Summary
Whip it good, this is an excellent action/adventure(?) game for the NES!
The Good
More of an action game, this is the game that made me as a kid, want to go out and buy a bullwhip. And I did, thats no joke. I was in love with this game from the time it was released in the coin-op version. It later became my first NES game I purchased.
You start out at the castle gates and work your way through the levels until you are finally at the top of the castle where the vampire is waiting. The levels all end with a mini-boss. Some pretty cool weapons can be found along the way including a stop watch that stops time. The mini-bosses are pretty fun to fight which were a big black bat, Medusa, Two Mummies, Frankenstein & Hunchback, The Grim Reaper and then the final boss is the Vampire. There might have been one more but they're pretty fun to kill.
The difficulty was enough to give you plenty of game play time, it took me awhile to be able to win the game. Pretty good "Translyvanian" kind of music, perfect for the haunted castle theme.
The Bad
Controlling your guy was pretty sluggish and difficult.
Everytime you get hit, you fly backwards which can be extremely annoying when you are standing on ledges fighting off enemies. Actually, it was annoying at any point in time.
There was also no way to save, one could argue the game wasn't long enough to need a save method. I think it might have been. There were continues though.
The Bottom Line
Some pretty sweet whip crackin' action, definitely one of the classics of the 8bit era and definitely my favorite series from Konami.
