I'm Playing Everything From Idol FX (Part IV): The Modern Release Of Drake of the 99 Dragons Is Better, But By How Much?

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 Loophole,A Hugo Clone
• Part III: Grumpa and Imp

Part 4 - Drake Of The 99 Dragons

What Is It?

Luckily not the only Drake catching a massive L.

It's the one and only Drake of the 99 Dragons. It's time to discuss the game and whose respective Blight Club inspired this series! A game whose reputation often precedes it, so much so that Wikipedia has it listed as one of its canonical answers to the question, "What is the worst video game ever made?" Paradoxically, when I started this series, while Drake was a driving force for initiating it, it likely represented the hardest entry for me to write. There was no documentation for Gast, Grumpa, Nosferatu, or Imp, which allowed me to revel in my write-ups acting as educational services or editorial thought pieces. But Drake Of The 99 Dragons? That game has been excoriated by virtually every major gaming publication and website and has been a continual whipping boy by streamers who enjoy swearing loudly into microphones for the enjoyment of tweens and adults alike. I re-watched Dan's playthrough, studying his descent into misery as a possible muse, and even turned to Alex's review circa 2003 and found an odd compromise. Dan, Alex, and I played slightly different games. They played the game on "original" hardware, whereas I played the "modern" Steam release from 2018.

Playing the game widescreen offers no visual improvements in my mind.

The differences are minor, that much I admit, but some roadblocks plagued their experience that I had no issues with, and there were impediments that I experienced that Dan, in particular, blew past without too much of a problem. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. As explored briefly in my previous entry, developer Idol FX hyped up Drake of the 99 Dragons even while it was operating under a codename, Foo, and also while they released multiple projects throughout 2002. Furthermore, even when Drake of the 99 Dragons was released in 2003, Idol FX had already published two games the same year, Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi and LoopHole: Skrattmagi och glädjetjuvar. What gets overlooked is that the gaming preview circuit was relatively upbeat about the game after Idol FX and publisher Majesco shared a demo on the E3 2003 show floor, which they even admitted was a partially completed build. Brad Shoemaker praised the demo's colorful look and was impressed by the "comic book feel of the game." Brad wasn't alone in saying that, as an earlier preview from GameSpot said the same thing, and competing publication IGN largely agreed that the demo was an interesting proof of concept worthy of mainstream attention.

At the game's heart is an attempt to merge late 90s comic book and graphical novel noir storytelling and visuals with environments and gameplay heavily inspired by the works of John Woo. I've brought up the issue of cultural appropriation and racial insensitivity with previous Idol FX games, and Drake is by far the one that feels the least deniable of this offense. The mish-mash of Chinese and Asian settings, characters, tropes, and idioms comes across as lazy and insensitive, especially with it sporting largely non-Asian voice actors. The game immediately reeks of yellow face, merging Western comic book sensibilities with Hong Kong gun-fu cinema. The disconnect between how comical the game looks and plays and how serious the story presents itself is immediately jarring. Drake replacing every gun that runs out of bullets with a new one, ad infinitum, is meant to make him feel like a badass, but it's downright humorous in execution. The slow-motion gunplay is the least offensive part of the game, what with the vaulting and parkour-based platforming being so much worse, but what Blight Club somewhat overlooks is how the game attempts to give you additional dragon energy-based tools and mechanics, but you're unlikely to use them. Instead, you stick with the slow-motion effect because it does the job with 95% of your combat encounters at a lower cost than some cooler and more extravagant abilities. And regardless of what version of Drake of the 99 Dragons you play, whether it be the Steam re-release or booting it up on original hardware, the game's jump and vaulting does not feel good. Any mission that requires or expects even a modicum of platforming precision is endlessly frustrating, and the Steam release has the same checkpointing as the original game, so, very often, a mistimed jump results in you needing to start from the beginning of a level.

Every jumping or platforming sequence triggers every synapse in your brain to tell you that this is not how this should feel.

So, what happened? How do we go from an E3 2003 game demo that left some people optimistic to a game widely considered a contender for the worst game of all time? Almost everything made by Idol FX is a smoke-and-mirror act to some degree, and Drake of the 99 Dragons is no different. As explored in an interview with a QA tester by the Bad Game Hall of Fame, that proof of concept demo was the whole game up to that point. Beta testing began in June, with the QA team repeatedly warning management that the game was "obviously unfinished" and that there was only so much they could do. And yet, Idol FX management ended development in October 2003, which means a bug-plagued beta build was given a quick salvage job of additional programming to the tune of four months. And if you have watched the game in action, that makes perfect sense. The original console release featured an auto-lock mechanic wherein Drake would automatically jolt to face an enemy after killing a previous one. It results in the jerkiest animations in the game, often with Drake flailing his arms around like a maniac, but with the PC release dropping this in favor of free aiming, I get why the game uses this feature. When you can more freely explore the environments and get up close and personal with the enemies, you see the haphazard stitching holding the game together. The enemy AI usually involves most targets standing in one place and shooting you until you kill them. Every level is a linear corridor, and the sound effects are all stock sound effects from AOL Instant Messenger. However, sans the auto-targeting mechanic, you feel far more in control of Drake's actions, leading to an immediately better experience. However, there are times when being less railroaded doesn't always work to your benefit.

