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Every one of the light games absolutely rules. Most of the franchise plays it straight move through a variety of locations on rails, clowning on zombies and mutants with a fun and satisfying selection of firearms. Think of it as a good version of Crypt Killer (does anyone besides me think about Crypt Killer?). Known mostly its over the top horror atmosphere, location-specific enemy damage and absolutely ludicrous voice acting, HotD is one of the elder statesmen of the light-gun genre. Perhaps Namco quickly saw how limiting the style was and how little it did to actually market the game to potential buyers? Pehaps the plan all along was to have only these three games share a similar cover, but what would tie them together? Other games like Air Combat would have been a perfect candidate for Man In Helmet style.** In fact, Ridge Racer only used this cover in the version of the game that came bundled with the Playstation console subsequent standalone releases had the standard car cover. However, concurrent with these releases were other Namco games (such as Tekken and Air Combat) that did not follow this short lived trend, and after the release of Starblade Alpha in late April 1996 Namco seems to have abandoned it entirely. While "Terrified Person Wearing Headgear while tiny renders of in-game vehicles float in their eyeballs" doesn't exactly explain to me what the game is about, you knew you were getting a Namco product when you saw it. Yes, like Nintendo's celebrated "Black Box" launch titles and Capcoms "gridline screensaver" cover art, it seems like Namco was angling to establish a House Style for their western releases. Can you detect the subtle pattern in the cover art*?
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Here's something I've never seen anybody talk about: In the young days of the North American PS1, Namco came out kicking by releasing ports of their early-90s arcade games.