Screaming Mad George's ParanoiaScape (PS1) Translated Playthrough - NintendoComplete
639A playthrough of Mathilda's 1998 horror-themed pinball/action game for the Sony PlayStation, Screaming Mad George's ParanoiaScape (パラノイアスケープ).
I translated the in-game Japanese text and edited it into the video, hopefully making this fantastically bizarre title a bit more accessible to western audiences.
ParanoiaScape is, as the game tells you several times, the warped product of "Screaming Mad George," Jouji (George) Tani, who was a Hollywood special effects artist best known for his work on Predator and Nightmare on Elm Street 4.
With credentials like those, maybe it's not such a surprise that this game is, unabashedly and unapologetically, a stream of nightmare fuel aimed directly at your face.
It resembles a pinball game, is all in 3D, and is played from a behind-the-ball perspective. That by itself would make it somewhat unique, but the ball is a flaming brain, the paddles are made of human skeletons, and the stages are pretty terrifying.
Each stage gives you a specific objective, usually tied to either racing toward the exit or destroying a target, and is divvied up by location. The nightmarescapes include things likes internal organs, the gate to Hell, and the "surrear world," which really is quite surrear, I must say.
There are eyeballs everywhere, a cancer-riddled heart boss has to be "purified," womens' bodies appear as pillars with faces instead of butts and mouths where nipples should be... It's all trippy in a way that I can't really do justice with words. You'll just have to take a look for yourself. And for a PS1 game, the graphics look insanely good. A couple of clipping issues aside, the stages all house a ton of detail, and everything sports some really impressive, fairly high resolution texture work. There aren't many PS1 games with such clean looking 3D, even if 'clean' is not really an apt word to describe the imagery here.
It's a fun game, but the amazing aesthetics (both in terms of shock value and quality) are the real stars here. It's absolutely a showcase game for the system, and it's totally unlike anything else. It's an artistic expression, much like LSD was, and it is an effort that Mr. Screaming Mad George deserves to feel a lot of pride for.
It's a pretty good game to play coming up on Halloween for sure!
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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