The Classic Arcade and Console Era (1972-1989) - Dr. Chaos
Check out this NES action-adventure game in the style of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest if it were mixed with Shadowgate.
RELEASE DATE: 1987
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Marionette / FCL
BEST VERSIONS: NES
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Fairly playable
I’ll begin by saying that Dr. Chaos is a deep cut from the NES library that has attracted its fair share of bad reviews. I get it – there are many reasons to criticize Dr. Chaos, and these include (in no particular order) the repetitive nature of the gameplay, the constant backtracking, the discordant music, the stiff controls and the lackluster ending. The lead hero looks like he’s been shamelessly copied from Thomas in Kung Fu, and the game’s levels and rooms don’t show much distinction or imagination. Dr. Chaos is often compared to Konami’s The Goonies II, which came out just a few months before Dr. Chaos in Japan, and honestly, The Goonies II does a lot of what Dr. Chaos is trying to do, but better. If you have to choose between the two, play The Goonies II instead.
But the purpose of this series isn’t to help you discover games that are well-known and relatively well-reviewed; I’m diving deep to search for the pearls that others have missed and ignoring the critical consensus as often as I can. I went into Dr. Chaos knowing absolutely nothing about it and found an interesting game beneath the obvious flaws. It’s definitely a game that will test your patience and times and for which you’ll want to have a guide handy from the start. I would also recommend playing on an emulator with saved states since the game lacks a save function.
The setup for the game is that Dr. Ginn Chaos has opened up an interdimensional gate, bringing all sorts of strange creatures into our world and making a general mess of his giant, four-story mansion. As his younger brother Michael Chaos, you arm yourself with a knife and venture inside to locate and free him. Much of the game involves navigating the mansion hub world and fighting enemies with your knife or with other weapons you can pick up, including a hand gun, machine gun and grenades. You can also locate shield suit armor that make it easier to survive, jump boots that allow you to reach places that are high up and an air helmet that allows you to breathe underwater. Beyond that, you’ll have to assemble ten pieces of a laser rifle scattered through each of the game’s interdimensional zones in order to defeat the final boss, the fire-breathing lion Canbarian.
But getting to those zones is tough because you have to first pick up a device called the Ultraspace Sensor and use it to find hidden doorways within the rooms of the mansion hub. This is where Dr. Chaos is at its most interesting, because while a lot of the game takes place from a sidescrolling platformer perspective extremely similar to games like Metroid, Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest or Rygar, the rooms are depicted in a Shadowgate-style first person perspective where you have a cursor and a menu of options. Beyond searching for items, the rooms sometimes have doors to hidden rooms that can only be accessed through this mode, and you’ll also find the entrances to the 11 zones where the pieces of the laser gun (and several other useful items) are being guarded by bosses.
The first zone is the hardest to find because it involves finding a room with a window you can crawl through to access it. Once you do, you’re treated to a short platforming level with a boss who is pitifully wimpy and easy to defeat if you just run up and stab him repeatedly with the knife. (If you hang back and shoot him or simply wait and let him grow, he’ll apparently get bigger and take more hits to destroy.) Once you defeat him and grab the Ultraspace Sensor, you gain the ability to detect hidden passages to other zones using the “hit” action when you’re in a room. Unfortunately, before you can find the next zone, you have to backtrack through the platforming stage back to the mansion. This is where the game really reminds me of Rygar, and it’s perhaps the biggest time-waster of anything the game has you do.
From there, you explore the mansion and continue searching for entrances to the various zones in a fairly non-linear manner, and this is where a guide comes in handy to help you to know which areas you can safely enter and which require an item like the jump boots or air helmet. Sometimes, your explorations will cause ghoulish creatures to chase you out of rooms, and it’s a good idea to have some bullets on hand to dispatch them quickly once they follow you into the mansion hallway. The boss encounters can also be pretty rough in places, and so it’s a good idea to have plenty of ammo and a health potion on hand to ensure you have an edge.
Eventually, you’ll have all the pieces of the laser gun and you’ll be ready to take on that final boss, who it turns out is actually your brother. A lackluster credits sequence rolls and the game is over; Dr. Chaos is far more about the journey than the destination.
So, given that the game has so many downsides, why do I recommend it? For one thing, the puzzling aspects of searching the rooms do make the game a little more cerebral than your average adventure platformer, and I enjoyed the challenge of searching for hidden passages to undiscovered worlds. I also found that the platforming really wasn’t as challenging as it seemed once I understood the enemy patterns, especially once after I finally got used to the game’s stiff controls and backtracking. Liberal use of saved states also greatly reduced my frustration since I didn’t have to replay any major sections. Dr. Chaos also isn’t that long of a game when you use a guide to help you plan your path through it; it’s completable within a few hours.
Dr. Chaos isn’t going to knock anyone’s socks off, but it’s a solid enough game that stands above a lot of the dull action platformers from the 1980s NES library because it dares to do something different. Unfortunately, the only way to play it legally is with an original cartridge since it’s never been re-released, so you’ll probably wind up using an emulator anyhow.
As Our Series Continues…
It’s time to move on to console and arcade gaming in the 1970s and 80s, and we’re going to cover it all with an exploration into hundreds more games you’ve probably never played but definitely ought to check out. Come for amazingly great early 1980s games like Warlords, Super Locomotive, Shark! Shark!, Acrobatic Dog-Fight, Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure and Intrepid and stick around for mid-to-late 1980s greats like Peter Pack-Rat, Penguin-kun Wars, Momoko 120%, UFO Robot Dangar, Wonder Momo, Raimais, Last Alert, The Legend of Valkyrie and the arcade version of Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack with wonderfully inscrutable lyrics.
If you’ve never heard of any of those games, you’re in for a treat as we explore them one by one. And If those games are all old hat to you, don’t worry; they’re just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be discussing!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!
Looks interesting, if a bit frustrating!