Games That Time Forgot: The Haunting Starring Polterguy (Megadrive)
Author: Vince | Date: April 15, 2008
Released in 1993 by EA on the Sega Megadrive/Genesis, ‘The Haunting Starring Polterguy’ largely slipped under everyones radar. The game sees you controlling the titles hero, a dead rebellious cool kid called Polterguy, in his quest to scare the yuppie Sardini family from their home. You do this by possessing the various items around the house in order to scare the bejusus out of them and make them run away like crying little girls.
There are 4 members of the Sardini family:-
- Vito Sardini, the fat, rich, cigar smoking dad.
- Flo Sardini, spoilt old biddy wife, owner of a horrible shaven poodle.
- Tony Sardini, annoying, bratty, teenage son.
- Mimi Sardnin, the angry little sister, the kind that pulls heads off dolls.
You have to scare all 4 members out of each of their 4 houses. Each family member has a ’scaremeter’ bar, showing how close they are to running away, leaving a pool of ectoplasm for you when they do. Of course, it’s not quite as simple as inhabit object, scare person away. You have an ‘ectobar’, sort of like your health, this constantly decreases while you are in the real world setting traps for the family. It can also be decreased if the family dog spots you, or if you are caught by the ‘ectobeasts’ (creatures attracted to the pools of ectoplasm). Once this runs out you are sucked back into the underworld.
Once in the underworld, you have to navigate the dungeon like caverns to find all of the ectoplasm. Once you have it all you can exit, but a big red arrow will always guide you to the next one. There are multiple hazards to avoid in the underworld, like steam vents, bouncing skulls, disembodied heads and bats, all of which taking Polterguy’s health away if they hit him. The underworld is the only place Polterguy can actually die, and the only way to get a game over screen.
While the controls for this game are quite clunky, it’s still excellent. I think it’s a shame that this game went largely unnoticed by most Megadrive owners, but I still have fond memories of this game, because as a 12 year old boy, games about dead kids, haunted houses and ghosts seemed rather cool!
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It’s interesting because I actually owned this game at one point in my life, enjoyed it, and even beat it. Regardless of this, whenever I think about the games I enjoyed on the Sega Genesis I think of Sonic 1-3, Sonic & Knuckles, Sonic Spinball, Kid Chameleon, E. A. Sports. (it’s in the game!), Jurassic Park, Altered Beast, etc. It was weird for me to read this article and be like “Oh yeah, I owned that!”
You’re right, it wasn’t just a simple “possess objects, scare people” kind of game, it required some strategy. Different objects had different behaviors. Some were timed (the objects would shake, the family members came over to investigate them, they’d scare), some were trigger activated (you would wait inside them and activate them whenever you wanted), and some you could even control with the D-pad (I remember hopping into model planes, rocking chairs, telescopes, etc and being able to float them around the room to scare them towards a specific door).
In the underworld, you could grab red letters that gave you special bonuses. One of them allowed you to drug the dog, others were “super-scare” presents that caused the family members to leave behind huge piles of ectoplasm — really helped when you were low.
Interestingly enough, I also remember this being the very first game I ever played that taught you how to play it. I’m not just talking about a game demo: The introduction showed your character possessing an item, and there was dialogue along the bottom of the screen saying that the “trap was now set” or something. One of the family members got scared and ran out of the room, and then the character showed you how to pick up the ectoplasm you scared out of them. Nowadays you see these “ease you into it” intros in video games all the time, kind of indicative of how Haunting was ahead of its time.
Anyhow, thanks for reminding me about this game that I had basically forgotten about. It was a great to reminisce about it.
Excellent stuff Shaun, nice to see the article is doing what I was hoping… Making people sit there and think ‘I remember that game, it rocked!’
Plus you probably wrote a better review of it than I did in the first place!
Rob Schneider is… a carrot!
ok i freaking LOVE this game….
it my absolute fav game of all time
however i could never beat that weird brain thing.
if someone could email me and help me out with telling me how its done tht would be great!
thanks
@ SmellyGeekBoy
2008-04-15 20:53:30
Rob Schneider is… a carrot!
Rated PG13