Here we have the 2011 Halloween AVGN episode – Dark Castle for the Sega Genesis. The Nerd introduces the episode pondering on why the NES had so many terrible games for it, and decides to give the big, bad 16 bit Sega Genesis a go as a change of pace, and the game of choice this time around is, as mentioned above, Dark Castle.
He spends no time tearing into the graphics and the way the game just throws you into itself without any explanation. After a small diversion regarding Burger King, we get to the core of the game – a platforming screen-based adventure puzzle game that tries hard to be loyal to its source material and provide a dark, dangerous, spooky experience but falls incredibly flat. He continues to focus on the graphics, reaching a “WTF” moment when he sees “Saddam was here” on the wall of a dungeon. Yeah, the developers thought they were cute with this one.
He moves on to the music; a somewhat low quality (and very “Genesis”) mix of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. A wonderful composition, but somewhat cliche and not very well realized in the game. You can turn it off, if you time it right, but it just comes back, so what’s the point. Then come the controls — as usual, the game controls horribly, especially in combat. This is actually due to the fact it was originally a computer game, which used the mouse for targeting. That works there, but the “rotate to aim like you’re a fucking tank” style of control doesn’t work well here.
Beyond that you have the usual issues with stairs, jumping, climbing.. all of it is a mess. Grabbing items is done with a button combination, ducking is confusing, and in the end everything is so bad it made the Nerd wonder if his controller was broken. Bad controls are the biggest thing to make a game go from passable, to outright terrible. The Nerd continues to go into details on everything wrong with Dark Castle. The list just keeps on growing, and if you’ve paid any attention to common complaints in previous episodes, you know what kind of things he will inevitably say about this game.
Eventually, he wonders if he’s doing something wrong, and checks what difficulty he’s playing on, only to discover he’s been playing the game on easy difficulty! That’s his limit for dealing with Dark Castle on Sega Genesis, but he has one more version to cover – the CD-i version!
The graphics are worse. The controls are worse. Everything is worse about this version! He can barely get past the first screen, it’s that bad. I won’t even spoil the complaints here you just have to watch it. Then again, it is the CD-i, so what do we really expect? In the end, following the now traditional ending rant, the Nerd declares that the games must “suffer the tortures of the damned” — meaning he chains them to a wall and whips them, presumably for all time. I guess somewhere, in some alternate dimension, the Nerd is still torturing those games to this very day…
Final Rating: 3.5/5
This was another fun episode for its time. It was a shorter one, and didn’t have too much special going on, but it was nice to see the Sega Genesis get some attention — I think the last time was in the Cheetahmen video, and even then just for Action 52 on that platform. It was also nice that the CD-i got some attention once again, which is funny given in the Making of a Nerd episode video he questions when he’d ever want to play the CD-i again.
Still, the episode was unique in its own right and it was nice that we got another Halloween themed episode without fail — it is James’ favorite time of the year, and mine too, so I always look forward to whatever video comes along for that season. This one, while a bit weaker than some previous ones, still didn’t disappoint.