ILX Plays: Castlevania (for the NES)

The early bit with the medusa heads ... I must have died there as a kid so many times. So much suffering has occurred in this place...

getting flashbacks of simon crumpling to the ground as the tips of his knuckles were brushed by those rising and falling spike-stamp things. really not that hard in the grand video game scheme of things but i seem to have died a lot in fairly indefensible ways in old games.

The spike stamp things ... I'm not getting the timing right on them. I died on them three or four times in a row and gave up.

There's a nasty part in stage 9 or 10 where you have to kill a bone pillar while also dodging medusa heads. My ways of dealing with those two enemies are not compatible.

The second spike stamp you can duck midway. The third you just have to move as soon as it starts lifting.

most of my stuff is still in storage which means no pc no emulator no fun

this is gonna be reel tuff when you guys get maniac mansion

I still haven't gotten past Igor and the monster. My working strategy is to focus on avoiding Igor while attacking blindly in the monster's direction when I can. Doesn't work super well.

The best way I've found to kill the skeleton dragons is to crouch and attack from as far as I can. That blocks most of their fireballs, and if you do it right you can keep them stunned in one spot. The dragon at the exit of stage 10 you can just run under.

*stage 11, I mean

Aha, holy water is pretty useful against Igor/monster.

Now stuck on this damn room. Is there a way to kill the armours using the whip?

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Ol1o7go2N8c/hqdefault.jpg

maybe the hardest room in gaming. the ultimate gauntlet. last time i made it through i was just charging again, jumping over medusa heads, whipping the armours, jumping over their axes, etc. u can kill them w the whip but it takes a few hits each.

crazy thing is there is a New Game+ and New Game++ and maybe even more modes. meaning if u beat the game the next time through will be HARDER. and the time after that. i wonder if that was a normal thing for Japanese players, to master this game and then need more of a challenge. cos just beating it normally is insane.

just now realizing medusa heads spawn there. you could possibly take out the armors and then farm the medusas for hearts and weapons.

of course if i tried that i would probably die shortly after getting up the stairs.

Ah, so armours do take damage when you attack them head on with the whip? It makes a misleading ping sound.

Yeah iirc it's... six hits? Def does not require a special weapon.

Ok. Level one is iconic. That music. Those images. That mansion hallway with the red curtains. The way it slowly builds and new enemies appear. The jump scares from mermen leaping out of the water. The way you get the axe right before the bat, and it has a perfect arc to it. So great. This first level is basically all of Castlevania. You can even pretend the bat is Dracula and end it after here. Boss music is insane.

i love the brickwork in these games. cv3 did this the best in 8bit but pay attention to archways and brick windows and stuff. with the pixel art they had to be spare. so using only a few stray pixels here and there they make it look ancient and ruined.

the first screen of level 2 is incredibly atmospheric. the red bricks worn away here and there to a grey foundation. or maybe it's normal bricks and there is a red glow over everything. the exposed brickwork and archways in level 2 are beautifully portrayed.

http://i.imgur.com/6kFUpIc.gifhttp://i.imgur.com/6kFUpIc.gifhttp://i.imgur.com/6kFUpIc.gif
really dig the theatrical lighting on the medusa heads.

wait those are the wrong ones.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_O8Z-NWKsR60/TJCih77PguI/AAAAAAAAADQ/uTW4PHK3lfk/s320/Castlevania_3.pngp

well they killed me once knocking me off the bottomless pit. there's a game mechanic you don't see often these days.

ok so now that i have the holy water i cant collect anything else, which is going to make going forward difficult. or at least i will have to consider which candles are easily avoidable and which are not.

oh yeah cheesed the medusa queen

protip: in the first area w the imps, you can glitch them out, if u walk forward and back carefully. if u scroll them to disappear in reverse correctly they will not respawn.

actually it may be that you scroll it right so the disappear and then tap left or continue at a slow weird pace that confuses the game

cool that they let u throw holy water on a skeleton from the top of some stairs

fuck. the bone pillar knocked me into a bottomless pit. twice actually. the second time i had picked up the time stopper and frozen time. it got unfrozen just in time for bone pillar to shoot me w fire :p

adam, dude, your attention to detail is really a pleasure. this whole game really jumps for me. i appreciate that there hasn’t been anywhere to really get lost on the game boards and i can just focus on mastering the jump & whip mechanisms. of course the holy water has been v key too. i’ll probably play this until I beat it and will continue off and on for the rest of my life? it beckoned me from bed last at around 12:30 and i totally gave in

Now stuck on this damn room. Is there a way to kill the armours using the whip?

