The House of the Dead

aka: HOD
Moby ID: 1218
Arcade Specs
Buy on SEGA Saturn
$37.18 used on eBay
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Description official description

The House of the Dead is a rail shooter. Go through the four chapters with branching paths and kill all the zombies, avoid killing the humans, and rescue the girl. Shooting various special targets along the way or in a certain time period give the player temporary health and weapon upgrades.

The Saturn version of the game contains two extra modes called Saturn Mode and Boss Mode. Saturn mode plays like the arcade game, but offers the player different characters to choose from. Character selection matters since they each have varying attributes such as their reload time and how much damage they can take before dying. The Boss Mode allows the player to fight one boss of their choosing or all of the game's four boss monsters consecutively.

Spellings

  • ザ ハウス オブ ザ デッド - Japanese spelling

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Credits (Arcade version)

34 People (28 developers, 6 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 67% (based on 34 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 78 ratings with 5 reviews)

A decent railed shooter, Dont expect anything more

The Good
Many people go on about how there is nothing you can do apart from shoot at the 'baddies' but one thing that i liked was that there was no need to walk around for half an hour to find a door or key or get stuck because you couldnt time a jump properly. So you see, I liked being able to just concentrate on shooting at whatever came in my way without the bother of moving.

The Bad
One thing you will notice is there are very few enemies, Zombies and a few others. The end level bosses too are not all that great. The graphics while good in the arcade, felt very dated on my pc. And finally the gore is downright ugly, with the zombies coming at you even after you shoot off their arms. Sick Man.

The Bottom Line
As i noted earlier this is a decent railed shooter and good for a few moments of mindless gore, thats all dont go expecting Half-Life hey or even quake, come to think of it i had a more fulfilling time finishing wolfenstein 3D.

Windows · by Andrew Hartnett (2205) · 2001

A good game

The Good
I liked the 3D graphics and the music. The sound effects and speech were ok too. The music is CD music redbook audio, and that is a plus (you can play the music in a normal CD player. I love stating the obvious.)

The Bad
It was too short and a bit repetitive at times. Other than that it was ok.

The Bottom Line
I bought this for $30. It's not worth more than that. If you find it for $10 or less, get it.

Windows · by James1 (240) · 2001

A great arcade shooter gets a horrible, horrible port.

The Good
The manual is written as if it was the journal of the game's villain, Dr. Curien, which is amusing.

The Bad
House of the Dead is overflowing with visual problems. The environments are sparsely detailed compared to the coin-op. If the zombie models were any lower-poly, they'd be flat sprites. The textures are garbled and full of fist-sized pixels. All the colors are bland and washed-out. Characters will routinely clip through walls, individual polygons will flicker in and out of existence constantly, and many of the models appear to be missing sides (many of the zombies' severed heads have no bloody neckhole on the bottom, for instance). And despite all this lack of graphical detail, the game engine moves like a shambling corpse, struggling to maintain a framerate in the low 20's.

Shoddy graphics could be overlooked to some extent if the game at least played like its arcade counterpart, but Saturn HOTD falls down here too. The slow, constantly fluctuating framerate basically ruins the gameplay - not only will your targets almost pop from place to place onscreen when the action gets even moderately heavy, but the choppy screen updates also cause sounds to lag or drop out entirely. And more importantly, the slowness affects your aim. There can be a half-second interval between pulling the trigger and seeing the shot onscreen in some of the heavier sequences, and the white flashes that accompany each shot last roughly twice as long as in games like Virtua Cop (making 2-player mode nearly unplayable in spots).

Add to this the fact that, despite the game's "M" rating, you need to enter a code in order to see red blood, and you have a serious contender for the worst arcade port of all time.

The Bottom Line
Sega's Saturn was by no means a 3D powerhouse, although it was capable of some impressive graphics in the right hands - search the Internet for the demo reel of the unreleased Saturn version of Shen Mue for an example. But getting good visuals out of the console was supposedly a serious headache, and not every developer could be expected to put in the same amount of work as Yu Suzuki and AM2.

But Sega's port of Virtua Cop 2, released two years before HOTD, runs at a constant 30fps and looks and plays a great deal like its arcade counterpart. The apparent lack of effort in HOTD is, therefore, inexcusable. It could never have been an "arcade-perfect" conversion, but it should be a hell of a lot better than it is.

SEGA Saturn · by Ludicrous Gibs! (38) · 2005

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Trivia

German version

On January 30, 1999, The House of the Dead was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS. For more information about what this means and to see a list of games sharing the same fate, take a look here: BPjS/BPjM indexed games.

Movie

The movie version of The House of the Dead has next to nothing to do with its game counterpart, but it has an interesting twist: one of the survivors of the zombie rampage was named Curien (the villain of The House of the Dead), and AMS agents Rogan and G appear at the film's end.

Awards

  • EGM
    • March 1998 (Issue 104) - Arcade Game of the Year Runner-Up (Readers' Choice)

Information also contributed by Xoleras

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  • MobyGames ID: 1218
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Derrick 'Knight' Steele.

SEGA Saturn added by Kartanym. Arcade added by The cranky hermit.

Additional contributors: Satoshi Kunsai, tarmo888, Alaka, Patrick Bregger, Rik Hideto.

Game added March 28, 2000. Last modified January 14, 2024.