"Life after death is under-whelming."

You know, when my time comes and I pass on, I like to think that there’s something better waiting for me on the other side. People like John Edwards and Sylvia Browne try to convince us that there is a better place after death, which helps most of us feel better about judgment day. However, in Haunting: Starring Polterguy, all there seems to be for Polterguy, a dead ‘sk8er’, to do is freak out some rich Italian-American family. It turns out that Vito, the father of the family, is partially responsible for your death, because his company manufactured the faulty skateboard that resulted in your demise(why you take out revenge on the whole family is beyond me though. I can imagine how traumatized those kids must be after this..). You need to scare them so much that they run screaming out of their houses, not caring if any of their family is still inside.

The basic idea behind Polterguy is to completely scare the heck out of all of the Sardini’s. There’s Vito, the ‘godfather’ like dad, Flo, who looks old enough to be Vito’s mom, Tony, the buck-tooth son, and Mimi, the buck-tooth pig-tail daughter who’s picture just SCREAMS ‘brat!!’. It’s too bad no living things can see you, or your job would be a lot easier. All you would need to do is walk in, say, ‘Hey, what's up?’ and they’d be outta there like a bishop at a Styx concert.

Alas, things are not this easy. So, you’re pretty much forced to possess anything in your environment and change it into something horrible or not so horrible for a short amount of time. This will cause one of the family-members to do something hilarious in their moment of fright. The children wet themselves, and Flo’s pants drop, revealing some.. leather panties.

Almost all of the animations are great! Some of them actually manage to be kind of creepy. The dart board turns into a bleeding eye, the globe spills water, the top of one of the doors morphs into a dripping gargoyle, and the shower/bath-tub fills with blood and has a limb-less torso hanging in it. Pretty cool, considering I was expecting this game to have weak animations. The characters all have great animations as well. I explained the good one’s earlier. The environments are pretty nice as well. Too bad that there’s only one house, with only a few rooms..

The music is this really... annoying... wanna-be creepy stuff. Plus, it’s all choppy. I didn’t hear more than one song playing.. Or maybe that’s because it was all so bad, I couldn’t differentiate between them.. Either way, the music is bad in this game.

The sound effects are, sadly, also poorly done. The screams of your adversaries the Sardini’s sound strangely muffled. Also, the fact that the father, mother, son, and daughter all have the same scream adds to the amusement of the low quality of the noises in the game. Everything else is also very, very generic.

The thing that helps Polterguy stay in the mortal realm and attempt to scare the Sardini’s out of their home is his ecto level. Ecto is what keeps him in our world. Whenever you successfully scare the bejeebers out of someone, their Ecto flies out and you can pick it up to replenish your ecto meter. When your ecto meter runs out, though, you’re send to what I can only describe as ‘hell’, where you have to collect dropping Ecto while dodging flying bats, arms crashing through the wall, and geysers erupting beneath your feet. The place is nicely decorated as well, with random bones and skeletons chained to the wall. This area is extremely boring. You’ll have to come here at least a few times throughout the game,

One thing that really could of helped out Haunting’s longevity would be to maybe follow the Sardini’s to their next house, and scare them their too, with all new animations. Sadly, this game was done on the Genesis, so putting in this much data would of been pretty difficult on one cartridge. If they could maybe make a new version for a new console, however..

Taking out revenge on the person who was the cause of your death by scaring them a lot seems sort of silly. If I was killed and I haunted the person who was most responsible for my death, I can only think of one thing I would constantly try to do. I suppose that EA decided to cater to a larger audience, and M-rated games weren’t that big back in ‘93, either.

Even after all of this has been said, I still recommend you to try and find this game. It’s truly innovative, and has it’s high points. Although it can be beaten pretty quickly, it should only run you a few bucks. Be sure to pick this one up.

Foot-Notes:

-Your main objective in Haunting is to scare the Sardini family out of their home.

-The game has a lot of great scare animations, for each piece of furniture and for each character.

-The music is annoying, pseudo creepy garbage.

-Sound Effects are generic.

-When you run out of ‘Ecto’, you are forced to go to a hellish place to refill your health, which becomes immediately annoying.

-Haunting is a short game.

-Haunting still remains one of the most innovative games on any console

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 06/26/03, Updated 06/28/03