What I’m Playing Right Now #15 – with bonus Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2600 Review!

So, I really wanted a bigger game than Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge up today, and if I do manage to get Dracula X up for Halloween THE DAY and not the time frame, I’ll be cutting it close. This will be the final Castlevania game I do in 2024. It’s telling how prolific the series is that I’m not even close to running out of Castlevania games on classic platforms for future Halloweens. By the way, I’m also late when it comes to Camp Bloodbrook. Our review will be added to the Pinball M guide within the next week. We just haven’t had a chance for the whole family to sit down with it.

So, what AM I playing?

Dracula X is not well loved and, from what I can gather, is considered both a poor remake of Rondo of Blood AND a massive step backwards from Super Castlevania IV. I get the contemporary hate for it, but time has only been kind to Dracula X. No longer bound by any comparison to any other Castlevania, it really does stand tall on its own. And I also get how someone who is a big fan of previous Castlevanias could not love it. That review is NEXT at IGC, unless you count this bonus review of Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the Atari 2600! Happy Halloween!

Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1983
Designed by Ed Salvo
Published by Wizard Video Games

Hell, the chainsaw looks more pornographic than the actual Atari pornographic games.

After playing the historically maligned but actually not THAT bad Halloween in The Games They Couldn’t Include – Part Two, I figured maybe history did Texas Chainsaw Massacre dirty too. It didn’t. While I ultimately didn’t give Halloween a YES!, it was clearly a cut above most Atari games and even had an eeriness to it that nobody should still have expected in the 2020s. It felt true to the movie, in a way few Atari 2600 games manage to pull off. Wait.. I am sure I wanted to give it a NO!, right? It’d be helpful to me, dear reader, if you just imagined me looking up at the ceiling in solemn contemplation right now. Are you doing it? No you’re not. I can wait all day. Okay, good. Yea, no, Michael Myers was too easy to learn to cheese and it took the guts right out of the game. BUT, the premise was solid. You can’t say that about Chainsaw. Here, you play as the villain. Why they would do this is beyond me. If you’re the killer, there’s no tension. The horror element is gone. So is basically any gameplay. You walk back and forth, avoiding anything on the screen while you chainsaw people. There’s no gore. They just turn upside-down. When you run out of gas, you lose a life. You get extra gas every 5,000 points. This barely qualifies as a game at all. It doesn’t even have novelty value. It’s like the most basic, lazy idea. The sh*t thing is, I know Ed Salvo was better than this, but this was flawed from the start.
Verdict: NO!