Is it Halloween already? No, not really. Not at all — it’s still June right now, but this is where we are in the Angry Video Game Nerd series and as such today we’ll be looking at an episode focusing on games based on the Dracula story.
The Nerd isn’t doing the most obvious ones – the Castlevania series – in this episode. Those are coming down the line. For now, we’re going to take a look at small collection of games from various consoles over the years.
With this being a Halloween episode, James goes all out with the nerd basically being Dracula this time around. Recall that Halloween is his favorite time of the year, and he loves doing these videos every season — at least, he did back a decade ago when the Nerd was in overdrive.
This episode has a lot going on, so we might be here a bit.
We start bu looking at “The Count” on the VIC-20, an early Commodore computer that predates the C64. The game itself is a text adventure, so, if you know what any of those games are like then you know what you are in for. If not, well, this little clip will be an introduction. Not a very good one, but an introduction nonetheless.
Next up is Dracula on the Intellivision. James plays it on the Intellivision 2, a redesigned version of the console, which gives him an opportunity to complain about this console redesign. As for the game, it actually looks like a pretty cool one (I don’t have it in my collection yet) albeit with a bit of a complex control scheme. As a bonus the Nerd looks at the somewhat odd text in the instruction manual.
Following that is an unreleased game, Dracs Night Out which was going to be a tie in for Reebok pump shoes… yeah, I don’t get it either. It’s kind of amazing a game would get this far and yet not actually be released, but that happened somewhat regularly back in the NES days. It looks like an unremarkable title, more frustrating than fun.
We move on to the Game Boy Advance and “Dracula, Crazy Vampire. A top down adventure title that just looks unremarkable. Following that the Nerd decides, for some reason, to cover the Sesame Street game “Countdown” (or “The Count’s Countdown” as he says) which seems to only be covered based on the strange control scheme where you automatically hop or run. It’s weird, but I guess may make sense for a game intended for 4 years olds.
We finally get to the meat of the episode, games based on the film “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” We open with an NES version which looks like it could be good but seems to be just too damned difficult, and a little cryptic. Moving on we hit the 16 bit games which aren’t much better. As the Nerd says, they seem like a cheap tie in to cash out on the popularity of the film.
Lastly, we take another look at the Sega CD version of the game. The Nerd had taken a look at this back in the Sega CD episode, so he doesn’t have too much more to add in here. He does find time to criticize the enemy selection and controls alongside the poor quality of video clips in the game before finally giving up, both on the games and on his vampire life!
Final Rating: 3.5/5
This episode is one I generally enjoy. It covers quite a few games quickly, getting the points across, cracking a few jokes where applicable, but otherwise seeming to be more of a chance for James to just have fun with Halloween than anything else. It’s funny enough and just the right length, and goes great with the follow up episode on Frankenstein games.