The House Of The Dead 2&3 Return

First thing's first - look past the baffling title, because there's nothing so awkward about the actual game itself. SEGA have proven themselves once with the arcade shooter genre on Wii with the cheese-fest of Ghost Squad, and House Of The Dead 2 & 3 Return is a more-than-worthy follow up - it probably helps that we're bigger fans of the latter series than the former title. It would have been nice to see the original House Of The Dead make it into this compilation as well, but it's probable that it didn't make it due to its age and maybe a touch of laziness. Why bother to spruce up a 12-year old arcade/Saturn game when you already have a Dreamcast-quality HotD2 and an Xbox-quality HotD3 ready to go? Still, we can't complain too much, as what we have here are two quality games at one budget price point.

What we've got here are straight ports of the Dreamcast/Xbox ports...so a compilation of ports of ports, basically. Normally this might be enough to make us back off instantly, but we gave it the benefit of the doubt, and are glad that we did - mainly because the games are still just as playable now as they were all those years ago. Blasting away hordes of rampaging zombies just doesn't get old, particularly when it's backed up by the most bizarre and B-movie-esque vocals ever. Honestly, in some parts we still can't tell if it's intentionally hilarious or not. In addition to the standard arcade modes, a couple of extra modes have also been chucked in: Original in the case of HotD2 (a deeper version of the arcade mode) and Extreme for HotD3 (tougher enemies, etc.).

 

The greatest part of Returns - aside grabbing a friend and co-opping your way through - is without a doubt the way it proves how perfect Wii is for arcade shooters. In the default settings you have a reticule moving about on the screen, and the aiming is perfect and lag free. However, have a little look around in the options and you will discover the amazing calibration feature which removes the cursor altogether. Click this option and targets will appear in the corner and you will be prompted to aim and fire where you think you should to hit these targets. Incredibly, from just these few inputs the system produces spot-on aiming the majority of the time without the use of a reticule. We're not sure what pixie dust has been employed to manage this, but it somehow even does it slightly better than the system in Ghost Squad.

Sadly, the extra modes are the only real advantages of House of the Dead 2 & 3 Returns over the other console versions of the games, and for that reason we'd be a little reluctant to recommend it if you already own the others. Certainly nothing else is altered, not least the visuals. HotD2 looks pretty abysmal, though thankfully HotD3 is a bit better due to its Xbox roots. It's clear that not that much effort has gone into recreating the House of the Dead experience for Wii owners, and that's why we would advise you to opt for Ghost Squad over this - a title that, despite not having the name value of the House of the Dead franchise, has obviously had more work put into it. Both games included are still fantastic, don't get us wrong; it just couldn't have hurt SEGA to have put something more into the package.