Spanning nearly twenty years, Skulfukk
is one of the oldest continuing game series. In Japan, Skulfukk is known
as Kuutaichi Dracula, which roughly translates as “Rip the Face of
Dracula.” Over the years, three of the games in the series were not released
in the US market. One of them, a remake of the original Kuutaichi Dracula
game was released in 2002 for the XR7500, a personal computer available only in
Japan. This December, Deathspell Entertainment is releasing that game for the
new Z-Bot under the title The Skulfukker Saga. Just in time for
Christmas!
At the end of Skulfukk IX:
Orgy of Pain, Our Hero, having returned to Earth, is left staring at a
flaming city, evidence that alien aggressors have arrived ahead of him. There
are vampires all over, from Tokyo to Timbuktu, from Stockholm to Scranton. Many
people are dead. Some folks have been transformed into flesh-eating zombies, but
some have actually survived. The remaining leaders of humankind have come up
with a plan. In orbit, they hope to build dozens of enormous ships to carry all
the remaining survivors into space, away from their ruined world. For this to
happen, Our Hero—that’s you, Dear Gamer—must rescue the surviving humans
and wipe out enough bloodsuckers so the ships can land safely at the spaceport.
Thus, the overall goal in the The
Skulfukker Saga is to decapitate the female vampires and fornicate with
their severed heads. Once you learn the basics of controlling your hydrogen
blaster and power saw, it’s up to you to use your skills to eradicate and
sexually humiliate the undead. A lot of the game’s challenges are actual tasks
that a bio-terrorism specialist would perform, such as inoculating the citizenry
and designing a crematorium. These tasks bring a neat sense of realism to the
game. On the other hand, some of the jobs are just silly and fun, reminding you
that this is just a game. Here are some helpful strategies.
Stage 1: Find the
Serum!
You’ve been airdropped at
the city’s abandoned CDC complex. Ignore the humans for now and take the
elevator to the sub-basement. You’ll come to a room with two large cylinders
against the wall. Destroy them with your blaster to reveal several metal
containers. Inside these containers are the serum vials you’ll need to save
the few surviving humans. Start the mass inoculation right away. To use the
syringe, get as close as possible to a human and quickly press B, which drives
the needle into the forearm. Don’t hesitate! In the world of Skulfukk,
humans are on edge. If they fidget during the inoculation, the needle sometimes
pierces their brains causing blood and gray matter to pour out the ears. Such
mishaps can drastically lower your final score.
Stage 2: Burn
the Dead!
Once the inoculation is complete,
you’ll need to dispose of the infected bodies lying around the complex before
they become reanimated. (This outer-space plague is NOT your grandmother’s
Ebola!) Build a crematorium by downloading Nazi blueprints from the CDC’s
mainframe. Remember to improvise! If you’re having trouble assembling the
proper materials, try this: Break into the radiation lab on the thirteenth floor
and see how hot the experimental laser gets. (Microwave corpse for three minutes—then
Dustbust!) This will save you lots of time. But be careful; if you absorb too
many rays, the game will end. (Tip: Use your power saw to render bodies into
manageable, easier-to-incinerate chunks.)
Stage 3: Greetings
from Camp Skulfukk!
You can’t have treated humans
wandering into blood-hungry clutches, so grab some razor wire from the storeroom
and confine them to the cafeteria, where there’s plenty of moldy bread and
thin soup to go around. Don’t allow them too much room, though; they’ll only
get themselves into trouble. Keep them cattle-car snug. (If a few are
accidentally crushed or suffocated, incinerate them immediately.) While you’re
at it, you might as well record their names and give them numbers. On second
thought, they’ll probably forget their numbers, because, let’s face it,
humans who are too stupid to have abandoned the planet by this point are not
going to retain much. So go ahead and tattoo their arms. (Tip: There’s a
needle and some ink in the main lobby’s security desk.) Okay, is everyone safe
and accounted for? Great! Now you’re ready to stomp vampire boo-tay!
Stage 4: Kill,
Then Kill Again!
The hydrogen blaster is your
primary tool, but during the course of the game you’ll stumble upon other
useful weapons. For instance, there’s the shotgun, the weapon of choice for
close quarters action in Vietnam. Their effectiveness in that respect has not
diminished in the least to this very day. They feed easy, never jam, and throw
up a wall of lead that mows down most vampires. (Their only drawbacks are
rate-of-fire and recoil.) Indeed, the shotgun will be your minute-by-minute
workhorse. Other weapons include chainguns, rocket launchers, plasma rifles, and
BFG 9000s. They each have their own advantages, so choose wisely.
