The House of the Dead: Overkill Message Board

House of the Dead: Overkill - The Lost Reels dropped from an original price of $5 to the much rounder free this week. The iOS remix of the 2009 Wii shooter still features in-app purchases, including $2 for the third and final campaign of the story mode.

Good news for iOS owners, but The Lost Reels retains its $5 tag on Android.

Sega's profanity-laden on-rails shooter, House of the Dead: Overkill, will make its way to iOS when the App Store refreshes tonight. Dubbed House of the Dead: Overkill - The Lost Reels, the universal iOS app is a remixed version of the 2009 Wii game broken down into three different "movies." An initial purchase unlocks the first movie and finishing that will unlock the second, with an in-app purchase of $2 required to access the final campaign.

Controls are handled through three different methods. There's a virtual stick-and-reticle set-up and another using accelerometer controls, but the third option is most odd - a locked Frenzy Tap setting. Touch Arcade has been playing the game today and says it hasn't figured out how to unlock that third option yet, or what exactly it is, but posits that it may be a tap-to-shoot style of play.

House of the Dead: Overkill - The Lost Reels should be available after iTunes is update tonight at 11 p.m. ET. The app is already live in the New Zealand territory and priced at 6.50 in New Zealand dollars, which comes out to about $5.50 here in the US.

Sega's profanity-laden on-rails shooter House of the Dead: Overkill will make its way to iOS when the App Store refreshes tonight. Dubbed House of the Dead: Overkill - The Lost Reels, the universal iOS app is a remixed version of the 2009 Wii game broken down into three different "movies" - an initial purchase unlocks the first movie and finishing that will unlock the second, with an in-app purchase of $2 required to access the final campaign.

Controls are handled through three different methods. There's a virtual stick-and-reticle set-up and another using accelerometer controls, but the third option is most odd - a locked Frenzy Tap setting. Touch Arcade has been playing the game today and says it hasn't figured out how to unlock that third option yet, nor what exactly it is, but posits that it may be a tap-to-shoot style of play.

House of the Dead: Overkill - The Lost Reels should be available after iTunes updates tonight at 11 p.m. ET. The app is already live in the New Zealand territory and priced at $6.50 in New Zealand dollars, which comes out to about $5.50 here in the US.

3 out of 5

Can I interest you nice folks in some wholesome, farm-fresh BRAINS???

I’ll admit, when it originally launched on the Wii in 2009, I was quick to dismiss House of the Dead: OVERKILL. I was immediately taken with the game’s exploitation sensibility, and how much of a departure it was from the badly translated Nippo-Gothic monster mash of your usual House of the Dead. After one level, though, the swimmy sense of lag that the Wii Remote introduced proved a high enough barrier to keep me from wanting to dig any further. Trappings aside, it was an old-fashioned, by-the-books zombie shoot, with all the pop-up zombies, blind corners, and carpal-tunnel-aggravating gunplay that entails.

The guts of the thing remain unchanged in House of the Dead: OVERKILL Extended Cut, but swapping out the Wii Remote for the remarkably more responsive PlayStation Move controller makes all the difference in the world. (The game can, theoretically, be played with a standard DualShock controller, but come on. If that’s how you’re going to be, I’m done trying to talk to you like a reasonable person.) OVERKILL is still a fundamentally shopworn experience, but it’s a game you can now cruise through to savor the grit and gristle of the sights and sounds.

Sure, OVERKILL owes just about every profane, mutilated ounce of personality it’s got to the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez Grindhouse double feature, from the lint-lashed policy trailers and lurid XXX warnings to the crass characterizations of rule-book-burning renegade cops and revenge-fueled strippers--hell, even the narrator, whose guttural delivery makes every forced alliteration sound lewd. But the very fact that OVERKILL hits so many of those little details with such perfect pitch makes it work. That said, OVERKILL’s characters--and indeed, certain machinations of the plot itself--are scaldingly misogynistic and foul-mouthed. Were the tongue not planted firmly in cheek, it might be genuinely offensive. Even as it stands, the hail of “*crag*s” and “mother*crag*ers” has a numbing effect within the first few levels. It’s not even creative cursing, though the game provides enough self-aware moments of clarity to let you know that it, too, knows just how filthy and juvenile it is.

I'm gonna need to see some ID. Also, your BRAINS.

Each chapter is framed as its own red-light tale of terror, trauma, and titillation, and these introductions can be an obscene joy. They also serve as locations changes for the starring quartet of dirtbaggy weirdos (including Agent G, the game’s only explicit, inexplicable tie to House of the Dead of yore) as they chase the evil kingpin responsible for the current outbreak of flesh-hunger and freaky monsterism through a plantation house, strip bar, slaughterhouse, carnival, swamp, and so on. The game’s overall structure is established in the first level--cutscene, shooting, cutscene, boss fight--and then adhered to slavishly for the eight subsequent levels. Though the bosses tend towards graphic, plus-sized grotesqueries, most of the game is spent cruising along the path provided, popping gaggles of garden-variety shamblers over and over.

OVERKILL is also bursting at the seams with collectibles, and it seems like you can’t walk down a hallway without spotting gold records, posters, comic books, grenades, piles of cash, slow-mo power-ups, and first-aid kits. In between levels, you can also upgrade your standard handgun and unlock a whole armory of shotguns, assault rifles, submachine guns, and the more exotic. As much as these baubles and upgrades might ring your bell, OVERKILL’s snotty, deliberate abuse of the expletive and the sheer repetitive exhaustion of pulling that trigger over and over again make it a game for sprints, not marathons. If you don’t spread the three-or-so hours it takes to see the story your first time through over a couple of play sessions, you will burn out fast.

Have we mentioned? We *crag*ing LOVE brains.

