Before there was Rick, the zombie killing ex-sherriff who leads a ragtag group of idiots though post apocalyptic Atlanta, there was Rick, the hockey-mask wearing, undead slaying, Mansion wrecking muscle man who tore through the beat-em-up platformer genre like a hot cleaver through a corpse…
---But before even THAT, was a game so ignored by later versions of it's own franchise that only the deepest, dankest basements in JAPAN are known to house it. A game so silly, so Nintendo Hard, so "Japaneezee" that it seems SplatterHouse overcompensated for the rest of it's history in efforts to keep this title down. Ladies and Gentlemen, SplatterHouse: Wanpaku Graffiti.
So we all know the story…
Rick's girlfriend is stolen and he has to fight zombies, blob-men, and vampires to get her back. Where Wanpaku is different is that all characters are comically super deformed, Rick is apparently undead himself, and bosses are hilarious caricatures of western pop iconography (mostly Hollywood and Michael Jackson).
This game blows. Yes, BLOWS. There are fun parts and the hack n' slash is amusing but players are given only ONE LIFE to wreck this whole game. There are continues which start you back at level's beginning and it takes just a few enemy collisions to send you into Game Over rage. On it's surface, S:WG seems like a totally easy game, and it is, but given the perimeters in which players are forced to progress, the game just ends up being turned off before anything meaningful happens. Codes are given to "save" a game, yet Rick starts back up from a continue with one life, so really it's a total crapshoot.
Mostly it is a typical side scrolling platformer. Kill creatures, collect health via candies, and try not to throw your laptop/Famicom out the window. Wicked Basement gives this game a 3/10 (notice the image above? ehhhh????) but we wanted our readers to at least enjoy the concept that Rick from SplatterHouse was first a cutesy, Jason knock-off who fought Michael Jackson Dracula and totally blew it on his first game. The Horror!
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