The House of the Dead

Sometime in 2005 Sega's classic hit 'The House of the Dead' (1996-98) was re-published onto CD-ROM by Empire Interactives as one of there Quality Fair Game Value collections. It works on Windows 95, 98, Me and XP. Higher PCs like XP require you to right hand click on the game as set the compatability to Windows 95 mode. It runs perfectly. Just make sure your monitor can support 640 X 480 resolution. Most monitors are backwards compatible and change once the game loads on there own.

You can use the PC mouse to shoot and 'reload' or use the keyboards arrow keys and space bar. Two player mode uses 1p mouse and 2p keyboard. You can use PC light guns as well, however most monitors today are LCD and light guns only work with the old fat CRT monitors. You can get LCD light guns today that work on PC, PS2, XBOX etc.

Depending on your PC, you can set the textures to low or high. Most high resolution computers (XP) do not not display the game properly when high textures are on. You also get DirectX 5 on the CD-ROM to play the game or play the game with DirectDraw. DirectX is better but DirectDraw is handy if any issues occur. Most XP PCs have DirectX 9 + on them so that installation can be skipped for most people.

The game is a classic copy of the arcade version and is a great CD-ROM for your collection, or retro collection for that matter. I use Xp and the issue I have is the sound. Sound effects work perfectly (i.e. guns, zombies and speech) but the music don't always play. Some days it will decide to play music and sometimes it wont. You can tell as soon as the demo starts. Also by watching the demo to the end, it will crash and must retsrt in order to open up THOTD game again. This might be due to XP. Get arcade mode, PC mode, boss mode. A must get.