Dracula Unleashed - Alexander Morris, Consulting Detective

Written by Joe Pranevich

Happy Halloween! Er… Thanksgiving? Hanukkah? Christmas? New Years? What month is it? Whenever it is, welcome back to Dracula Unleashed. I hope you remembered to guess the score. 

Last time out, we watched the introductory movie. We are Alexander Morris, brother to Quincey Morris who died while facing off against Dracula in the original novel by Bram Stoker. Alexander has come to London to investigate his brother’s mysterious death ten years prior. The younger Mr. Morris’s primary character trait appears to be procrastination: not only did he delay ten years before coming to London to investigate his brother’s death, he was immediately side-tracked by meeting a woman, a beautiful young lady named Anisette. Now, several months later, Alexander has finally been inducted into the “Hades Club” on the night that Anisette’s father passed away. We ended the night with a request that we visit Anisette in the morning as her father’s doctor sedated her for her own health. That’s where we’ll start the plot today.

Missed Classic: Castle Adventure - B.J. Blazkowicz Goes Looking for Loot in Several Wrong Places

By Michael

In today’s review, we are playing a game where we direct a character who is locked in a castle, looks for loot and secrets, and picks up weapons he finds along the way to kill horrible creatures, in hopes of escaping.

This reminds me of a screensaver...

When last we left our intrepid, unnamed hero, he was killed by an ugly ogre. So, perhaps it’s time to start again.

BloodNet – Elvis Lives!

Written by Will Moczarski

 

Before my next session of playing BloodNet I decided to consult the manual once more, originally to refine my combat skills. But then a chapter about “jury-rig components” which I had previously ignored caught my eye. It contained lists of items necessary to jury-rig certain weapons, armour but also electronic lockpicks and a cyborg. I learned that the tub, nozzle, and hose I got from that one kid in Central Park (I forget his name) will enable me to build a flame thrower. But the lockpicks and the cyborg were particularly interesting to me because they corresponded with two open quests of mine: the lockpicks may be vital in opening the locked door inside TransTech while the cyborg will probably enable me to finally download either Elvis or Charlie Flyer (or both of them). Two other sentences were also quite interesting to me: “If a jury-rig attempt fails, you stand a chance of breaking a component.” And: “One of your party members must have a tool kit for a jury-rig to be attempted.” Does one of my party members have a tool kit? I have to admit that I’m not sure.

For the cyborg I will need a cyborg body, a cyborg head, a cyber arm (only one!), a cyber leg (only one!), and a spark board. I never would have guessed the spark board had I not consulted the manual. The electronic lockpicks can be jury-rigged by carrying a lock dbase, a lockpick casing, and a diagnostic unit. Sounds doable, maybe I’ve picked them up already at some point. I also learn that the mysterious dermal filament is necessary for all sorts of suits – initial dispersion suit, refraction shield, electrolytic suit, inert rad suit, and arno suit. 

Another section about vampires in combat seemed pertinent as well but since I haven’t encountered any of them after the opening sequence (Sampson doesn’t count, right?) it may become important later on.

What's Your Story? PsOmA

 Intro and pictures by Ilmari

We've again had an influx of new commenters and couple of What's Your Story -answers have been waiting for publication for a while. Here's the first one of them: let's all welcome the commenter with the moniker PsOmA!

It's a little big adventure for all of us

7th Guest - Final Rating

Written by Reiko

Having finished the 7th Guest and taken some time to consider the experience, I'm going to take it apart and consider what worked and what didn't. I'm glad I got to experience this classic game, but it really hasn't aged well. I wish I'd at least tried playing it back in the day so that nostalgia could have helped me out a bit.

Puzzles and Solvability

We've got a mixed bag here, for sure. Probably two-thirds of the game is solving puzzles, and the rest is trying to understand the ghostly scenes. The variety is good: we've got chess puzzles and tile puzzles and language puzzles and even a music puzzle, but the quality is uneven. Most of the puzzles are interesting to some extent, but honestly I'm struggling to think of puzzles that were truly fun.

I liked this clever twist on a maze

Now that I've finished, my favorites are still the mazes: the heart maze with the valves and the full-size maze depicted in the rug. The card and skull coin puzzles, where the goal is to find a connected path through all the objects, were also quite good: I liked making the realization that the path could jump over gaps and also previously flipped objects. The door path puzzles (the insects and the knives) were tricky but fair.