One of the things I miss most about when I worked at a video game store is the ability to find really interesting games. I mean, I can still look around the store like a regular person now, but when I was working there every single item in the store had been through my hands first – so I got first dibs on anything I wanted. This was never the truth more than it was when the original Playstation and Saturn had just come out. The chain I worked for was offering a deal where you could trade in 10 Super Nintendo or 10 Genesis games and get $100 off one of the new systems. The good deal for me was all the games we were trading in were not individually accounted for… that means that all the company knew was that we had X number of Genesis games, not what each game was. So all I did was bring in my old shitty games (Super Hylide… what was I thinking!?) and swap them straight out for better new titles like Landstalker, or even better, find older games I needed like Gunstar Heroes. Those were some good times for my game collection…

So why did I waste time telling you that? Well, secretly I’m hoping you all are keeping notes on me and eventually will create an army of robots in my likeness. But the other reason is that due to this game swapping, I grudgingly took home Haunting one day when I was bored and there was nothing else that really held my interest. It’s not that I didn’t like it, it’s just that it didn’t make me grab my groin and sing. That sort of thing was saved for when I found my copy of Skullmonkeys for the Playstation or when I found out Nick-at-Nite shows old reruns of Charles-in-Charge at 5 AM. You can’t start your day better than a good BM and an hour of Scott Baio. Well, maybe if I didn’t wake up alone… Nah.

Back to the matter at hand, you know what the deciding factor was in taking Haunting? I already had some of the other games by Electronic Arts for Genesis, and they all had similar box designs – so they’d look really cool on a shelf. Yeah, I know I’ve talked about my problems with that sort of thing before, but I just wanted to reiterate it, to make sure you know I didn’t make that up… I’m really that stupid.

Polterguy! He's sort of like if Corey Haim died in 1989 and haunted your house.

This is you – Polterguy. You are haunting the Sardinis’ new house, and trying to make their life completely miserable. Why are you doing this? Well, according to the book you were skateboarding or breakdancing or parasailing…. something EXTREME to be sure, when you were hit by Vito Sardini’s car (Vito is the father of the family) or something. Basically, it’s a lame story, and the idea is that Polterguy was the cool extreme type of kid that would be in a “KIDS CAN WIN!” movie… you know, one of those movies where some smart-ass 12 year old stops an international crime syndicate using his Commodore 64 and a toaster oven. That’s who you were. Well, now you’re dead, and Vito was never caught or punished for your murder. Hey, it’s a stupid story, and I might not even be right… I lost the booklet a long time ago. Let’s just say you want to scare them out of your house like in Beetlejuice. It works for me.

Vito Sardini and his family will be your host family. He looks like a standup guy.

There are four members in the Sardini family – Vito, Flo, Tony, and Mimi… they’re all interchangable as far as the game itself is concerned. Your mission is to clear them out of their houses and make their life miserable. This poses a problem for us because the Sardinis cannot see us. However, we can possess their furniture, floors, and other household objects to let our presence be known. This leads to them getting more and more scared as you try to lead them out of the rooms in the house and towards the door. Let me show you the first house, and the layout…

The layout of the first home... this reminds me that I live in a 2 room shack. Now I am sad.

There are 13 rooms and only 3 of those give access to an outside door. What you’ve got to do is follow the Sardinis from room to room, possessing their crap and scaring them towards the doorway. However… you only have a limited amount of Ectoplasm, which is shown on a green bar at the bottom of the screen. Everytime you possess something, a little bit of the ectoplasm is used, and it falls naturally through time. Once you scare one of the Sardinis out of the room, they drop little green blobs of Ectoplasm and it slightly refills your lifebar. Let me show you an example of the possessions…

Below you’ll see little Tony Sardini hanging out in his room, trying not to touch anything with his greasy hair. I am facing a bright pink guitar, the kind that only Poison or Enuff’Z'Nuff would have used, and there is a blue sparkle on it. Well, that shows that I can possess that item. To possess an item, you jump into it, leave a little ecto in it, and jump out of the object again. Then the item will shake or something to get the Sardinis to notice it, and the item does something that varies from “KICK ASS THAT RULED!” to “Meh.” This one is sort of a midpoint…

They should have used that guitar in Cold Slither! (That was the band COBRA made with Zartan and... oh forget it...)

The guitar fretboard turns into a snake, making Tony’s head spin around like a cartoon character. The Sardinis have lots of good panic animations like that… their clothes rip off, their eyes bulge out, they wet their pants… it’s good to see little touches like that made it into the game.

However, as I played this again, I remembered a few things I hated about this game. First off, there really is no way to tell which room the Sardinis will run into. Sometimes you’ll even possess the door to another room you don’t want them to go into, and then they’ll run right through the door you scared them with. While this is incredibly frustrating, it also means that you’ll waste all your ectoplasm running from one room to another while the Sardinis run from the bathroom to the hallway over and over again. This brings up another part of this game I hate… once you run out of ectoplasm, you are sent to the underworld.

This looks just like my bathroom.

In the underworld, you’ll basically run along a path trying to collect drops of ectoplasm until eventually you’ll reach a light brown switch in the floor that will open a door back into the Sardinis’ house. However, this part of the game is where you will most likely die. While you are trying to collect your green lifeblood, there are traps designed to damage you and stop you from escaping your eternal afterlife in the underworld. See that little picture of Polterguy in the lower left hand corner of the screen? Well, this is your actual lifebar. As you take damage here, the little picture becomes smaller and smaller until eventually it is gone, and your game is over. And it doesn’t refill once you get back to the real world. Add on the fact that everytime you visit the underworld it gets harder, and you’ve got a whole lot of anger management classes I had to take.

However, lets say you finally stop the Sardinis from running from room to room and actually get them to leave the house. Well, you get to travel to the next house! There are three houses in total, and in the second house the family finds out one of your weaknesses… the Sardinis purchase a dog. That bastard dog runs randomly through the house, barking at things you’ve possessed and calming down the Sardinis. This doesn’t seem like it’s too big of a deal, but what it means is you spend a lot more time in the underworld – which means you die a lot more often as well. At least… that’s what I did. Actually, I hate to admit this, but I couldn’t get past the third house when I was playing it this week… I’ll admit, I didn’t spend too much time on it because it’s not Animal Crossing, but I really wanted to show you the last boss… the impossible last boss. However, I also wanted to find a box full of money, and that didn’t happen either.

I supose if I have one complaint about this game, it would be the control… I know they were trying to make you fell more like a ghost by having you float and slide around, but when you are supposed to have the few combat scenes in the game – the final boss included – you can’t move as well as you’d like. Otherwise this is, as one of my friends put it, “Like Beetlejuice the game”. Yeah, that’s pretty much it.