Box Copy
A Hilarious Animated Adventure
Deep inside the sinister castle, evil brewing...
As Lance, computer repair genius, you're summoned to the castle of
the disembodied brain, Dr. Nero Neurosis. You uncover the brain's
master plan...
Time is running out! Racing through the demented Doctor's twisted
castle, you'll battle the ultimate mishaps of science:...Moose...Vivi...and
Fritz, the half human half-pet of Dr. Neurosis. But, if you're not
quick enough to evade their attacks, you'll find yourself sliced,
spiked, skinned, singed, smoked, shocked, squashed, squeezed,
shaved, slugged, or worse! Dying has never been this much fun!
Discussion
Like Dragon’s Lair, Brain Dead 13 is an
animated Quick Time Event based game where you simply watch a
cartoon and press the required button at the right time. Limited to
just the 4 directions and an Action button, the challenge comes from
the game’s lack of super-imposed visual clues. You have to figure
out what to press AND when to press it. This can cause a lot of
frustrations in several areas, since not every instance requires
several rapid button presses right after another. I actually used a
guide to plow through the game after I kept getting stuck on the
first room. Even then, I still had to continue several times when I
couldn’t figure out when I had to press which button.
That said, the animation still holds up fairly well after all this
time. Fritz has about 100 different ways to kill you, and the
character designs are brilliant. There are roughly 7 or 8 main
characters, with several minor ones poking around. The catch here is
that the Saturn's video compression dilutes a lot of the game's
vibrant colors, especially if playing on S-Video. If you're too
accustomed to today's HDMI fireworks, Brain Dead 13 will look like a
Sega CD game to you.
However, what the Saturn take lacks in visual flair, it whomps the
PlayStation's game with much better controls. Sadly, there's missing
options and a lack of password feature in the Saturn version.
Brain Dead 13 is essentially a lost art in the gaming world, both
literally and figuratively. Few companies are willing to spend the
time on 2D animation (sprites not included) and provide an old
arcade laserdisc-like experience. BD13 is worth it for the once
through, or even several to see all the death animations, but once
you unravel the castle’s path, there’s really not much to do but sit
there…brain dead.
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Trivia
- Brain Dead 13 and other games
like it (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, etc.) paved the way for
modern games' "Quick Time Events" - sections in a game where you
need only press a button motion to form the solution. Games like
Heavenly Sword, God of War, and Ninja Blade all feature QTEs.
- There are actually two possible
endings to the game, determined by two very different button
press sequences in the final act.
- The game allows infinite lives
and a Save option - very rare for a game of this type.
- The Saturn version is a single
disc, while the PlayStation version is on two CDs.
- What makes things interesting is
that you actually can 'run around the castle' if you so choose.
Rather than a straight path, you can make intersection choices
in specific parts of the structure. A perfect play-through of
the game actually removes the need to play 4 areas.
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