Dracula Vs. Macguyver

Lately, it seems, I've been undergoing a vampire renaissance of sorts. It started one particularly boring Spring afternoon, when I decided to pull Buffy the Vampire Slayer up on Hulu.

It actually took me a little while to warm up to Buffy- most of the dialogue, especially in the first episode, was too corny even for me. However, Allyson Hannigan has a cute smile, the fight scenes were pretty entertaining for network television, and Anthony Stewart Head's voice is downright sexy. In, y'know, that not-gay kinda way. Don't judge me.

So after season 1, Buffy picked up, and I moved much more Season 2. Half of Season 3 had shown up on Netflix when Hulu uploaded it, and after that I was watching them about as fast as Netflix could send them to me. Once Buffy was done, it was on to Angel. Again, the first season was a little awkward, but once Charisma Carpenter learned how to act and the writers got more comfortable with what they were doing, it was pretty good.

Somewhere in the midst of that, I picked up a game called Vampire: The Masquerade. I did a whole blog post a while back about how much fun I had with that, but the short version is that I played the hell out of that game.

Last week, I started watching the second season of True Blood. Last week, I also finished the second season of True Blood. Even though the writers couldn't resist the temptation to reduce most of the storyline to a live-action Anne Rice novel, and despite the fact that I will never be able to stop staring at the gap in Anna Paquin's teeth, I find myself looking forward to the third season.

And this week, I played through Dracula Origin, which Liz bought me a couple months back. Next weekend, I'm going to the final week of the Ren Fair, during which all the Canterbury characters will be vampires (in addition to being knights, squires, etc) in honor of the coming Halloween. I've also still got to start the final season of Angel.

I didn't really stop to take stock of it until recently, but I've been on a serious vampire kick since, like, June. Fittingly, I predict that this shall peak during October, as I am quite frankly out of vampire-ish things to do, watch, read or play, and I absolutely refuse to stick my nose into Twilight. I also don't know how I'm ever going to do better than a vampire Ren Fair.

And now, because for some reason I like writing about video games, a few short words about Dracula Origin.

I've spoken before about how I often find myself enjoying B movies, simply because the laughably low production quality entertains me. Well, for the first time, I've seen that same effect in a video game. Dracula Origin is so bad it's funny.

For starters, there are no fights or action sequences in this game. It's all puzzles and logic problems, like an old school DOS adventure game. It basically boils down to "Dracula Vs. MacGuyver". At one point in the game, I was required to gather some holy water, but a local priest could not bless water that had touched the polluted earth around us. So I had to use a barbecue, a camel trough, a broken mirror, and a casserole dish to produce some condensation to pour into a whisky flask. Another time I used a funnel, a drainage pipe, and a dead beaver and a conveniently placed hole in the ground to quickly empty and hide the contents of a wine cask so I could hide myself inside a cask before the carriage driver got back. This was right after I fooled an innkeeper with a fake key I put together with some silver wrapping paper, a wad of gum, a boar's tooth, and a couple of pretzels. The game climxes when I use a chain mail shirt, a curtain cord, and a vat of grease to strike at Dracula's undead army with a bolt of lightning. I can't make this up.

The writers and voice actors worked very, very hard to make the game dark and moody and intense, which serves to make it all the more hilarious that it all comes off as pure camp; the only thing missing is Bruce Campbell to play the role of Van Helsing.

The game has, however, made me somewhat curious as to the original story, as told by Bram Stoker. What little experience I've had with ancient fiction (The Pearl and Frankenstein) have struck me as overly verbose and poorly paced, so I'm not setting my hopes very high. Here's hoping I'll be surprised.

[EDIT] And if it is awful, I only spent 99 cents on it. So no major loss there.