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Ol1o7go2N8c/hqdefault.jpg

― jmm

I think the key here is to just keep things moving forward. You should hop the Medusas, but keep the armored guy at about a whips length when hitting him (I think this gives you better odds of neutralizing the axes he throws).

Re: the atmosphere and the art, the blocks and so on - one of the best things I've taken away from Jeremy Parrish is the observation that, versus the overwhelming majority of platforms in games, the ones in Castlevania all appear to be a natural or logical part of the space you're in. Nearly all of them are plausibly projecting forward from some supporting element in the background, with the ranks of pillars and vaults in the second level maybe being the most subtle but effective.

On the third stage (the one ending with the mummies):

The light blue background masonry and the orange foreground blocks match up. The castle’s outlines line up from screen to screen, as you can see in the wall that spans the vertical transition above. Gaps exist because that portion of the path has crumbled, with mossy and vines having grown over ancient divots in the background that correspond to holes in the footpath. The silhouettes of distant walls and parapets give the impression of a much larger structure than the critical path Simon traverses. Castlevania represents one of the first efforts to explore logical (or at least internally consistent) architectural design in a video game(.)

(...) Stage 09 consists of a lengthy bridge between two portions of the castle. Everything here is amazingly well-considered. The bridge spans multiple arches which have begun to decay with age. Through the arches, you can see distant portions of the castle and even the forest beyond. In fact, Stage 11 and beyond is entirely visible right here: You’ll soon travel through those wooded areas seen through the broken double-width archway, into the lower portion of the building and ultimately up into the tower to fight the final boss in the structure jutting from the main tower at an impossible angle. Of course, you don’t know that the first time you play the game, but the second time through you’ll marvel at the thought that went into such a seemingly incidental one-shot background detail.

In fact, it occurs to me between the medusa stage and the frankenstein monster, the ramping up of the difficulty is baked in by (among other devices), moving from environments where it's logical for there to be a lot of continuous floors to areas where the increasing gappiness of the environment - the principal hazard given Simon's propensity to get knocked back into pits - is similarly locked in conceptually with the environment seen in the art. So you go from a very stable, solidly-built part of the castle (as you ascend the dense masonry tower), through a more ruined, jumping-heavy portion on the ramparts (weathered, I suppose, by the elements?) from which you drop into the primeval cavern underneath, where you're clinging for dear life to that little raft gliding back and forth below the stalactites. With the axe-men stage you're back to civilization and solid ground, but the enemy pattern difficulty has ramped WAY up, so it comes down to the other skills you've been acquiring in the meantime.

When you think about how many games just had basically randomly theme-decorated but interchangeable levels --- this one's blue, this one's red, maybe the red one has fire enemies --- it's really something.

Cool, I was wondering about that - how much of this background actually represents other levels.

http://s.uvlist.net/l/y2005/1/432.jpg

I also think the selection of which music goes with which level is really good, moving from the relatively bright, adventurous "Vampire Killer" at the start, through the slightly tenser, more nervous "Stalker" and "Wicked Child," with the outright creepy "Walking on the Edge" not arriving until the sewers. "Heart of Fire," in the axe-men stage, could maybe work someplace else, but in my mind its basic shuffle kinda felt right as maybe capturing the backwards and forwards movements of the axe-men, while the weird portamento effect at a couple points suggests either the swoop of the Medusa heads or, I dunno, the increasing proximity to dark, reality-warping magic or something. The clock tower theme is the only one I have no strong associations with, probably because I've only ever played the damn stage once.

I think the key here is to just keep things moving forward. You should hop the Medusas, but keep the armored guy at about a whips length when hitting him (I think this gives you better odds of neutralizing the axes he throws).

Having the axe as a secondary is useful on this part; it only takes two axe hits to kill the armours if they land from above.

