The Adventures of Dr. Franken

The Game

The Adventures of Dr Franken is a port/remake of a 1992 Game Boy game just called Dr Franken. The object is to find 4 pieces of an item in each level, and then find the exit, although the game doesn't tell you any of this…Save that for later though, if I start now I won't stop.

It was developed by Motivetime Ltd, and if after all these big name developers recently you're thinking "ooh, I've not heard of them, I wonder if they're a hidden gem of a developer" well, kind of yes and no. Their name is linked with a load of very big games, Paperboy, Might & Magic II, Prince of Persia, Micro Machines, but none of those games were developed or published by Motivetime, so why are they in their catalogue of games? Motivetime Ltd were "associated" with Elite, who were a very popular developer and publisher, putting out a huge amount of home computer releases (Paperboy for example) before becoming the first European company to sign a deal with Nintendo to publish games for their new fangled NES console, and also the first to sign a deal with Sony for European publishing for the Playstation console.

So I decided to go through every game they were credited on to see which ones they actually developed, versus which ones Elite were involved with which included them by proxy. No Paperboy, no Might & Magic, no Prince of Persia, you want to know the first game they developed themselves? Dragon's Lair for the NES. This might give you a clue as to the sort of quality we're dealing with here. They also developed the SNES version (can't wait for that one to come round), the original Dr Franken and its sequel on the Game Boy. They had 6 other games where they were credited as the sole developer, and none of them were stand out games.

What about the publisher? DTMC published 8 games, all for either Game Boy or SNES who look as though they went out of business in 1994 after 2 years. Now this is all starting to make more and more sense.

Gameplay

Okay, now I can get into the meat of it all, and full disclosure, I did not finish the game. I tried, lord I did try, but it was, and let me stress this, fucking awful.

You're dropped in playing the titular Dr Franken, who incidentally is Frankenstein's monster, and not the Doctor, but I'm not getting into that, it's been done to death. It's the 90s so he has to be cool and wear shades, and he wanders round these levels that are essentially several stories of flat left to right, looking for pieces of certain things, the first level for example seems to be his passport you're after. As I said earlier the game doesn't tell you any of this, and I know, I'm playing this in 2026 without the box or manual, and I'm sure they explain it all perfectly (we'll find out about the box soon enough) but they couldn't even be bothered to start the level with a simple "find this" with a picture of what you're looking for next to it.

You expose these levels while fighting off various enemies with a right kick, a left kick, and a bicycle kick, so the controls ended up being annoying as hell too with directional attack buttons, why can't I just attack in the direction I'm facing? So, no idea what you're doing, no indication of where to even start, multi tiered levels with left and right directions, enemies that respawn when their spawn point is just off screen, and some walls are "secret" walls that you can just walk straight through, again without any indication. What, I hear you ask, could possibly make this game play any worse? How about a time limit? Would you like one of those with your dish of absolute unwashed arsehole?

I did watch a play through to ensure I wasn't missing anything important and I wasn't, every level is the same thing with a different backdrop. You do have 2 limited ammo ranged attacks, one stuns and the other kills, but they don't fix any of the problems this game has. It definitely feels like a Game Boy game on the big screen.

Graphics

The game does look fine, I will give it that if nothing else, the sprites are well detailed for what they are, Franken looks decent in his shades indoors slappable face kind of way, and the enemies are all fairly varied in each level. I will accept that, I've seen better on the SNES but I've seen worse too. The animations however are very basic, the enemies just repeat the same loop over and over as they float in their set animation paths wherever that may be. There really isn't much more to say, the levels themselves are varied in a visual sense, but not a design sense, they're a mess of exploration with very little thought to them at all.

Sound and Music

To give you an indication of the quality of the music in this game, there are 20 levels and 8 music tracks. One of those tracks is called "entering level" and is 3 seconds long. The whole soundtrack is 16 minutes, and the songs that are 2 or 3 minutes long are completely unforgettable. They really missed a trick not going for some classic horror style tracks, take some music from Frankenstein (1931) and give it a jaunty beat to match the style, but no, generic gubbins is all we get.

The People

Okay so I want to look at the music first and I'm not surprised to see the composer has worked on two games, and this was their first. Toyin Agbetu then went on to work on Elite Soccer and nothing else in the industry again.

