u/kl0

I've continued rolling through games based on movies and TV. There are some real pieces of garbage in that list. Games like Total Recall, Back to the Future, and Waynes World are really difficult to play through - though I have been. But thankfully there are also games like Batman, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Willow.

I would unequivocally put Dracula in that latter category - it's a wonderfully done and very fun game.

It's different from the typical platformer. There is some polish missing here and there and the boss fights could have been a bit more varied, but I found the level design pretty impeccable for this era. The game has endless traps, spikes, platforms, toggle switches, and most importantly, secret passages. Each map is essentially a giant puzzle. Weapons easily run out. The earlier maps are fairly linear, but as the game progresses, you really have to find your way around. After stage 5, many of the secret passages are required just to finish the level. Sometimes you have to find a secret passage full of time clocks so that you earn enough time to even make it to the end of the level. Stuff like that was fun.

One thing they did was to inject a level of realistic human mechanics into the game. Best comparison is Prince of Persia. To my knowledge, there really aren't many games like that, especially of this era. What it means is that you can't just press left and then right on the D-pad and expect your hero to turn around on a dime. Like a person would, you have to slow down, stop, about face, and then accelerate in the opposite direction. It's not nearly as dramatic as PoP implemented it, but it does change the gameplay rather significantly. I routinely found myself missing jumps that I would never miss in another platformer, but only because I wasn't accounting for the extra step I'd need to actually make such a jump.

I suppose this can affect the fun-o-meter either way, but I found it enriching. Mechanics like that really force you to play differently. And if you're playing these kinds of games in 2026 then you're probably pretty good at them and I think the change is welcome.

I could go on, but this game really did surprise me. It has three different difficulties and you can only play X% of the game on each (meaning you have to play it on hard mode to complete it). Incidentally I played through it on all three difficulties. It's a pretty quick game.

Random aside: one curious component to the game is that they used Mario blocks for items. They look identical - the yellow cube with the question mark inside. There's no problem with this and it doesn't affect the game in any way, rather I just found it a curious artistic choice given the vampiric setting of Transylvania.

Conclusion: I'd highly recommend giving it a go if you haven't.

As I'm continuing going through all of the movie -> NES game ones I can think of, Beetlejuice was another one I'd played long ago, but never could get through.

It's a difficult game. Very difficult. I love how fast everything moves, but this really does contribute to how hard it is. There are two distinct modes to the game. About half of the game is played as a platformer and the other half as an overhead game.

The platform part of the game, while very challenging, really just requires skill. I'm sure there exists a person out there who can zip through it with every jump being perfectly timed and landed. I appreciate that in a game. It's fair. You can improve. One caveat is that the game requires you to land as low as possible on a given screen before you can go lower (the remaining map is only revealed after landing). So you can't just jump off of some platform and hope you'll land on something currently offscreen. You won't. It's not really a criticism, but does limit your ability to zip through certain parts.

The overhead part of the game, by some contrast, I would think requires quite a bit of luck. The main problem is that you as you acquire scares and tools along this view, you don't fire them off at a specific target, but rather throw them into the room and then bounce around hopefully killing everything you need killed. There's SOME skill to it for sure, but there's also just a ton of luck if the enemies happen to walk/fly into the path of your weapon as it randomly bounces around. I didn't really enjoy that mechanic. There were a bunch of mazes and things you have to find and all of these kept my attention.

One thing about the game is that despite the levels being quite challenging, the bosses are all a joke. They all fight in the exact same way, are slow, are easy, and are more just annoying. This is primarily because Beetlejuice doesn't actually have any weapons. So you have to equip a "scare", it lets you shoot a fixed number of fireballs, and then you're back to having no weapon. So you basically just have to keep equipping a costume in order to fight. It's a pretty stupid mechanic IMO, but not a big deal either.

There's also curiously no final boss. You eventually get to the Afterlife level - which probably most resembles anything from the movie (the bureaucratic part where the guy who was run over flies around on his wires) and is probably the most enjoyable platform level. But then you just get to the end. There's a door that reads "Exit". You go into the door and the game ends. So that was kind of weird.

In all, I suppose the game is worth checking out. Unless you've really got some patience, you're probably going to want to save your progress or it's going to take you some real time to get through it all.

Not my favorite, but significantly better than some of the other movie-based games I've recently played.

I was never able to finish this game as a kid and as I've recently been playing through movie+tv based games, thought I'd give it a go. I think it had the potential to be a decent game, possibly even a really fun game, but the developers decided to use every trick in the shit book to ruin the fun/creative parts.

The game is hard, but not in the kind of way where practice will make you better. For starters, it has some of the shittiest controls ever. The way you fight, the way you jump, and even (especially) the way you're meant to select your inventory item is just insane. The way you have to scroll through the weasel jokes is almost impossible in the time limit. That all gets super irritating. To make it worse, random shit all over the map will kill you. A cat or a dog might knock you back, but then a rat will take a life. It can be somewhat unpredictable in those ways. Certain creatures are positioned to attack you just you by switching screens. So by the time the new screen refreshes, you're already half step away from being killed. Things like that where there's just not much you could have done. Memorization might help, but skill really won't. All of that kills a lot of the fun.

Then there's the endless searching. You basically have to comb through building after building looking for hidden items. It's not the worst thing ever and plenty of games did it (and do it today), but it just adds to the slowness of the game. You even have to wait the 3-4 seconds while he "searches" a cabinet or whatnot. A building might have 30 searchable points so.....

