ADG Episode 243 - Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion

[@GodIsTheReason]

I'm so happy there's someone in this day and age who's making neat expositions of all the good old forgotten stuff. Keep it up! Dangerous Dave rocks!

[@drst00]

I did not know (or forgot) the little piece of trivia - that the death animations were originally more gruesome. Now I understand where the actually gruesome animations used in "The Risky Rescue" and "Dave Goes Nutz" came from! It's interesting that Softdisk, who objected to the gore here, changed their mind for the sequels (which were done without the id team, but obviously drawing heavily on the original code and assets).

[@lvkeyne]

One of my first PC games!

[@RichardP539]

There are indeed shotguns that hold 8+ slugs. In fact the Kel-Tec KSG-25 holds a total of 21. The drawback being that its a Kel-Tec so if you don't say "Aw, who's a good shotgun, yes you are, I love you KSG!" every time you shoot it, it will become depressed and shatter into a collection of polymer and metal chunks.

[@mouthmw]

Love this one. It's hard, but definitely beatable, and not super long. I think the furthest I got when I was a kid was level 4, but I beat it again like 15 years ago (damn I'm getting old lol). It's almost survival horror platformer. Lack of checkpoints was completely normal for those DOS classic iD, Apogee, Softdisk games and many others. That's completely normal. Die in Keen? Star all over. And that's a classic game through and through.

Nice review. I need to say that Dave's Risky Rescue is even worst, hehe!

[@RINAS77]

No it's a good game

[@XeLeTaToR]

i did not even tknow this game existed. great video, thanks man

[@RINAS77]

Du you know all the game existed till now🤔😂

[@XeLeTaToR]

@@RINAS77 non native speaker, my bad

[@joe--cool]

There is a DOSBOX patch to fix the PC Speaker in Carmack and Apogee games. Because it's not supposed to sound like in the video on real hardware. DOSBox SVN Daum by taewoong is an older build but it includes the patch and sounds much better if you don't have real hardware. It's even more noticeable with Commander Keen.

[@zirkoni42]

Much better? I don't think the difference is really that big since PC speaker doesn't sound that great anyway.

[@marcsm2008]

@@zirkoni42 Try playing Pinbal Fantasies with the PC Speaker and you will be surprised. PC Speaker CAN sound nice (not great due to the quality of the speaker itself), it can even play digital samples, even voices.

[@Athonite]

@12:08 to answer your question in the credits, there are indeed shotguns that have 8 rounds or more...my Mossberg 590 will hold 8 in the magazine plus one in chamber for a total of 9.

[@Pixelmusement]

+tacomeat666 Interesting... I'm not a gun guy but I still find the mechanics and details about that kind of stuff neat. :B

[@JomasterTheSecond]

Less Dangerous, more Danger-Arse. (Hah.)

[@AlexeiVoronin]

A drastic departure from the first game's look and tone... but still fun overall. Especially valuable for fanatical id Software fans like me.

[@roguerifter9724]

Shotguns are among my favorite weapons in games but the combination of one hit deaths, no checkpoints, and many, many slimes with no chance to react deaths made this more frustrating then fun when I played it as a kid. I beat it once but haven't played it since even though I own the collection on GOG, and owned it before this review came out. The frustration is a big part of why I don't count this among the games that influenced my love of gaming Shotguns despite playing this before I played many of the games on that list.

[@LucasAmott]

Dude, love your videos. I would love to see an episode about Little Big Adventure 2: Twinsen's Odyssey. To me the Little Big Adventure episode was the most memorable, I still find myself laughing about the footage capture problems. xD

[@OverDoseVapes]

Another great video! Thanks brother!

[@zorkan111]

Yep, the game is frustrating. Later levels require you to learn the enemy patters and figure out exactly where to stand in order to avoid them. Especially when those werewolves start jumping at you, or ghosts start appearing out of nowhere. It's not everybody's cup of tea, but I love it. Single hit deaths give the game a sort of feeling roguelikes do - no ability to save the game means every step forward can be tense and exciting. The only really bad thing about this game, which you haven't talked about, is the sidescrolling mechanic. The screen won't move unless YOU move to the edge of the screen. There's no way to look up or down like in Commander Keen for example. That means vertical movement can often be very dangerous, which just adds to the annoying luck mechanic you mentioned. Sometimes there's no way of knowing where the enemies are on the level above or below you.

