A “Rad” adventure that may or may not pull you in.

Rad floats around and points at which option is selected. Neat!

To Beat: Reach the ending
To Complete: Beat the game with all health upgrades and items
What I Did: Beat the game
Played: 10/17/16 – 11/1/16
Difficulty: 8/10
My Difficulty: 8/10

One of my favorite game styles is the open world platformer, more commonly known as a Metroidvania. The Adventures of Rad Gravity does not feel like a Metroid game but it is sort of a similar experience, which took me by surprise when I started to get into the game. While the Metroid series is one of my favorite game series, this particular game is not nearly on the same level though it does have some moments that are really quite interesting. Let’s take a deeper dive so you can better understand what I mean.

The Adventures of Rad Gravity was developed by Interplay and published by Activision. It was released in December 1990 on the NES in the US and it later made its way to Europe and Australia in 1991. The Australian version was distributed by Mattel. The game is an NES exclusive since it was not released in Japan and had no ports to any other system.

The story of Rad Gravity starts with a colonization effort long ago between nine planets. During this effort Compuminds were developed that could communicate instantly between all the colonized worlds. At some point, a wizard named Agathos was transformed by some kind of weird space magic into a huge brain. Because of this, Agathos came into power and decided that he wanted to take over the colony and shut down all the Compuminds, leaving the worlds to fade away and decay. Some time later, one of the Compuminds named Kakos was discovered and turned on. He came up with a plan to restore the rest of the Compuminds and bring back the former colony to glory. Kakos cannot physically explore the planets and must employ Rad Gravity as the best space cadet suited to travel to each world and restore both the Compuminds and the colony.

Rad gets stuck doing the dirty work.

The Adventures of Rad Gravity is a side-scrolling platformer game where you play the role of Rad. You team up with Kakos to explore each of the nine worlds. The game begins in your spaceship where you can select an available planet from your monitor and Kakos will beam you down to the surface. Here you control Rad directly from a side-scrolling view. At the start of the game you only know the location of one planet, but as you explore you will come across the coordinates for other worlds. You will also accumulate different kinds of equipment to help you explore later levels. You can travel to almost any unlocked world at any time. Thus the item and level progression is how the game resembles Metroid.

The controls are simple. When controlling Rad use the D-Pad to move around, press A to jump, and press B to use a weapon or item. The Start button pauses the game and brings up the item selection bar at the top of the screen. Press either Left or Right to select the item you want to equip and then press Start to unpause the game with the item you selected. You can press Up on the D-Pad to enter doors or interact with computer terminals, and you press Down to duck. You can also jump down through certain floors by holding Down while jumping with A.

When inside your spaceship looking at the map, there are colored circles that indicate places you can reach by teleporting. Use the D-Pad to choose a teleport location and press A to go there. If you choose one of the planets you will zoom in on it to see either one or more possible landing spots. There are also stargates on the map that will warp you to a different part of the colony where you can see different planets. I found that the map can be pretty confusing to navigate when the stargates are used, so sometimes I had to bounce around for awhile just to figure out what areas were available to me, but it’s something I eventually got used to.

Enter your coordinates and get going!

There is a menu bar at the top of the screen displayed during the platforming sections. You can see which item is equipped as well as Rad’s health bar. There is also a score counter that is completely frivolous because you only earn points when collecting items. There are no points awarded for defeating enemies which seems pretty unusual for an action game.

Rad collects many items along the way to help in his quest. You begin the game with three very useful items. The Communicator item is your method to travel from a planet back to your spaceship. You can use it at any item to leave a level whether you are done looking around or if you get into a bad spot. When you teleport back to your ship your health is completely restored. That sounds really nice but there really isn’t much of a penalty if you die. Actually you can teleport out during the death animation and you still get full health back, making death a personal choice! The second item is the Translator which allows you to read messages found on computer terminals. The third item is a Laser Sword for close range combat.

