Chiller (NES) Playthrough
181A playthrough of American Game Cartridge's unlicensed 1990 light gun game for the NES, Chiller.
For being an unlicensed title, Chiller is a surprisingly reasonable arcade conversion. Graphically, it's a huge come down from the 1986 original, but censorship aside - everyone is now wearing clothes and many of the people have been turned into monsters - the stages are all fairly accurate depictions of the original game's and the game play is similar.
The primary goal is to find the thirty-two talismans hidden throughout the game. They're signposted at the beginning of each stage, and they're easy to find thanks to the way they all become visible whenever you fire the Zapper. Just shoot at the red dots you see when the screen flashes!
Once they've all been found and the secret message has been fully revealed, you're swept off to a Duck Hunt-style bonus round where you'll blast away at random spooky things flying around out front of a haunted mansion. The game then resets the talisman board and continues on a loop until you get a game over.
The arcade version was banned in many countries, but the NES version's low-resolution, low-color tiles graphics don't horrify as much as they amuse. It's pretty funny to see people dissolving into 8x8 pixel puddles of dithered gore.
The music is monotonous, but I'm a huge fan of the heavily distorted screams that you're rewarded with as you dismember everyone in sight. (But why does the dog scream like a woman?)
Chiller is fun as a novelty to pull out around Halloween, but it won't keep your attention for longer than ten minutes or so. Still, if you want something that boldly differentiates itself from the rest of the NES Zapper games, this will fit the bill quite nicely.
And a completely random bit of trivia: the North American publisher, AGCI, was an offshoot of ShareData. ShareData was responsible for most of the game show games released on PC in the late 80s. Sometime in 1990, IJE decided that they could profit more by self-publishing than they could by licensing games to Sharedata, and so GameTek was born.
So there you go - a link between Chiller and Wheel of Fortune. Wild, huh?
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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