WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Bram Stoker's Dracula

Publisher: Sony Imagesoft

Developer: Psygnosis

Released: 1993

In the early nineties the smart money was on Hollywood and the video game industry ultimately joining forces. I mean, how could that not be the future? Games were an exciting new way to tell interesting stories, viewers were able to interact with the characters directly, and with the advent of CD storage, games were capable of realistic visuals and video playback.

The Sega CD suffered greatly for this philosophy, playing home to a huge amount of absolutely awful full-motion video games where the player was more or less along for the ride, trained to press the proper button at the proper time to see the next video clip.

To Psygnosis' credit, Bram Stoker's Dracula wasn't quite that sort of game. It took full-motion video and tried something a bit different – creating free-scrolling levels out of 3D computer graphics that, had they not been limited by the Sega CD's low colour palette, would have looked pretty damn nice.

The game play was layered over top of this video, where digitized versions of Jonathan Harker and others battled digitized versions of Dracula's minions (bats, birds, zombies, rats, spiders, etc). It was sort of like the next level of the FMV game mixed with the sort of technology seen in Mortal Kombat.

Of course, who had the money to bring in professional actors to play the main characters in the game? Actually, did actors even do digitized characters in video games back in the day? They certainly didn't on Dracula, as the cast list shares a lot of similar surnames to those found in the production credits.

While the pre-rendered backgrounds gave the game a pretty cool, 3D look (that none of the other console versions shared), they also lead to a whole host of problems (that none of the other console versions shared). The main issue being that the playable character was able to move a lot faster than the screen could scroll. So it was nothing to walk into a huge ambush if you were a bit too impatient, or jump off a ledge without even knowing it was coming.

The other, bigger issue, was that the collision detection between the main character and the ground tended to shift a bit as the levels scrolled. This made precision jumping an impossibility – especially when there were tiny platforms involved. It was common to stick the landing on a narrow platform, stand perfectly still as the level “caught up” to your position, and then watch your on-screen avatar suddenly fall off a seemingly solid surface to his doom.

Thus, the only way to play Dracula was to constantly correct for the scrolling, and to never get too far ahead of it, as the enemies would overwhelm you. It didn't help that the characters you controlled fought like a bunch of video game producers in cheap costumes flailing wildly at empty space.

Dracula is a memorable game in that it was a really interesting experiment that tried to give the standard platforming games of the time a bit more depth and fidelity.