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This one falls under "What the hell were they thinking?"

Seta released Nosferatu for the SNES sometime in 1995, near the end of the system's life. It was originally going to be released shortly after the SNES itself, but the game got stuck in development for all those years. Nosferatu is a lot like Prince Of Persia, Out Of This World and Flashback: The Quest For Identity... in other words, it's an action/puzzle game. It's a fairly good one too... the graphics are extremely nice, the animation of the different characters is fairly fluid - although not as fluid as the animation is in the games I mentioned already, it's got decent music, and the horror theme is done extremely well.

The plot is your standard "girlfriend-got-kidnapped-by-evil" type of plot... in this case, Kyle's girlfriend Erin has been taken by Nosferatu, who's some big badass of a vampire. Kyle takes it upon himself to go track down Nosferatu and get Erin back. So, astride his horse, he sets off to rescue Erin... and what happens next has to be the most ludicrous thing I have EVER seen in a videogame! I've seen a lot of ludicrous things in games in my time, but this takes the cake.

Apparently Kyle (hereby after referred to as The Idiot) thinks he's some kind of superman or something, because he goes on his quest to rescue Erin with no weapons whatsoever! As if THAT isn't enough, he uses his fists to beat the undead enemies to death!!! WTF?!? What were the programmers at Seta thinking when they came up with that brilliant idea? "Let's not give him any weapons, let's just have him beat everything to death - even zombies!" There are no weapons for The Idiot to pick up either... hell, in Prince Of Persia you find a sword. In Out Of This World and Flashback you get a gun. You'd think that The Idiot could at least find a dagger or club or something. No, all you get are these crystals that let The Idiot do fancier moves - but these aren't any moves that could seriously deter the undead. I mean, come on. If this was Resident Evil, for instance, The Idiot would be eaten by a zombie before he could throw a second punch. In Nosferatu, though, punching things to death works! Even Nosferatu can be beaten by punching him to death. That has to be the saddest part of the game. No crosses, no garlic, no stakes, no whips, no nothing! You just punch him to death.

I'm sure some of you may be asking "hey, what about Splatterhouse?" True, Rick uses his fists most of the time (although he can pick up various weapons in the Splatterhouse games, unlike Nosferatu), but at least there's a reason given as to why they work against the undead - the Mask. He's got supernatural powers behind those punches. No such explanation is ever given for The Idiot. Maybe he had his fists blessed by a priest and doused in holy water before he set out on his quest. Yeah, that's it. Sure.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Nosferatu is a bad game - far from it - but come on. The fact that The Idiot punches everything to death is just plain ridiculous. I know this is a video game, but seriously!