Driving Benny the cab around is kindof fun at first and should be super fun except that it's near impossible to get any speed going given the endless sin-wave-styled roads and the cars constantly hitting you. I suppose you could argue this makes it more difficult, but it all contributes to the momentum being killed. Conversely, they did speed things up (music included) when the weasels gave chase. That was pretty fun.

Finally, the final fight with Doom is just stupid. I think he only hit me once or twice, but I still had to bounce around punching him for about 20 minutes. So again, the time of stuff like that makes it seem like the game is way more complex than it really is.

All in all I really wouldn't waste ones time with this. It has some fun features. But most it's just a boring and repetitive game trying to peacock its way to something bigger.

Like many of you (from what I read anyways), I couldn't for the life of me figure this game out as a kid. It was just maddening. Kill some zombies, Jason appears, you don't know how to fight him, and you die. Repeat 5 times and the game is over. Or an alarm keeps going off, a bunch of kids die, and same result. It always just seemed like the shittiest game and just another money grab from a franchise.

HOWEVER, it's actually pretty impressive game once you (a) know what to do and (b) know how to do it -- neither of which is at all clear when you're dropped into the game. If ever a game needed a starting intro, this is it. Maybe the original game instructions detailed it? ...but what 8 year old was actually reading those booklets :)

As far as TV+Movie based games go, this one ranks pretty highly.

My only complaint is that it seems very difficult to kill Jason on Day 1 with a low-level weapon. I guess eventually you will? But you've more than enough time to complete all of the other tasks in the game and even get yourself the torch before the day finally ends (aka: when you first kill him). So when day 2 finally starts, you just wander around waiting for him to strike. It would have been really awesome if they'd added a few different things as the days go on as you just kind of wait. But still - not a huge complaint overall.

Anyway, if you fall into that category of people who thinks this game sucks - give it another go. Just look up the objective and mechanics first and it'll be a lot more fun -- and still very challenging.

>!(hint: you can duck Jason WAY before he actually strikes and you will still dodge him -- this is necessary later in the game)!<

I legitimately played through the entire game and it -- it's just terrible.

There are 4 levels. Each is a timed maze. You just have to run around and find the castaways, except that you technically need to visit them in a certain order as they will all request you visit a specific one next. Consequently, you wind up running back and forth a lot. There's just not a whole lot to do in the game and so it's not even really fun exploring the world (if you can call it a world).

The game doesn't have especially good graphics or animations. The music remains the same throughout (and is pretty annoying). Then there's the bad mechanics. Jumping is wonky, hit boxes are wildly inaccurate, and there are parts where you have to lose health just to advance the maze.

Bottom line is that it's really just a very good game. There's little to do other than run around the maze looking for people. Each screen is basically identical. There are 3 or 4 obstacles that they mix and match on every screen. You can't fight back against most of the enemies. And the ones that you can just spin around and go the other way when you hit them.

I'd probably avoid this game entirely.

I'm also impressed about this being an early version of teaching people how to play while letting them play. The initial maps are super easy, but they let you jump right into the game as you get introduced to all of the mechanics.

The main game itself isn't super hard, save for maybe a few levels nearing the end. But there are 30 "special game" rounds after you beat the story. Most of them are pretty challenging.

The post I'm referring to asked whether it's a masterpiece or garbage. I don't think it's either. Here's my personal take.

Downsides:

They limit you from running. I realize it's intentional per the level design, but knowing Milon can move much faster while frequently not being able makes the game feel a lot slower.

Compare that to a game like Mario where you CAN run basically the entire time and it just requires you reacting much more quickly. In Milon, it's reserved only for reaching certain heights.

There's also some frustrating development nuances. For example, every time you finish a bonus round they start you at the beginning of the level instead of back where the flutebox appeared. Shops don't seem to do that. You also have to jump over doors to avoid prematurely exiting a level so that can be frustrating (and I don't THINK that was meant to be an added difficulty). So those things are annoying, but I can look past them.

Why I would never call it a masterpiece is because there's absolutely no variety to it. You basically fight the same boss 10 different times with slightly different skins and difficulty. They move and shoot identically. Like actually identically. So there's really nothing to figure out. Most of the puzzle mechanics remain the same too. Some slight variation like the electric fields, but not really. Most mechanics are just re-skinned (ie: the flip doors eventually become ice, but function identically).

Consequently, most of the difficulty of the game just comes from them making frustrating jump ledges while enemies continuously hurl objects at you through walls (while endlessly respawning). This would be fine by itself, but that pretty much defines the only challenge to the game. There's not much of a strategy to anything. There's never really a skill that you get better at as you go on. So the whole game is really just a series of jumping over projectiles while shooting every block you see.

Upsides:

It's a little different. The bubble shooter and the items you acquire do add some spice. The fact that the game can be played semi-non-linearly is cool. Even a lot of the bosses don't have to be played in order. And the fact that you skip some of the items for added difficulty is also neat.

Some of the puzzles are fun and I do like that you're forced to find everything hidden in blocks. That mechanic really forces you to explore the entire world.

Conclusion:

Overall I think it's a good game. I remember playing it as kid when it first came out and really struggling with it. I don't think I ever beat it until emulators were finally a thing (late 90s?). I do think it's a game most people would enjoy playing, but I definitely wouldn't put it in my top 10 much less call it a masterpiece.