I'm Playing Everything From Idol FX (Part III): Wait, The Drake of the 99 Dragons Studio Invented DLC?!

Author's Note: If you missed the previous entries to this retrospective on developer Idol FX AB, you can catch them over here:

• Part I: Gast, An Admirable Start
• Part II: Nosferatu And A Hugo Clone

Part 3: Oh, Dear God, More Idol FX Has Been Found Since I Started This Series

How did this happen? After debuting my retrospective on the history of every game Idol FX ever made, multiple people have come forward to address an error embedded in my premise. After publishing two entries and sitting on the conclusion for about two weeks, I have been mulling over the fact that both Giant Bomb AND Mobygames have misled me. Apparently, there's more Idol FX "goodness" than I initially thought! The first of these, Grumpa, was something I discovered after briefly perusing My Abandonware in hopes of finding a more stable ROM or rip of Loophole. As I was starting to come to terms with the prospect of playing another one of Idol FX's questionable children's adventure games, someone found me on YouTube and pointed out that there was ANOTHER Idol FX title absent on not only Giant Bomb and Mobygames but also My Abandonware! That's two works by a studio with almost zero documented evidence on the internet outside of a few Swedish-speaking platforms! How could such a gap in the video game fossil record happen?

First, both games got next to no distribution outside of Europe, and I couldn't find any evidence of an English release for either. I should note that My Abandonware erroneously lists a United States release for Grumpa, but I could find zero evidence of that ever actually happening. Considering how spotty the overall documentation is, however, I could be wrong and would happily accept any corrections anyone reading this write-up has to offer. With Grumpa, I found evidence that the game got some distribution in neighboring Scandinavian countries such as Norway, Finland, and Denmark, as well as possibly in non-Scandi countries like Germany. The game was also released in Eastern European countries like Poland in 2003, one year after its Swedish release. Nonetheless, it is doubtful it was a top seller; it got as much, if not more, distribution than Loophole, a game MobyGames and Giant Bomb have in their respective databases, even though that game was almost entirely within the borders of Sweden. Yes, it was based on a briefly popular television program, but that's no excuse for it to be in our database with Grumpa absent. The game itself is a more apparent attempt to make a clone of the much more successful Hugo games and shouldn't have gone under our radar for this long. Again, the paper trail for Grumpa is spotty, so if you believe this game was released in your country, feel free to let out a yelp. It's almost as if we are collectively excavating a recently discovered dinosaur fossil.

Imp's absence, on the other hand, is entirely understandable. Imp got virtually no distribution outside of Sweden, and the only documented evidence I could find discussing its existence was a single Tweet thread discussing its highly unorthodox monetization, which we will discuss shortly, and a single untranslated Swedish magazine interview with one of the game's leads about their plans for the game. I also found a Reddit thread about the game, which suggests that it might have seen some distribution outside of Sweden, but this might also be the Mandela Effect in full force. To return to that magazine, a representative from Idol FX talks rather confidently about Imp and another game they had in production at the time, codenamed "Foo." Imp was ostensibly a fighting game intended to have a roster of as many as FIFTY playable characters, an absurd premise even when you grapple with its questionable distribution scheme, but one that speaks to the chicanery that seems to have taken foot with Idol FX's management after some of their fleeting successes making adventure games. As things stand, there is a rip of the game on the internet, which I will not directly link to but merely point out that it is indeed "out there," works when you get things properly mounted, and is unlikely to be DMCA-ed, considering Idol FX has not existed in decades. That version has the whole roster; though the interface leaves much to be desired, you can still get the gist of what Imp was and intended to be.

"Foo," on the other hand, is none other than Drake of the 99 Dragons, and it seems Idol FX always intended it to be their money maker and were billing it as a "mature comic book game" for fans of the works of Alan Moore or Frank Miller, circa the mid-2000s. Believing the rise of graphic novels and adult comics at the time would be their ticket to the gravy train, they were all in on Drake of the 99 Dragons as early as 2003. Oh, dear Icarus, how you shouldn't have flown so close to the sun.

Game #1: Grumpa

What is it?

