Award for Outstanding Achievement

Here is proof that I have finally completed Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion. It only took me thirteen years. It was actually one of the first games I found genuinely frightening (although Whitney thinks I'm scared of just about everything) - it has just the right feel of being constantly underpowered against the next thing that's going to leap out at you from around the corner or materialize out of the wall, wondering if you can afford to keep moving or stop to reload the shotgun that never seems to have enough in it. The detailed (for the time) death animations don't exactly help either. In some ways it predated Resident Evil as the first survival horror game.

But a realization came to me as I was killed by a werewolf for the eight hundredth time on Level 7 - as gamesplayers go, we're all too soft these days. Look at the evolution of the Final Fantasy series in particular - from it being challenging in the early days, to softening up considerably (although largely by accident) in FF8, to the level of restoring all your health points whenever you touch a save point in the latest two games. We've also been spoiled by the increasing ability to snapshot-save, encouraging repeating sections over and over again to get them perfect by luck or coincidence rather than spend the time to actually become good at the game. Of course, disallowing instant saving and loading means that you have to get the balance exactly right, and have the game absolutely free of places where the player can die through something that wasn't their own fault, or it's just frustrating. Look at Prince of Persia - in my view, a game should just frustrate you up to the level of writing out a hit list of the developers' names and addresses (but - and this is important - frustrate you in the right way), then reward you for the effort. That's what made them addictive in the age of the shareware war - the sense of achievement at beating them. I'll stop all this now because I'm starting to sound old.

Strangely, the next two games in the series are dramatically different compared to this one. (This is uncomfortably placed as the second of the series although it's the first of the "new" series of games - the very first one was a simple puzzle platformer written years before.) The third game is a lot more bright, cheerful and arcadey somehow, even though it's bloodier - it's just so over the top that it becomes silly again. It did improve a bit on the weapon system, though - rather than having a limited capacity of eight bullets at a time that you could reload by standing still, your capacity was reduced to six and you had a total ammo stock to keep track of as well. The fourth one is just dreadful, having entirely got rid of the weapon system that made the game tense in the first place, and it's also held back by frustrating scrolling problems.

What's even worse is that in the first two games, your weapon had an instant hitscan - when you fired, your bullet reached its target at the same moment. The third game kept this but removed the handy compensation that you were allowed for diagonal shots, allowing you to aim at more than just three angles. But in the fourth, the whole system is replaced with a projectile one - a badly-drawn bullet (that doesn't even rotate according to which direction you fire it!) zooms out from you when you fire, and collides shakily with the background or whatever you're pointing at. Frankly it looks like something a beginner made in a few minutes with an MMF tutorial.

I did wonder why this had all happened, and looked at the credits for Softdisk Publishing for the third and fourth games. Greg Malone, Nolan Martin, Carol Ludden... they're not exactly the most recognizable of names in the software world, but there aren't any Uwe Bolls of the game industry in there either. Then I found the credits for Haunted Mansion.

John Carmack	Programming
John Romero	Programming
Tom Hall	Creative Director
Adrian Carmack	Art Director

Suddenly, everything becomes clear.

It's also worth mentioning that thanks to the above team (who would later go on to found id Software after they realized they were much better than the rest of Softdisk Publishing), the very first side-scrolling platformer on the PC was named "Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement". To test the theory of getting the screen to scroll, which in those days involved pointers to the start of the EGA buffer and other frightening things like that, one of the developers had taken the old Dangerous Dave sprite and stuck him into a mock-up of the first level of Mario Brothers 3. Apparently they nearly got Nintendo interested in the idea, but they didn't want to enter the PC market at that time. It's all true, you know.