The rest of the items are found along the way. The most common upgrade is the health upgrade. The item itself looks similar to a chunk of your health meter. Collect it to add another bar of health to your maximum. There are 15 of them in the game and some of them are well hidden. The teleport beacon is a neat item with some really clever uses for the resourceful player. It comes in two parts. Press B when equipped to throw one on the ground, and press B again to teleport to the exact spot you dropped it. The beacon location is lost whenever you go back to your ship, but you can use to teleport back no matter how far away you go or how many screens away you are. Another item is the Energy Disk that acts like a hoverboard. Deploy it with B and hop onto it and you can float on it while moving left or right. You can move downward with it but you cannot go up. If you jump off then it vanishes. This item does force you to spend a bar of your health to use it so you will only use it in a few cases. There are also three different levels of armor upgrades that lower the health loss when taking damage.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy a health upgrade!!

The rest of the items are weapons. There is a sword upgrade called the Super Sword that gives slightly longer range and more attack power than the base sword. You get a Power Pistol that fires bullets horizontally across the screen. You can upgrade it to the Vertigun that lets you also fire vertically, and you can later find the Maxigun that gives it a power boost. Saurian Crystals act as bombs that you toss in an arc ahead of you, and you can find the Crystal Bombs to power them up even further.

There are ten levels in The Adventures of Rad Gravity. Cyberia looks like a cityscape with a few buildings to explore. Effluvia is the garbage dump of the colony. Sauria is a jungle styled level with some vicious baby dinosaurs. Turvia is flipped completely upside down for a unique experience. Vernia is another city high up in the clouds. The Asteroid Belt contains an abandoned spaceship. Utopia is a planet with two sides and an underground factory. Odar contains an underground maze. Volcania is a burning planet with active volcanoes as you might expect from the name. Telos is the final planet shrouded in mystery!

There are quite a few enemies and traps that stand in Rad’s way. Most of them are your run of the mill enemy types that can be killed with a few attacks. However there are quite a few obstacles that have some kind of unique behavior attached to them. Some enemies you can kill and they explode after a short pause sending shrapnel across the screen. Other enemies cannot be killed but they can be manipulated by how you shoot them. Some enemies can be pushed around if they are blocking a critical path. Sometimes an enemy can push Rad through small spaces that he cannot walk through by himself. There are some enemies that Rad can safely ride on top of. These enemies tend to be put in places where you have to think more about what to do to get past them rather than just engaging in pure combat.

Weaving and bouncing through the asteroid belt can be really taxing.

By the same token, there are certain kinds of mechanics that only appear in a single area in the game. In one level, you have to place a peg inside a hole on top of a gate that opens it. One levels has keys to find. There are blocks you can push that you need to use as stepping stones to clear certain jumps. In the Asteroid Belt you need to navigate between obstacles by firing your gun in the opposite direction to push Rad around as he floats in space. The game does have a variety of things to do in all kinds of environments that make the game interesting.

The Adventures of Rad Gravity does feature a few boss battles mostly in the second half of the game. Similar to the enemies, the bosses tend to have some kind of unique gimmick associated with them where you have to figure out what to do to effectively fight them. These solutions are not always obvious and there was more than one moment where I was left scratching my head.

While not overly long, this is not a game you can finish in a single sitting unless you have already played through it a few times. Fortunately the game has a password system! The only way to trigger the password screen is to actually die in a level without teleporting out of it, which is a little annoying to do. The passwords themselves are 20 characters long and they track all of the items collected and planets unlocked.

Hmmm I wonder how to fight the green blob?

This was my first time playing The Adventures of Rad Gravity. I did not really know about this game until I started my big push for collecting NES. The only way it really stood out at all early on is because of the bright orange label. I ended up buying this cart individually on eBay in 2014 for a little over $7 shipped. While not a terribly expensive game, that cart had the best price I have seen on it so I snagged it right away. The game now sells typically in the $15-$20 range and that price is not too much higher than it was when I bought the game.

I started playing Rad Gravity when my wife was out of town for a couple of days. I was able to put in about 4-5 hours of play time and that got me about halfway through the game. The latter half of the game took longer and I spent two weeks grinding through it. Some of the difficulty stemmed from not knowing which area was the correct one for my current item loadout and some of it came from figuring out how to best clear the areas themselves. I struggled some on the bosses too. I am happy to report that I managed to beat the entire game without looking up anything in a walkthrough. Some of the solutions are obtuse enough that it was no small feat to clear the game on my own. Now this was not a 100% complete run because I missed some health upgrades as well as one of the powered up weapons if I recall correctly. I watched a longplay of the game with all items and some of the ones I missed I probably would not have found on my own. There is only one ending regardless of item completion so reaching the credits is enough to consider the game beaten.