Grumpa, as I mentioned earlier, is yet another attempt by Idol FX to make a game that seeks to emulate the odd popularity of the Hugo video game series. If I could sit down with anyone from a European country that remembers Hugo the Troll, I genuinely want to pick their brain on why this series took off and what ended up running it into the ground. There was a weird two to three-year period when Hugo quickly became one of the most recognizable video game mascots in certain parts of the EU. Returning to Grumpa, it runs on the same adventure game engine I reviewed with my write-ups about Gast and Loophole, but Grumpa has a few notable additions. First, you can mercifully carry more than one item when attempting to deliver quest items to NPCs. Gast and Loophole limit you to just one item at a time, making their fetch quest-oriented gameplay arbitrarily tedious. Second, the game has action combat, with you needing to equip armor and weapons on your character and occasionally swinging swords to kill approaching enemies. I found a lone Swedish magazine that referred to Grumpa as a "baby's first Diablo," but even that seems generous. Every enemy seems to lumber at you, with only a few needing you to pay attention to cues or damage windows. Also, even when you get to a few of the game's more elaborate combat arenas, the same strategy of spamming your sword swings or basic attacks carries you to victory. There's next to no strategy involved with any of the combat.

There are only about a half-dozen weapons to pick up, and the game's paper doll inventory system ISN'T EVEN THAT, with almost every subsequent armament replacing the previous one. Speaking of the game's linear character progression, Grumpa is far more linear in general when compared to Idol FX's previous adventure games. There are mission objectives for you to accomplish, and when you move from one set piece to the next, there's little to no reason for you to return to a previous one, and often you can't. On the one hand, that boils out all of the annoying backtracking seen and experienced in Gast or Loophole, but on the other hand, that means Grumpa is far less replayable and dynamic. One of the best parts of Gast was how there were variable ways you could apply items to different NPCs and see different effects but still not be disqualified from seeing the game's end. It's not that there's none of that variability in Grumpa; it's just that it's not the game's point of emphasis. Instead, the game is much more narrative-focused, with you listening to a troupe of anthropomorphic fantastical creatures attempting to fight back against an army of pirates. There are many more in-game cutscenes than in any of the previous Idol FX titles I have played, and they are all in-game and in-engine, rather than the pre-rendered cutscenes seen in Gast or Loophole. That means they look terrible and sound like shit, and yet, the game doesn't seem to realize it and instead places them on a pedestal to be the center of your attention. What hasn't changed is Grumpa's playtime, which tops out at around the two to three-hour mark, which is the one-budget tier stand-in with almost every Idol FX game besides Drake of the 99 Dragons.

What's the worst jank?

Grumpa has one of the worst combat systems I have seen in a game I have played and completed this year. It's not a combat system; you spam the same attack until the enemy dies and hope you don't take too many hits before they kill you. However, the game is generous with its health placements, at least at the start of the game, which means the stakes are incredibly low. Worse because the game is running on the same engine as Idol FX's adventure games; the combat feels like shit. You have to click and hold to move your character, including turning them to face enemies. I cannot even begin to list the number of times I swung and missed an enemy because I struggled to pivot Grumpa to face a soldier who was wailing away at him non-stop. The hitboxes are all over the place, with you getting lucky strikes from time to time and other times when you can visibly see your weapons clip through the enemy models, and yet, you get zero credit for a successful blow.

On top of that, every time you land a hit on an enemy, there's a knockback effect, and you need to inch Grumpa ever so slightly forward to continue attacking enemies after hitting them. And to add insult to injury, the game uses fixed camera angles, so there's a good chance that your combat encounters often occur in the corner of your screen, and you can barely tell what direction you need to face to avoid getting killed. Additionally, you can also knock an enemy forward enough to cause the game to shift into a different fixed camera angle mid-combat. Luckily, the enemies are incredibly dumb, with most just stomping towards you without regard for their surroundings. For example, the game culminates in a pirate ship, and there's a part where you need to walk across a plank of wood between two ledges. The enemies on the other side are so dumb they very often fall over the bridge before they can reach the other side to fight you.

The terrible audio and sound mixing from Idol FX's first few games is back. There's a puzzle sequence where you need to guide Grumpa across a floor littered with trap doors, and whenever you fall into a trap door, you hear the generic door-closing Windows MovieMaker sound effect from the 90s and 2000s. Almost all of the game's cutscenes are done in-game and feature some of the worst sound I have seen in a long while. Every time you hit an enemy with an attack, you hear the same lo-fi squeak or scream with next to no variation. It's simply astounding how shoddily this game is built in certain areas. One of the more questionable choices comes during the game's opening acts, wherein most of the game takes place on a tribal tropical island where pirates attack it. Grumpa is a member of one of these native populations, but there's a "unga bunga" twang to his mannerisms and design that is immediately off-putting. Yes, this game existed in a different time. Nonetheless, these depictions of native cultures were wrong then and are wrong now.

