by: Dr. Boogie
"Welcome to 'Fright Night'... for real!"
When you're a game developer making a movie tie-in game, the foremost question on your mind has to be, "How do you get that death stench off my game?" Unless you worked at LJN in the 80s, in which case your number one question was, "How can I love the devil more?"
The team behind the Fright Night video game came up with a unique answer to the former: instead of having you play as hapless loser Charlie Brewster, you get to play as the suave vampire Jerry Dandrige. And instead of a short point-and-click adventure game, you race around draining the blood from your victims before dawn. Sounds like loads of fun, right?
In contrast to the sharply-dressed vampire-about-town from the movie, this Jerry Dandrige has a simple white shirt/black pants combo that does little to distract from his partially-transformed face. Speaking of face, he can't stop making goofy faces. I mean, like, ever. The whole game he just blinks through several different faces like he's walking through a series of photo booths.
I guess it's a strategy to freak out his victims.
Positioned throughout Jerry's house are various meddlers: Charlie, Peter Vincent, Evil Edd, and three women who I assume are supposed to be Amy and two others. Maybe the prostitutes Jerry killed in the movie? It's hard to say with old pixel art.
Whoever they are, each one puts up a token resistance, hurling garlic and crucifixes at Jerry as he bears down on them. They do hurt a little, but not enough to prevent the inevitable.
Jerry leaps on each one and savages them for their precious blood juice. His thirst quenched, he stops for a sheepish glance over his shoulder as his victim... fades away into nothingness. Just like in the movie!
The goal is to drain all the victims and return Jerry to his coffin before dawn. Each level is a new day of the week with more and more victims to gobble up until the week starts over again.
And just as all powerful vampire Jerry was halted by a pencil, the game version of Jerry is equally fragile. The human characters are still more or less the same hapless boobs as their movie counterparts, so the threat has to come from somewhere else, but what else is a threat to Jerry? The film's homoerotic undertones? No, don't be silly.
It comes from ghosts flying around the rooms and groping zombie hands coming out of the floorboards. Obviously. I guess these things just build up when his manservant Billy isn't around to clean up the place.
Neither creature will slow Jerry down, but if he so much as touches them his health will plummet, and there's no recovery time! Worse yet, Jerry has no way to defend himself from these creatures, and avoiding them is next to impossible because he's almost half as tall as the entire screen. And as if that's not bad enough, while you're climbing stairs you're even more helpless. If you climb down the stairs into a new scene and spot a ghost swooping at you, your only recourse is to flee and hope the next time you pop in, the ghost will be moving in a different direction.
So get used to seeing this:
The upside is that you can regain your health by revisiting your coffin. The downside is that you'll have to go back and forth through a forest of hands and ghosts, costing you time and health.
Still, it gives you a nice opportunity to enjoy all the work that went into rendering the different rooms in Jerry's house:
Some of the rooms actually resemble rooms from the movie, so color me surprised. Unfortunately there's no sign of the room with all the clocks in it from the flick. That one seemed like a gimme.
In this version of Fright Night, Jerry protects himself from the vampire hunters by stocking his basement with numerous coffins, including a few with vampires of their own. Which one is the REAL vampire, Charlie? Your only hope is to stake them all. And no convenient windows to help you this time!
I don't remember an organ room in the movie, but it felt like there could've been. Maybe a grand piano instead of an organ, but it would've fit in with Jerry's cool, contemporary demon of the night.
You may have also noticed the portrait of a topless Medusa. And also the topless women appointments on the organ. Whereas the movie was rife with homoerotic undertones, this game wants you to know that Jerry is all about women. As long as they have their tops off.
Just look at how he decorates his home:
Portraits, chairs, statues, lamps, clocks, and busts (ha!). Knockers to the left of me, hooters to the right. And the pixel nipples (the "nixels", if you will), always drawn on, even if they're so small as to be only a single red pixel on a distractingly-rendered female form.
What are there so many topless objets d'art? Why, when you're otherwise dedicated to making his house look like a haunted mansion as decorated by a hoarder that raided a Halloween Town?
And just when you think you've become inured to the constant boobery in the background, a ghost swoops in after you...
Well I guess the total number of enemies goes up 50% if you count Tits McGhost here.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying there are too many breasts in the game. I'm just saying all this nudity makes it seem like Jerry suffers from an entirely different thirst.
While we're on the subject of video games: if you've enjoyed all the years of free content I-Mockery has provided, please consider purchasing a copy of our all new Halloween horror game, Grave Chase, now on Steam for PC, Mac, & Linux!
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