BRIEFs: Mighty Nerd (1989), Rolan's Curse (1990), Dracula in London (1993)

The title screen does not have him "vs." anything.

        

Mighty Nerd

AKAs:

Mighty Marvel vs. the Forces of E.V.I.L.

Mighty Nerd vs. the Forces of E.V.I.L.

Mighty Nerd vs. F.O.E.

Mighty Nerd vs. the Supervillains 

I.S.M. (developer and publisher)

Released as shareware for Apple II GS in 1988, Macintosh in 1989, Amiga in 1989 or 1990

Rejected for: Technical problems

      

Every version of this one that I've tried has been unplayable. The game comes with character creators that allow you to create both heroes and villains, assign them various powers and abilities, and set them loose against each other in a cityscape. The player's ultimate goal is to reach the lair of "Dr. Skull" and defeat him. I guess it has experience points; whether I consider it an RPG depends on whether those points affect anything more than the strength and "frame" bars on the main screen.

   

The hero and villain clash.

       

The problems with the game are many:

   

• Only one version I found (for the Amiga) has any documentation, and it clears up virtually nothing.

• I can't figure out how to get into the character creator on the Amiga version.

• The Mac version crashes when you try to load any custom-created character. Fortunately, there are some default characters.

• The Mac version crashes when you try to transition levels.

        

Crashes are frequent.

      

In no version can I figure out how to attack. The Mac version doesn't seem to respond to any keys at all. You use the mouse to move, but if you click on something that isn't a movable square, the game gives you a series of error tones that go on forever.

   

There are some videos online of people playing the game, but none that I can find in which anyone is attacking (except the villain attacking the hero), so that makes me think it must be a common problem.

    

There are some fun elements. The opening cinematic shows a squat milquetoast-looking guy finding a rod on the ground, picking it up, and transforming into a tall, muscular hero. A digitized voice reads the game title. It looks like the game supports both walking and flying, if you have that power, and the creator lets you create your own powers, like spells in a fantasy game. The different types of effects here suggest a complexity that I can't make the game deliver. I guess you can destroy buildings and cars.

      

Some of the options when creating a new power.

       

The game was written by Winchell Chung of Phoenix, Maryland, who went on to some renown as a graphic artist.

    

I don't really think it's an RPG and I thus don't want anyone wasting time on it. I suspect that won't stop some of you. If you can get a stable version and it turns out that experience and leveling affects more than just maximum stamina, I'll think about it.

    

******

     

Damn, it's trademarked. There go my dreams of opening a little French bistro called Rolan's Curse.

       

Rolan's Curse

Japan

Nihon Maicom Kaihatsu (developer); American Sammy Corp (U.S. publisher)

Released 1990 for Game Boy in Japan; released 1991 in North America

Rejected for: Insufficient character development

     

You may remember that when I first tried a Game Boy game four years ago, The Final Fantasy Legend (1989), followed swiftly by Wizardry: Suffering of the Queen (1991), I was pleasantly surprised at the relative complexity of the system. Wizardry, in particular, was essentially indistinguishable from the earliest PC games in its series. This was in sharp contrast to what I had expected from the handheld experience: "A relatively short, simple, single-character game, probably action-oriented, perhaps something along the lines of a single-character Gauntlet."

       

Rolan's Curse is largely what I had been expecting, although its obvious inspiration is Zelda, not Gauntlet. Its only value is that it's presumably more interesting than doing nothing while being driven to little league practice or waiting at the dentist's office.

       

Guy looks like a tiny, squat Iron Man.

       

The setup is boring and derivative: An evil former ruler of the land of Rolan, King Barius, has broken out of prison and rallied legions of monsters to his service. The Goofy Cartoonish Little Man (two if you link your Game Boys with a cable) must fight his way through the monsters and defeat him. The game begins with no character creation in a village where the NPCs offer platitudes about the upcoming mission. You then enter a succession of linear screens occupied by monsters that, in Zelda fashion, bounce back and forth on established movement paths, sometimes engaging only when you're right on top of them, some firing missile weapons.

       

Attacking a blob on an early screen.

