Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion (1991)

Name:Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion
Number:146
Year:1991
Publisher:Softdisk
Developer:iD
Genre:Side-Scrolling Shooter
Difficulty:5/5
Time:2 hours 30 minutes
Won:No (48W/51L)

ID Software did a lot of strange games during their time with Softdisk. I talked about Catacomb, which is known, if more for the "first" FPS Catacomb 3D. You might be vaguely aware of Rescue Rover, which is a nice puzzle game, last time I played it decades ago. Dangerous Dave is a series hardly known, only for the very unusual piece, Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement.

See, back in the days before we had all these fancy graphics cards or processors, everyone had strict limitations in what they could do. For instance, the Commodore 64 and the Nintendo 64 both have that number because they're advertising something they have 64 of. The C64, memory in kilobytes, the N64, graphical bits. Because of this, and graphics chips more focused on delivering text than fancy images, home computer games were usually flip screen rather than free-scrolling. You've probably seen them even if you didn't have a name to it. Flip screens are where until you touch one of the edges, the screen stays the same. But when you touch an edge, it "flips" to the next screen.

There are probably 1983 games that did it, but I couldn't tell you how the underlying code of these games work

But nobody really wanted that to be the focus of the gaming world, and it was always an unfortunate compromise. So people started working their way around it. On DOS, starting with at least The Adventures of Captain Comic, people had this technique where instead of drawing every pixel every frame, they just drew new pixels where pixels had changed. Earlier examples were much more distracting than what iD would come up with.

This would lead into Commander Keen of course, but Dave himself would not fall by the wayside, especially as iD was still under contract to Softdisk. This is all just a gross oversimplification, many games beforehand did something like this. I'm pretty sure that even during the 8-bit computer days people were doing this. iD just gets credit since iD was usually at the front of the pack technologically.

If Catacomb had the controls, and Commander Keen had the level design of the future FPS titans, then Dangerous Dave had the tone. Only...not in the games I just mentioned. Dangerous Dave has two halves, the nice, friendly jewel collecting jetpack wannabe, and the shotgun-toting redneck who's lucky if he isn't zombie chow. Haunted Mansion is all about Dave rescuing some people and killing things in a mansion controlled by his evil nemesis. Between here and there are hundreds of zombies.

This is actually an unusual case for me, because back in the day I actually took the time to beat this game, or at least I think I did. Normally a game like this would involve me whining about how you just memorize a bunch of stuff...but I did memorize it. Its still very hard though. This is one of those games where you can't save and you just see how far you can get. Oh, sure, some places SAY there are codes to select a level, but they're complete LIES, at least as they're presented. Then again the game supposedly allows you to continue from the last level you were on and it doesn't do that either.

This is where what I thought would be my successful run would go. Despite being rusty I was sure I was going to win it with a few tries. First level is easy, second level not so much, mostly because of those dang slimes. Third level easier than you would think. I eventually won the boss fight. Then I reached level 5 and realized I had never seen this before. Then the game switched from me being casual enough about it to post a video to me deciding to get serious.

This is an entirely valid way of taking these guys out

Dave controls like you'd expect a side-scroller of the era to, he can move left and right, and jump. He can aim his gun diagonally up, in either direction, or diagonally down. His gun has infinite ammo, but requires reloading. His gun holds six shots and you reload by standing still. Dave dies in one hit to anything that hurts him. Quite violently. He cannot look up or down, that is, move the screen up or down without moving up and down. If you time it right you can switch from shooting in one direction to the other.

It controls pretty well. For the most part. I dislike not being able to look, as this causes most of my deaths in this game. The second is that you can go down some platforms by holding down and pressing jump. Thing is that sometimes you're off the area by a pixel or something, which is frustrating in this game. It also sometimes tripped me up jumping, mostly around the ledges.

The shotgun is absolutely incredible as a weapon. It just feels powerful, Dave etts back with every shot. This sounds awful, but you can never go off a ledge this way. Most enemies go down in a few shots too. Even the reloading has a good feel to it, even if you're empty and a zombie is bearing down on you. You also get considerable leeway with aiming it. Like holy crap, you can actually snipe people above or below you. It just works so well that I never had any issues with this game series just having one weapon.

