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Playing Castlevania II: Simon's Quest for NES, extracted from the Steam version of Castlevania Anniversary Collection (see entry 1570) and played in Mesen (see entry 1536).
I used this Steam version ROM extraction guide to access the ROMs: https://github.com/farmerbb/RED-Project/wiki/Castlevania-Anniversary-Collection
What's funny is, going to the left from the first town was way worse. : P
Castlevania (see entry 1571) starts you in a castle. You stay in the castle. You castle it up. This game starts you in a town. Then you're in a swamp or some caves or maybe a forest thing. And two other identical towns, except when night falls--whenever--it gets a nice creepy purple palette and Lady Frankensteins are all over, which is sort of neat but also real boring because you can't even go to the creepy Church Man to insta-rest-heal. But I kept hitting dead ends in the swamps and things and there were annoying respawning floating eyeballs. Monsters take twice as many hits at night, maybe? It's like non-linear and you have to talk to side-scrolling townsfolk. And monsters flash when you hit them. My whip didn't upgrade and I didn't find any subweapons. Oh I guess I could have bought some holy water in a shop but I didn't know if that was a good deal and anyway some jerk had told me I had to buy a white crystal. It sounded like a set-up but I did it, then a guy like two towns later that I randomly talked to traded it for a blue crystal without waiting for confirmation from me. Now we're action RPGin'! Hey man, wanna blue crys? No idea what the crystals are for. Most buildings you can enter in towns are empty. The skeleton sprites are ripped from the first game but animate less and do less, and the other stuff generally looks worse. Oh and it tries to scroll smoothly up and down instead of screen by screen like the prequel but there's tons of slowdown like mid-jump. I bailed.
The music was nice though. |
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| | | Has red hit flashes (bats & brides in night town in video for instance).
Probably should have used -16 overscan to cut off occasional black borders / garbage screen areas. |
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