What's The Worst Jank?

I mentioned that the most recent PC port is, in some areas, worse than the original Drake of the 99 Dragons that plagued reviewers like Alex back in 2003. The first problem returns us to the PC release's use of free aiming. For most of the game's bosses and combat arenas, not needing to deal with the Xbox version's auto-targeting mechanic is a good thing, but there are a handful of bosses where the opposite is true. The most prominent example is the brain-in-a-jar robot boss during "Mission 15." The issue with this boss is that its hitbox is completely a mystery, with most people assuming you have to hit the brain jar to do tangible damage, but again, given the fact that the game gives you zero input or feedback about any of your actions, that could be hearsay. Nonetheless, this particular boss constantly spams a deluge of missiles you need to dodge while also aiming and shooting at it and possibly at an incredibly tight hitbox. With no auto-targeting mechanic, you need to freehand aim at the boss while also performing dodge rolls, which means you constantly need to adjust your mouse to hover over the enemy target, and it's completely maddening. This specific boss isn't the only occasion where this problem on PC makes encounters way harder than they are in the OG Xbox version, and it straight-up sucks.

The last two levels in this game remain an absolute chore.

The PC re-release is also busted in other ways that are simply astounding. Like many early 2000s games, it didn't have multi-monitor support when it was first released, and the 2018 re-release didn't fix that issue. It has widescreen support but does so with a grainy border that eats up about two to three inches of the sides of your screen. The keyboard controls leave much to be desired. There's no controller support, and mouse acceleration is paradoxically absent. Worse, there is a bug that shipped with the modern release of the game where sometimes, the game displays your mouse as the Windows loading disc instead of the standard in-game reticle. Someone forgot to set the game's mouse detection tools to override the mouse-checking protocol so it would not display on the screen every ten seconds. It's incredible. Subtitles and closed captions don't exist, and all the janky-ass audio effects are essentially the same. The only bit of heavy lifting the Steam or GOG version of Drake of the 99 Dragons has done is ensure that it runs on modern versions of Windows and Linux, but beyond that, the game is the same. The "meme" tag on the game's Steam page tells you everything about whether or not you should try and host your version of Blight Club using it.

Oh my god, this last boss is something.

However, the biggest hindrance to any attempted successful playthrough of Drake of the 99 Dragons remains. Its final boss is still complete dog water. As you likely saw during Dan's struggles, the final boss is a three-headed dragon whose attacks are often unavoidable. There's a randomness to them, but occasionally, projectiles and swings are just going to land, and you can do nothing to avoid them. Furthermore, the "modern" PC release fails to fix a common problem with this boss, where they hit and lock you into a position that makes you unable to move, and then the boss drains your health in the blink of an eye. This mission is a multi-phase boss, and you can get an immediate "Game Over" due to a poorly implemented hitbox. And there's no checkpointing, so if you complete the first phase and get stun-locked into oblivion with just a lone bullet left to take the dragon down, the game still boots you to the very beginning of the mission. The first phase annoyingly involves you destroying statues in a room until the boss is even open to taking damage. Then, a short musical cue plays, and that's all you're told to start wailing on them. It's not like the game gives much input in the first place, as every boss fails to display a health meter to indicate if you are doing what the game needs you to do to progress further. Again, the beta-like nature of the game is undeniable.

Is It Bad?

The cutscenes were not optimized for modern monitors, so that fuzziness is by design and unavoidable.

Yeah. You might be shocked to hear this, but even with its 2018 re-release, Drake of the 99 Dragons is still a miserable game. I know Cassidy of the Bad Game Hall of Fame has a soft spot for it, but Cassidy's love for Drake is a different sort of love. To its credit, the movement of the game, once you wrap your mind around it, becomes second nature, and you can tell someone at Idol FX honestly thought they were on to something. I will defend Cassidy by saying that the levels and the variety of locals are impressive in what should have been a budget game. And as I have said, with the PC release, you have more free-form movement, so you get an even clearer idea of what the team at Idol FX was aiming for. The fact that so many levels have distinct, albeit one-off, gimmicks is weirdly inspiring because the few people who worked on the game wanted this to have more to it than simple shooting action gameplay. But the game is still not "good." The final boss is one of the most infuriating things ever; listening to the game is grating and annoying, and the visual variety only goes so far, with several of the game's environments being copied and pasted from previous ones.

