At this point, this is a tradition in our little marathons. Me taking an off day to just talk about a couple of shortform comedy gaming videos with a loose horror theme. So here for you, once again, are brief capsule form thoughts on three more Angry Video Game Nerd videos. Eventually we'll run out of these since I do three a year and he only makes one spooky themed video a year, possibly two if we're really good. Even so, we can raid the backlog for a bit yet. That's exactly what I did, actually. All three of these videos are over a decade old, and in fact we're starting with the very first that James Rolfe ever did. That's right, strap in, it's...
You know, I've always been at odds with this video. I had this game growing up. I got it at a flea market in the 90's on the cheap with no preconcieved notions about Castlevania or anything like that. I also eventually was gifted a Nintendo hint book with a chapter on this game. Those two facts definitely skew my opinion of the game. I think it's fine. Pretty enjoyable, even, in the here and now when we can know all the shit. That does poke at an interesting observation I want to make with this video, though. This is the one, though. This kickstarted the whole thing. Not just AVGN, but people hating on this odd little game I liked as a child. The same thing happened with Zelda 2, but Zelda 2 is arguably a better game, and even this video has Rolfe admit it's pretty good. You've got all the standard complaints that have become infamous. The long day to night transfer, the cryptic clues, the need to grind for hearts. Among those are some oddly personal ones like there being few bosses. There are ROM hacks out there to "fix" all that if you truly care. What I find most interesting are the infamous crystal kneeling complaints. They're the sort of stuff that got me stuck as a kid too, but I just had fun roaming around the world in it. Rolfe is right in saying they're cryptic, but said complaint has been seen by millions of people. Those millions now know the solution, even if they agree it's cryptic. The popularity of the video could be argued to have eliminated the cryptic nature of the game. It's wild to think on, but don't think on it too hard. We'll move on.
This one, on the other hand, I remember renting for a while there back in the day. It certainly wasn't the greatest and I never beat it, but I don't seem to have missed much. I said it before when I talked about all the movies on here once before. I have no brand loyalty to Ghostbusters. They're decent movies to me, not tentpole 80's classics (and one reboot like nobody but me seemed to like) so Rolfe's disappointment at the bungling here doesn't hit me as hard. There are definitely some good highlights in this video, though. Even if I know the car vacuum prank call is rigged so it's just one of Rolfe's friends on the line, it's still amusing to think on. It becomes this slow descent into angry nerd madness with all the balls in the air to keep track of while playing. Then we've got that stairwell climb, which... Jesus, that's brutal on your thumb if you have no turbo. I don't think I've ever seen a non-cheated play of it, but I would like to in order to know how in the fuck such a thing is even possible. There's a strange feel to it, especially when that ending screen hits with its wild typos. It's a decent episode, and so we move to the last of the three.
This game has an interesting sort of issue thanks to being reviewed by AVGN. It shares the same fate as Silver Surfer, though on a far lesser scale. A B-list game that, all of a sudden after the AVGN video, everyone has played and deemed one of the hardest games on the NES. I haven't actually tackled it myself (though I bought the cart once) but looking at a longplay it just looks like a really tedious slog based on the bad part of Blaster Master. Unremarkable, but not infamous. Yet Rolfe seemed to think so in part, as he chose to tackle it. There are certain prickly points of the game design he gets to needle, like the gun downgrades and there being no technical continue function. The latter I know is because they didn't have time to program it in after the fact, or just plain forgot. Some oopsie along those lines. I have played about as much as Rolfe has, and I can't say it's the greatest but I don't hate it, either. I've certainly played harder and I've definitely played worse. Even so, it's an enjoyable episode and must have taken a hell of a time to shoot with all the retakes of him as Addams Family characters to put on the screen at once. The Genesis Addams game he looks at seems okay enough as well. That'll put a bow on AVGN for another year. Next time, I dunno.
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