The House of the Dead 2

aka: HOD 2
Moby ID: 3588
Arcade Specs
Buy on Dreamcast
$55.51 used on Amazon
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Conversion (official) Included in

Description official description

The House of The Dead 2 is a conversion of Sega's popular light gun arcade game. In this game, you play the role of a detective out to stop a madman who has unleashed zombies and other horrid creatures in an Italian city. You have to kill the monsters, save people and find out the plans behind this mayhem. The game uses an auto game camera that pans around in a preset manner as you venture through the city killing the creatures and rescuing people. Extra modes like training and time trial are included for replayability.

Spellings

  • ザ ハウス オブ ザ デッド 2 - Japanese spelling

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Screenshots

Promos

Credits (Arcade version)

27 People (22 developers, 5 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 78% (based on 39 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 64 ratings with 2 reviews)

Another great arcade conversion for the Dreamcast!

The Good
House of the Dead 2, eh? Definately one of the best arcade light gun games gets an excellent Dreamcast conversion. The Dreamcast version is almost arcade perfect and with a couple of light gun controllers and a big TV makes for an awesome 2 player experience!

The graphics are great. The level design is great. The animation and characters are great.

The light gun tracking and targetting is better than in the Dreamcast version of Virtua Cop 2 and features a more accurate calibration system.

The Bad
If you don't have the gun controllers, don't bother! The game isn't fun with the normal control pad - however this should be obvious for any gun game.

Being an arcade conversion there are sections (particularly some of the boss fights) which can be quite tough, but the game is ultimately rewarding and as good an experience as can be expected on a home console.

The Bottom Line
The best shooter since Virtua Cop 2, and the the only shooter worth playing on the DC! Grab some mates and have a blast!

Dreamcast · by Tibes80 (1543) · 2003

Fun game, bad dialogue

The Good
It's a great improvement over The House of the Dead. In that game, you had unlimited credits and your gun automatically reloaded when you ran out of bullets, giving you in essence infinite bullets and no need to reload. However, in this game, first of all, there are power-ups which work the entire game. You start out with only three, but if you shoot certain power-ups during the game, they don't work immediately (as I disappointedly found out when I shot a +10 credit power-up, then soon after lost), but you can choose two in the beginning of the game, usually along the lines of an increase in bullet power, a larger bullet magazine, or more credits. These power-ups are a big help, meaning that while you probably can't win on your first try, finding them and playing the game with them makes it possible for you to actually win. Unless, of course, you're playing Arcade version, which has no starting power-ups. The action itself is the kind of fun you'd expect from a rail shooter, with zombies and other creatures popping up, throwing things at you, jumping at you, etc. bosses at the end of stages, and it mattering where you shoot things, with visible effects (e.g. you shoot something in the leg, it'll show a leg wound and walk slower, something rare in non-rail shooters). It also has some things that are rare even in rail shooters. Who you rescue can make a difference as to where you go. For example, saving a man on a boat being attacked by a zombie can mean you can go a direction which might have been blocked by the exploded boat. This is especially useful because the limited credits and magazines (unless you get unlimited magazines, of course) means you'll probably have to play more than once to win, and it's nice that you don't necessarily have to follow the same path you did before, which can be repetitive in other games. Also, the music's pretty good, and the graphics are a bit better.

The Bad
The dialogue is awful. It's difficult to describe how bad it is, but it's something close to if you made 12 year olds write the script, then the script was given to people off the street who were told to go home and tape record themselves saying the lines. I don't think there was any voice director or anything to tell people about how to say their lines. They say very stupid things like "Don't come! Don't come!" when a zombie's attacking, and say their lines like they're reading a children's story for the first time. But that's only half of it. Instead of actually lip-syncing, their mouths just quickly open and close, like they're saying "BBBBBBBBB". Their lines don't meet up very well, with long pauses between them. The caption's aren't that good, sometimes getting it wrong, sometimes using the wrong punctuation like saying someone said "No~", but that's all you can go on sometimes, such as the cut scene when everyone's in a boat, and you can't hear what the heck they're saying because the engine's so loud and their voices so soft. You wouldn't be able to tell what they were saying without the captions. The dialogue's the worst part, but there are some little things which aren't that great. As with all rail shooters I know, you shoot things to pick them up, you can be hit with a giant chainsaw 5 times and survive, and you can reload in less than a second, all things which really don’t make much sense. Also, the CG animations will sometimes not work quite right, with things going through other things, or the incredibly lame part where someone throws the protagonist some keys, and they slide to his hand like they're sliding across an invisible countertop. And finally, the storyline's pretty confusing and lame. Something about a rich misanthrope being angry at humans for something, so he wants to destroy them. You could play the game 10 times beginning to end and probably still not understand the storyline.

The Bottom Line
Not a great game, but you'll probably have a good time playing it, so long as you can as you can ignore the shoddy dialogue, or better yet, laugh at it. Also, you'll need a hefty amount of suspension of disbelief, because little if anything will be explained by the end. But it can be fun to play for a day or too, and on the plus side, next time you go to an arcade of bowling alley with the game at it, you can impress all your friends by being really good at it, even though playing it at home will cost you no more money than it's initial investment (which can cost you as little as $6 on Amazon.com).

Windows · by kvn8907 (173) · 2007

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The Arcade version of The House of the Dead 2 appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Extras

Some versions of House of The Dead 2 came with a free copy of Sega Swirl. The documentation for Sega Swirl takes up over half of the Readme file included in HOD2.

German index

On September 29, 2001, The House of the Dead 2 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.

Version differences

The blood in the German version of the game is rendered green, but you can play through a level, shooting all of some gadgets to unlock red blood.

Awards

  • Game Informer
    • August 2001 (Issue #100) - #99 in the Top 100 Games of All Time poll

Information also contributed by ClydeFrog, phlux and Xoleras

Analytics

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  • MobyGames ID: 3588
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Kic'N.

Arcade added by The cranky hermit. Windows added by The Ring Hawk.

Additional contributors: PCGamer77, The Ring Hawk, tarmo888, Patrick Bregger, Rik Hideto, FatherJack.

Game added April 3, 2001. Last modified February 12, 2024.