Forgotten Old Games – The House of the Dead 2

Hi everyone, today is a god day to pop some zombie brains out! Today I’m gonna talk about The House of the Dead 2 for Arcade!

Released in 1998, The House of the Dead 2 is a classic shooting game for Arcade that later was ported to Sega’s Dreamcast. I’d like to say that house of the Dead series is like Resident Evil meets Virtual Cop because well… basically House of the Dead is a “Halloween” version of Virtual Cop.

Ok, first I’m going to talk about the plot. The House of the Dead 2’s plot is a direct sequel for the events of the first game. The story take place 2 years after the Curien Mansion incident. An organization called AMS is trying to prevent similar events to the Curien case. So they start an investigation of the Curien case, however the agent G has gone missing an his last known position was in Venice, Italy. Later there’s a report that a new zombie outbreak has started in the exactly same location.

Agents James Taylor and Gary Stewart are dispatched along with Amy Crystal and Harry Harris to investigate. Well that’s it, House of the Dead 2 feature a B-MOVIE like story and I personally thinks that this is a good think.
The House of the Dead 2 has the same game mechanics as it’s predecessor. You progress through a on-rails adventure shooting everything that pops in the screen. In order to hit the targets you’ll use  light gun, this light gun is pretty much the same used in virtual cop series and works perfectly. You shoot enemies with the trigger and reload your weapon shooting off-screen.

The House of the Dead 2 is a rail based game however you can choose between different routes during stages but in the end they all will lead you to the same point. I think that The House of the Dead 2 is a very difficult game, it’s hard to beat the game without losing continues. It requires lots of practice and some strategies. Most part of the enemies are very strong, however they can be killed really fast if you shoot them in the head, so I recommend that you practice your aiming skills. Another stuff that I like to do in order to increase my performance in this game is reload my weapon blocking the light gun with my left hand instead of aiming off-screen. If you do this you can save a lot of precious time reloading your weapon and you’re gonna need it when facing lots of enemies at once.

Speaking about hard enemies, every stage of The House of the Dead 2 features a tough boss. Bosses can be difficult to kill, however before every boss fight a book appears on-screen showing bosses weak spots, so don’t worry about knowing how to beat the bosses, the main problem is to be good enough.

The House of the Dead 2 feature 6 levels and every level has a final boss.

The graphics are nice, characters are very well modeled with sharp textures and details, maybe they could put some more accurate lighting effects but at the end of the day this game has some cool graphics. I like the way that you can put some holes in zombies and even blast they heads off, these gory effects are awesome.

Sound is pretty decent with nice tunes and special effects however the voice actors are terrible, I think that this game features the WORST voice acting that I heard in my entire life. If you think that Deep Fear has bad voice actors it’s because you never played The House of the Dead 2 yet… They’re so ridiculous that sometimes it´s funny.

You can check by yourself here:

Well that´s all I have to say about The House of the Dead 2, it´s a nice on-rails shooter and my favorite one from The House of the Dead series.