Dangerous Dave in The Deserted Pirate’s Hideout is a 2D platformer that originally released in 1988 for the Apple II. The version we’ll be looking it is the PC port that was released 2 years later. This title is most famously known as being made by John Romero before the time he and the rest of his team left to form a little company known as ID Software. If you care to hear about this story in more detail I strongly recommend checking out this article written by Romero himself as it is quite an interesting tale.
With its interesting pedigree out of the way, Dangerous Dave features a grand total of 10 levels. You can breeze through all of them very quickly, though true to that era, the sheer difficulty of it will prevent most of us from being able to accomplish that. This game is hard even for 1988 standards. We are given three lives to begin with and can gain more by raking in enough points from both finishing the levels and collecting the goodies scattered about. If you lose a life then it is back to the start of the level for you.
A small mercy is that enemies will stay dead so you can stroll right back to where you left off rather quickly, granted you don’t get overconfident and land in a pit of deadly seaweed, among various other hazards. The game is quite simple to control, you move around with the arrow keys or the control pad section of the keyboard. You then have Alt to activate a jet-pack and Crtl to shoot your gun, given that you’ve actually collected said items in the level. Something I was never a fan of is jumping with the up arrow key, which you have to do here, and was thankfully fixed for the sequel.
Dave controls decently, the only part where you may have some issues is trying to precisely control where he’ll land while in mid-air, as it is very sensitive and can see you accidentally kill yourself. The ultimate goal is simply to collect the golden chalice then make your way into the door leading to the next level. You don’t necessarily have to collect anything else if you are confident enough that you don’t think you’ll need more than three lives throughout its entirety. There are secret warp zones to skip around levels, though you will have to reach it amid a variety of hazards and they actually end up feeling like extra stages.
Funnily enough, I found some warp zones more difficult than many of the actual levels. You will have to earn the right to skip the next few levels. The enemies you will face throughout are a mishmash of random things such as spiders and further bizarre things. They all take a single shot to go down and so do you. Considering they all fire projectiles and you don’t always have your gun, facing them is just as dangerous as platforming. Nailing them with a bullet will see them explode in a glorious fashion however, giving it a satisfying conclusion. Just don’t step into the ensuing explosion or you will anticlimactically die alongside it.
You can toggle between CGA, EGA, and VGA graphics on the fly. I recommend leaving it to the default VGA unless you have some nostalgia for the funky color scheme of CGA. There is no music and all the sound effects are done via PC Speaker bleeps and bloops. Overall, Dangerous Dave is quite the fun little title. It is clearly influenced by Nintendo’s Mario but is far from a clone. There is a decent bit of fun to be had cautiously flying around in a jet-pack containing limited fuel and having a gun to fire back against foes. Even without all of the history behind this title, I would recommend it for those with a passion for brutal old-school computer platforming.
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