Why There'll Never Be A (Capitalist Overlord Raccoons Halloween Special)

Hello!

I don’t like scary games. So, in planning out various themes for different issues of the newsletter, I hadn’t planned at all on doing anything approaching a Halloween special. I still don’t think this will be one; none of the games covered in this issue are out-and-out horror games, because that’s just not what I’m into. The games in this issue are more hauntological than anything; spooky-themed. with maybe the occasional after-school-special vibe, with notes of goofy comedy to alleviate the tension. I also discuss a game that I’ll never play again, and haven’t played the remaster of out of bone-chilling anxiety, but that I still love, can get excited about, and love watching speedruns of.

I’m also going to be writing about why I prefer games that make me laugh. You’re welcome to get in touch at please@makebad.games if you want to get enthusiastic about any true bone-chillers, though!

Thank you for your time and attention. If you enjoy this newsletter, consider subscribing to the mailing list and sharing it amongst your peer group!

Grabbed by the Ghoulies review (2003, Rare, XB)

I played this as part of the Rare Replay compilation.

I love the 3D beat-em-up Grabbed by the Ghoulies for its name, visuals and audio presentation, but I also find it deeply irritating and artificially difficult. You’re Cooper, a boy sheltering in an old mansion, with Amber, your girlfriend, only the mansion is haunted. Where do they get their crazy ideas?  

A spooky game like this is about my level over a scary game; and there’s a distinction. Structurally, it’s divided up into storybooks and scenes, and all the cutscenes are delivered as though they’re the animated pages of a storybook, with the character audio for the human characters and the enemies being garbled, cute noises and the dialogue just being text. The Xbox is more than capable than something like the Nintendo 64; developers for which would occasionally rely on this kind of presentation in their ports, with Spider-Man (2000, Neversoft, PC,  PS, Sega Dreamcast, Nintendo 64) immediately springing to mind for me. 

However - this presentation is absolutely perfect for Grabbed by the Ghoulies. It’s cute, it’s spooky without being scary. I enjoy its cel-shaded comic visuals, simple narrative, and fun, inspired enemy designs (the Ninja Imp noises are cute and stimmy, and I feel bad about beating them up as a result) more than I actually enjoy playing it thanks to several eye-rolling mechanical decisions. I ask you, what’s scarier; unavoidable jumpscares, or avoidable jumpscares that trigger quicktime events? Ones that have such a forgiving response window that they may as well not even be there.

The game starts as a basic beat-em-up. Because it’s 2003, the right analog stick, of all things, is for attacking. You attack fairly quickly by holding it, but I had to adjust to this, rather than hoping for precision if I tapped the stick, and instead got my head kicked in. Because it’s all on the stick, you don’t actually choose what attack you use; there’s a punch, a kick, a backwards kick, and a sort of running kick that launches you forward a bit. These are all very useful, but not having a button for each of them feels reductive. 

Given the game’s base mechanics and lack of agency (there’s also a map, but the game is linear, so there’s no getting lost to worry about), it’s aimed towards younger players, as well as (as addressed by an accessibility option that gives you more health per encounter), ‘people who are rubbish at games’. I readily admit I’m the latter, but I did find myself wanting for some precision in the combat and didn’t always feel like every death was fair.  Camera controls are on the triggers, because it’s 2003, and I find it tremendously finicky to actually face enemies, and especially annoying if I have to aim my attacks, such as if I’m trying to kick mummies into a furnace (a section in the Workshop room that I got stuck on for just under an hour maybe before deciding to pack it in for the night). I’ll give you an example of the controls and the camera issues coalescing to make for a pain in the arse: at just under halfway through, you’re backtracking through the mansion to bring a fetch quest (aaaaa) item back to the kitchen, chasing a skeleton who’s stolen it from you. When you get there, you have to chase the skeleton around the kitchen - full of tables and worktops and obstacles generally - to get it to drop the egg. Fine, that’s a pain of a conceit, but I’m still on board. But then the skeleton always runs slightly faster than you, and you can never get within reach of them to land a punch. You have to get close-ish and hope, when you tap the right analog stick in the direction you want, that the random attack selection just happens to be the running kick; and then repeat this several times. 