But is it a worthy candidate for "Worst game ever made?" I usually abide by Jeff Gerstmann's old "acceptable answer" protocol when answering that query. While I'm unwilling to plant my flag down to declare one game as the best or worst, I have a relatively long list of games I will accept as answers for either distinction. Drake of the 99 Dragons isn't a game I would accept as an answer to a blue book exam about explaining what one thinks is the worst game ever. In a world where Custer's Revenge, Action 52, Lula 3D, Stalin vs. Martians, Final Fantasy All the Bravest, Alone in the Dark: Illumination, the original version of Raven's Cry, eFootball 2022, and The Day Before exist, the workmanlike effort put into Drake of the 99 Dragon puts it one rung above the lowest levels of the video game quality ladder. You can play Drake of the 99 Dragons and even finish it without worrying about funding a Ponzi scheme or Web3 absurdity. When you buy a copy of the game, it doesn't ask any more of you than what it says on its box. There are no exploitative gacha hooks or a link to a manifesto advocating alt-right conspiratorial nonsense. Trust me; I have seen some stuff in my occasional efforts to check out the darkest corners of the gaming hobby. Of the worst things I have played, Drake is too functional and playable to be considered the worst game ever.

There are just times when I think this game looks at least alright.

The worst games ever made don't try as hard as Drake of the 99 Dragons. I'm not advocating that you put it on a pedestal alongside the similarly styled Max Payne, as there are whole swaths of it that make no sense. I don't get why the game has a time mechanic, and when you realize you don't need to kill every enemy in front of you and can just book it to the endpoints of every level, the game clocks in around three hours. Drake is a try-hard with comically overwrought voice acting in every single cutscene, and the story itself is campy to a fault. Nonetheless, as Cassidy explains in their write-up fairly well, none of us will ever genuinely find ourselves stuck on a desert island with only three games to play. We are allowed to have guilty pleasures alongside "normal" pleasures. I'd like to see more games that use cel-shaded graphics to evoke the aesthetics of comic books, albeit without a twinge of racism, and I still have a soft spot for bullet time. Similarly, when I look at the final game they made, the ambition of Drake of the 99 Dragons remains undeniable in my mind. Idol FX committed to this game in a way bargain bin games rarely see from their developers. That's enough to at least inch it away from Big Rigs.

But Really, Is It Bad To Buy These Bad Game Re-Releases?

Have we reached a Fukuyama predicted end time for video games?

This question is a topic for discussion further, but with this game, the revived and "remastered" Bubsy games, and now the re-release of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, I think there's a conversation that needs to be had with the gaming hobby. Is buying these shoddily made re-releases of games that coast by notoriety alone a bad thing? As a known purveyor of bad video games, I don't think so. I don't think you can defend the stance that every dollar spent on Drake of the 99 Dragons or Big Rigs represents funds that would have gone to support a fledgling indie developer. People who buy meme games are no more or less culpable for the state of the industry than those who invest thousands into gacha games or those who play one live service game, and that's it. Someone who jumped at the opportunity to add Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing to their Steam library isn't subtracting the cost of doing so from their monthly gaming budget; they're likely engaging in a viral gaming culture that will continue to exist no matter what you do. In the case of Big Rigs, the concern is more about the intent of its newcomer publisher and what they are promising consumers. With Drake of the 99 Dragons, Majesco has always been the IP's publisher and rights holder, and they have done what they promised. They gave people Drake of the 99 Dragons. Warts and all, you can play the game and revel in its incompetence and haphazard construction, and whatever time you put into it, you can learn a thing or two about video game design.

What about the imitators? What about the risk of developers taking note of these games and purposefully releasing garbage in hopes of making a quick buck? Honestly, we lost that battle years ago. Have you seen what comes out on Steam every day? Look at Steam's "New Releases" tab for ten solid minutes; I double-dog dare you. If you want to turn blue, turn off the "adult" filter during this exercise. Look at how much abject trash is coming out and compare that to how little retro game releases, whether good or bad, have come out in comparison. Digital marketplaces have dropped their obligations to protect consumers and enforce basic quality assurance ages ago. Just look at that banana clicker game! We still don't entirely know the developer's motives for that thing, yet it persists. So, Majesco made a half-assed effort to bring a bad game to modern OSs! That pales in comparison to most of the exploitative crap that comes out these days, and the fact that indie games are still coming out despite that background noise means that these re-releases of bad games are a complete nonfactor to the health of the industry.

Farewell Drake, may your 99 dragons lead you well wherever you find yourself next.