The Nerd: Alright, So tonight, we do somethin' a little different. 'Cause I haven't tortured myself enough with all these shitty games! So I created a monster to conduct the review for me. Behold... Franken-Nerd! Yeah, I could really use another bolt of lightning! (lightning strikes and the Nerd pulls the switch) Ye-he-heah! It's alive! IT'S ALIIIIIVE!
Title card for the episode.
Frankenstein - Angry Video Game Nerd - Episode 58
(Halloween Angry Video Game Nerd theme plays)
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (SNES)[]
The Nerd: (pointing to an SNES game cartridge) This is a game.
Franken-Nerd: (growls)
The Nerd: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein on Super Nintendo. Game, good.
Franken-Nerd: Good.
The Nerd: (chuckles) You bet your ass it's good. (The Nerd puts in the game) Here, here's the controller for ya, you just hit Start, knock yourself out. Have fun. He looks like Uncle Fester. Oh come on, hit him, hit him, hit him!
Franken-Nerd: (Growls twice)
The Nerd: Yeah, y-you like that game, huh? (Franken-Nerd shakes his head) Go in the building. Wh-What's the point of goin' in the doors? Little shortcuts? Yeah, get the fire!
Franken-Nerd: (Roars)
The Nerd: W-What was the point of that, you gotta ride the elevator thingy? Ah, look, you fell.
Franken-Nerd: (growls)
The Nerd: If you gotta get it to come down, pull the ropes. W-Where are ya goin'? W-What are you doin'?!
Franken-Nerd: (Roars angrily)
The Nerd: I dunno where you're supposed to go.
Franken-Nerd: (Roars) Game no good! (growls)
The Nerd: Yeah, it's frustrating, isn't it?
Franken-Nerd: (Roars)
The Adventures of Dr. Franken (SNES)[]
The Nerd: Alright, w-we'll play another game. Try The Adventures of Dr. Franken. This one should be easy for ya, check it out. Frankenstein's got sunglasses, yeah, to try to make him hip for the kids. (Puts sunglasses on the Franken-Nerd) Frankenstein's cool. (Upbeat music plays) Well actually, since the game's called The Adventures of Dr. Franken, I would assume that you play as the doctor, so, why are you the Monster? Dr. Franken? What's that, a Hadouken, a Sonic Boom, and a Flash Kick? Wow, this game's another Street Fighter wannabe. Here you go, go in the door!
Franken-Nerd: (Roars)
The Nerd: Wha-what's wrong, you pushin' the buttons?
Franken-Nerd: Fuck! Fuck!
The Nerd: I dunno, are you hittin' every button? Uh, you pushin' up, pushin' down?
Franken-Nerd: Game bad!
The Nerd: Maybe there's somethin' that you're supposed to get? Oh, I'm sorry! (Franken-Nerd attacks the Nerd and chokes him, and then the Nerd turns him off) Whew! Biggest mistake Dr. Frankenstein made. If you're gonna make a monster, you'd better be able to shut it down. But unfortunately, I can't shut off the game, 'cause the monster's in my soul. It's my duty - (chuckles) duty - to play it for myself and explain why this game sucks! Because I created a monster, and there's no turning back. Okay, so I figured out that the goal is to collect pieces of a passport which says F. Bone. Okay, so is this Dr. Frankenbone, or just F. Bone? Is he the monster? The scientist? Who knows.
The Nerd: The control is ass. But it's that certain kind of ass-ness that's hard to explain. It's like if you push one button, it attacks behind like if there's somebody behind your back, but if you hit the other button, it attacks in the front, so, it takes a lot of time to get used to figuring out which direction you need to be facing, to use each attack. If you ever played Double Dragon II, it's the same thing; it's all screwed up. It looks like a pretty easy game, but I can't stop dying. You get this huge lifebar, but you take two or three hits and you're dead. (Dr. Franken goes crazy from being killed) But I think the biggest problem is that you move too fuckin' fast. It seems like you never have time to react to enemies and obstacles, so you have to keep tapping the D-Pad so that you don't run into things. And that's no fun! It's like in Sonic the Hedgehog. You love running fast, you wanna keep the flow going; you don't want to stop moving, but sometimes, you gotta slow down and pay attention. But the only difference is that that game was fun and feels rewarding of that patience, but this game is fuckin' garbage!