The game’s simple combat mechanics go out of the way to make the game frustrating. It’s also the only game I know of to introduce to you new mechanics (giving you a new weapon for use on a specific enemy type), only to take it away from you a few screens later. I get that a weapon wheel adds complexity to what’s supposed to be a simple game, but it’s odd.

The challenge system is also a struggle. See, each room in the mansion has a challenge attached to it. This can be defeating X amount of enemies, all of a specific enemy type, alternating between enemy types, doing all of this in a specific time limit, surviving for a time limit, not getting hit at all, only using your fists, only using weapons, only using objects in the environment, and probably some others. CRIVENS THE BUTLER (this is a very English game, just in case you couldn’t tell from the title and that it’s developed by Rare) gradually introduces these mechanics at a good pace, although it gets to the point that there’s so much challenge criteria, communicated only by icons and numbers on screen, that you have to hit pause and have CRIVENS explain what they all mean again. 

Some of the enemies in the challenges are designed to be invulnerable but for a specific mechanic, like the mummies that need to be thrown into fire, or zombies that are best dealt with with the SUPER-SOAKER FULL OF HOLY WATER. Some of the enemies are just annoying, like the vampires that can only be dealt with up close but can also open their coffin lids and knock you to the ground, or the skeletons that pick up weapons that can knock you to the ground.

The worst part is the omnipresent challenge mechanic that says ‘do all this or we’ll spawn the Grim Reaper [actually depicted well; plays electric guitar with his scythe] to chase you down and kill you instantly’, which makes the game artificially difficult and frustrating, and stops the challenges from being fun. They can be knocked down by other enemies, or by you if you have a ranged weapon, and there are occasions where you can trigger him but manage to get to the exit door anyway, but this is more anxiety than I care for in any game, let alone one rated E for Everyone.

When one of the powerups you can find completes a challenge for you automatically, the developers could have been aware of the fact that dealing with the Grim Reaper and having to play in a specific, precise way to not spawn them is not a fun gameplay loop. The Grim Reaper might have been more manageable with better combat and camera controls, but as it is, I wish they weren’t in it, because they’re making me get stuck and wanting to take a break from it to play something else for a bit. I’ve said to people multiple times that I’m going to bin it and then I always keep coming back; make no mistake, that’s because it’s a colourful, vibrant game with inspired enemy designs, and because I’m weirdly invested in Cooper, a little guy trying his best; not because it’s fun to play. As I wrote in my notes for this, ‘it's a load of challenge rooms but they get annoying and if you mess up in them it spawns an enemy that can kill you in one hit’, and that’s my elevator pitch.

The difficulty can still vary wildly because of the tension between simple combat and challenge rooms that sometimes take it easy on you. Take this, also from my notes: ‘after I get past an irritating section I'll flit through like 5 easy rooms that may as well not be there and then hit another section that's rock solid [...] [it] needs to just end.”

The structure is fetch quests, which, combined with contrived moments like ‘oh, this little imp man just stole this geezer’s garlic gun; i’d better retrace my steps through harder challenge rooms than before to sort that out’, or ‘oh, this thing I’ve just done three fetch quests for is actually just a narrative excuse to do three more fetch quests to achieve the same objective’, make the game a chore that only persists on its capital-r Rare charm. I keep playing it for that, and because it’s giving me Rare Replay stamps to watch that compilation’s featurettes. 

It’s mechanically simple but made arbitrarily hard in a way that suits Rare’s older stuff (like its biggest pain in the arse, Atic Atac; as featured later in this newsletter), but not really an Xbox game, and especially this game in particular. The game doesn’t benefit from annoying me, the player, at all. It’s telling that even Rare treats Grabbed by the Ghoulies as an also-ran in Rare Replay; there are no featurettes about it, it’s just there for you to play. Which is fine! There are thirty games in that, and some of them are actually great fun. They can’t all be out-and-out winners. 

Based on the amount of swear words in my notes, I don’t think Grabbed by the Ghoulies has brought me as much happiness as I thought it would. Will I continue playing, somewhere in the first part of the two-part third chapter out of four? If we were still pre-Youtube, then, honestly, yes. But we’re not, so I may just watch a longplay and get it out of my life. 