Is it bad?

This game is bad. When I played Nosferatu, I posited that it and Gast suggested that Idol FX was an indie outfit that slowly turned to the dark side of tie-in games for the sake of keeping the lights on and that they had ideas that suggested they were capable of better works. When I said that, I was unaware of the existence of Grumpa and Imp. With both games now under my belt, I accept that Idol FX baked cheaply-made tie-in games into its core identity. They don't present a more ambitious alternative to Titus, Ocean Software, or US Gold; they were cut from the same cloth. Gast and Nosferatu, regrettably, seem like outliers now that we have a larger sample size. Grumpa is yet another recycle of their adventure game engine, with no previous problems solved or addressed and sub-standard combat thrown in the mix instead. Having more inventory slots is nice, but that doesn't change your overall satisfaction with Idol FX's Grognard quest design. With the game being far more linear than Gast or Loophole, Grumpa lacks some of the upsides of Idol FX's earlier works. There's no open-world level design, and there isn't a wide breadth of alternate animations or puzzle solutions to mull over either. When you get a bunch of bananas, there is only one person to deliver those bananas to, and now you also have to spam the same attack on three or four enemies along the way.

It is a game where you can feel its cheapness bleeding through your screen as you play it. The grating audio design and effects don't improve. The combat is dismal during your first enemy encounter and doesn't improve after your fourth or fifth fight. The level design still has frustrating fetch quests where you must make long treks to one-off locations to pick up trinkets that open doors or gateways to new set pieces that are patched together using bubblegum and duct tape. This game is bullshit. It is enlightening to see the origin of where some of the worst of Drake of the 99 Dragons' more questionable designs came from. But other than having the delight of context to one of the worst video games ever made, don't play this game. There's no English fan translation for Grumpa, and only a handful of non-Swedish European languages have been officially made. Unless you enjoy banging your head on the most vanilla pick-up-and-deliver mechanics because you don't know what the Hell you're looking at or hearing, you are best returning to a life where you didn't know this existed.

Game #1: Imp

What is it?

As I have indicated before, Imp is ostensibly a fighting game. Yet, outside of the worst free-to-play or mobile gacha titles, which prey on people's addictive tendencies to bilk them of their hard-earned cash, Imp may be one of the most abhorrently monetized games in video game history. The game was initially released on fifty CDs because each disc only contained a single fighter. To populate the game's whole roster, you had to find a different CD with an alternate character on the cover and install them in the game's .exe file, which collected them in a single folder. As per that Tweet thread I linked to earlier, the total size of the data from all of the discs is about 191 megabytes, and from that, you can correctly assume that the intricacies and complexity between each fighter aren't the greatest. I could only find two game box covers, but a ROM/ISO rip from 2001 has the whole roster. Fun fact: you didn't need to have more than one disc in your computer's disc drive, and upon loading the game, a single disc would allow you to ALT-TAB to select your desired fighter from your unlocked roster. However, because of how awkwardly implemented this system was, Imp was largely a single-player-focused fighting game with players stuck with the fighters they managed to acquire and completely unable to play online against other players. On top of that, given that it was a PC game, which would be the only logical platform to support this format, playing the game with split-screen co-op was impractical.

I tip my hat to whoever decided to spend the money to buy all 50 CDs and rip them for posterity's sake. None of my sources could track down the launch listed price for Imp's single-character discs, but it is doubtful that any were sold for full price. One source on Reddit said the discs were as low as five Euros or fifty-ish Swedish Krona per pop. Likewise, there are some notable differences between the playable characters. Some are grapple-focused, others oriented around projectiles and keep-away tactics, and another, I think, relies on stances. I'm unsure about that last one because the game's animations and combat are so rudimentary that it's hard to tell. The most common type of playable character seemed to be boxing-based ones, which tank opposing hits and try to unleash flurries of punches. The characters are fully rendered in 3D, and the fighting arenas remind me of the Xbox and PS2 era Mortal Kombat games or the Soul Calibur franchise. As you plan attacks, there's some side-stepping and circling your opponent, but you're always facing them, and you can't entirely avoid their attacks by taking advantage of a 3D plane like in Power Stone. Regardless, the strategy with the gameplay here is less about pulling off cool or complex combos and more about spamming quick-hitting attacks until your enemy goes down for the count. As such, any fighter with a meatier or more durable health bar is almost always the better option, with attack speed being a second priority.