Always focus on your front sight
and shoot to kill, not to wound. Fire center of mass on all targets. Never shoot
an enemy once, then stop to see how good you were. Double tap everybody, then
follow up as necessary. You should pick up blood spray that confirms accuracy,
even without refocusing on the target. Conserve ammo when you can, but it doesn’t
make sense to die with full bandoliers.
Now that you’ve confined the
humans, you can exit the complex and start your killing spree on the streets.
These space vampires have it coming. After all, they wander around like rejects
from a George Romero movie. Sure, the females are sort of beguiling; they
possess a sleepy, reckless beauty that’s hard to ignore. Which is why we
recommend getting up close and personal with the power saw so you can “burger-ize”
them before raping their severed heads.
This is accomplished by jumping
on the enemy and rapidly pressing A until skulls are detached from bikini-clad
bodies. Now press B while moving your joystick back and forth to begin the
violation. Remember to tap A afterwards to spike the head like a football. Extra
points!
If necrophilia isn’t your bag,
you can also earn points by finding more unusual ways of defiling the vampires’
faces. Try point-blanking their lower jaws with a shotgun. Or you might pour
hydrochloric acid from the lab into their eye sockets. Yank their brains through
their noses with a rusty pair of pliers. Creativity is always rewarded, both in
this life and in the one that occurs outside of The Skulfukker Saga.
Some advice on shooting: Put
these creatures out of their misery. Waste the dirt bags. Mow them down.
Dispatch all nasties. Unleash the BFG and give them a taste of what human
technology can do. Kill them now—it may save your life later. Blow a hole
through the monsters. Blast these puppies. Shoot out their brains. Decapitate
them with rockets. Explode their heads. Crush their skulls. Kill everything on
the lower level. Exterminate the brutes on the upper level. Kill these dudes
while you are still invulnerable. Kill them all from the doorway. Stay on top of
the stairs and kill them. Kill these guys without leaving the section of the
floor you are on. Kill them all and go to the back of the alcove. Take these
guys out and exit this room through the door in the west wall. Continue down the
stairs till you come to a small room with a floor covered in blood. Get on your
knees and lick the blood. The floor is a lake of blood and there are specters
running around in it. When the rocket goes in the goat’s head, it passes down
a tube and strikes the President’s brain. After the first round he screams;
the second round finishes him off. Don’t feel bad about that. The President is
definitely happier than you are to be finished. If you stop to enjoy the
cinematic glory of this advancing wall of death, you will be toast. A toast to
the vanquished: Here’s blood in your eye! The hall is full of barrels of
explosive toxic waste. Ignore them—to stop is to die. Eliminate them, then go
around the corner. Destroy anything that gets in your way and jump on the
transporter. The President’s head is on a stick. When he is dead, go back down
the stairs and there will be a Pain Elemental on your left. The wall will rise
revealing four commandos. Kill the Imp. Kill all that you can see. Grab the case
of ammo and the blue armor. The blood tastes like the mouth of God. An arena
like a pit, at the bottom of which is Arachnotron and toxic waste. A box of
shells. Keep moving or you are dead meat. Use the plasma rifle to sweep the
room. Give them a BFG enema. Here you will find a panel in the wall to your left
with a goat’s skull and a pentagram on it. Be alert for the specter waiting
for you there and thrash it. Send him back to hell. When he shows his ugly mug,
redecorate it for him. If you did a good job, everything here should be dead.
Sweep the room with the chaingun until you see blood spatter, then stay on it
until the bullets begin to hit the wall behind. Repeat till the monster is dead.
Congratulations, you’ve beaten the final boss!
Stage 5: The End?
Once you’ve cleared the
spaceport of vampires, you will be treated to the game’s ending credits. Yes,
it’s Miller time! Give your trigger finger a break, sit back, relax, and just
imagine how fully realized the next Skulfukk installment will be as the
Deathspell developers become more and more confident with the nuts and bolts of
the Z-Bot system!
In short, the intense challenges
and pure simple fun of this product are sure to attract anyone who loves games.
It’s our hope that these strategies will help you to better understand—and
enjoy—the latest and greatest of the first-person shooters. Happy hunting!