Adapt it as an animated feature, go on. I’d watch that. I maintain that, stylistically, it’s a lot of fun. The DJing mummy in the embassy ballroom is fun! Action hero-tier lines like “I sure showed him the door” after defeating a haunted door, or “you’re notre looking so well”, after defeating a hunchback, are funny, and tonally appropriate!

There’s also innuendo for the dads, but it’s a bit tepid. Even beyond the name, Fiddlesworth the boatman saying stuff like “adjustin’ me tackle in the boathouse”, him having a nephew called “Little Willy”, there being a location called ‘Dunfiddlin Cottage’, background pots that have things like “old seaman’s wood stain” written on them. It’s Rare doing their Conker’s Bad Fur Day yucky comedy thing but dialled down so as to be subliminal to children. If Conker’s Bad Fur Day didn’t already exist, I think I’d appreciate Grabbed by the Ghoulies’ comedic tone more. 

I do love the boldness of it being Rare’s first game under Microsoft ownership; of this being the game with ‘from the creators of Donkey Kong Country and Banjo-Kazooie’ on the cover, is delightful. It’s more interesting to think about the game befuddling a hypothetical Xbox executive than it is to actually play.

Not playing Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster (2024, PC, Capcom)

I was given a review code for this in a former life.

I have Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster (DRDR) sitting in my Steam account and installed on my gaming computer that gathers dust under my television. I can’t bring myself to press ‘play’.

This might be the best game to kick off a spooky-themed issue, but it’s also a great springboard for a discussion about how I, an anxious person, tackle video games designed to play on that emotion. I often just don’t, but I did  play a fair amount of the original Dead Rising on the Xbox 360, where it was initially an exclusive; first the demo and then the full game. I never finished it, let alone strive for the ending that unlocks a playable epilogue and the mode that asks you to survive for seven in-game days.

Day and night cycles are and were nothing new to games, but Dead Rising taunts compulsive completists like me by putting players under time pressure. You have seventy-two hours to complete the main storyline, bring survivors to safety, and defeat eccentrics who have lost it in the apocalypse; some of whom I still consider actively repulsive to this day.

At times, it’s a silly game, with little off-brand LEGO heads you can stuff on zombies to photograph and get experience points, with usable skateboards and bikes and cars, with the sledgehammer satire of setting a zombie apocalypse story in a middle-American shopping mall. That’s the level I took the demo at, which, as I recall, gave you fifteen minutes to do whatever you wanted before kicking you out to reload. It’s the level I tried and failed to take the full game at, while it dawned on me that it wasn’t a silly, fun game, but an actively oppressive, harrowing one. 

There are some standout moments that chilled me then and still do. The cutscene that plays when the first night draws in, and the zombie horde’s eyes all turn glowing red, signalling that the nights are going to be much more dangerous than the days. The police officer who has a young woman tied to a chair and is being suggestive with a baton. The protagonist, screaming into the sky, on top of a tank surrounded by zombies at the end of the epilogue.

I feel cold and get goosebumps when I think about playing it in any way other than holing up in the security room for seventy-two hours. I can’t do it today, and I probably won’t do it tomorrow, or ever again.  And yet, it’s probably one of my favourite games of all time; I’m glad it exists, and anyone up to it should at least know that it’s out there. Watching an S-ending run on YouTube is also valid for those stricken by the inability to stomach being in control during such a pressurising experience. I hate it. It’s fantastic.

I’ve seen the remaster in action, and Capcom has made the right mechanical changes to bring it up to code in this day and age. The survivors you find around the mall are much easier to corral back to the security room,  and you can move while aiming now. It’s otherwise close to the original.

Spider-Man mini-review (2000, Neversoft, Sega Dreamcast, Nintendo 64, Sony Playstation 1)

Continuing on with anxiety rather than outright SCARET or SPOONK, I’ll do the Spider-Man game I mentioned earlier. So much about this game derailed me when I played it on Playstation when it was contemporary. The thug enemies look gnarled, the spider-sense visual and sound effects are loud, the music is screeching guitars, and it all makes for an unsettling experience. I credit the cheat that unlocks everything (EEL NATS, or Steve Ditko backwards) and the Spider-Man Unlimited suit’s invisibility power for getting me through it. There are lots of unlockable, wearable suits from comic book history, including comic-deep-cut THE AMAZING BAG-MAN, which I was glad to see make a return in Spider-Man new one (2018, Insomniac Games, PS, PC) after a patch.

