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Games

All Hell Unleashed: The Ultimate NES Horror Game- and You Can Play for Free!

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Cough, cough-in my very best Sophia Petrillo voice: Picture it- Las Vegas, Summer of 1989. It’s hot as balls outside in the desert sun, and even though I was a pretty tough hellion in my youth, some days in Vegas are meant for indoors. To hell with the eleven-foot deep swimming pool WITH a built-in slide in my backyard that landscapes the view outside my bedroom window. It’s too miserable to even bear. So I grab some Ecto-Cooler, a can of Planter’s Cheese Balls, and waste the day away on shag carpet with my beloved NES in the comforting air conditioning. The game of the Summer was FRIDAY THE 13TH, and you can imagine just how many times I threw my controller against the wall with that one. But it was Jason Voorhees and a game based on a fucking R-rated horror movie; a horror movie, mind you, every kid my age knew and secretly watched anytime one of the flicks was on television. So, based on that alone, I suffered through some preadolescent rage just to be the cool kid on the block who could take out Jason and save everyone at Camp Crystal Lake.

And not much has changed in the last 30 years. James Rolfe got this one right.

I still play these shitty games, but bless the NES Homebrews and people like Steve McCall (8-Bit Slasher), who have taken their love for horror and NES glory and mashed them together into a holy matrimony of what we all should have had in an NES cartridge growing up.

“I’ve always had a love for horror movies, and the NES & I always wanted to see all of these horror icons have their own NES games. With my background of making simple old school horror games in the late 90s for PC where you could play as the slashers, and later learning how to program for the NES, demaking my old flash games for the system felt like a natural step.“

“It was only a matter of time before I made a brand new horror game. The problem was.. I didn’t know which slasher to pick… so I said to myself, “All of them.” Well, as many as I could fit anyway lol… and that’s how All Hell Unleashed was born.“

8-Bit Slasher

You may have seen his homebrews before, as far back as the late 90s, where Steve made his own horror PC versions that mimic 8-bit gaming with titles such as A Nightmare on Elm Street: Son of a Hundred Maniacs (1999), Halloween: October 31st (1999), Friday the 13th: Return to Camp Blood (1998), and Candyman: Be My Victim (2006), also all avaible to download for free by clicking on those individual links. And believe me, they’re truly fun as hell, so give it a go.

8-Bit’s latest venture is ALL HELL UNLEASHED, a horror game that takes every horror fan’s favorite icon and throws them into a game of structured chaos. Every icon is a boss to fight at the end of a stage, once you’ve collected all the orbs to progress to the boss stage, and whoever you fight depends on what world of horror you dared to enter, which includes Jason, Michael, Freddy, Candyman, Ghostface, Leatherface, Chucky, Pennywise, Pinhead, and the Killer Klowns From Outer Space.

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Also, you can fight Regan if you can find her secret hiding spot located in one of the horror icon’s stages. Hint: The window on the second-floor house blinks SIX TIMES! She was a pain in the ass, by the way…

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GAME STORYLINE: Amidst a realm where darkness reigns and evil lurks in every shadow, a sinister cult has unleashed chaos upon our world. Introducing ‘All Hell Unleashed,’ the NES game that pits YOU against the most infamous horror icons of all time.. Jason, Michael, Freddy, Candyman, Ghostface, Leatherface, Chucky, Pennywise, Pinhead and the Killer Klowns. As the world teeters on the brink of eternal fear, you must embark on a perilous journey to confront these iconic villains. But beware, time is of the essence, for the shattered fragments of a cursed amulet hold the key to sealing the dimensional rift and saving our world from eternal darkness. Can you rise to the challenge, gather the fragments, and stop the cult before it’s too late? The fate of humanity rests in your hands. ‘All Hell Unleashed’ Confront the terror… or let it claim your soul.

I went through every stage, and it is GLORIOUS. The little details in the game are pixel-perfect, and why, yes, I very much like to listen to the Dickies’ “Killer Klowns” theme while taking out Shorty. Watch out for those pies, boys.

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In the most recent upgraded version of ALL HELL UNLEASHED, THE V6.66 VERSION, you can play as 8-Bit machete-wielding Jason or Ash with his trusty chainsaw, with their own little mini-games included!

Head on over to Fista Productions’ website to download this game and all the others while you’re at it for FREE because you deserve to live like its the Summer of 1989. Also, for tips and tricks for the game itself, take a gander at the ALL HELL UNLEASHED exclusive web page by clicking here!

And the answer is yes: physical copies ARE available through a sister site for a mere $20! Which I totally prefer because I need to feel the nostalgia running through my veins from my 40-year-old NES controller.

Bonus points for you if you get to play it with the Power Glove.

Horror Nostalgia

Listen to the Entire 1-900 Freddy Krueger Hotline Story Collection Here!

