ABADOX: THE DEADLY INNER WAR

Abadox is a word that fills my mind with many possibilities. Is it a bathroom cleanser? An off-brand painkiller? Of course not, it's a side-scrolling shooter that Natsume made for the NES in 1989.


It's full title is Abadox: The Deadly Inner War, a conflict I believe I took part in after eating five Gregg's sausage rolls one hot summer afternoon. It was a war with no winner, I can tell you that much. The story, according to the instruction book at least, is that a space monster called Parasitis eats your home planet of Abadox and then turns into some kind of gooey bio-mechanical horror planet. A planet that looks like a meatball with a goofy mouth.


They even managed to work a princess getting kidnapped into the space-battle plot, with is nice. You might think that in the Astro-Year 5012, outmoded ideas like monarchies would have been abolished, but I suppose they have to keep a certain amount of princesses to facilitate all these videogame plots. Maybe they grow princesses in a lab somewhere, specifically bred to be stupid so they are easier to carry off from their lavish Cosmo-Palaces. Anyway, our hero sets off to the planet wearing his little jetpack, and the game begins.


Scroll sideways, shoot, get power-ups, listen to the excellent music:

It's all very standard, except for the gore. Yes, the planet is a writhing mass of sinew and flesh, and the enemies are things like flying, disembodied eyeballs and X-TREME STYLE flaming skulls. Quite what damage a flying eyeball is supposed to do I couldn't tell you; maybe Parisitis is counting on our hero's squeamishness to kick in. Getting splattered by the vitreous humour of a giant alien eyeball would certainly make me think twice about continuing with my current plan of attack. Our hero is undaunted though, and he flies along until he comes to the first boss, which is a rotting skeleton dog thing with an eyeball on its back.


Of course it is. He's easy enough to defeat, and it's into the body of the planet, via the mouth. There are teeth and a squirming tongue, and it's all pretty gross and kinda cool.


What Parasitis also has is a face on the back of its throat, which is a rubbish place to have a face. You'd get crumbs in your eyes every time you ate a biscuit, and Lord help you if you eat a bag of salt and vinegar crisps. Obviously the eyes are the weak point, so blast away at them and the way is opened to stage two.


I assume stage two is in the throat, but there are hands reaching out of the walls, so what do I know? It was around this point I realised that this game was very, very pink. Pink everywhere, which is I suppose what you get when you fly into the body of an alien-symbiote-planet-monster-thing. The fact still stands that this game is pinker than Barbie's... dreamhouse.

This level also has a lot of sphincters. Lots and lots of sphincters, all over the walls, firing thankfully-unidentifiable substances at you. There are more sphincters in this game than in, well, anything. There is literally not one thing exisiting on this planet that contains more sphincters than Abadox, and that is something. The boss is a grumpy mouth on the floor. I would be grumpy if I was a mouth and I was that close to so many sphincters.


Stage three, and the pink has been temporarily replaced with grey, because we are in the field of nerves and we all know nerves are grey and look like udon noodles. The mid-boss is... it's, well, look, I have no idea. What do you think it is?


Robot-skeleton-shark-parrot-thing is my best guess.
The comforting grey background doesn't last long, and soon it is replaced with this:


MY EYES. Speaking of eyeseses, the boss is an agressively pink humanoid lump with an eye in its chest.
Why does it even need eyes down there? Surely it's too dark to see anything in whatever part of the alien body they're currently in? Anyway, guess where its weak spot is. On to stage four...

...which is kinda bland. You move downwards through the maze of baked-bean-textured walls until you reach the boss, who is long.


He's a wiggly, wobbly intestinal parasite! Yay! He doesn't break from the theme of the game so far, being covered in eyeballs and sphincters as he is. He's probably my favourite thing in the game, and it is at the time of my battle with the Astro-Tapeworm that I must make a confession: this game is too hard for me, and I had to cheat to get past this boss. I don't think it was just me being rubbish, and Abadox is just a damn tough game. Try it out yourself, I get you can't do it eaither. So there. Anyway, with cheats firmly in place the tapeworm isn't a threat and stage five awaits.


