said, as throwaway Halloween entertainment, you really can't complain about the holistic experience too much. The visuals are great, the music, while a little low key, is effective at establishing a nice, spooky atmosphere and the character design is just superb. At the end of the day Beast Busters may hardly be anything more than a slightly above average light gun shooter, but considering its oh-so-awesome aesthetics, it definitely has enough eyeball appeal to keep you blasting your way to the very end. I mean, can you really hate on a game that was enjoyable enough that Michael freakin' Jackson himself took it on tour with them via cargo plane? I think you already know the answer there, mi amigos.

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'The Pinball of the Dead' on the Game Boy Advance!

A look back at an awesome handheld oddity from the George W. years that merged Sega's zombie-filled franchise with good old silverball-shootin' fun.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

When Sega’s first House of the Dead game hit arcades, most people’s gut reaction was that it was nothing more than a cheap Resident Evil clone. Of course, once they actually got their hands on the bright red and blue chunks of firearm-shaped plastic and started blasting hillbilly zombies in their undead beer bellies, we all came to accept and appreciate it on its own merits.

Although ostensibly just another light gun rail shooter a’la Virtua Cop and Time Crisis, the House of the Dead trilogy nonetheless went on to become a quarter munching favorite in arcades across America, with many bowling alleys and movie theaters still proudly sporting ancient House of the Dead 2 and 3 cabinets.

Of course, the House of the Dead isn't necessarily an all light gun affair. Proving once and for all that the suits at Sega in the early 2000s were mad geniuses, they developed a HOTD game tailored to the Dreamcast's snazzy keyboard peripheral called - what else - The Typing of the Dead, in which you gunned down the living dead and hulking, chainsaw wielding bosses by spelling phrases like "moisture," "imitation milk" and "paging three girls." In pretty much any other franchise, that would easily be the weirdest offshoot the series could possibly produce. But like I was saying earlier, House of the Dead ain't your run of the mill cash cow.

So jump ahead to the year of our lord 2002. Sega had just discontinued the Dreamcast and officially gone third party, supplying Microsoft, Sony and yes, even arch rival Nintendo with all sorts of software that probably would've landed on the ill-fated DC had the platform not gone belly-up earlier that year. Xbox owners got Shenmue II, Panzer Dragoon Orta and Jet Set Radio Future, PS2 owners got Virtua Fighter 4 and Rez and Gamecube owners got Ikuraga and a really, really ganked version of Phantasy Star Online. Overlooked in the deluge of third party Sega offerings, however, was the glut of Game Boy Advance releases that started pouring in that year. Before long, the handheld was getting all sorts of weird-ass Sega originals, including an isometric version of Jet Grind Radio, a full-fledged (albeit 13-year-late) sequel to Altered Beast and even a couple of really solid Shining Force spin-offs. But in terms of the absolute weirdest Sega GBA forays, nothing - absolutely nothing - comes anywhere close to outdoing The Pinball of The Dead.

Yep, they made a The House of the Dead pinball game, and it was every bit as awesome as it sounds. Indeed, this was one of the games that really got me off the fence and convinced me to go out and buy a damn GBA, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I sunk way too many hours in this game than anyone probably should.

By now, you should know at least three things about me. One, I love pinball. Two, I love all things horror. Three, I fucking love Sega. Thus, to combine all three of my passions into a singularity, of course I was going to adore the offering. Granted, if for some stupid ass reason you don't like pinball or watching morbidly obese zombies explode, I suppose you can go your whole life without ever playing it and feel perfectly fulfilled, but if you're my kind of person, you really, REALLY have to add conquering The Pinball of The Dead to your bucket list.

You know what other traditionally non-violent genre should incorporate bloody explosions? Falling block puzzlers. 

Structurally, the game bares a pretty strong resemblance to Naxat Soft's Crush pinball games on the TurboGrafx-16. The Pinball of the Dead is especially influenced by Devil's Crush, the much more Satanic-feeling sequel that was eventually ported over to the Genesis as Dragon's Fury (which, as it turns out, wound up with a stellar sequel of its own on the Genny, Dragon's Revenge.) Of course, technology growing by leaps and bounds since the early 1990s, The Pinball of the Dead manages to give you a whole lot more game for your money, all the while exuding that unmistakable, inimitable House of the Dead flair, atmosphere and Grand Guignol panache.