You have a wide variety of enemies. Starting with zombies. These guys are actually smarter than you'd think, they move up and down stairs. They go down in two shots and die in a messy way. I feel like some of the people at Apogee either played this or had access to the code, because the enemies in Bio Menace and Monster Bash die in the same gory mess.

I'm not aiming low to hit him, I just missed

Then we have hunchbacks. They're a bit more dangerous than the zombies, in that they have a ranged attack, and a bit less, since you can touch them as much as you want. Considering how fragile Dave is I'm shocked they let that happen. I died the most to these guys, mostly because there are a lot and its easy for them to get a cheap shot off. They die in two shots. You can also avoid their shots on stairs if you aim it right.

Slimes are some of the more annoying enemies, they jump diagonally to the ceiling or floor and are quite fast. These were my least favorite enemy, because every fight with them is an event, despite going down in one shot. The trick in dealing with these, when you're able to anyway, is that they can't really go past the floors you can jump down, so things like crates are very effective cover.

The spiders, crawling along the ceiling, are mostly easy to deal with. The game puts them in a few tricky situations where you'll get bitten if you're unlucky, but mostly you can manage them easily. They die in one shot.

Werewolves are rare and were the only enemy I saw that took three shots. Thankfully the game always put them in situations you could deal with quite easily.

Then we had ghosts. You walk into these guys and then walk off before shooting them. Outside of figuring this out they weren't very hard, but that's in isolation. Outside of this there was one more enemy, but I didn't reach the levels it was on.

One thing to note is that all these enemies have different movement patterns. Most walk towards you if you land on the same floor as they are, and some enemies move off-screen and some don't. Sometimes its even situational.

The boss fight I reached was boring and rather pitiful. There's a monster who walks back and forth and shoots lightning in a diagonal pattern. How is it taking me out so often? Its like I need every live I can possibly scrounge up beforehand or I'm just completely screwed. I'm apparently not good enough to get past this pattern. Turns out you shoot the lightning. Which the first time through turns into a joke. Then the second time I play it I the game just starts not wanting to control properly. Suddenly the game went from being smooth to me constantly failing jumps or missing shots I should have gotten.

You can see ahead quite a lot in this game if you pay attention

Outside of the boss level I felt that the levels were well-designed. Its designed to introduce you to each kind of enemy, then after you've discovered the trick, how to deal with them in ever more tricky terrain. You really have to take advantage of every bit of knowledge you have in order to get through a level. Exploit every bit of terrain, take every advantage you can, and its incredible making it to the end of a level.

The problem is...I don't want to have to play the entire game through every time. Its a game you absolutely have to focus on to win and its draining to do that over the course of 8 levels. (or 16? I didn't reach it) When I made my final run I just gave up on level 5, despite having plenty of lives. Why? I didn't really care to continue playing it. I didn't want to have to slowly and methodically make my way up the tower. From a value perspective, its great, it would have been better than some commercial titles at the time. But for someone who has to beat it in less than a week, not so much.

Weapons:
Despite only having a single weapon, it feels incredible. It is the gold standard by which all side-scroller shotguns should be measured. 5/10

Enemies:
A nice selection of enemies, each with their own behavior. 5/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
The game is well-calculated that despite being a one-hit wonder, the player isn't constantly dealing with gotcha moments designed to drain his lives. I do wish the game focused on regular levels over boss levels though. 5/10

Player Agency:
I like it, but I wish the game was more clear about where you can and cannot jump down. 6/10

Interactivity:
You can open doors. 0/10

Atmosphere:
Despite starting off strong, towards the end this feels like a series of random locations vaguely connected to a haunted mansion. The terror factor is still strong throughout though. 4/10

Graphics:
I think the game looks good. Dave looks good, the backgrounds look good, enemies look good. All in EGA. What's important is that everything stands out, even if you can only see something partially. 5/10

Story:
Rescue Dave's cousin from some evil dude. Not even a token one, its just there. 0/10

Sound/Music:
Simple but effective PC speaker. 2/10

That's 32. To put that in perspective, the last time I gave a game that high a score, above 30, was back in April, with Ultima Underworld. That makes this the 16th best game and the best side-scroller so far.

I think that this game works in what it set out to do. I just wished that the level select cheat worked, because its incredibly tedious playing through the whole game over and over again.