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Australia gets The Evil Within maze-style haunted house
In an effort to scare the ever-living-shit out of its fans, Bethesda announced a partnership with Warner Bros. Movie World to craft a real-life maze based on its horror game, The Evil Within. Located on the Gold Coast in Australia, the maze will feature characters from the game portrayed by actors as well as lots of fake blood. The Evil Within maze will be part of Warner Bros. Movie World's "Fright Nights" event held throughout the month of October. Those that can't make the trip will have the chance to experience a "teaser version" of the maze at the EB Expo in Sydney from October 3 to 5 at Bethesda's booth. The Evil Within launches October 14 for Xbox One, PS4, Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. [Image: Bethesda]
New Alone in the Dark, Haunted House games in Atari's horror revival
Despite recent strife, Atari's 2014 offensive continues with upcoming reveals of new Alone in the Dark and Haunted House games. Both games are coming to PC this fall, and Atari plans to reveal them behind closed doors at next week's PAX Prime conference in Seattle. Alone in the Dark: Illumination marks the first entry in the horror series since the 2008 release, which failed to set the world alight despite its hi-tech fire physics. Illumination is in development at Pure FPS, a Californian studio with little info to go on except it holds the trademark to Rekoil, a game made by Plastic Piranha. Consider one of our eyebrows raised.
Perfect Ten: Virtual haunted houses
Happy Halloween! Or if that's not politically correct enough for you, Happy Scare-Related Holidays feat. the Stylings of Ed Casbar and His Electric Teeth. It'd be the best of holidays if most people didn't have a prejudice against a middle-aged guy going trick-or-treating. Hey, us adults need sugar fixes too, you know! And just because you don't understand my seductive Night Elf cosplay outfit doesn't mean it's less valid than the tots with Iron Man masks. At least the online world is prejudice-free, which is why I love bouncing around between MMOs looking for a little haunted mansion action. Let's take a quick tour through 10 virtual haunted houses that go from zany to freaky, although not necessarily in that order.
City of Heroes adding a haunted house to the Halloween event
In a game all about creating colorful costumes, you might expect that Halloween would be a major holiday. And for years that's been the case in City of Heroes, with a special costume slot only available via taking part in the event. But this year it's time to bring back something that's long been missing from the holiday event by instilling a sense of terror. There's a new part to the event now, Dr. Kane's House of Horror, and it's going live on the servers on October 20th. Accessed via the Team-up Teleporter, the house will be a cooperative venture for four players between 15-50, with heroes and villains alike seeking to prevent Dr. Kane from unleashing the unquiet dead upon the world. That's in addition to the usual festivities for the event, which include costume slots and zombie invasions across the game world. With City of Heroes Freedom in full effect, everyone can enjoy the celebration this year, even if you might not make it out of the new haunted house in one piece.
The Road to Mordor: Festivals and you -- a love story
It's a shame that Lord of the Rings Online's fourth anniversary will probably be remembered more for being a mismanaged festival event than for the achievement that reaching four years signifies. But things are as they are, and the "Grindaversary" has now gone down in LotRO's history of what not to do for an event. If you're only tangentially tuning in to the LotRO news these days, last week Turbine launched its first anniversary celebration in the game (previous anniversaries were marked only by gift tokens dropping in the world). The celebration was a lesser type of festival that borrowed elements from previous events, namely, the horse races and the beer brawl. Players were challenged to participate in both to gain tokens to acquire special rewards, such as a new horse mount, housing decorations, and cosmetic outfits. The problem was twofold: The tokens were gained so slowly that it took a long time to get enough for even one moderately priced reward, and the only endlessly repeatable activity (the beer brawl) could be failed if you were knocked out of the area by another player. As a result, players heavily protested what should've been a fun time and Turbine ended up with egg on its face. In participating myself, talking with friends, and reading through the many, many responses to the event, I got to thinking about how Turbine's approached festivals over the past year or so and how the studio can learn from this to avoid another stumble.
Bloody Good Time, Haunted House sneak onto XBLA
We're not sure who's fiddling with all the levers and knobs at Xbox Live Arcade headquarters, but we've received a second day of new releases this week. Call it XBLA Thursday. Bloody Good Time and Haunted House were initially expected -- and then rejected -- to arrive on Wednesday, but it appears they needed another day to cook (or get out of Game Feast's way). You can now explore Haunted House for 800 MS Points ($10) or, if you prefer, have a Bloody Good Time for the bargain price of 400 MS Points ($5).
