Whether it is with the Stunner or the controller House of the Dead remains playable. If you can get past the hideous presentation (which is a tall ask I admit) then the gameplay more than holds up. Because of the short development time there was not even time to go back over the game to polish it and sadly it shows. And while it aims for a solid 30 fps it drops from that target frequently. The resolution is lower which also affects the texture quality as well. Character models are chunky and in many cases unrecognizable. While it captures the atmosphere the textures are ugly. The Saturn version only manages one of those. In the arcade House of the Dead was a beautiful game with fantastic art direction, a creepy atmosphere, and a flawless 60 fps.

Let’s get it out of the way now: the House of the Dead is an ugly game. Considering this was one of the last games for the Saturn in the US expectations were high. What is not is that this is an incredibly disappointing version of a great arcade game. Whether it was rushed to market or not is debatable. This is pretty evident with House of the Dead. That being said not all of their conversions received the same amount of attention. Considering the Saturn’s messy hardware that they were able to near perfectly replicate games like Virtua Fighter 2 is somewhat of a miracle. Sega built up a stellar track record of great Saturn ports of their arcade games. Developer: Tantalus Publisher: Sega Release: 03/31/98 Genre: Action

The house of the dead arcade