This and the next one are fun because they're a bunch of games tied around one theme; in this case, Dracula games. No Castlevania, but he would do a 4 part video series on the older games for one spooky season. The whole gag with fucking around with an old text adventure parser is what you'd expect from the Nerd, but it's still amusing enough and something we all no doubt did in our youth. I had actually forgotten that Drac's Night Out existed before I loaded this one up again, and looking at the video it seems that may have been for the best. Then again, I like a lot of games he doesn't (CASTLEVANIA 2 CASTLEVANIA 2) so who can say for sure? The most interesting thing in this one, for me anyway, is his look at the games based on the Coppola adaptation of Dracula from the 90's. I remember a friend of mine had the Game Boy version, and its title theme is burned in my mind. The NES game's nonsense music is actually a strange and shrill mix of what I assume is European PC composition and just sheer chaos on purpose. It sets an odd mood, and I kind of dig it. This is also where his joke about "Fred Fucks" comes in, which... well, that got co-opted by a certain game designer a few years later. That's a horror we're not ready to unearth again, so let's go to another video.
A little messier, this one, since there's less material to cover. The whole "Frankennerd" idea is goofy and dumb, but it does what it needs to do. I assume it's Mike Matei under there, but who knows. Well, the credits know, but I didn't look and I'm making a point to not look now. The two SNES games he covers here are pretty brief dives, and don't look too remarkable. The Bandai Frankenstein game almost looks passable, challenging, and fun. He does, of course, have his gripes, but this looks like a flawed but fun gem on the surface. You almost want to ask James Rolfe about his actual opinion on the game. Yeah, you can't use the satire excuse completely when it comes to the man, but I'm sure some of it is played up. Could be fun to check out a longplay of this game after I'm done writing all of this. The finale, with the Frankennerd choking the Nerd to death while the Nerd desperately tries to beat his bad Frankenstein NES game, is a total chaotic mess that still manages to be funny. Yeah, not much to say on this one. A decent watch. Which leads us to...
Oh yes. The big one. The game that helped make the Nerd character into a popular thing, and a source of trauma for the character (and James Rolfe, no doubt) that had to be embellished upon and explained. This is where the influence of the Nerd on retro gaming culture can be felt most; load up any Top 10 List of the worst or hardest NES games, and there's a chance you'll see Jekyll and Hyde on there. As it's not a ubiquitous childhood-scarrer like, say, Battletoads or Ninja Gaiden or something, I have to put this down to the James Rolfe effect. Is it a bad game? Hell if I know. I played some of it and just found it sort of dull, really. You walk to the right and jump over the occasional thing. Then again, I know the general idea of what to do thanks to this video. If I really wanted to, I could beat the fucker... but there's no drive to. This, then, is a personal exorcism from James Rolfe. Using his character to vent frustrations over a bad game that stuck in the mind as a child. In that regard, it's brilliant. The bit at the end where he goes all avant-garde and calls it a secret masterpiece which represents the duality of man and Victorian societal attitudes is the best part for me, as that's the kind of shit I unironically love doing when I write. That's Nintendo Project level shit, and it speaks to me. Good or bad, this one's an iconic bit of AVGN canon which actually has influenced how people think about these old games. The video itself? It's fine. The ending's goofy, sure, but AVGN always has that level of dumb crudeness to it. That'll do it for tonight. Four more to go. We'll bullshit our way through this.
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