Suddenly, robots! The center of Parasitis is mechanised, you see, and the enemies are now little cyborg blobs. There are laser death-traps everywhere, along with more good music.

If stage four hadn't made me need to cheat, stage five sure as hell would have. When it comes to balls-hard videogames, I used to have a pretty high tolerance for instant death, no passwords and repetition, repetition, repetition. However, I think even my ten-year-old self would have put the Abadox cartridge in the microwave, and then kicked the microwave down the stairs. So god bless cheats, otherwise I would never have known if there is anything in Abadox more entertaining than a giant intestinal parasite (spoiler: there isn't).


The boss of the mechanised area is the robot pictured above. So now I'm fighting a robot in the robot-filled, robotised innards of an organic-parasite-planet thing. Try and keep track. To be honest, it's a pretty shitty robot, who just kind of stands there and waves his hands about, sort of like C-3PO but even less effective. Soon he's dead and the final stage looms close.

Down, down you travel, through what appears to be a mechanical robot colon, which, given the progression of the levels so far, is understandable. The level remains unflinchingly pink, and you would probably welcome the brown of a colon. The stage itself is a little of everything for before, as well as a few new things like the irritating monsters who stick to your gun and stop you firing. Great. Eventually you reach the final boss, who looks like this:


Sphincters, eyeballs, teeth: all the elements are there. I don't know why the right-hand eyeball is broken like that, and it gives the fight a strange lack of symmetry. After all these years of playing games, I have been so condition to aim for the center of boss like this that it took me a while to realise the mouth wasn't the target. All in all, it's a fairly simple fight, and once it's dead, the princess pops out of the center:


Luckily for her, she doesn't explode due to the sudden decompression. Our hero scoops her up, and there's a brief section where you have to navigate your way out of Parasitis' backside at high speed, and I imagine that if you weren't cheating and you died during this section you would probably tie your arms behind your back and jump face-first out of the nearest window. The credits roll, and that's all she wrote, Abadox is complete.

More like Abadox: The Deadly Inner GORE, am I right? Yes, as a game to play during the Hallowe'en period, Abadox isn't a bad choice. There's plenty of gore and giant tapeworms. Sadly, it's just too godamn hard for me to enjoy it, fnarr fnarr. It's not often you get to fly all the way through an alien planet's digestive tract, but if you really want that experience, I suggest you play Salamander instead, it's much better.

SPLATTERHOUSE

Have you ever wanted to punch a giant, deformed baby head right in the eye? Of course you have, and here's your chance with Namco's 1988 arcade classic Splatterhouse.

I have something of a love-hate relationship with the Splatterhouse series. I love the pure out-and-out gruesomeness, I love the music, I love punching giant baby heads. However, the difficulty level is such that a mere mortal like myself stands next to no chance of getting anywhere with any of the games. Every so often, though, I go back and try again. This time I'm even writing about it!
In case you missed out on Splatterhouse's bloody charms, it's an age old story: Young lovers Rick and Jennifer take refuge from a storm in an abandoned mansion, where they are attacked by ungodly monsters. Jennifer is kidnapped, and Rick is dying until an evil hockey mask whispers that Rick should try him on. The mask turns him into a beefcake, and he sets off through the house to rescue his beloved. It's essentially the same story as almost every Super Mario game, except Mario doesn't clobber zombies with a two-by-four.
The game itself is a simple scrolling action game. You move left to right (there's no up-down plane) punching things, every so often using a weapon like a plank of wood or, erm, a rock, and occasionally jumping over something. It's pretty basic, but its main draw is the gore and the horror-movie theme, a route which surprisingly few games have taken. Rick starts the game in the dungeon of the house, and the game makes its intentions to revolt and disgust clear from the off. Mangled corpses litter the stage and zombies trundle around, waiting to be punched until goo flies out or they're decapitated with a meat cleaver. There are women in cages in the background: women which Rick doesn't even so much as glance at. I'm sure Jennifer would be touched by his devotion. The caged women, one assumes, are still there at the end of the game, which is unfortunate for them, as we shall see later. Monsters hang from the ceiling and vomit on the floor, until you hit them with the meat cleaver, which makes a rather satisfying "hitting a baseball" sound effect. Soon you come to a room that it full of meat - there's gore everywhere, piled up in the corners of the room, from which a host of monsters that look like the chestburster from Alien jump out and try to eat you. This serves as the boss of the first stage, and you can deal with them best by rotating on the spot whilst mashing low kick. Soon they're all dead, and it's so far so good in terms of the difficulty level.

