The House of the Dead 2

Genre: Rail Shooter

Release Year: 2001

Developer: Wow Entertainment

Publisher: Sega

Age Rating: 15+

Playability Status: Perfect

Tested On: Windows 10 x64

Availability: Copyright retained - Still sold

Some videogames may have huge budgets, motion capture stunt-men and top voice actors, but it is often the ones that don’t that end up being all the more memorable for it. Anyone who played through the original Resident Evil will fondly remember the terrible voice acting in that game. Sega’s House of the Dead 2 has a similar low-budget script and hammy acting. The game casts you as either James Taylor or Gary Stewart, agents in the mysterious AMS organisation, who are called upon to investigate a zombie outbreak. The game also introduces Goldman as the main antagonist, he’s the head of one of the most eminent financial groups and an expert on the genome theory. Thanks to a barely B-movie grade script and very wooden acting, Goldman remains my favourite video game villain of all time.

Originally released in the arcades, the game was eventually ported to the Sega Dreamcast console, along with a re-release on the Wii several years later, and of course, it came to the Windows PC.

Dogs of the AMS, time they made a move

To begin your fight against the evil Goldman, simply place the CD-ROM into your computers optical drive and follow the on-screen prompts. If the games autorun window doesn’t appear automatically, browse to the CD in Computer/This PC and run the “Autorun.EXE” file manually. Do not install DirectX from the CD as the version on the CD is somewhat out of date.

On our Windows 10 PC, the installer did not create any shortcuts on our Start menu, so you may need to do this manually. See this tutorial if you need help with this. You will want to create two shortcuts, one for the game itself (Hod2.exe) and another for the configuration tool (Config.exe).

Once the game is installed, start the configuration utility by running the “Config.exe” program. Here are the extensive options the game supports.

As you can see, there are no graphics or sound settings that we can configure at all. The game is regrettably fixed to a 640×480 resolution. Note that the game doesn’t support using two mice either, meaning that if you want to play in co-op, one of you will be limited to gamepad or keyboard controls. Some users have reported that it is possible to use two AimTrack light guns, however. The PC version also has a unique network mode that should allow for online or LAN play, regrettably we weren’t able to get it to work in our brief tests.

Once you have configured the controls, start the game by running the “Hod2.exe” program from within the games directory. The game should run without any difficulties.

Only man himself can control his fate

Regrettably there doesn’t seem to be any way to run House of the Dead 2 in any resolution other than 640×480. You can however, use the dgVoodoo2 package to add a little more functionality to the game. While this won’t enhance the graphics, it does make the game compatible with tools like Nvidia Shadowplay or Evolve.

Troubleshooting

Game does not respond to input – If you have an Xbox One controller attached to the PC, then for some reason the game will not respond to any keyboard or mouse input. This happens regardless of if game controller is selected as an input device or not. We have absolutely no idea why this is. There is no problem with the original Xbox 360 controller.

Screenshots

Click on any screenshot to enlarge it.

Don’t come!

Suffer like G did?