If your first run through OVERKILL somehow left you hungry for more, you’ll have unlocked the Director’s Cut of the story mode by then, though the appeal of a slightly longer version of the game you just finished is a little elusive to me. There’s a trio of minigames that are good for about one play a piece. A fistful of bulletpoints differentiate the Extended Cut from the original release of OVERKILL, including a couple bonus levels, some new weapons, and a handful of oddball gameplay modifiers, though some of that content is oddly buried. The most significant differences are inherent to the shift from the Wii to the PlayStation 3, with the visuals and the controls receiving a noticeable bump in fidelity. This is clearly the better version of OVERKILL, but I’m not convinced that it’s better enough to warrant a second purchase for those that already played it on the Wii.

House of the Dead: OVERKILL Extended Cut so relishes wallowing in its own filth, that at a point it’s easy to start questioning whether the stuff that’s terrible about it is that way on purpose. (Spoiler: some of it is, some of it isn’t.) It’s the most shameful of guilty pleasures, brain-dead and proud of it, best suited for those with a lust for the minutiae of cinema's seedier side.

House of the Dead: Overkill Extended Cut, the enhanced, Move-enabled PS3 version of the on-rails shooter originally released on Wii, has won its Australian classification appeal and will be available on October 27 in the region.

"It is with great pleasure that we announce the success of our appeal," said Darren MacBeth, managing director of Sega Australia. "We are proud to confirm that the game will be released in Australia in its original entirety, with no content altered or removed in any way."

The Board previously refused classification after it concluded that "the additional modes included in this modified version and the interactive nature of the game increases the overall impact of the frequent and intense depictions of violence." That point that didn't quite stand up to the simple rebuttal: "But it's almost the same thing on the Wii!"

We kinda get why the game's been banned in Australia now - the near-nude, skinless zombies are tough to look at. Good thing we'll get to shoot them right off the screen!

Sega's revealed the second location for the Extended Cut bonus chapters in House of the Dead: Overkill Extended Cut (the first was revealed to be "Naked Terror"), dubbed "Creeping Flesh." Side story protags Candy and Varla must shoot their way through a slaughterhouse that has been taken over by "a meaty disease of sorts," Sega's David Bruno revealed in a post on the PlayStation Blog. There's also a boss with a giant meat cleaver named Meat Katie, who's half Katie, half cow. We must admit, we're having a hard time seeing the cow in the image above.

Yesterday, we postulated that the extra content in House of the Dead: Overkill Extended Cut could be the reason the game was refused classification in Australia. It turns out that's exactly what happened, according to a Classification Board decision report obtained by Joystiq.

The report specifically cites the new Hardcore mode contained in Extended Cut, which requires players to make headshots and evidently ratchets the violence into territory that is "unsuitable for a minor to see or play." The report also mentions Extra Mutants mode which is ... well, it's pretty self-explanatory. Somewhat puzzling, however, is the fact that Extra Mutants mode was also available in the original Wii version of the game.

The Board concludes that "the additional modes included in this modified version and the interactive nature of the game increases the overall impact of the frequent and intense depictions of violence." So there you have it: Classification refused.

Joystiq has yet to receive comment on the matter from Sega, the game's publisher.

The new content in the "Extended Cut" of The House of the Dead: Overkill has resulted in the game itself being cut from Australian release. The Classification Board has refused classification of the PS3 update of the Wii game. The R18 rating has yet to go into effect, meaning that material considered too "adult" is still refused classification.

The original potty-mouthed zombie shooting game was released in Australia in 2009, though there was some controversy at the time about the rating lacking notification about the vast, prolific use of profane language. Perhaps, then, it's not that this version is much more objectionable -- it could just be that the board wasn't paying close enough attention the last time.

We've contacted both Sega and the Classification Board to learn more about the (expletive) situation.

We were a little ... unsettled by the revelation that one of House of the Dead: Overkill Extended Cut's new levels, "Naked Terror," had a high likelihood of zombie nudity. Fortunately, the first batch of screens for the stage features only tasteful, partial zombie nudity. Which is still kind of rough.

I think most of us can agree that light gun games are effectively dead in this day and age. So it was with some delighted surprise that I found myself rather enjoying House of the Dead: OVERKILL when it dropped for the Wii back in 2009. Sure, all Sega and developer Headstrong Games did was add copious amounts of cursing and some weird Grindhouse-y visual filters to the tired-ass House of the Dead formula, but hey, I like Grindhouse, and I like cursing. Sue me.

My word! Those zombies are so high def!

Happy news for anybody who doesn't own a Wii and would like to partake in this filth-laden cheese-fest themselves, as Sega today announced an Extended Cut edition of OVERKILL that's headed exclusively to the PlayStation 3 this October 25th in North America, and October 28th in Europe.

The director's cut includes two new scenarios in addition to the seven original ones featured in the Wii version, as well as all the usual PS3-related what have you, like HD-upgraded visuals, 3D support, and (obviously) Move support. Because how else are you going to play a light gun game on the PS3, right?

Be sure to watch our old Quick Look of the Wii version if you're interested in seeing what kind of action might be in store for you. Just try to pretend the visuals are in HD and 3D, and that Jeff and Ryan actually enjoyed themselves.

Finally, Sega has something for those of you who love both the PlayStation Move and the f-word. Today, the publisher announced a new PS3 version of the Wii's utterly vulgar House of the Dead: Overkill, which adds ... you know, the usual PS3 stuff: Move support and 3D.

It also adds "two brand-new scenarios," offering even more opportunities for Agent G, Detective Washington and pretty much everyone else to scream obscenities at you as they shoot at zombies in a B-movie version of Louisiana. Maybe it can reclaim the record!

The Extended Cut will be out in North America on October effing 25, and in Europe three effing days later, just in time for Halloween! Play it nice and loud, and keep those kids away from your house.