I know this looks ludicrous. Really, I do. Those of you without any prior experience with Ecco The Dolphin might wonder what in the everloving fuck a 16-bit game about dolphins is doing in a Halloween marathon. Those of you with experience, on the other hand, are likely nodding your heads in agreement... if you've seen far enough into the game, that is. Let me assure you that, despite not being horrific in the traditional sense, Ecco The Dolphin absolutely belongs on here. There are at least two reasons for this, one a little more valid than the other, and both will be explored in due time while we're here tonight. Dive right on down into the depths of terror, even further than the surface waters terrorized by a shark. This shit will make one shark look tame. You'll see. Oh god, how you'll see.
For the uninitiated (and those who don't feel up to peeking at the linked longplay), Ecco The Dolphin is a 1993 Sega Genesis game in which you play as a cute little dolphin. The opening moments of the game are idyllic as you swim about with your dolphin pals and talk to them with sonar. Then you leap high out of the water and it all goes to shit, a horrible series of noises as all the sea life save for you is sucked up and vanishes. The quest, then, is to find your pod. It's a wild ride which takes you from your coral home, to frozen wastes, to sunken cities, to back in goddamned time. There's a certain mysticism to Ecco The Dolphin which slots well into its time... but the sea is also a horrific goddamned place full of dread beasts. Giant octopi will harass you. Massive snow crabs which look like facehuggers from Alien home in on you relentlessly, hungry for a meal. The deep ocean is a deadly place, and it's made all the more deadly by Ecco's second bit of horror; its difficulty. It may not be the hardest game ever made, but rest assured that it is no joke. Ecco The Dolphin is a Hard Motherfucker from the era of Hard Motherfuckers In Video Games, and it will battle you to ego-death with all of its might in the darkest depths. Part of this difficulty is due to Ecco needing air, making lots of the game a frantic dash into danger in order to find safe points and keep yourself breathing. Part of it is the near lack of post-damage invincibility, coupled with enemy AI tendencies usually boiling down to "STICK TO THE DOLPHIN SPRITE LIKE GLUE". It has passwords and whatnot, but it's still a wildly difficult journey. Up to this point, though, the horror of the depths and the horror of the hard game haven't really stacked. The endgame changes all that in one big symphony of sorrow.
It was aliens all along. The Vortex come to Earth every 500 years, Dread Beasts from beyond the stars which drain the seas dry for sustenance. After getting advice from an ancient DNA strand, Ecco travels back to the beginning of the game and allows himself to be sucked up by the Vortex to destroy them from within. What follow are some of the hardest levels in any game, and some of the most horrific. After ascending up the Vortex's suction tube, you enter the final stage: Welcome To The Machine. This is a six-minute long autoscroller with no checkpoints and much memorization required to avoid being crushed by screen scroll. At the end of it all is the Vortex Queen, herself a ridiculous difficult fight. Dying to her will send you back to the beginning of Welcome To The Machine. The sadistic thing is that a password exists to go straight to the Vortex Queen fight. The game gives it to you for beating the Vortex Queen. This is ludicrous, but the Queen herself is a terror in her own right. Special mention goes to the attack where she eats Ecco and the screen turns blood red. It's like something out of a creepypasta. Not only is it terrifying, but the difficulty is enough to send most retro gamers screaming for the hills. I cannot blame them; it's utterly out there. As Ecco's creator, Ed Annunziata, noted on Twitter once... he noticed that kids were beating rentals really fast so he made his game hard. Such a simple decision, but one that added terror to terror already lurking within. Ecco's still a very interesting game, mind. It got plenty of sequels and whatnot, even! Still, it is a doubly haunted game; haunted both by the terrors of the deep and by the terrors of Hard Goddamn Games. Let's get out of the water. I'm starting to prune.
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