[@Roobar_Plays]

I also don't like this game. I never even make it past through level 1. But I like the first Dangerous Dave. With it's simplicity, secret levels and challenging difficulty, I consider it a master piece and one of my favorite platformer games.

[@Pixelmusement]

+Roobar Oh yeah. I'd be totally fine with more Dangerous Dave games in THAT original style. Maybe we could prod Romero into making one? ;)

[@Roobar_Plays]

Well, you could review Dangerous Dave in the Deserted Pirate's Hideout for iOS. That's probably the closest thing we will ever get from him. It would worth porting it to android though. I don't know why he never went for this. The Dangerous Dave clones in android store are terrible.

[@DookNookim]

There are two sequels for the Apple II in the original style: Dangerous Dave Returns and Dangerous Dave Goes Nutz! Somebody could try using Camoto to mod the DOS version to have the same levels and graphics as these two games.

[@AlexNovakim]

I think this might be the first game I ever played...i must have been like 5 or 6...my dad was in the navy and one day he took me on his ship and i played this game on the computer of an old soviet frigate lol

[@pocketstationman6364]

My biggest gripe with this game is that you CAN'T. F'ING. CROUCH. That would make those knife guys far less of a pain in the rear, among a few other things.

[@lilwyvern4]

Kris, I beg you. Please don't board the "literally" bus. There's enough of that as it is.

[@Pixelmusement]

+Torcularis I don't say it that many times, do I? ...oh wait... my script is showing it in there FIVE times... Yeah, that's way too much "literally" for one script; I'll try to be more careful in the future. ^_^;

[@lilwyvern4]

Sorry if that was a little passive-aggressive. It's become one of my recent pet peeves. I still enjoyed the episode otherwise!

[@Pixelmusement]

+Torcularis Oh don't worry, it's good to keep me on my toes. Had I noticed how often I used that word in the script I absolutely would've cut it down to just a couple. :B

[@LazyBastard69]

You literally gotta be kidding me. He didn't say "literally" too often, like literally at all!

[@KeeperBvK2]

Pixelmusement It‘s not about using it often, but about using it incorrectly. It‘s not synonymous with something like „really“, „truly“ and such.

[@Gui.Vieira_]

10:34 a lost soul from Doom!

[@Pixelmusement]

+Guilherme Vieira VERY POSSIBLE! :O

[@BeyondTheScanlines]

I could totally see myself want to get into this one, but being just a tad too infuriated by the single hit deaths and level restarts. The slimes alone would truly, truly want to make me throw my keyboard up against the wall to be honest, simply because one can't prepare for them, which seems to be my one thing I can't forgive about old games these days (or worse, new games for old hardware which reimplement this. grr.) Which is kind of a shame really.

[@todorkolev7565]

I think a part of it is like human attraction - you are not really supposed to get everything you want. A certain level of frustration is actually a legitimate ingredient in game design. Flappy bird made "too much money" on frustration alone! :D

[@polarbear3417]

Nice review; regarding no checkpoints - as far as I remember, you can save game and load it later with F4 (maybe?) or some other F key.

[@Pixelmusement]

Nope. F1 is help, F2 is sound, F3 is keyboard controls, F4 is joystick calibration, F5 returns you to the title screen, and F6 through F12 do nothing. :P

[@LLlap]

You jump on the head of the final boss. Also there`s a secret right at the start, instead of going inside you can climb up the side of the building. I enjoyed the sequels a lot more.

[@weirdproq]

I wonder if the jumping animation was taken from/or reused in the Commander Keen games.

[@Pixelmusement]

+weirdproq1 Maybe a little, but this game was actually adapted from a game Id made between Commander Keen and this one called "Shadow Knights". :o

[@SomeOrangeCat]

I LOVE this game.

[@thejoin4687]

Which of the three remedies (no one-hit death / checkpoints / no level reset) do you think would be appropriate? I'd probably keep one-hit death because otherwise it would undermine the death animation. But I think the presence of even one checkpoint per level would make all the difference (and do something about the slimes).

[@Pixelmusement]

+The join I'd eliminate the level resets, have the player respawn right where they died. The levels aren't really large enough to warrant checkpoints and then this would make extra lives more valuable because they'd essentially become your extra hits. :B

[@thejoin4687]

That sounds reasonable. Then perhaps the level could reset when you use a continue (as opposed to being sent back to the previous level, which seems like a real kick in the teeth).

