[X] My Assistant

[Wounded Ronin]

Recently, I learned about an old game from 1988 called "Dracula In London". Generally speaking when we talk about vampires in popular culture and video games we're hit with a smorgasboard of crap that have little or nothing to do with Stoker's Dracula. Besides for the proliferation of emotionally vulnerable borderline homosexual vampires, there's often just a whole lot of deviation from Stoker's story even when something purports to be handling Stoker's dracula. For example, I remember a Dracula movie coming out in the 90s that had wolfman sex in it. Yes, wolfman sex. Thank you very much...

Dracula In London, however, is different and superior. It actually deals with Stoker's story. You, the player, control the characters from Stoker's story, and they have various abilities and parameters that are based on the events of the novel. So, for example, Van Helsing is the only character who can produce holy relics. Mina, being sickly, has half the EQ carrying capacity of everyone else, and in fact through events in the game her possession by Dracula can go several ways. According to the documentation certain characters have better stats if they work together, such as Jonathan and Mina. Because of these details, I'd classify Dracula In London as part RPG, and part strategy game.

The gameplay consists of searching for evidence, done by assigning certain hours of the day to invesigation or visitation of certain locations, and of a turn-based "dungeon crawl" mode for exploring various dangerous locations in London. During these exploration the player may deploy some or all of Stoker's characters, including Jonathan, Mina, Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, Arthur, and Quincey, and the actual contents of the locations depends on the time of day. During these explorations the characters may have opportunities to destroy boxes of unhallowed earth used by Dracula for resting during the daylight, to battle Dracula himself, to encounter other vampires (for example, Mina can potentially become a vampire, and then the characters may wait for her at her tomb in the London cemetary), or sometimes get attacked by wolves and spiders. Characters may become injured, fatigued, or killed, but it's also possible to win the game by destroying Dracula. At the end of the game each character gets a personal score based on how the outcome of the game met or failed to meet his or her personal goals and needs.

Just to give an idea how badass the game is, here are some spoilers...

[ Spoiler ]

In one game, I'd managed to be very successful destroying Dracula's boxes of unhallowed earth. I hadn't realized, though, that the next address I'd send the characters to investigate contained the last of Dracula's boxes. When I sent the full team of characters into the house, the boxes of earth were in the front room, so I left most of the characters standing by the door and had Mina walk away from the group and start to sterilize the earth with some Eucharist. Suddenly, though, the mental patient who was possessed by Dracula (the guy who was obsessed with flies and spiders) burst into the room with an axe and honest to god started laying into the characters. At the same time a spider appeared and attacked from another direction. I was completely caught off guard, and at the time only a couple characters had tools that could harm him, i.e. bowie knives. Since I wasn't expecting this everyone was loaded down with anti-vampire, anti-wolf, and anti-spider equipment. In the end, Mina had a piece taken out of her but managed to still sterilize all the unhallowed earth, winning me the game, but Van Helsing, Jonathan, Dr. Seward, and Arthur had all been axe-murdered, and Quincey had barely managed to take out the mental patient with his Bowie knife getting badly injured in the process.

How awesome is that? If someone made a movie of Stoker's Dracula and then something like that happened, it would be badass and Tarantino-esque. Even in a lot of contemporary video games with all the high end graphics you don't get scenarios that are simultaneously as cool and dynamic (i.e. non-scripted) as that.

Link to abandonia: http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/968/Dracula+in+London.html

[Blade]

Looks fun. I'll try to play it.