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Kids today, with their Snapchats and Discords, could never fathom kids of the 80s and 90s calling a 900 hotline just so they could interact with their favorite horror icon. I’m also willing to bet they would never think that these phone calls caused us a swift ass-kickin’ in most cases when the phone bill came in- but unlike today, we had an entire month to plan our escape if needed until that paper bill came in the mail.

The horror hotline and basic 900 number dared young millennials to dial between your favorite programming, specifically aiming at kids that, as mentioned above, could cost you your left nut. But goddamn was it exhilarating. It sure as hell gave you a sense of living dangerously, and no doubt a few strands of pectoral hair sprouted on your chest when you ate the forbidden fruit if you actually mustered up the courage to call the “$2.99 a minute and $0.99 for each additional minute” numbers.  And with the peak of Freddy Mania in the late 80s, it was only natural for the world’s most notable homicidal insomniac to cash in on some poor kid’s wallet and the excitement of actually talking to Freddy over the phone!

After the release of DREAM WARRIORS, the 1-900-660-FRED was launched, and soon after, alongside DREAM MASTER and the syndicated FREDDY’S NIGHTMARES, the more infamous 1-900-909-FRED, with 1-900-860-4-FRED following after in the early 90s, which included the infamous sweepstakes contest to win a walk-on role for at the time, was just titled as “Nightmare 6“.

If your memory is as shitty as mine, you probably don’t remember much if you were one of those brave souls who called those numbers, but lucky for the blessed internet, YOUTUBE Channel Movie and Video Game TV Spots has uploaded the entire original collection of Springwood stories you heard on the other end of the line. Shoutout to the buddy, HERE LIES for sending me the video!

When you called, Freddy greeted you with a prerecorded message, then we got some fuckwad resident of Springwood talking about some weird tale or another that occurred in Freddy’s hometown. Finishing up with Freddy, urging you to go behind your parents’ backs some more and call again tomorrow. Which was way more terrifying than any story Freddy could come up with.

Horror Nostalgia

Tales From the Video Store: LEPRECHAUN (1993)

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It was a sunny Spring Saturday in April 1993. I was eleven years old and had my weekend routine of riding my bike a mile up to my local shopping center near my home, where my friends and I would peruse Osco Drugs for some snacks and the latest in MAD and FANGORIA magazines along with the ever essential stop next door to our mom and pop video shop, ACTION VIDEO to grab our weekend flicks and video games for rental. After purchasing some leftover Easter candy on sale, we headed to the video store, and as soon as we walked in the door, there was a giant standee VHS cutout of a new release that immediately intrigued us: LEPRECHAUN FROM VIDMARK NOW ON HOME VIDEO.

Fantastical horror was and still is my jam, so of course I right away grabbed a copy knowing full well this was going to be glorious cheese- and it did not disappoint.

SYNOPSIS:

Dan O’Grady (Shay Duffin) steals 100 gold coins from a leprechaun (Warwick Davis) while on vacation in Ireland. The leprechaun follows him home, but Dan locks the murderous midget in a crate, held at bay by a four-leaf clover. Ten years later, J.D. Redding (John Sanderford) and his daughter, Tory (Jennifer Aniston), rent O’Grady’s property for the summer. When their new neighbors accidentally release the leprechaun, he goes on a murderous rampage to reclaim his gold.

If you haven’t seen this movie yet, and what the hell if you haven’t, everyone going into this should know it’s a B-grade cheese show. They didn’t even attempt to make it sound like serious horror back when they were producing it. There are zero reasons anyone should not know the Leprechaun franchise is basically one long-running joke. I’m pretty convinced that as the series went on with sequels, they were just trying to figure out how Looney Tunes they could get with the concept.

But it’s a classic. It was the beginning of a broader movement among writers and directors to have more fun with the concept of horror. The industry was finally beginning to come around to the idea that bad could mean good. All the major franchises jumped on the concept, and that brought us some of the best horror movies I can think of. And let’s face facts: Warwick Davis, a serious theatrical actor, gave an A-grade performance as a homicidal mythological maniac. Props to that guy.

That’s what makes the magic, though. It’s video store gold that you found at the end of the Rainbow Room, behind the Family titles and before you hit the black curtain point of the shop that is about a three-foot-tall, shoe-shining, homicidal sprite, in a green tuxedo. That should have tipped you off to what you were about to get.

It’s one of those movies we rented to watch and riff on with your friends. Which gives it a really special memory in my old nostalgic bank there. The movie is silly, not even remotely scary, hammier than an Italian smokehouse, and carries the plot of something you might expect out of a Full Moon picture. Which I personally love, so that is in no way a complaint here, and the movie can be summed up in the big one-liner delivered by the child actor at the end:

Yet another beautiful video store discovery that has become an annual tradition for St. Patrick’s Day, and then sometimes Leprechaun 3 when I feel a little saucy.