I made it through barely and then immediately was killed by a grim reaper.

grim reaper is insane. hardest NES boss ever? dodging those scythes is even more difficult if u attack in mid-jump cos u just fall like a rock.

good to know about the axe! the grim reaper completely manhandles me every single time!

IIRC it was all about the boomerang for me against the reaper, but I guess holy water is the preferred method?

Holy Water stuns most bosses.

gonna give this another run in a few minutes.

maybe all bosses, actually.

this extremism thing has been going on for a long time. very true. u mostly hear the same theory over and over about what they really want and what we can do to stop them. if people really knew the former maybe they could do something about the latter.

oops. wrong thread. lol

probably better here than the other way around

This is going to take a while.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5f/Ingmar_Bergman-The_Seventh_Seal-01.jpg

omg this is such a great idea for a thread!!! I want to join in next game!!! I wish I'd started one when I just played through Super Mario 64 last month :(

there's so much I wanted to talk abt w/ other ppl

y'all really are going to seduce me into buying a USB controller

I did p extensive research on USB controllers a few yrs ago and unless much has changed, it seemed like the de facto best bet was the *wired* Xbox 360 controller. It's cheapish, the buttons are great, and most importantly it's got well-placed analog joysticks which make playing N64 games a breeze. My only gripe is that with my weird stiff fingers, it's tricky to comfortably hit the L1/R1 bumpers and the L2/R2 buttons are squishy triggers

I was thinking about buying this guy - http://videogamesnewyork.com/pc-mac-nes-usb-controller/

damn made it to stage 10, underground, and then just lost my flow. kept getting knocked into the water. still played for 10 minutes on a single life. this game is harder than dark souls.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002YVD3KM?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00

this is what i got. its like $1.99 used. feels really close to an original NES controller too. there is a stiffness and quality of build factor to those controllers that Sega and other competitors could never match.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71jW9hmmHpL._SL1500_.jpg

sorry if huge. there is one going for $1.96 new!

expensive, but if you have a ps4 anyway, the controller works very well with emulators.

i've been using the one adamvania mentioned. it's great, works like a dream

I mentioned this before, but if you really want a retro controller, get the late-gen NES bone-shaped controller instead of the original square one. Feels a million times better in your hands.

http://www.amazon.com/Retro-Dogbone-Controller-Nintendo-Entertainment-System/dp/B0034ZU72E

Fuck, so close with the Reaper. I was able to kill him, but his last two scythes didn't die along with him.

I'm going in with multiple boomerangs and firing them off before he's even appeared. After that it's chaos.

http://cdn.wikimg.net/strategywiki/images/3/33/Castlevania_Skeleton_Red.png

These red skeletons are interesting to me. They're not super tough enemies: they can't be killed, but they're slow. The crucial thing is where they're placed, often above or below staircases in such a way that you can't easily pop your head up to the next floor, or so that you have to race to reach the bottom of a staircase before the skeleton gets to that spot. The designers were aware of how awkward the game's stair mechanics are and built these little challenges around it.

Alright, progress! I'm now on to dying a lot in the clock tower. The fleamen have learned to climb walls.

while I love the design of this game, it's just a tad too difficult to be 'enjoyable' imo

Finished! The game's one act of mercy was to make Dracula's chamber a continue point. I was all set to be replaying the clock tower endlessly.

Once you get the hang of Drac's first form it's fairly mechanical. On the second form I used the same holy water method as abanana. I'll try it with the cross too.

This game was a blast. Definitely a new favourite.

finally beat Grim Reaper, shout out to Mikeyspike200 for describing how to beat him with holy water, getting totally crushed in the next level

er, Mikeyspikey200

I tried a single credit run just now and made it as far as the reaper. I could have beaten him too dammit.

New game: ILX Plays: Mike Tyson's Punchout for the NES

i did end up beating this but i used an unconscionable amount of saves

playing castlevanja tonight

uncle vania

It's strange that there hasn't been a new game in the Castlevania franchise since 2014. You'd think what with the popularity of the Netflix show, and things like Bloodborne/Lies Of P, there'd be scope to do something quite ambitious, possibly like an open world RPG but in the Western anime style of the show. I'd play it