This Wednesday: Pinball FX 2 comes to XBLA [Update 3: Bloody Good Time or Haunted House released late]
It's set to be another packed Wednesday for Xbox Live Arcade releases. First, the previously delayed Pinball FX 2 will bring its bumpers to the table. Plus, Ubisoft's humorous FPS Bloody Good Time is set to debut. And as if those weren't enough, GamerBytes reports 3D Ultra Minigolf Adventures 2 (finally, a sequel!) and Atari's reboot of Haunted House will be released this Wednesday, as well. Oh, no -- we're not done yet: The Hydro Thunder Hurricane Tempest Pack DLC is also coming out this Wednesday ... Okay, we're done now. Update: Microsoft's Graeme Boyd (a.k.a. AceyBongos) has tweeted that both Bloody Good Time and Haunted House are not confirmed for release this week. Of course, Boyd's wording indicates that both releases could still happen. Update 2: Wednesday has arrived and, sure enough, only 3D Ultra MiniGolf Adventures 2 and Pinball FX2 have been released. Update 3: Okay, last one, we promise. Bloody Good Time and Haunted House have now been released. A day late.
The Road to Mordor: A haunted tour of Middle-earth
Despite what the brochures may tell you, Lord of the Rings Online's Middle-earth isn't all puppy dogs, sparkly rainbows and ice cream wagons. In fact, when you take a moment to stop screenshotting the living daylights out of the Shire, you'll quickly realize just how dark, cold and brutal this world is. Middle-earth is a realm where good is under siege by evil, and in many places, the evil is winning. You can see this in many places that formerly held beauty, but now are covered with the decor of death: bones, blood, cages, pikes and filth. Evil isn't just Freddy Krueger-style splatter, either -- there are plenty of spots that are haunted by the spectral spirits of the beyond, and if you dare venture into their domain, you should probably have your will made up in advance. So in honor of one of my favorite holidays -- Halloween -- I want to take you on a haunted tour of Middle-earth, covering some of the most notorious spooky, scary and outright creepy places I've found. Grab your torch and let us push back the darkness together!
Haunted House screens bridge the generation gap
This post has been conveniently broken into two sections, each serving a different part of Joystiq's demographic. Please read whichever is most relevant to you. For the Young: We try to keep the curmudgeonly "lessons for the youth" to a minimum here at Joystiq -- we don't like being reminded of how old we are anymore than you do -- but you really should check out these screens of Atari's Haunted House reboot to see what gamers of yore used to call "fun." Each screen shows a scene from the ancient Atari 2600 title side-by-side with the new version for PC, Wii and Xbox Live Arcade. For the Cantankerous: Atari has released new screens of its bastardization of the Atari 2600 classic, Haunted House. This entry in the franchise -- soon to be available on PCs and those consoles you refuse to buy -- takes place 30 years after the original. It seems that Samuel Silverspring disappeared on his trek through Graves Mansion all those years ago, and now it's up to his grandchildren to find out what happened. You can see this new abomination side-by-side with the original in the gallery below. %Gallery-101833%
Atari's Haunted House returns to scare PC, Xbox 360 and Wii
Atari is finally bringing back its classic Haunted House franchise for a new XBLA, downloadable PC, and Wii game. For those of you who aren't ancient, Haunted House is a maze game about a kid exploring a mysterious mansion in order to put an urn back together, hindered both by aggressive ghosts and total inability to see items or exits without lighting a match. The new version benefits from 29 years of technological advancement by, among other things, displaying the player avatar as a person instead of simply disembodied cartoon eyes. The gameplay still involves avoiding ghosts and looking for pieces of a broken urn, but now also includes puzzles, bosses, and what sounds like a much larger environment than the original house, with "towers, basements and catacombs." The new Haunted House will be out in September, and you can see a spooky trailer after the break. Now that Atari's started remaking its old games again, what's next? Circus Atari for Kinect? It would make more sense than that other Kinect circus thing. [Update: Shacknews confirmed with Atari that Haunted House will be a retail Wii game -- not WiiWare.] %Gallery-97494%
The Road to Mordor: Touring the fall's new content with Turbine (part two)
Last week we began a tour through the upcoming content Turbine have planned for Lord of the Rings Online, including the new-player experience, instance scaling and the region of Enedwaith. By themselves, those features represent so much exciting content that we could've ended there and been satisfied, but that wasn't the half of it. Well, it was the half of it, actually. Here's the other half. Buckle up, it's gonna be a bumpy ride on the Buckleberry Ferry!
Haunted house run using home automation gear
We've always thought our basement full of old Newtons and Amiga machines was pretty spooky, but we'd admit that we've been one-upped by Pennsylvania's Halloween Park, which built an entire haunted mansion using off-the-shelf HAI home automation equipment. Designed by Digital Panacea, the system is "run by typical motion detectors, contacts, resets, and timers," which trigger spooky sound effects and mechanical effects, including a leaping ghost nicknamed Dead Fred. That's way more interesting than the usual home-automation setup, we'd say -- any of you planning on re-rigging your systems at home before the kiddies come by?