Now, as far as the general gameplay, you've got three different tables to work with. You have the option of just going in there "free play" style or you can tackle the "mission" mode, which - for all intents and purposes - follows the plotline of The House of the Dead 2 to a "t," albeit, with all of the light-gun zombie tomfoolery replaced by silver ball zombie tomfoolery. You can also monkey around with some basic settings like controls and sound effects, but probably the most interesting "turn on/turn off" selector involves the color of blood. Not into seeing the crimson stuff splattered all over the bumpers? You're in luck, pal, because with one click of the button, you can turn that nasty red juice blue, green - or white. Yes, the game does give you the option to view your enemies go kaboom in glorious geysers of mysterious milky fluid, a design choice that in no way, shape or form could ever be construed as questionable in hindsight.

Before we get into the meat and potatoes of the gameplay, a few things about the audiovisuals - they rule. Granted, the zombies - some are just torsos, some are your standard shambling green guys that wouldn't look out of place on an Iron Maiden album cover and others are morbidly obese country bumpkins who explode like well-fed ticks - do look a little lo-res, but the tables are vibrant, with a whole bunch of stuff going on in the background at all times. Furthermore, the evil techno X-Files soundtrack is just an aural delight, and for those of you wondering about the control scheme? It's super simplistic - one face button controls the left flipper and the d-pad controls the right one (but yeah, even if you don't like the default setting, for some reason, you can always switch up on the start menu.)

Even without the awesome techno-disco soundtrack, The Pinball of the Dead already has the makings of one hell of a rave.

At heart, The Pinball of the Dead is indeed a remarkably solid little video facsimile of that other arcade staple (no, not the claw game, you wiseacre.) The controls are super smooth and the playing fields, while littered with both moving and stationary obstacles, isn't too cluttered to impede your ramp shots. The M.O. here is the same as in any other pinball game - you hit trick shots, spell out certain words and send the ball colliding into a specific object at this exact point in time and you'll get a million bajillion points. What separates TPOTD from other genre games, however, is its inclusion of boss battles. Yes, pretty much all of the primary big bads from the second The House of the Dead game show up in this one, and each baddie can only be dispatched via a certain technique (not going to lie, the "tilt" feature is a big help in some of them.) Regardless, each encounter requires a lot of strategy and deftness with the flippers - although, in some circumstances, the inclusion of multi-level stages makes it very difficult to pinpoint when, and where, the ball is about to drop. 

OK, the stages themselves: like I said earlier, you get three to mess around with, and each table has at least two separate screens (meaning, you have three sets of flippers to control per backdrop, in case you weren't following me.) Each table is inundated with a never-ending stream of the bumbling dead, who have a nasty habit of getting in front of your shots (which, while redirecting your ball, at least results in a dandy arterial explosion for your troubles.) The in-game physics are pretty good, so very, very rarely will you find yourself struggling to line up your flipper in just the right spot so you can smack the ball into that 10 million point jackpot hole. While you can adjust the speed of the ball, anything below fast is just ludicrously sluggish; this is a House of the Dead game, after all, and its meant to be played fast and loud. 

As an homage to its arcade roots, each level begins with a mini-game where the cursor is darting around the screen like an epileptic mosquito. Time it just right, and you blow away a zombie, demon or FBI agent on a facsimile of a dot matrix screen. Oh, and the plunger itself is a facsimile of a handgun, because firearm violence sells.

Pictured: Sega in the early 2000s, clearly not giving any fucks about copyright law. 

And for the tables?  Here's my quick rundown of the playing fields you'll encounter in The Pinball of The Dead:

Wondering - After gunning down a shambling reanimated corpse who bears an uncanny resemblance to long-time WWE stalwart Mark Henry, you find yourself at the topmost screen - a metal-looking slab dotted with (unintentional?) tri-forces with a half dozen zombies on it. There are two slots with areas, clear giveaways you're supposed to smack your balls in there (that's what she said.) There's also a couple of skeletal looking ramps connected to the lower tiers, and this flashing blue disco ball that takes up most of the upper left hand corner of the screen. The second tier is the smallest ... it's essentially a piss yellow backdrop with a giant drain int he middle, with a gaggle of emerald-hued zombies doing a conga line to keep you from moving your way back up. The bottom of the screen features a giant clock (which, unless I'm really unobservant, doesn't move in real-time) with a mausoleum bumper. And, of course, near the ball drain, it's just swarming with monsters. It's probably the least interesting of the tables, but on the plus side, it's also probably the easiest and smoothest to play. 

Movement - After blowing away a very human looking federal agent (strangely, even if it's a direct head shot, he doesn't explode in a shower of gunk and gore), your ball lands in a very small playing field where your flippers are "shadowed" by a mirror image behind them on the table (yes, this does get confusing, especially during hectic ball-blasting activities.) Up top, you have two very large ramps and a couple of ball slots. The idea here is to get your ball all the way to the top-most corners of the table so it can go into a huge, spiraling ramp that makes either a zombie fetus or a gigantic grey brain grow. Beneath that, you've got a mostly blue, lab-themed playing field glutted with bats and fat-ass hillbilly zombies. This is probably the most frustrating table, because as soon as your ball plummets to the bottom tier, a bumper pops up preventing you from launching the ball straight up back into the top-most playing field and to unlock it, you have to nail a tough trick shot that is often made impossible because of the constantly respawning zombies. Although it's my least favorite of the tables to play, it does feature the game's most awesome music - this really jazzy, Italo disco number that's practically a long-lost Goblin track in midi format. 

