The Ring: Terror's Realm is a survival horror game released in 2000 for the
Dreamcast based on the
The Ring franchise. You play as Meg Rainman, a new hire at the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) whose boyfriend, Robert (a scientist that got her the gig in the first place) has mysteriously died of unknown causes.
This game provides examples of:
- Adaptational Dye-Job: Instead of her usual Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl appearance, Sadako appears how she presumably did when she was alive, with brown hair and an intricate kimono.
- Alternate Continuity: The game has more in common with the original novels than the movies (Sadako being a hermaphrodite, curse being linked to smallpox, the modern day being a computer simulation.), and yet it still goes in a much different direction due to addition of action elements and how Sadako looks much more different than the usual.
- Always Night: Whenever you open the window in Meg's lab or step outside into the courtyard, the sky is pitch-black. Although this could be Foreshadowing that this isn't actually reality...
- Artificial Stupidity: The enemies lack any form of AI scripting beyond "run straight towards Meg and attack her repeatedly", often resulting in them getting stuck on bits of scenery and flailing uselessly at the air, giving you ample opportunity to fill them with bullets.
- Bland-Name Product: The descriptions for the firearms give misspelled versions of real gun manufacturers (although the prototype version just used the actual names).
- Difficult, but Awesome: The katana obviously doesn't have as much range as any of the guns, attacking with it involves a long, interruptible startup animation, and the attack will be cancelled if it hits a wall (a la Sword of the Berserk: Guts' Rage), but it does a lot of damage and doesn't require any ammo.
- Haunted Technology: Now a program that somehow transports its user to a post-apocalyptic future (or, as it turns out, a pre-apocalyptic past), but as usual, the program will kill its users.
- The Main Characters Do Everything: The commander has you do pretty much everything in the Darkworld from turning on the emergency power to retrieving a grenade launcher. This eventually gets Lampshaded when Meg calls him out on this, with the commander's excuse being that he was busy fighting enemies off-screen.
- The Reveal: The Darkworld stuff with the monsters that you thought was a computer game? That's actually the real world, and what you thought was real was actually a simulation created by Sadako's memories.
- Tyop on the Cover: Multiple typos exist in the game, such as "Setember" instead of "September" and "are" instead of "area" (and possibly the infamous "Dalad Jelly" sign in the cafeteria).