Rick progresses further into the house, mostly with the same enemies. When you kill the hanging
corpses, their intestines spill out in a nicely-animated pile, something which I'm sure you'll all appreciate as much as I do. You venture into the sewers of the house, which for some reason are filled with spiked balls that look like marine mines. I can't think why they'd be in there, unless their constant movement scrapes all the dried-on corpse meat off the walls. It would certainly be difficult to get down there for maintenance, what with the swamp-monsters who keep jumping up and who seem very reluctant to be punched. Jump-kicking sorts them out well enough though, and it's onto the boss of stage two. This time it's a haunted poltergeist room: a chair flies at you, some knives fly at you, and then the painting of an eyeball flies at you. They all just need a thorough punching to put them back in their place, although Rick should think himself lucky the ghost wasn't haunting those sewers. I don't think punching the spiked iron balls would have been so easy. The first time I beat the poltergeist, I didn't realise that the chandelier falls down. If you're standing underneath it, it hurts you. This is a pretty embarrasing way to lose a life.
For stage three, Rick steps outside. The music gets real nice here, although the Splatterhouse 2
soundtrack is much superior. You have your first encounter with zombie dogs here; crouching down and kicking them in the face works wonders. Soon after, the aforementioned mutant baby head makes an appearance, all pink and gooey and pretty darn creepy, although to his credit Rick doesn't seem surprised. There's a shotgun nearby, but I recommend saving it for the level's main event: the boss fight with Biggy Man (no, that's really his name). Biggy is one of my all-time favourite videogame enemies: he's a large, lumpy, red fella with a bag on his head (like Jason Voorhees in Friday 13th Part 2) and chainsaws for hands. Not in his hands, chainsaws for hands. That is some serious hardware sticking out of those stumps. It must make him very frustrated, not being able to touch anything without chopping it into tiny pieces. You know, I kind of feel sorry for him. Oh no, wait, he's trying to slice my arms off. Any goodwill I had towards him has evaporated, and I have a shotgun. Soon he's full of lead, and I can move on to the next stage. A couple of things I noticed about Biggy: one, he bears quite a resemblance to the chainsaw-wielding, head-bag-wearing Dr. Salvador from Resident Evil 4, and two, he looks to me a little
like he's made of raspberry jam. Delicious.

It's back into the house for the nest stage, and whoever owns this place must be a keen fisherman. Of whales. Look at all them harpoons! Of course, harpoons are just as effective at skewering zombies as they are butchering the gentle titans of the sea, which is useful. The baby-head returns, still as pink, waxy and creepy as John Prescott after climbing some steep stairs. Whirling blades spin at ankle-height, which, having seen Pet Semetary and its abuse of the Achilles, made me a little anxious. Once they are traversed, there's a hallway of mirrors from which, you guessed it, an (even more) evil version of Rick appears, and he's pretty tough, too. Once a few more have been dispatched, you arrive at a church. A spooooky church, that is, complete with and upside-down cross surrounded by floating severed heads who acts as the stage's boss. He's an irritating prospect, constantly firing disembodied heads at you while you try and smash him with an axe that someone conveniently left in the aisle. Once he's defeated, Rick takes a moment to contemplate the altar before Jennifer's screams get him moving again.