Even the first level (which is just you going from building to building and beating up, at most, three gnarled men, that gruffly go “hey!” when they see you), makes me all brr. I’ve never felt comfortable playing through it. You’re crawling up this half-pipe kind of building, and there being this grungy guitar sting, the spider-sense effects, as you crawl up and see one of the gnarled men with his back to you, and then he turns and starts on you. It’s just spooky.

There are points where the music just stops, and you’re swinging about, and it’s so eerie. It’s like being dead. It’s a tone that gives me goosebumps, and actively discourages me from playing it, but it’s also perfect for it, somehow. There’s a bit in a bank where you’re crawling on the ceiling and neutralising armed guards to save hostages, and it’s tense beyond belief. Conversely, when you have to defuse a bomb in the bank, the guitar music kicks up and you feel under so much pressure, but also like a hero. You have to be there. Go and play it.

Increasingly, though, I find it to be a game that I had to be there for. There are annoying boss fights - one with Venom becoming invisible and teleporting about the place to constrict and lick you to death and actually taking a massive chunk off your health, and one where DOC-OCK-CARNAGE is chasing you through exploding ventilation shafts. There are annoying corridor bits that I’ve gotten worse at navigating over time, as soon as you get into warehouses full of anonymous symbiotes that keep coming out of these machines that you have to destroy, which I’ve also lost patience for. The manual aiming for web-zips didn’t hold up well even at the time, so I just don’t even bother doing that now.There’s probably another themed newsletter in ‘mechanics that are there but that you completely ignore because they’re bad or just not explained very well’. 

Licensed games get a lot of stick, but what you have to hand to Neversoft on this is that it absolutely adores and indulges in the intellectual property that it has. This game contains: Fantastic Four, The, Daredevil, Captain America, and Punisher; an adult Spider-Man, facing a supposedly reformed Otto Octavius and a Mac Gargan who’s already Scorpion and blames Jameson for fusing him to the suit. It’s not afraid to be in-media-res, and puts plenty in for the anoraks (collectable comic books that unlock things are a really nice touch), but it’s also not impenetrable to newcomers to the webhead or Marvel generally. 

It’s also just funny, and a lot of that comes through in the love-hate relationship between Spider-Man and Venom, which is also just presented without hesitation. In the early game, they’re taunting each other, and Venom is kidnapping Mary-Jane (“She’s my wife, you symbiote freak!”) to draw Petey Boy out of the woodwork, but then EVENTS happen and they’re working together and cracking wise. There’s a brilliant bit of rapport where they break into the Daily Bugle and Venom is just being goofy to Spider-Man’s straight man. This is saying nothing of the epilogue cutscenes, which are the best rewards for finishing this game, and maybe any game.

What I’m saying is that I never want to play Spider-Man ever again, because the tension and the goosebumps that it inspires are so visceral, and to me weirdly unpleasant, but that it is worth playing. Like with Dead Rising, I’m going to stick on a YouTube longplay and enjoy being a spectator going forward.

Accessibility Corner (but spooky): Hades’ (2020, Supergiant Games, NS, PS, PC, XB) and Hades 2’s (2025, Supergiant Games, NS, PC) ‘God Mode’ helps me play them

As a currently tired person, I’ve been playing video games in bed a lot. I also have dexterity issues, and don’t find twitchy action games very comfortable to play, and so I don’t play them very much. I was very shocked, then, when the original Hades - a twitchy action real-time roguelike - bowled me over. Steam says I have 80 hours in it [reader, it’s now 90, help me], and I played it a whole lot before even buying it there.

My dexterity issues make me resist games that make being a challenging gauntlet a feature, and though Hades can be this if you want it to be, you can make it less challenging thanks to God Mode, which takes some of the sting out by providing a stock 20% resistance to damage; increasing by 2% when you die, up to 80%.

This is helping my patience with either game in the Hades series. Their gameplay loops are moreish, but there are plenty of enemy types that feel unfair, and the bosses are chaotic to the point that I often get lost in what I’m doing. All too often, I’m dashing blindly about the place and falling into some trap or other; so, the damage resistance really helps offset my lack of spatial awareness when I play, and it lets me move my fingers just that bit slower and still have a fighting chance. 

