{"id":19898,"date":"2020-02-19T00:01:12","date_gmt":"2020-02-19T00:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=19898"},"modified":"2020-01-27T14:07:12","modified_gmt":"2020-01-27T14:07:12","slug":"haunted-halloween-86-switch-nes-xbox-one-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2020\/02\/19\/haunted-halloween-86-switch-nes-xbox-one-pc\/","title":{"rendered":"Haunted Halloween ’86 (Switch, NES, Xbox One, PC)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Donny and Tami are two schoolkids in 1986.\u00a0 Which means they\u2019d be about my age now.\u00a0 It\u2019s Halloween night, and they\u2019re walking home from school to get ready to go trick or treating.\u00a0 But on the way they hear about some strange noises at a farmhouse, and decide to investigate.\u00a0 But they fall into a trap and now must defend their town from a zombie attack!\u00a0 The game is like a cross between River City Ransom on the NES, and maybe, I dunno, Castlevania or Costume Quest, what with the Halloween themes and all.\u00a0 Anyway, Haunted Halloween \u201986 is available to download on most current consoles and PC, and even an old console as well!\u00a0 Yeah you heard that right, at one point you could get this game as a homebrew NES cartridge!\u00a0 So it\u2019s actually running on that hardware!\u00a0 But it\u2019s reviewed on Switch here.<\/p>\n

In the game you play as Donny and Tami, and can switch out between them.\u00a0 You run left to right, and like many NES games, you can\u2019t scroll back.\u00a0 You must punch and kick all manner of zombies along your way past spooky locations like dark caves and forests.\u00a0 You have a bunch of moves at your disposal, and it\u2019s pretty complicated for a NES game.\u00a0 Luckily there is a tutorial.\u00a0 Depending on what difficulty you have the game set at, you\u2019ll either have all the moves from the start, or get new moves each time you find a piece of a map.<\/p>\n

The way your health works is a bit different.\u00a0 There is no health bar, but you can tell by the color of your skin how many hits you can take.\u00a0 You start off tan, but turn pale and then green with each hit.\u00a0 Try not to take too many hits or you\u2019ll turn into a zombie and lose a life!\u00a0 Press select to tag the other character and play as them for a while if you are low on health.\u00a0 Collect candy corn to refill your energy and turn back to normal.\u00a0 It\u2019s a neat idea, but I wish there were a health bar anyway.<\/p>\n

You can continue with passwords (this is a NES game after all), or tackle an \u201cOnslaught\u201d mode where you try and defeat as many waves of zombies as possible in a single room (which happens to be an 80\u2019s arcade).\u00a0 For a NES game, the graphics are pretty impressive with good use of color and parallax scrolling.\u00a0 I certainly would\u2019ve rented this game at least once as a kid.\u00a0 Unfortunately the game is just too hard, even on the easy setting.\u00a0 Hit detection feels a little off, and you don\u2019t always come to a stop when I\u2019d like, which is only problematic during platform jumping sections.\u00a0 But it\u2019s still interesting to play a new NES game after all these years, and might be worth checking out if you\u2019re curious.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kid Factor:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Haunted Halloween \u201986 is rated E-10 with an ESRB descriptor of Fantasy Violence.\u00a0 You can punch and kick all sorts of pixelly zombie monsters that disappear when defeated.\u00a0 But about the worst you do is knock off their heads with an uppercut.\u00a0 Reading skill is needed for the text, and younger gamers may find it too difficult.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Donny and Tami are two schoolkids in 1986.\u00a0 Which means they\u2019d be about my age now.\u00a0 It\u2019s Halloween night, and they\u2019re walking home from school to get ready to go trick or treating.\u00a0 But on the way they hear about some strange noises at a farmhouse, and decide to investigate.\u00a0 But they fall into a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19894,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19898"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19900,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19898\/revisions\/19900"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}