Night Trap 25th Anniversary Edition

This action game that was once so controversial is incredibly tame both in its content and its gameplay, especially in its new re-release. Night Trap 25th Anniversary Edition reproduces the original full-motion video (FMV) gameplay faithfully, clearing up the clunky presentation from the Sega CD with sharper playback, although it still carries over some of the film glitches of the original. That actually adds to its B-movie charm, which always stood out about the game in the first place. Whether it's the shuffling, shabbily costumed "monsters," laughing at the broad overacting, or listening to Dana Plato plead for help, the schlock factor is high. The same can be said about the use of traps, although the challenge of precisely timing the trapping of the vampiric-like Augurs adds extra difficulty for players; you'll frequently need to abandon a plot point in one room to trap a monster or save someone, and you'll need to track the Martin family as they catch onto your takeover of the house and change trap color codes. If you miss their audio cue, you won't know what you have to adjust the system to, and you'll let too many monsters escape. This will keep you playing over and over again until you memorize the patterns for each scene. Players that spend the time to capture every monster will unlock extra content in the newly included section The Basement, such as hidden endings, a theater mode that shows every game scene, production art, and even The Scene of the Crime, the game that helped inspire Night Trap. It also comes with a director interview, as well as a documentary on the congressional furor it raised when it was initially released, leading to the creation of the ESRB.

The downside here is that the gameplay itself really isn't very long. In fact, a full gameplay session will literally run less than a half-hour from start to finish once you've gotten the hang of what's going on. There's no radically new content, and with the death of some of the actors, there's no possible expanded Night Trap content here either. On top of that, the gameplay is extremely tame, especially by today's standards. If you're expecting gore, sex, or some of the other things that were initially and mistakenly decried by Congress, you'll find much worse on TV today than you would in this game. The fact that this would literally be a tempest in a teacup today highlights how much standards change over time, and how this title is a tame, yet infamous, footnote in the history of gaming.