Super SCARY Halloween post!

What's the scariest game ever? Not Resident Evil or Silent Hill or Condemned or System Shock or Fatal Frame or Nightmare Creatures or Phantasmagoria or Kiss Pinball. No, the horror game genre reached its peak in 1988, with the release of Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road for the NES. No other game has scared the crap out of me as much as Ikari Warriors II. I don't think it was meant to be scary, but that only added to the creep-factor.


The thing about Ikari Warriors II is that nothing in it looks like it was done on purpose. There's no way someone would draw the main characters as stacks of asses, or the background tiles as mostly huge flat expanses of a single color. The whole thing gave the impression of being generated by a glitch, or by a nightmare reality where NES graphics don't represent identifiable objects or concepts.

Even worse are the voice samples. I guess it's notable to have voice samples in an NES game at all, but these don't really impress, so much as they cross some kind of aural Uncanny Valley. When the game starts, someone (the player character? the villain? The hardware straining to break out of its cruel slavery?) gargles what I can almost identify as "Come on! Let's fight!" Later, when you enter a shop, a sample comes up that could only be "Bath time!" Wikipedia says it's "Welcome," but I think that interpretation is the result of a desperate mind trying to make sense of the inhuman noise.