So, I’m trying to get a bit of a headstart on my plans for October – that is, I’d planned to play through as many horror-themed games as I could during the month – and I figured I could cross it with my other goal, which is to completely eliminate my Dreamcast backlog before the 11th anniversary of the console’s US launch.

Thus I played Blue Stinger, which wasn’t particularly horrifying – turns out it’s a straightforward action title, really – and D2, which was much better on the whole horror front. Not necessarily scary, but the lack of jump-inducing moments was well compensated for by some of the most disturbing imagery I’ve seen on a console title.

I typed up a long description here of probably the weirdest scene the game had to offer, but I decided that it probably didn’t need to be posted in detail.

I’ll sum up: someone at the ESRB was asleep or bribed to let this one through with ONLY an “M” rating; I’m astounded that it saw the light of day in the United States, and it’s probably a good thing that it didn’t sell very well.

Oh, it had a pretty good story, marred by some 15-20 minute cutscenes with terrible, terrible dialogue/character mouth sync, and an ending which was both upbeat – in the video game sense – and thoroughly depressing, in a real world sense.  Not many games couple a “yay you saved the day!” with black-and-white statistics on exactly how messed up the world still is even if you may have momentarily prevented it from being outright destroyed.