[@nodakamakadon]

~trivia~ You can wear a barrel in Secret of Mana.

[@SharewareWizard]

you don't like it? I personally love this one!

[@Pixelmusement]

+Shareware Wizard Fair enough. I'm not a fan of highly frustrating games or games which require you to repeat things as a punishment for making simple mistakes. The game otherwise plays perfectly fine. :B

[@DookNookim]

@Pixelmusement Have you ever played Rick Dangerous?

[@Pixelmusement]

+DookNookim Nope, but I am aware of its existence. :B

[@CaptainRufus]

I have this game thanks to the Id Anthology. I'm a legit fan of it in spite of it being a bit rough like so many EGA platformers are.

[@todorkolev7565]

I don't think they half-baked it on purpose (I don't think the game is so flawed, even, but that's a different question). If they wanted to, they could have created a theoretically perfect game but one that is boring and forgettable. Instead, they created a classic and deliberately so! The death scenes are a nice extra touch. The pointing, the reloading, it's all really cool for its time

[@omkarkulkarni3943]

Is it just me or does this look more like a sequel to Bio Menace than Dave ?!?!? The last boss in particular seems to be directly lifted from Bio Menace.

[@Dicker296]

Awesome game... It's lake a caveman´s version of Resident Evil 4's Mercenaries minigame... Zombie enemies overcrowding, dangerous reloading times, one hit kill moments (like garradors and chainsaw guys in RE4)

[@TheMoogleMaster]

It uses the same engine as Bio Menace and Monster bash so of course it's going to be frustrating.

[@miguelnevares6604]

Woow pasaba horas jugando este videojuego, no me acordaba como se llamaba

[@marcsm2008]

I have horrible memories of this game. I like this game a lot, but the lack of a saving feature and the difficulty just frustrated me as a teen.

[@RINAS77]

😂😂

[@shorty1k]

Are the other softdisk Dave games any better? I remember liking this one but never making too far since it was hard as nails.

[@Pixelmusement]

+shorty1k / spritenoob From what I'm told, all of the Dave games following this one were not developed by Romero or anyone at Id and the quality takes a bit of a dip, but I have not played them so I can't say from my own experience.

[@earthsteward70]

Seeing this art style reminds me of how EGA has a high-res mode, and VGA has a high res mode, that would be fun to make graphics for.

[@Pixelmusement]

+earthsteward70 Fun to make graphics for, sure, but gaming performance back then would've been sketchy, especially for screen scrolling and ESPECIALLY in the VGA mode which lacks the memory for page flipping. :P

[@earthsteward70]

Pixelmusement yeah, I don't think anyone's attempted anything advanced with the 350P mode of EGA, and the ram necessary would simply be better used on VGA. I think only MAXIS titles actually cared, mainly because those were simulations.

[@Pixelmusement]

+earthsteward70 Well, remember that on PC in order to scroll an EGA screen you pretty much have to redraw the ENTIRE thing, and with VGA you can do hardware scrolling but only if there's enough video memory, which at 640x480x16c there is not. Thus those video modes are better suited to games which only update portions of the screen every frame instead of the entire screen, thus why games like SimCity or the stuff from Soleau were able to use higher res graphics. ;)

[@earthsteward70]

Pixelmusement I wonder how the hell SYNDICATE got away with it then, that's the ONLY game with highres scroll I've ever encountered.

[@Pixelmusement]

+earthsteward70 It technically didn't. Syndicate is using the same high-res mode Populous II uses and it literally redraws the entire screen every time it has to move the camera, but then uses dirty rectangles to erase and replace sprites while it's stationary. On a Pentium or a high-end 486, this goes fairly quickly and doesn't interrupt the gameplay too badly, but on minimum specs it can take a sec for the screen to reposition itself. Also, it's keeping a few things off-screen in video memory as it's only rendering 640x400, not 640x480, using some VGA hacking. :B

[@Cyberbrickmaster1986]

You forgot to mention that you can't save your game in this. In later entries you could, but here it should of been a feature given how hard this game really is! If only DOSBOX or the GOG re-release had save states of some kind to make it easier for the player, because I'm not going to finish this entire game in one whole playthrough!