Here’s a tip that helped me get through the game. I found the manual to be particularly helpful for a specific reason. Toward the back of the manual is a section called Top Secret Clues. These hints in and of themselves were only occasionally helpful. The clues are grouped by planet and the order of the planets listed in this section is the same order you can play through the levels. It turns out you do not have to follow this exact order but this way definitely works if you want to take the guess work out of where to go next.

Trying to figure out this stage had me running on fumes.

I have mixed emotions about the game. There are some really neat elements to the game that I have already mentioned, but the whole package doesn’t add up quite right. If I had to describe my experience in a single word, I would choose clumsy. The jumping physics feel really heavy most of the time, meaning you can jump pretty high and then fall down hard. In contrast, the level design is often claustrophobic with long tight horizontal corridors. The jumping combined with the level design can lead to missed jumps and a lot of unnecessary frustration. The sword is not really a great weapon and you are stuck with dealing with close combat and hardly any health at the beginning of the game. The backgrounds can be very unclear on which blocks are solid and which ones are just decoration. The way to make progress is not always obvious making it easy to get fed up with the game, at which point you might drop it altogether or dip into a walkthrough at the slightest hint of getting lost. But I have to say, there were some moments where I figured out something that was so cleverly done that it will stick with me for a long time. It is really hard for me to pick a side here!

The Adventures of Rad Gravity is a really tough game for me to give a strong recommendation. It’s not a great game, it’s not a hidden gem, and it’s not really even an average game. Instead it is a combination of varying highs and lows. I think this is a game that you have to play to know if it’s something you will like. Watching videos or looking at screenshots do not convey well what this game is all about. And frankly reviews don’t do it much justice either. It seems to me that most reviews give up on the game before some of the neat stuff starts. My hope is that this post will highlight the game just enough for you to decide if you want to seek it out on your own and form your own opinion.

#36 – The Adventures of Rad Gravity

A fun platformer that will only haunt you just a little bit!

The title is large but the screen is otherwise dull.

To Beat: Reach the ending playing on Hard difficulty
Played: 8/31/2016 – 9/5/2016
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 7/10

It has been well over a month since I played through Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but in this case delaying the writeup plays into my favor a little bit. My last horror themed game, Ghoul School, was beaten back in April on the wrong part of the calendar. This time I get to share Bram Stoker’s Dracula with you as we approach Halloween.

The film Bram Stoker’s Dracula was released in November 1992. It was directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola and is based on the novel Dracula written by Bram Stoker, hence the name. It was released to generally positive reviews and performed well in theaters grossing over $200 million on a $40 million budget. Like most other movies that led to an NES game, I have not seen the film.

Surprisingly there were many different games that spawned from the movie. The NES version is a platformer that shares gameplay with versions released on the Game Boy, Game Gear, and Sega Master System. The Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis received their own version of the game that is a more action based platformer. The Sega CD version is yet another variation of a platformer game that isn’t all that great but does have fuzzy digitized movie cutscenes included. The Amiga version uses similar if not the same graphics as the Sega CD version yet it is another unique platformer game. Finally, the DOS version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula isn’t a platformer at all, but a first-person shooter in the vein of Doom or Wolfenstein 3D. It is amazing to me that a movie license like this led to five distinct video games plus several console variants. There’s a YouTube video from Gaming History Source that has some footage of each game to compare and contrast the versions.

Just a stroll through the woods.

The NES version of the game was released in September 1993. The game was published by Sony Imagesoft and developed by Probe Software. The Psygnosis logo appears in game before the title screen so they probably had some hand in either the development or publishing but there’s no solid information on their exact role for the NES title. I do know Psygnosis developed the other versions of the game as well as published the Amiga and DOS versions. The game was not released in Japan, but it was released in Europe. I was not able to nail down a release date for Europe but I suspect it was sometime in late 1993.

