Game:

Dangerous Dave (1988)

Category:

Walkthrough

Duration: 13:18

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Here's a little DOS game I used to play a lot as a kid: Dangerous Dave. You take control of a random guy named Dave who goes through 10 different levels, collecting different items and avoiding hazards and enemies. The goal in each level is to find the gold chalice somewhere in the level and then head for the door. In addition to unlocking the door, the chalice also gives you 1000 points. Other collectibles include gems, purple balls, crowns, rings, etc. all of which add up different amounts to your score. When your score reaches a certain value you'll be awarded an extra life, but I haven't really done the math to figure out the actual number - I'm guessing every 2000 points. You start off with 3 lives, which is the maximum you can have at any time ! There is no energy bar, so contact with anything is instant death and you get sent back to the beginning of the stage, no matter how far you've got. Once you lose all your lives, it's back to level 1 - no checkpoints or password system, which is typical of early games like these ! It's also funny that if you make contact with an enemy and die, the enemy itself also blows up in the process, which is pretty unusual - I mean, in most games you don't expect the enemies to ALSO die when they kill YOU ! You also die if you get shot, if you fall in water or fire, or if you touch the purple squiggly seaweed-like things. To defend yourself you can pick up a gun with an infinite amount of bullets, though not all levels have it. You fire the gun by pressing CTRL and the bullet kills whatever enemy it hits, though you can't fire more than one bullet at a time - you have to wait for it to leave the screen before you can shoot another one - which is bullsh!t because enemies CAN fire multiple shots at once, so you're left defenseless until your bullet finally goes off screen. The bullets are pretty slow too, so shooting down a distant target can be very frustrating, especially if it flies around in an erratic pattern - you just have to keep firing and hope for the best, all the while avoiding getting yourself killed. You don't lose the gun if you die, but you do when going to the the next level ! Another item you find is the jetpack: you use it to fly over obstacles and deadly areas, as well as to stop Dave from falling (activating it makes you hover in mid air). You can fly in any of the four directions, but not diagonally. A meter appears at the bottom of the screen whenever you grab the jetpack to show you how much fuel it has left. You switch the jetpack on and off with the ALT key. When the jetpack is on, the fuel gauge slowly depletes and there's no way to refill if it runs out, which can be more or less of a problem, as the door in some levels is only reachable using the jetpack, so don't get too excited with it and waste the fuel just to fly around. Like the gun, you keep the jetpack if you die, but lose it when you complete the level. The graphics are as simple as they can get: the backgrounds are plain black, the platforms are just the same block side by side, the enemies are random shapes, there's no animation whatsoever when you fire the gun and Dave is pretty blocky too, but the animation of Dave's walking, the fire and the explosions are all decently rendered for the time - after all, it was only 1988 when the game came out and it was on DOS, so you can't really expect more than that ! The same simplicity goes for the sounds too: Dave's walking sounds like a jackhammer, jumping and collecting items just make high pitched squealing sounds and the gun is left out of the sound department entirely, because just like there's no animation when you fire, there's also no gunshot sound effect either. The explosion sound effects are pretty cool though - I could never get tired of shooting enemies ! The simplicity of the game is not the problem though - the biggest issue is the lack of continues or checkpoints ! As I said, if you lose all 3 lives it's back to square one, no matter how far you've got, which means you'll replay the first levels over and over, but barely get enough practice on the later ones. By the time you finally reach the later stages, you're lucky if you have any lives left to practice - just when you think you're about to beat the level, you step into another screen, an enemy pops out of nowhere and shoots you faster than you can react. If it's the first time you play that level there's no way to know what's going to come up next, so most likely you won't be fast enough to jump over the projectile. This game is all about practice and remembering exactly what comes next and where to move and stand. Bottom line, Dangerous Dave is a decent time killer, but suffers from the same lack of checkpoints many games on the DOS at the time did. Try it out, though - it will hold your interest at least for a little while !

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