With only a handful of quality Saturn titles set for release in 1998, 
Sega’s all-star arcade conversions are going to have to be spot-on. So 
have Tantalus silenced their critics with a fantastic conversion of 
House of the Dead? Don’t get your hopes up... 

House of the Dead was one of the last Sega arcade games developed for 
the Model 2 board, but with visuals of an almost Model 3 quality, a 
Saturn version was going to be tough. Sega farmed out the conversion 
to Tantalus, who have previously delivered a technically impressive 
version of Manx TT, but it would appear that House of Dead may have 
been out of their league. 

While the gameplay is all intact, with the right monsters leaping out 
of the right places at the right time, they do their leaping in 
horrible, blocky, lo-res-o-vision. In fact it is the visuals that let 
the side down entirely. We were never expecting a perfect conversion, 
due to the visual splendour of the arcade version, and limitations of 
the Saturn hardware, but even so, this is a mess. 

The main problems that the game encounters are more a matter of 
hardware limitations and a short development period than sloppy 
programming, with scrappy background textures and intruding mid-level 
loading making for a very patchy game indeed. In fact the stop-start 
nature of the Saturn game is a direct contradiction to the coin-op 
where zombies loom out of nowhere at a frightening pace and where the 
action is unrelenting. 

There’s definitely a feeling that HotD has been rushed through its 
development as corners have obviously been cut. Even in the finished 
game there are annoying graphical glitches and missing textures that 
just make you feel that a few extra months of fine tuning would have 
delivered a much tighter product. A year ago, and this extra time may 
have been taken. In fact Sega might even have bothered to handle the 
conversion themselves. 

reviewed by

Stephen Fulljames