What's the worst jank?

Just look at the playable demo I linked above. Look at it. Where do I even start? Imagine for a minute you are a child, and you see a badass skeleton on the box of a game you see in your local game store. You buy it based entirely on that cover. After inserting the disc into your computer's disc drive, you install it but find you only have two percent of the game and can only do a mirror match against yourself. Worse, the character you bought is entirely not your style. Maybe you like tankier grapple-based characters, but the badass skeleton is a zone character. If you are committed, your only recourse is to pony up the cash to buy another copy of the game but with a different character.

That sucks. There's no other way to characterize Imp other than to call it a game designed to exploit children into purchasing multiple copies of a cheaply-made game. You're essentially forcing kids to buy upwards of five to six copies of the same game before it reaches a state where it approaches a "complete" video game experience. I know some of how Imp was sold sounds comparable to Skylanders or anything from the "toys-to-life" era, but Imp is demonstrably worse than any of those games by an entire order of magnitude. At least with Skylanders, you always have a base campaign to explore and complete with even a skeletal roster of characters you buy in packs and improve over time. Imp is barely a game with its whole roster of fifty characters, let alone with one or two characters. That is unless you find the prospect of subjecting yourself to the exact same mirror matches over and over again enticing.

Likewise, the "balance" with Imp is non-existent. A fighting game having a fifty-man roster sounds absurd on paper, and as you can imagine, corners were cut to make it possible for Imp. None of the characters are entirely unique, and there are plenty of cases where characters are shameless palette swaps of others. As I already pointed out, some characters are downright better, and because the game's base fighting game engine is so simple, there's no depth with any individual character. For the most part, buying a new character provides you with some visual variety in an otherwise mindless brawler that seeks to present itself as having the depth of a fighting game while utilizing the gameplay hook of Pokemon. After playing the game a fair bit and getting my fill after testing out half of its fighters, I can pinpoint my exact issue with the gameplay. Every character only has four to five moves, and there's no combo mechanic. You can't even chain attacks to do bonus damage. Instead, you wail away on the four to five things unique to your character, and because the enemy AI is dumber than a sack of bricks, you really have to mess up to lose. The only real motivator to keep on with the game is to see three or four character-specific animations each fighter has. Still, they all meet the same end terminus with zero narrative connective tissue to justify why any of them exist in the first place. That's it. That's Imp. That's all the game has going for it.

Is it bad?

It's not exactly surprising that Imp was throttled into obscurity shortly after its release. It seems Idol FX tried the game in their home country and possibly in a handful of other "test" countries on the European continent, but that seems to be "it." With how the game was structured, I assume that they aimed for an attachment rate of four to five games per customer, and they missed that mark across the board. That's not to say the game is or was a complete failure, but considering how little Idol FX did to keep the game alive and supported, it leaves me to believe that even they knew they didn't have a hit on their hands. Bottom-of-the-barrel game developers range a wide gamut of business owners, some knowing their markets and niches perfectly, and others going full mask off with fraudulent schemes right from the rip. Considering Idol FX pivoted to Drake of the 99 Dragons even as they were hyping up Imp suggests they only had one speed: fast. As this series has painfully shown, they always switched to something new if a game didn't do what they wanted financially. There's something admirable about that ethos, but not really considering the by-products were almost always a waste of your time.

What leaves me flummoxed is this. After Imp, their next game was Drake of the 99 Dragons, and the game after that was FBI Hostage Rescue. That's three certifiable turds in a row; four if you want to lop in Grumpa, which you likely should. These days, when a developer has a batting record as low as Idol FX, you go bankrupt after one or two duds. I have no idea how they were able to keep going for this long despite the vast body of their works being of such dubious quality. I'll be the first to admit to having a weird fascination with Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi, but I doubt that game set the world on fire. So, what was keeping the studio going? Were the owners getting angel investor money despite everything they made being shotgunned crap? Were those early games good enough to net them royalties? Did Loophole and Grumpa do better financially than I made it seem? Did they sucker enough kids into buying Imp CDs that they were able to fund two more projects? What blood sacrifice to the great goat god did they perform that allowed them to make this many bad games?

And with that, I wrap up this entry as I mentally and psychologically prepare myself for Drake of the 99 Dragons. Also, I have a couple of wiki pages to create for @marino.