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula on NES, you play as Jonathan Harker as he seeks to defeat Dracula and save Mina Murray from his evil clutches. Your mission is to clear each of the seven scenes in the game and defeat each form of Dracula that you encounter along the way. Now the game manual describes seven scenes, but each scene is comprised of a daytime stage and a nighttime stage so there are actually 14 levels total. Each of the nighttime levels ends in a boss battle with one of Dracula’s forms.

Before starting play there is an options menu. Here you can choose your difficulty level of either Easy, Medium, or Hard as well as toggling your jump and attack buttons. There is also a sound test where you can play any of the sounds or music tracks you like.

The game plays like a typical platformer game. Jonathan can jump with the A button and attack with a short range knife with the B button. There is no run button in the game to change the player speed but it’s not really needed because Jonathan scoots along pretty fast. He can crouch by pressing Down to dodge some enemy attacks. Also while crouching the camera will pan down to show what’s below, and similarly you can look upward by holding Up while standing. Jonathan has a jumping smash move that is triggered by pressing Down while jumping. This move is typically used to destroy certain floor blocks to open a path forward.

These are the floors you have to smash through.

The bottom of the screen displays the status bar. This is fairly bare bones and it takes up a decent chunk of the screen despite being sparsely populate with game info. You can see the number of lives remaining, how much health you have, how much time is left on the clock, what special weapon you have equipped if any, and how many shots remaining on the weapon. The game does have a scoring system but this only appears on the status bar when the game is paused by pressing Start. The pause screen also shows how many credits are left.

Throughout the levels there are question blocks that look like they belong in a Mario game. These boxes contain various powerups to help along the way. You can slash them with your knife or perform the jumping smash move to open them. The powerup floats upward when released from the box so they can get away pretty easily if left alone too long or if the box is opened unintentionally. Using the jumping smash to open the box makes it a bit easier to collect the item because generally you grab it as you slam into the box, but then you collect the powerup immediately without seeing what it is first. It’s kind of an interesting trade off when you think about it.

There are quite a few items to collect but most of them are standard fare. There are three different kinds of health pickups that restore a tiny bit of energy up to full health powerups. There in an invincibility item that lets you wreak havoc for 10 seconds. There’s a clock item that adds 20 seconds to the level timer. Gold coins give points and the diamond gives you even more points. There are also extra lives that show up from time to time, but even better than that are continue credits that let you continue if you run out of lives. There are no continues to start with so you can only get them by finding them in the stages. You will definitely want to memorize where the credits are hidden!

The axe arc is much less pronounced than in Castlevania.

The other set of powerups are special weapons that temporarily take the place of the knife attack. These powerups are all throwing weapons and they have a limited number of uses before running out. The axe weapon slightly arcs through the air when thrown. The torch leaves a flame the spreads on the ground for a short distance that can hurt enemies that come in contact with it. The rock is tossed out in a straight horizontal line, and the triple rock is a three-way attack that has the best range.

The levels tend to be somewhat maze like. There are occasionally branching paths and dead ends, but mostly there are hidden rooms and caches of items tucked away in certain places. The hidden rooms are often enclosed behind fake walls that you can pass right through despite appearing solid. The primary path to the end of the stage winds around a lot so there is a little bit of memorization involved in finding the best way through the stage. There are lanterns throughout each level that act as checkpoints and are activated by touching them.

There are all kinds of enemies that inhabit the levels. Many of them are what you would expect to find in a game like this such as bats, zombies, skeletons, wolves, etc. There are skulls installed in the walls that shoot fireballs. There are hands that grab out at you from the background and ghosts that pop out right in front of you. There are retracting spikes in the walls, moving platforms, and crumbling platforms as well. There is enough variety here to make the game interesting to play.

Moving platforms over castle lava! Hooray!

Aside from a few problematic enemies, perhaps the biggest threat in the game is the level clock. I find the amount of allotted time tends to be fairly tight late in the game so there is a balance between exploring the stages for items and moving forward to reach the end. One of the frustrating aspects of the clock system is that hitting the checkpoints does not save the time remaining when they were touched. So for instance if you die 60 seconds after activating a checkpoint then you don’t get that time back. I know I got stuck in situations like this where dying in a bad spot meant that I didn’t have enough time left to reach the end of the stage.

