Evil Night (Arcade) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Konami's 1998 horror-themed light gun arcade shooter, Evil Night.

Played through on the default (medium) difficulty level as Henry Jones. The video shows Course B played with the good ending.

Bearing a somewhat less-than-subtle resemblance to Sega's 1996 zombie shooter The House of the Dead, Evil Night (or Hell Night in Japan) sends a group of teenagers into a dilapidated old mansion filled with all sorts of horrors to rescue Liv, a girl who has been kidnapped and turned to stone.

You run through corridors shooting at all sorts of zombies, monsters, mutants, bats, and other assorted horror staples, and beyond the initial course select, each path has a few alternate paths and hidden items to find by fulfilling certain conditions. I find all of the available items here, earning the best of the three possible endings.

Though the game clearly draws a lot from The House of the Dead, in does feel somewhat different in a few ways. The game is much faster paced and there is a lot more variety in the enemy types that show up, helping to offset the simplistic stage designs and the dearth of memorable set pieces. The shooting is also a bit more involved here - whenever you aren't wildly firing at anything that moves, you can point the barrel of the gun in the air to fill the gauge next to your ammo counter. Once the gauge is full, your next shot will become a powerful "penetration shot" that'll deal heavy damage to whatever it hits. It's important to get the hang of this mechanic quickly and to learn to balance the two shot types, because the game will regularly throw you into situations where both are needed to avoid being brutalized by the onslaught of bad guys. The game is difficult - much more so than Lethal Enforcers - so you'd do well to take any advantage you can get.

The graphics and sound are pretty good. The Konami M2 platform (based on Panasonic's intended successor to the 3DO) had a fair bit of muscle behind it, and though the graphics are chunky due to the modest resolution (640x240 stretched to 4:3), everything animates well and moves quickly without any hitches. The sound is also good - the music is a big step up in quality from Total Vice and it's memorably eclectic - it jumps from rock to electronica to what I like to call "action jazz" without missing a beat, and the voices are just as hammy and entertaining ("I feel nauseated!") as they were in The House of the Dead 1 and 2.

If you want to try it for yourself, like Total Vice (Konami's other M2-based light gun shooter), Evil Night runs fine through Mame but for a couple of minor graphics glitches. It struggles to run at full-speed on pretty much any PC at the moment, though. I had to use Mame's -aviwrite command to get a smooth recording while playing on a i9 9980HK (w/RTX 2080, 64GB RAM) since the game ran at only 60-70% of its original speed most of the time.

Evil Night does a solid job of playing up its cheesiness, and the inane dialogue and endless stream of flying gore keeps it as entertaining as the best B-movies. It's not the classic that Sega's light gun zombie-shooting titles are, but it does more than enough to justify checking out if you enjoy these sorts of games.

Happy Halloween!

If you are looking for any other horror games to get into the spirit, be sure to check out my Halloween playlist!    • Horror/Halloween Games on PC & Consoles  
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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