Cemetery - The hardest table, but it's definitely the most awesome. You begin the stage by popping or not popping a cap in an anorexic zombie's ass and then you're immediately thrust inside a chunky, red playing field that almost certainly is supposed to mimic a pile of disemboweled entrails. Like "Wondering," the idea is to eliminate all of the zombies here so you can gain access to one of two trap doors leading to boss fights. That's a lot easier said than done, because if your ball drops down to the second tier, you are going to have to fight like a motherfucker to get it back up there (pretty much the only way to do is to bump it with a solo flipper, and you have to time the movement of the upper flippers just right to allow the ball enough wiggle room to squeeze throw.) It can be a little daunting, bu the atmospherics more than make up for it. For starters, did I mention that you are basically playing inside the remnants of a flayed corpse? As gnarly as that is, the oblique nods to other horror titans totally puts this table over the top. You've got chainsaw bumpers on the bottom screen, severed hands for flippers, what appears to be either Linda Blair in The Exorcist OR that one raggedy, evil looking with from Raimi's The Evil Dead just hanging out in the corner (bop her in the mouth and the bald zombie from the Dawn of the Dead poster pops out of the table!) and hey ... is it just me, or do those little wormy guys up top look remarkably like the titular creatures from the 1980s cult classic Deadly Spawn?

Remember, kids: shooting zombies creates mass murderers, while simply pummeling them to death with a gigantic metal sphere makes you a whimsical hobbyist.

And then, there are the boss fights. If you're familiar with The House of the Dead in the arcades or on the Dreamcast, you know what to expect here. Practically all of the major bosses from that game are represented, in some manner or fashion, and considering the gameplay restrictions, the battles are actually shockingly nuanced. Of course, you can only do so much with a ball and two sets of flippers, but each enemy requires a different approach. Some bosses you can simply smack at random, while others can only be polished off via ball trap assisted knockout blows. It necessitates a lot more strategy then you'd imagine, and some of the battles become quite challenging - and heated. And hey, I wasn't bullshitting about using the tilt button either - a lot of times, you're going to absolutely need it to keep the ball from straying off-course en route to its anticipated target.

Yep. A game that came out after 9/11, that refused to employ a battery backup. 

From an objective standpoint, just one look at the game and you will know immediately rather this one is right for you. If you love pinball, crappy horror and Sega, you will absolutely adore this one, and if you're not especially gaga about any of the three things mentioned above, well, you'll probably get bored with The Pinball of The Dead very fast. 

There are some cons, of course. At times, there is some noticeable screen freezing, which is absolutely a backbreaker for video pinball games. Furthermore, the physics are a little iffy, with the ball sometimes taking up to ten seconds to work its way out of certain spots (and dear lord, even for the points bonanza, do we really need to watch our ball spin around in a labyrinth of chutes for twenty seconds at a time?) While the challenge mode adds some replay, there really isn't a whole lot to the core gameplay. Once you polish off all the bosses (which, really, isn't that tall of an order), that's pretty much it, except of course, for beating your own personal high score. And I know I said this before, but fuck, is it hard to time your flipper strikes just right so as to bounce your ball up from one tier to the next. 

All that said, though, The Pinball of the Dead is still an incredibly fun little game, which provides a ton of entertainment for genre purists. As far as video pinball offerings go, I'd definitely say it's on par with stuff like Alien Crush and Crue Ball, and I'm pretty sure it's the best pinball game you'll find on the GBA (and in case you weren't aware of it, there are a lot of fucking pinball games on the GBA.) 

So what are you waiting for? This is pretty much the perfect game for late night, Halloween-season playthroughs. The horror aesthetics are just kitschy excellence, and the pick up and play nature of the game means you don't have to worry about long-term commitments or having to learn deeper, more nuanced mechanics. Just fire up your GBA, turn the red blood feature on and whack your flippers until your thumbs are numb or your eyelids are too heavy to make out what's on the screen. Even if you aren't necessarily a pinball fan, if you have even the slightest inclination towards B-horror goodness, you owe it to yourself to try this one at least once - I mean, until somebody makes us a proper Phantasm pinball game, this thing is destined to be the zenith of undead-slaying pinball action for a looooong time to come...

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