The music engineers credited had a bit more of an interesting career path. Richard Frankish had worked previously on Paperboy and Dragon's Lair (SNES) before doing music for Micro Machines, but they were mostly considered a programmer, he had credits on GTA Liberty City Stories, Manhunt 2, GTA Chinatown Wars, Red Dead Redemption, LA Noire, GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2. He must have jumped ship to Rockstar and has been eating pretty good since then! Big steps up from this steaming pile of Franken-shit.

Rob Mann was also a music engineer on this, and he also moved more into programming but didn't take off quite the way Richard did, he worked on a couple of fairly popular racing games, DiRT and Grid, then fell off the radar by 2012.

Racing games seems to be a theme here, David Percival was one of the people working on the graphics of this game, and he did graphics for a couple more games after this he also predominantly worked in programming and ended up technical director and head of engineering for F1 2010, 2011, 2012, F1 Race Stars, F1 22, 23, 24 and 25.

Russel Phillips was in charge of "additional graphics" whatever that might mean and he has actually worked art/design his whole career working on a few SOCOM: US Navy Seals games among others.

The programmer Adrian Jones, did a few very uneventful games afterwards and vanished in 1999.

I can't believe the worst game I've played so far had one of the biggest breakout programmers involved!

Box art

And the drizzling shits just keep on coming don't they, look, I remember the 80s home computers, My first proper gaming device was an Amstrad CPC 464, and some of the boxes for these games had artwork literally drawn by the person that wrote the code, usually a literal child. I have nostalgia for some of those boxes, but in 1993 there really is no excuse to have box art that looks like it was drawn by a child who is desperate to get into comic book artistry. The US box art has that early home computer feel for sure, but the EU one might be even worse, Franken looks like a totally different character, the shades aren't there, and the enemy in the background looks like another child's drawing, but worse. The only thing saving it is the nostalgia of that Elite logo. Honestly a dumpster fire of a box that I wouldn't give a second look in a game shop in 1993.

As for the back, we're back to the classic 4 screenshot setup, and as I said before the graphics aren't bad and they picked a couple of decent screenshots here, but the text is just the story of the game and nothing at all offering any insight into what you'll actually do in the game.

Reluctantly this box gets my rating of - Accurate. But really, really, painfully shit.

The Press

Computer & Video Games:

Here's a great game starring everyone's favourite munster. Dr Franken is a real cool guy who's rather frantic about finding his missus. There's lots of variation in the gameplay, with moving platforms, secret passages and hidden staircases and coves to maximise the fun. And it's worth just losing a life to see the hysterical expression on Dr Franken's face. It's a big improvement on the Game Boy Version, with excellent attention to graphic detail and good sound to compliment the involving gameplay. Order your copy now.

87/100

Super Action:

Considering the limitations of the vastly overused platform concept, this cart comes out looking and sounding pretty dang good. With enough levels to keep even Baz Diablo happy it'll take us fallible gamesplayers a long time to complete. More to the point. Dr Franken is probably just about interesting enough for you to actually want to finish it. This isn't an all time classic, but is still good enough to warrant having two whole pages of the greatest SNES mag in the Universe dedicated to it!

83/100

Game Players:

Help green-skinned Dr. Franken search the world for pieces of his robot girlfriend. DTMC targets younger players, but they're the ones most likely to be frustrated by it's lack of a password feature.

73/100

GamesMaster:

When you first start you'll feel little or no urge to continue, but persevere and things do get better. There is a good platform game in here, but look over there and you'll see another one, and another, and another, and another, and another…

72/100

Electronic Gaming Monthly:

This is a good, almost non-linear game.

33/50

Super Play:

Collecting bits of Bitsy becomes incredibly repetitive after several levels, despite some attempts to inject variety into the proceedings (the New York docklands level requires you to operate a crane to retrieve your paramour's parts). At no time does it ever rise above the level of spotting a switch and throwing it to see what it does. The kicks and punches are sluggish to operate if you're moving fast, so the sensible player takes everything at a zimmer-frame pace. Sometimes it's a little unfair in this respect, and will have you cursing in disbelief as you're killed by a space-hopper that you chose to attack (although the lack of continues prevents you, fortunately, from finishing the entire game in a weekend). Dr Franken really isn't very engaging, and the imbecilic expression on the monster's face when he dies doesn't exactly leave me clamouring for more. Call me a junkie if you like, but I prefer my games to have Class A addiction.

58/100

Thank god for Super Play at the end there, because I thought I was taking crazy pills reading the other reviews. I quite like CVG usually, but "order your copy now" sounds like "we were paid for this review" to me.