There are a few interesting mechanics in the game that are worth mentioning. First, the daytime levels have a bit of a grace period at the start of the level where there are no enemies to deal with. Thematically it makes sense that in a horror game there would not be many daytime threats. Eventually it starts to get dark and when that happens not only do the enemies start appearing, but the screen dims a bit and the music changes to something bleaker. The nighttime levels have the enemies and traps enabled the whole way through.

Another unique aspect about the daytime levels in that each one has Van Helsing hidden somewhere. He will aid you if you find him though the benefit is not immediately evident. The bosses at the end of the nighttime levels cannot be attacked with the default knife, so if you do not have a special weapon the game will provide rock ammunition. Finding Van Helsing turns those rocks into triple rocks which make the fights significantly easier.

Insert your runaway bride joke here, I guess.

Finally, one recurring threat is the Bride of Dracula. These encounters act as a sort of a mini-boss battle. Here you cannot do damage to the Bride and all you need to do is survive until she goes away. When you reach her chamber she will appear, sweep across the room in some kind of pattern, and then vanish. She will repeat this several times before leaving. These parts are all about both recognizing the pattern and learning how to dodge her in that pattern. The encounters ratchet up in speed later on and the patterns get more challenging to learn.

This was my first time playing through Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I remember testing the game after I bought it and playing through the first stage. At the time I thought it was a pretty decent game and having played through it I enjoyed my time with it. I didn’t recall how I got the game in the first place, but thankfully my email records had that answer! I see that I bought the game on eBay in November 2013 for $8.99 shipped in quite nice condition. That must have been a case where I saw the listing come up and knew that it was a good price for that game. I imagine it was around a $15-$20 game when I bought it, and now it has creeped up in the $30 range.

It should be no secret by now that I like to try and beat games on the highest difficulty whenever possible, so given the choice of three difficulty levels I picked Hard from the beginning. For this particular game, that was a good choice because the game can only be beaten on Hard difficulty. Easy difficulty ends after the first two scenes, and Normal difficulty ends after the first four scenes. Hard mode is the only way to play all seven scenes. The only other differences that I have found is that the powerups are more lucrative in the easier levels. Hard mode has only small hearts, Medium replaces some of the small hearts with medium hearts, and Easy mode contains large hearts. You also get fewer uses of the special weapons the higher you go in difficulty.

These pop-in ghosts can be downright mean!

It took me about a week to beat the game over 7-8 attempts. It’s the type of game where every time you play you get further while breezing through the earlier levels more quickly. This is especially true once I found where the extra lives and continue credits were hidden. However, it wasn’t exactly smooth going. One enemy type that really gave me trouble were the ghosts that pop in right in front of you. They are fine once you know where they are, but if you don’t you really have to tiptoe through the stages so you don’t collide with them as they appear. That strategy runs counter to wanting to move through the levels at a brisk pace once the clock becomes an issue. Some of the Bride portions really took some time to understand the patterns as well. Those two elements were what made the game challenging to me.

My winning run had an exciting finish. This will spoil the last level a bit, so skip ahead if you want to try this game out on your own. It was my first time playing the last stage and I had one life remaining on my final credit. I got about halfway through the level and I got completely lost. I found a room with a bunch of clock items in it which helped get my time up, but I was otherwise going in circles trying to find the boss. I ended up running out of time. Dying does not reset the clock, and every single time I had run out of time in any prior run I was on my last life anyway. As it turns out the game does give you one minute back on the clock if you run of time with lives remaining. So now I had 60 seconds to try and finish the game on my last life. I found some more clocks to give me some more breathing room, and I was able to find Dracula’s hiding spot. Down to my last bit of health and not having seen this form of Dracula before, I managed to defeat him anyway and beat the game. I wasn’t really looking forward to spending another hour or so to get back to the end of the game and lucky for me I didn’t have to try again!

Bram Stoker’s Dracula on NES is not well known at all but I think it is a pretty good game and a nice surprise. Developers had a pretty good grasp of what could be accomplished on NES during the last couple of years and they made a competent game out of this one. It’s not a masterpiece and probably not a hidden gem, but it was good enough and I enjoyed tackling this game.

#28 – Bram Stoker’s Dracula