[@DookNookim]

At least there's a cheat code that lets you warp to specific levels: W + F12.

[@zirkoni42]

There's a source code patch for DOSBox that adds save states. If you don't mind compiling DOSBox yourself, I'm not sure if a precompiled binary exists with that feature.

[@EdmondDantes224]

Sigh... I KNEW it would be a game I own, but I couldn't place it from the clue and so never sent in a guess. Twice in a row. I'm losing my edge.

[@pelimies1818]

”You got slimed!” Pretty annoying - gonna pass this one.

[@StephanS]

I totally agree with you. The game is not bad, but is so frustrating. I love it but i give up very soon after dying for the 100th time

[@Pixelmusement]

+Stephan S Although that's impressive that it takes 100 deaths before you ragequit... I only lasted 20. :P

[@StephanS]

Well yes... i always think "Ok, im gonna beat this game this time" until i give up..... it's also because the game has some serious scrolling problems on some HW... it makes it even harder then

[@arboris]

Weird, I've never played this series :D Looks pretty good, think I'll get it from GOG

[@Gabrinius]

I played it in the early 2000's and i can say, for sure, that it is better than last of us.

[@IllidanS4]

Oh come on, I should have guessed this...

[@RINAS77]

For me this game is so good man👍

[@DFuxa]

I both love that shotgun mechanic but hate the single death and restart mechanic. The question, this looks very much like another one of IDs games [kid wearing football helmet jumping on pogo stick]. The this game come out before or after it?

[@Pixelmusement]

+Davion Fuxa Commander Keen came first. In fact, Id had even another game between these two called "Shadow Knights". :B

[@intel386DX]

When I was a kid I cheated this game by copy level 1 and rename it to the number of the levels and beat the game by passing it several timea again and again :D

[@majmunx9703]

I don't agree with you. DD 2 is awesome game, but it is hard. LOL, my coworker and I use to play it on work, in some online dosbox emulator thingy... He beat it a few times, I never did... I think my max is lvl 5.

[@executivebexley252]

Of course John Romero put a shotgun in the game!!

[@bsharpmajorscale]

Sounds like an easy speedrun that's definitely marathon safe! /s

[@DookNookim]

There are a couple of speedruns of this game on KZbin. It's where I first learned that you can touch some enemies without dying.

[@herbiehusker1889]

The gameplay seems a lot like Biomenace.

[@zintosion]

8:04 *DEATH FROM ABOVE* Lol that’s just BS.

[@Pixelmusement]

+zintosion That slime originally came from the BOTTOM of the stage, and I was actually near the top! D8

[@BADBLOOD-n4j]

This game so hard

[@arseniy]

I can't play it because of annoying scrolling

[@KeeperBvK2]

God, I really love your vids 95% of the time, but whenever you throw around the word „literally“ in a wrong context, I cringe hard. Just in this one video you‘ve done it four times with a fifth one where one at least could argue that „literally“ might be usable there. Please tell me this is getting better with newer videos...

[@Pixelmusement]

+Burkhart von Klitzing It does, at least as far as scripted content. Occasionally I have a lapse of which words I'm using and some words can end up repeated multiple times when they really shouldn't be. Stuff like that is more likely to happen on Shovelware Diggers as that's not scripted and recorded live as I try those games out for my first time. :P

[@KeeperBvK2]

@@Pixelmusement While that is somewhat good to hear, I feel like you are half-missing the point. Everybody has words they use more often than others. If you have a penchant for "literally", then go for it. The problem is that you do not seem to either know or care how to properly use the word. It can only be used if whatever you are going to say could also be understood as a metaphor. So the door swings both ways (metaphorically). If you could be using both metaphorically and literally in the same sentence (albeit of course with different meanings), only then would "literally" be used correctly.

[@Pixelmusement]

+Burkhart von Klitzing I'm not missing the point, rather I'm simplifying the explanation of why it's happening so as not to create a wall of text several pages big. I know how to use the word "literally", but because of numerous factors, that word, amongst others, can end up repeated multiple times in a script when they shouldn't be. It's not because I don't know how to use the word, it's because a series of circumstances is allowing it to end up in the script without me noticing. Again, this is something I'm always striving to improve upon, but improving upon already learned, instinctual speech irregularities can take many, many years of effort. :P