It can't be easy being a vampir. Bad breath, pasty complexion, and you keep biting your tongue. And just think of how hard it must be to get a date. Have you ever tried chatting up a girl when your eyes keep glowing bright red? It's impossible. You can't even get on Blind Date. Imagine it...
Gormless bimbette (reading questions off cue card): Number two, if you invited me round for lunch, what would we eat and why?
Vampire: Er, well I'd probably bit you on the neck and suck all the blood out of your body, actually. (Audience laugh until their tonsils bleed. Cilla grins sickeningly. LWT commission yet another series, mass suicides ensue).
It just won't work willit? So what can a lonely vamp do on a weekend, eh? Well, ol' Dracula seems to have got the right idea.
Rather than popping down to the youth club disco and trying to wanle a salt and vinegar flavoured snog behind the church hall, he's decided to make all the girls in the village fancy him.
And how does he do this? Does he send off for one of those "Make Yourself Dead Sexy, Honest" sprays from dodgy magazines? Of course nog! He stalks through the night, chomps the babes on the neck and turns them into the Brides of Dracula (dan dan diddy daaaaaan).
Naturally, the villagers are a bit narked by this spate of babe thievery, and along comes Van Helsing. Van, or Transit to his friends, is the world's best vampire killer. He's probably the world's only bloody vampire killer, but nevertheless, he's very good at it. Unfortunately, he's managed to scatter his vampire killing kit all across the village (pretty careless I thought) and so he must find all his bits and pieces before he can nail Drac.
So the race is on - Dracula trying to capture all the luscious young ladies in the village, and "Transit" Van Helsing trying to remember where he's left all his tools of the trade. Arcade adventure time, I guess.
It's a two-player affair, where you each control one of the protagonists. Now in principle this is a great idea, especially if you get to play Dracula, 'cos you get to chase buxom maidens and stuff. Even so, it's basically a run around and collect things game. And it's not a very good one either.
This game first appeared on the, cough, ST way back in 1991. And rather unfortunately for us, there's a quote from a certain sister magazine of ours, Atari ST User, on the box. A whopping 92 per cent it claims. Oh dear.
Maybe it was radically different on the ST, but if it was anything at all like this then the reviewer was either blind, or very, very drunk.
So, Brides of Dracula, prepare yourself for a stagging off of Olympic magnitude. First up, the graphics are tiny and their movement is stilted, so trying to jump over a moving enemy is pretty damn impossible. This doesn't help the gameplay any, and that's a pity 'cos it needs all the help it can get.
The basic idea is a tried and tested one, but it's spoiled by the thoughtless way that each object, be it woman or weapon, must be taken back to your starting point before you can collect another. So back and forth and back and forth you go, until one of you runs out of energy. Wowee.
Unimaginative sound and fairly lame graphics are just the final nails in this game's coffin. Cute idea, but it's neither scary or funny. They might have got away with it if the game had consisted of more than just going through the same screens over and over again, but as it is I don't think that this game's likely to rise from the dead too often. Ho ho ho, I'm a right joker me...