God Mode doesn’t make the games any less chaotic, but it does make the game easier to brute force to see out the story, which is what I’m there for when it’s the kind of game that puts me in physical pain if I play it for too long.  It lets me accomplish more in my limited game sessions; I started a new Hades old one file in anticipation of Hades new one and I feel like I’m sailing. Hades 2 then came out, and at first I thought I was struggling more, but then found that I was outpacing my friend who was also playing the game, but without God Mode on.

The description under the checkmark in the settings for ‘God Mode’. talks about focussing on the story, but also just says that you can turn it on ‘for any reason’. I appreciate that Supergiant is paying attention to the fact that not everyone is the same. I haven’t put as much time into Hades 2 as I’d like yet, but that it has God Mode guarantees that I’ll get around to rinsing it eventually. What I have played has been promising, as well as comfortable. 

I just think God Mode’s neat, and a nice step beyond just adding difficulty settings (which neither Hades game have, but would have been nice) that I’d like to see more of. The fundamentals and frustrations of the games haven’t changed, but I am more patient with them as a result of the toggle being there.

Atic Atac review (1983, Ultimate Play the Game, ZX Spectrum)

Ultimate Play the Game being the very first incarnation of Rare, the developer that used to make games that were at least interesting and respectable and is now consigned to the Microsoft and Everwild-cancellation and Sea of Thieves-support studio dungeon.

I’ve only played the ZX Spectrum version because that’s the one everyone around me knows; I didn’t even know there was a BBC Micro version released in 1985 until I looked the game up specifically for this bit.

This has the loose premise of Grabbed by the Ghoulies (you’re in a scary mansion oh no scary aaaa), but isn’t linear at all, and I find it very easy to get lost in it. I’m generally not very good with games set in labyrinths. You’re supposed to be finding pieces of a key and I seem to have found every power-up under the sun instead. Grabbed by the Ghoulies is too linear to the point where the map is literally style over substance, and Atic Atac loves giving you no map. or in fact any guidance at all. So, what I really want is a spooky (not scary) haunted house game that strikes a good middle ground. It’s not that I don’t like the idea of spooky games (which aren’t ‘scary games’), it’s just that I’m waiting for a game to come along with the haunted mansion premise that isn’t too difficult or disorientating.

As it is, various fossils in my life swear by Atic Atac, so I’ve given it multiple goes on emulators and Rare Replay, and yet I struggle to know what I’m doing, or where I’m meant to be going. There’s a free remake, Melkhior’s Mansion (2022, BitGlint Games, PC, Linux, Mac) that has an interface and menus that help you along a little more, and the developer does provide some helpful tips, but the controls are still a bit awkward.

Okay, future me now. Since I wrote the above I’ve spent the weekend playing Atic Atac and watching video walkthroughs presented by English anorak men, and I’m getting the appeal a little more. It was interesting that the moment I came away from a couple of these walkthroughs (that are informative and clear - it helps to have a passion for the thing you’re explaining, I think, and part of that’s why I think ‘games enthusiasm’ is the way to go for me), I was instantly more capable, and noticing parts of the game that I’d never had. Oh, there’s the key! There’s the spanner I need to kill the Franklingstein’s monster and the cross I need to neutralise the Draclea! 

I’m still getting lost in it, and finding parts of the ‘ACG’ key but failing to find my way back to the front door before that truly vile chicken graphic is drained to the bone, but I’m having more fun with it. I think that this is the way my brain is wired; I’m terrible at direction, even in that newfangled real life, so I’m never going to be speedrunning this in two minutes like some of the turbo-anoraks are.

My feeling of being so unseated by games as old as Atic Atac is probably unavoidable; there’s the fact of my brain wiring, but also that I’m coming to them games after the fact and not wanting to live my life like the teenager who pretends it’s the 1940s. The ZX Spectrum graphics are garish to the point of nausea, though I appreciate the plik-plak-krrk sound design of Atic Atac specifically. I’m full of disbelief hearing the anoraks calling it the best game of the 1980s, and/or the best game on the Spectrum, but then I assume younger adults or just people younger than me would look at my regard for Disney’s Toontown Online and think I’m from Mars, so they’re welcome to what they like!