Frankenstein: The Monster Returns (NES)[]
The Nerd: Now for the feature presentation. Well, the cartridge says Frankenstein: The Monster Returns, but the title screen just says Frankenstein. What the hell? As the game begins, you'll notice that the graphics are pretty good for NES standards, and it reminds you of Castlevania. Essentially, it's the same concept, but instead of Dracula, it's Frankenstein you're goin' after. You're tryin' to rescue some girl, I dunno. Who cares. And yeah, the monster in the game is called Frankenstein. I guess nobody ever read the book or saw any of the movies. So basically, you walk right and kill everything in your way, but just to confuse you, there's all these doors which don't have much purpose whatsoever.
The Nerd: If you go in, you might find some energy, but some of them, like this one, take you into these sewers where you have to fight a dragon which looks like Barba from Zelda II. If you beat the dragon, you get some energy, which might make up for whatever energy you lost fighting the dragon, so how about just don't go in there and fight the dragon at all? It only exists to make the game a little more complicated, but all you wanna do is keep walking right and don't go in any of the doors. Then you get to the stage boss, which is the Reaper, kinda like Dracula from Simon's Quest. But here's the real annoying part: when you beat him, a bird comes, and trust me, you gotta kill it. If you let this bird touch you, it carries you back to the beginning of the stage! So, you fuckin' gotta go through all over again! And you think that the Reaper would still be dead? But no! You have to beat the Reaper again! And the bird, AGAIN! What the fuck?! Afterwards you fight some Minotaur thing, which is the real stage boss, and then you get a cutscene which is slow and drawn out. Why can't the text move any faster?
The Nerd: In the second stage, you fight your way through the woods. Some of the trees have platforms, but you're never sure where you can stand. (His character is somehow standing on the gap between two tree branches) Like, look at this! I'm standing right in between them, don't you think I would fall down? Then you climb up a giant tree stump, I guess, and there's some random guy who talks to you. Afterwards, you don't know where to go, so at first I climbed back down and then walked all the way back to the start and wandered everywhere 'til I found out that you're supposed to jump down the right side. But you keep getting stuck on the edge, so it's never clear of where to go. Like, couldn't there be a sign or something?
The Nerd: Then immediately, you fight the evil He-Monster and She-Monster of the trees, which is what the guy just told us about. Doesn't it seem cheap, that right after he tells us about a certain monster they appear? It doesn't build up any mystery. Remember the first Zelda game? You knew that you had to fight Ganon, the instruction manual talked about him, characters in the game talked about him. But at the time, nobody knew what Ganon looked like. It created all this suspense. But imagine if they never talked about him until right before you walked into that room. It's like: "Oh, there's this monster you gotta fight. Oh, there's the monster! Fight him!"
The Nerd: Then you come to this swamp where you have to hop on lilypads. But there's barely enough space to jump from one pad to the next. If you miss, you have to fight a Merman underwater. You can't swim back up. The only way to get out is to beat the Merman. But there's no real strategy, so you just keep attacking him and praying not to get hit. When you die, you'd expect to start right back at the swamp, but no! It starts you off with the Merman! Yeah! You don't get a second chance on the lilypads! You have to fight the Merman over and over until either you beat him, or run out of lives!
The Nerd: And you only get a few continues. The only way to pick up where you left off is to enter a password. And then you still have to play the whole stage all over again. Finally, you make it back to the swamp. This time I'm just gonna try to inch my way to the edge of that lilypad. Oh, fuck! It goes away! Wow, you're really smushed between a bag of piss and a pile of shit.
The Nerd: If you jump right away, you don't make it. If you take your time and carefully plan your jump, then the lilypad sinks. And once you fall down, you might as well hit Reset, because the whole game's over. Look! I'm standing as close to the fucking edge as possible! And even then, it's still not enough to clear the distance! So, I give up. I'm putting in a password for the third stage.
The Nerd: Here, you get this pretty cool graveyard scene. The tombstones attack you. I think they were really running out of ideas here. Then I'm goin' through this castle, and the enemies are too hard to kill, so I find myself running past them just to get ahead. But that's not the mark of a good game, is it? Because doesn't it mean that you're not enjoying the game if all you wanna do is bypass everything so you can get the game over as quick as possible?! Then you gotta fight a floating red skull that calls itself the Gatekeeper. What's the hand's name, the Keymaster? (A "Ghostbusters" reference) Then you fight Dark Warrior. (sarcastically) Oooh, scary name! How about Death Guy or Mr. Kill?
