Here we have what was 2010’s Halloween episode of The Angry Video Game Nerd, and also the second part of James revisiting some of his early review subjects — in this case, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
He opens by discussing that, to his horror, even though he warned everyone about the abomination that is the game in his second episode ever, people have played the absolute nightmare that is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
He doesn’t blame people, though — he only showed a bit of gameplay and that was it, so he realizes he must play it again and this time take it seriously, but before he does that, he manages to stall for a minute and half, putting off the inevitable with side rants about the guy on the art, the pronunciation of Jekyll, the fact the game was made by TOHO, the same group behind Godzilla, before finally getting to it.
Before he even begins, his hands are trembling and he realizes he’s going to need some alcohol — not just the normal Rolling Rock, oh no, some hard stuff. No shot glasses either — straight out of the bottle.
We do have one more delay, where James notes a similarity between the music in Jekyll and another game, Rygar. Following that one final side comment, we get to the game and, much like in the original video way back in 2004, he plays for just a moment before lightning strikes and it’s game over.
He actually explains this, however; the game actually has a perfectly sensible mechanism where the idea is to stay as Jekyll for as long as possible. If you die or your anger gets maxed out, you change into Hyde, going through the same level in reverse but now fighting demons. If you reach the point as Hyde that you died as Jekyll, that’s it – game over. If you kill enough enemies to bring your anger meter back down, you go back to being Jekyll and can continue the game.
It’s honestly a mechanism I like, and, as James will allude to later, it creates an odd duality (almost symbolic, really) between good and bad.
For the sake of a game, though, it doesn’t go over well. James goes into decent detail on all the annoyances of trying to really play the game, how everything and everything is trying to kill you, and you have no real way to defend yourself. As Hyde he feels the game actually feels like a game, but as Jekyll it’s just a slow dredge through a very special kind of gaming hell.
James really spends a decent amount of time going into the details of the game, and how crazy everything is. Between Billy Pones and his slingshot, crazy cats, giant bombs, terrible singing, statues that are pissing, and birds shitting on you this game is a wild experience. In the end James loses it, becoming a beast in much the same fashion as the characters in the novel the game is based on. It’s really something you just have to experience in the episode — the Nerd covers everything better than I could relay here.
By this time the horror that is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is getting to James and, in classic Cinemassacre style the Nerd becomes a monster much like Hyde in the novel. He goes to dig up the grave of Robert Louis Stevenson (the author of the novel) to destroy his remains, only to be met with a “fuck you” and a command to play more Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Nerd’s attempts to attack the skeletal remains of Stevenson are ineffective, just like the staff in the game.
The Nerd awakens, realizing that (as mentioned above) the game symbolizes the duality of the human experience, the joy of being “bad” which, as fun as it can be we must never let take over, with the dullness of being “good” which, for as boring as it is, is virtually always the better state to be in. To win you must be Jekyll, but to have fun you must be Hyde. It goes on, and on, in an incredible rant that actually makes complete sense — I fully agree with this idea, which ties into the source material well.
Of course, the Nerd abandons this, deciding one could also say the game “just fucking sucks.”
Final Rating: 4.5/5
It was nice to see James go back and give this game the review it deserved — a combination of theatrics and an in depth review make this quite a good Halloween episode. Granted, it wasn’t as good as Castlevaniathon the previous year, but at this stage James was really rolling back Nerd episodes and the fact that, like how he covered Castlevania II again in Castlevaniathon, he this time covered the rest of the “classic” Nerd episodes makes up for that.
The skit portions were nice, and watching him descend into madness as he played made the episode even more enjoyable. The ending was superb, coming to a realization on how the game works tying into the source material concepts was just great, contrasted perfectly with the realization that regardless of all that one could still just say it’s a terrible game.
This wouldn’t be the last time James would redeem an otherwise terrible game, in at least some form.