In short, there’ll never be a Capitalist Overlord Raccoons Halloween Special because I’m a scared-wuss cat who gets freaked out by either not-even-’scary’ games, and made anxious enough by punishing mechanics and even just the odd weird sound effect or art asset.

But also; I like comedy games, and just games that have funny undertones in them, more! Here’s a review of the demo for a new comedy game that’s coming out… eventually? 

I regret sharing gags from the Earth Must Die demo (TBA, Size Five Games, Steam) (because it's really, really funny)

Okay, so I’m not really a point-and-click adventure person, but after a couple of screens, I was hooting over the Earth Must Die demo and sending screenshots of various funny bits in it to everyone who would listen. I really wish I hadn’t because everyone should experience this thing fresh; especially you. Really; I wrote down several choice lines as I played, but I’m not including any because it is so good and you should just go off and play it and why aren’t you, you silly person? Well, you should play it if you like things that broadly file under sweary and dark comic satires of capitalism, monarchies and bureaucracy.

You’re Vvalak (Joel Fry; Twenty Twelve, W1A, Plebs, who is absolutely BRILLIANT in this and so much else), third-in-line to the throne of an outer space dynasty, and you can play him, via dialogue choices, either as a petty, overgrown child or a petty, overgrown child standing on his tippy-toes and trying to appear functional, and as not a petty-overgrown child. That’s literally all I want to reveal in this, because anything more would be giving plot-spoilers, and any examples of the pettiness would be giving away too much from this out-and-out scripted comedy game, with talent in it to boot.

Really; this thing has an encyclopedia of British comedy talent in it; if you know names like Martha Howe-Douglas (Horrible Histories, Ghosts UK), Sophie Duker (absolutely terrific stand-up comedian and panel show guest; Frankie Boyle’s New World Order), Tamsin Greig (Black Books, Episodes, the Mother in ‘The Mother’ episode of the TV version of People Like Us, but also basically everything?) and Matthew Holness (Garth Marenghi, then you’re well-served. There’s also, per the Earth Must Die Steam page, so many more comedians involved, such that it’s genuinely wild to me, a comedy enthusiast, that so many Names I Love are in here. It’s like when Matt Berry popped up in Thank Goodness You’re Here; worlds colliding in the best possible way for me in particular. 

Even if you don’t know who any of these people are because you exist outside of all of the events of chance that have conspired to make me the person I am today, you should still be excited, because the performers are GREAT at delivering the FUNNY lines. Fry is PERFECT for Vvalak’s petty/petty-but-trying-to-not-be-ness and various notes in their delivery were responsible for a lot of laughter this end. I don’t know if any of the cast have been directly involved in the writing (the demo ends on a simple ‘WISHLIST NOW’ screen without specific credits), but it doesn’t matter; the writing and performances are all there.

There’s no shortage of funny point-and-clicks, but it’s nice to have a new one with a modern game design lens such that you can make steady progress in it because the puzzles dare have a logic to them. I don’t know how long the actual game will be, but I spent an hour and a half with the demo. Some of that was spent screenshotting, as well as wrestling with the gamepad control scheme; the controls aren’t bad, I think I just accidentally skipped the primer for how the interface works with a controller and then had to divine it from the settings. I do wish that the menus weren’t controlled by a mouse cursor while a gamepad is plugged in.

The word from Accessibility Corner is mostly good - it’s the left stick and the right bumper by default that’ll get you through the whole thing, and all controls are re-bindable. I wish that there was a blanket ‘increase text size’ option, but you only get that for the subtitles specifically. I had to squint at some of the text on the Steam Deck. You can also add a black background to the subtitles, which I appreciated.

Play it! Go!

Thank you for reading this month’s Capitalist Overlord Raccoons!

This month, I’ve done my best to tackle spooky games and anxiety-inducing games, but I’ve also loved writing about a funny game, and sharing some more sense of what kinds of games and culture things I enjoy! I’ve enjoyed writing this issue, and I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading it! I love exploring what Capitalist Overlord Raccoons can be and trying new things with it, and long may that continue, honestly.

See you next month!