The Nerd: Stage 4 is the final stage. Yeah, they chose to keep the game as short as possible, yet as annoying as possible. This place is all fucked up! There's all these weird faces in the background. Like, where are you supposed to be? Inside Satan's asshole? (a giant turd goes through the stage) Then you start fighting all the classic monsters. First it's the Wolf Man, but here he's called the Manwolf. After you beat him you get a new weapon, three-way fire. It's kinda like the Spread Gun in Contra. But guess what? When you get hit only one time, you lose it! Which happens only in a matter of seconds. Then you get smothered by sackless balls. Yeah, floating testicles. Then you fight Dracula. Yeah, Dracula's in this game. His arm looks all cockeyed, looks like a dick, like his hand is a dickhead? (Chuckles) Dickhead. So once again, it's like Castlevania, almost as if Frankenstein and Dracula just switched places. Then you have to swing on vines like Jungle Hunt, but you end up just jumping through the vines and die.
The Nerd: So now, just to try again, I gotta type in the fuckin' password. It's so tedious! I mean, it's not the longest password I've ever seen, but it's still longer than necessary. But unlike most passwords, if you move the D-Pad to the sides, it doesn't move your cursor over to the other side. So say your cursor's on the letter K, and you need to move to J? In most games, all you need to do is move the cursor left, and it will show up on J. But here, you can't do that! You have to move the fuckin' cursor all the way to the J! A lot of effort considering that J comes right before K. It's so fucked up. And also, if you enter the password and it turns out that it's wrong, like if you messed up on one letter, it erases the whole thing and you gotta type it in all over again! Why can't I just go back and fix the one letter?
The Nerd: I really hate this password thing in general! Because, what's the point? You should have unlimited continues. Yeah, because, the only reason that you should have to put in a password, is if you turn the game off and wanna come back to it later. As long as you're still playing, you're gonna keep playing the same stages over and over and over again, so what's the point of sending you all the way back to the beginning? The earlier stages are the easiest, and those are the stages ya end up playing the most. It's the later stages where you need the most practice. It's all about trial and error. Like - imagine if in high school, you fail outta Senior year. What happens, you do Senior year again, right? You don't have to go back and do Freshman year again! So, bottom line: have unlimited continues! GODDAMN IT!
The Nerd: Another big piss-off about this game is that enemies can kill you even after they're dead. Like you have to wait for them to completely die before you can pass! Anyway, I can't get past the vines, so I'm gonna cheat with Game Genie, the last resort. But check out these codes! Almost Unlimited Energy, Invincibility After Losing the First Life (May cause the game to freeze), Start with No Continues, Can Not Collect Extra Energy, and One Hit is Fatal!
The Nerd: (shocked) What kinda codes ARE these?! Is there like some sick fuck who thinks the game isn't hard enough?! Like somebody who wants to be tortured some more?! Well, how 'bout this? I got a code for ya. How 'bout a code that just starts you off dead? ("PHUCKEWE" appears on the screen) Yeah. Well... well I don't wanna freeze, so, I guess I'm gonna go with almost invincibility, whatever that means.
The Nerd: At first, the code works fine, but then I found out that if you collect energy, it takes life away. Not that you would NEED to collect energy, but it's kinda silly, isn't it? And guess what? Once you get to the vines... you still die! Well, THAT would have been nice! Why couldn't the code say Invincibility Except for the Vines? Even if you pass the vines, the invincibility goes away, so you're left with your own wits to fight Frankenstein. So, fuck the Game Genie, and let me tell ya, when Game Genie doesn't help, you KNOW you're fucked. (Throws Game Genie away)
The Nerd: So you fight Frankenstein. His first form's pretty easy, but then he grows into a giant Super Frankenstein. Come on! C'mon! C'mon, you fuckin' Fuckenstein! (Lightning strikes the Franken-Nerd and he starts attacking the Nerd while he's fighting Super Frankenstein, and a rock version of the Angry Video Game Nerd theme plays, then the Nerd eventually beats Super Frankenstein)
The Nerd: YEAH! (The NES Toploader electrocutes the TV as it causes it to explode, and an explosion kills the Franken-Nerd)