       

There are no attributes, and character development is achieved only through increasing maximum health, which is done by finding armor that enemies sometimes drop. Each piece increases the maximum number of hearts that represent your health meter. The only other improvements come from switching weapons (between a sword and the imaginatively named Wand of Uzi) and gauntlets that augment the power of your weapons. You have two inventory items at all times, the primary weapon and a secondary usable object like a full healing potion or a "magic axe" (looks like a pickaxe) capable of clearing obstacles. Enemies get harder in time to the increases in your items' power. They also respawn continually.

I wasn't a Zelda fan, but at least it had some light puzzles, hidden areas, and shops, all of which this game lacks. Zelda was also relatively nonlinear, while Rolan has you on a rail from start to finish.

    

Finding a Wand of Uzi. I don't know why they didn't just use an actual Uzi.

      

I don't regard improvements in maximum health to be enough "character advancement" to call a game an RPG; this is more appropriately characterized as an action game. HowLongToBeat says it only takes 2 hours to win, and an LP on YouTube clocks in at 90 minutes. Despite this short time, I declined to continue with it. The LP shows the character passing through a variety of bland environments, fighting increasingly difficult monsters, visiting a couple of towns with purposeless NPCs, and fighting the occasional mini-boss. Barius is a bull skull-headed villain in a robe who constantly disappears and reappears as the player attacks. Once he's defeated, the people rejoice while the protagonist heads over the horizon to new adventure. Barius returns in Rolan's Curse 2 (1992), which sounds like it adds enough complexity that I probably need to check it out rather than dismiss it immediately.

       

LP author Longplays 4 Days fighting Barius.

        

It feels like for every innovative, landmark Japanese game there are a thousand bland clones, but I suppose that's true of western games, too.

      

****

        

One Halloween as a kid, the only "costume" I did was to gel my hair to a point like that, then put on a "scary" face when people opened the door. Hey, I got candy.

       

Dracula in London

SDJ Enterprises (developer); published as shareware

Released in 1988 for DOS, updated in 1993 for Windows

Rejected for: No character attributes or leveling

     

Dracula in London is a somewhat bizarre adventure/board game based on Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). The author summarizes the first half of the novel--up to Lucy Westenra's death--in shorter versions of the letters and journal entries that characterize the novel. The second half of the novel, or some approximation of it, makes up the core of gameplay. A single player can control all of the canonical vampire hunters (Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, Mina Harker, Dr. Jack Seward, Arthur Holmwood, and Quincey Morris) or multiple players can each take one or more characters.

     

The game mostly plays out like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel with graphics. You select from a menu with options like following up on Dracula's cargo, collecting equipment and holy items, visiting Renfield in Seward's asylum, or visiting various other locations in the city. Success is based partly on who is doing the activity, what items that person has, and luck. As you select each event, time passes in hours and days. You have to rest a good portion of each day to avoid exhaustion. Dracula does not passively wait for the hunters but is prowling the city as they hunt him, and his actions (e.g., attacking a constable while in wolf form) are relayed in newspaper articles that give the party additional clues and leads.

       

The city and its options. The manual calls the clock tower "Big Bend."

      

The game is most like an RPG when characters visit houses. There, they become individual icons that can move around buildings of multiple rooms, searching for clues. Monsters occasionally appear and can be fought by characters with the right weapons. For instance, if Renfield escapes and attacks, only the character with the large knife can fight him. A character with turpentine can defeat rats. Characters have health meters and can become diseased or wounded, but they do not have attributes and cannot get better at their skills. Combat is rare anyway.

        

Fighting Renfield in a mansion.

     

The game ends--usually after less than an hour--when the party finds and kills Dracula or he flees London to return to his castle in Transylvania, at which point the player has one final chance to track him down. The game also ends if all the characters die. In between these extremes, characters can be taken out of the game for hours or days by police (who catch them breaking into various locations), illness, or various life events. At the end, each character gets a score based on what he accomplished.

       

Well, this is pretty grim.

        

I found playing it very chaotic and confusing and gave up after I lost twice. MobyGames oddly does not classify the 1988 version as an RPG but does classify the 1993 version as such.

    

SDJ Enterprises was owned by Steven D. Jones of St. Louis, Missouri. He also created a strategy game called The Big Three (1988/1995). Dracula cost $15. I'm guessing the re-release was meant to take advantage of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), the Francis Ford Coppola film that generated a slew of official tie-in games in 1993 from Psygnosis.