Stage five starts off with a short, frustrating platforming section across some sloped floor sections, inbetween which beckoning hands try and grab you. If you're a fan of puns, you could say I defeated them in hand-to-hand combat, but that's a really bad joke and I wouldn't laugh at it if I were you. Beyond them, you get a choice of routes. They all lead to the same place, so here's a quick rundown of the rooms: a small sewer section, followed by a room full of corpses (quelle surprise) in which zombie attack you. These are no ordinary zombies, however, because a little necromancer chap flies around and brings them back to life by shouting what sounds like "Underhoover!". Once he's dealt with, there's some more zombie dogs who, in a nice touch, start eating the corpses of the zombies. There are also some cutesy ghost-girls who drop skulls on you head and then laugh at your lack of skill in getting out of the way. If you go the other way, there are more skull-droppers and some haunted paintings that fire faces at you. Further on there are some more mirror Ricks in a dressing room, followed by another meat room full of the chestburstery boreworms. Low kicking is still effective. Then you reach the boss room, where Jennifer lies surrounded by monsters. The monsters vamoose, Jennifer says "oh, my darling!" and then transforms into a rotting corpse-monster. Notice how I didn't make a cheap joke about women's moods there, mostly because I don't know anything about women. This boss fight is, apart from Biggy Man, my favourite thing in the game. Jennimonster jumps around and tries to claw you with her extending Wolverine talons, and after you've kicked her enough times, she transforms back into Jennifer and begs you to help her, and then back into the monster version. Once you've given your lady friend enough of a kicking, she sadly dies and turns to dust. Strangely, even though Rick's sprite doesn't change or anything, you can see that he's really pissed off. So pissed off, in fact, that he jumps into a gaping bloody hole in the floor and into the squishy bowels of the house for stage six.

This stage. Dear fucking Christ, this stage. Jack Bauer could get a lot of use out of this stage: it could be used as torture, it's so frustrating. Floating eggs spawn randomly around the level and fly towards you. This is bad enough, because they hurt you when they touch you. That's okay, though, because they die in one punch. Soon there are what seem like hundreds of the things, and because Rick's so bulky, there's very little place to hide. It gets worse, though. After a while they hatch, and the little foetus-monsters jump onto you and latch on, draining your health. There are lots of them. Lots and lots. At this point, the game has stopped being fun and become a perverse lesson in masochism. It makes you want to hunt down the developers and slowly push knitting needles into their tear ducts. Slowly, slowly you crawl through the level until you reach the boss, which is a wall with a tumour on it that's constantly giving birth to these eggs. I can't even imagine how many times I tried to kill this thing, and when you die, (and you will die,) it sends you back to the start of the goddamn level. I nearly punched myself in the throat the first time that happened: I can see this stage being responsible for a lot of smashed arcade cabinets. If you have the god-like perseverance required, it eventually goes down, and as it dies it shoots out some acid which can kill you. Fortunately I avoided this, but if it was to kill you, I think you would have reasonable grounds for murdering the nearest person to you.
Once that's done, the final stage awaits, and it's back outside while the mansion burns in the background. Some (apparently sentient) flaming logs hover toward you, and the zombies have been set on fire and bound around the level, generally being a nuisance. It's a short stage, and soon you're at the boss. He's a giant rotting head that pops out of the ground, and apparently Rick has some kind of dirt allergy, because the soil he knocks into the air will hurt you if you touch it. After the last stage, this boss is almost embarrassingly easy: you punch the head whilst avoiding its big rotten hands until it dies, and that's the end of the game. The mask explodes while Rick, looking a little stunned, stands in front of the burning mansion. If those women are still caged up in there, then they're crispy-fried now thanks to Rick's sociopathy. Rick wanders away, confused now that there's nothing left to punch; there's an evil laugh, and the mask reforms itself. The End.

So, Splatterhouse, then; A triumph of style over substance. The actual gameplay is, frankly, a bit ropey. It's all very samey, there's some wonky collision detection and there's that goddamn embryo stage, but in the end, I still love it because of the atmosphere, the setting, the music, Biggy Man and Jennimonster, and, of course, punching a giant deformed baby head right in the eye. Who could ask for more?

BONUS LINKS!
Gameplay footage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9wx6K12lq0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOc9g1y6cMM

West Mansion, a great site for all your Splatterhouse needs.
http://splatterhouse.kontek.net