Angry Video Game Nerd - Every Halloween Episode So Far

Quick Overview

The Angry Video Game Nerd reviews several horror movie-themed video games for Halloween, harshly criticizing "Friday the 13th" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street" for poor design, confusing navigation, and awful controls, while also panning Atari games like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Halloween," contrasting them with slightly less terrible, though still flawed, titles like "Frankenstein: The Monster Returns" and various Dracula games.

Key Points: The Nerd sarcastically praises "Friday the 13th" for its brilliant concept of adapting an R-rated slasher film, immediately following up with extreme disgust, noting that stones miss zombies due to their arc and the map navigation defies basic logic: "The bare basics of left and right do not apply." The game over screen in "Friday the 13th" is called "ingenious" and "brilliant" because it explicitly states, "You and your friends are dead. Game over," which the Nerd notes is unusually harsh for a Nintendo game. The Nerd harshly critiques "A Nightmare on Elm Street," noting that enemies are stock (spiders, ghosts, skeletons, bats) and the gameplay is confusing, comparing its nonlinear, day/night (awake/dream world) mechanic to the suckage of "Simon's Quest." He dissects the Atari 2600 game "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," pointing out that the entire goal is to murder innocent girls for points, and noting absurdities like the chainsaw blending into Leatherface's body color and the victim's body seemingly vanishing into "two puddles of blood." The Atari 2600 "Halloween" game is deemed boring because the player controls the babysitter (not Michael Myers) and must lead kids to safe corners, with the most amusing part being the decapitation death animation where the head disappears and blood spurts from the neck. The segment on Dracula games includes criticism of "Drax's Night Out" (NES prototype) for heavily promoting Reebok Pumps as power-ups and having time limits that make stairs an instant death trap, and "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (NES) for requiring a nonsensical ground stomp to pass walls. The Nerd concludes the Halloween special by creating a monster named Frankener to review "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" (SNES) and "The Adventures of Dr. Franken," finding the former frustratingly confusing and the latter having overly fast movement that prevents reaction time.