Castlevania

The Good
this is a video game legend. this game is what every platform game should be-entertaining, and enjoyable. you must journey through the counts castle, in a bid to make it to the tower-where the master of the house, the count, awaits you. i find this games level design and overall layout very enjoyable to watch, as the detailed backgrounds and locations really show what the programmers can do. the music is spot on, and you,ll be humming the music from this game long after you have switched the game off. i have completed this game many times, and the playability of this game mean it is worth a re-play every now and then.

The Bad
the difficulty level. it is very challenging to the trainee and master alike, and bosses such as the grim reaper and the count himself, will test all of your game playing skill. and if by some stroke of luck you survive the game, a second, tougher quest awaits you, and this is for a master, since enemies appear more, and they get in your way, like in stage 29, you must travel across the outskirts of the castle, whilst killing bats and hunchbacks!

The Bottom Line
if you want a game that gives you a challenge, and takes all of your skill to master, then look no further , since this masterpiece is great fun to play, and offers a memorable game play experience.

The Good
Ah, the game that kicked off the whole Castlevania franchise. This true classic remains as fun today and it was when it was first released.

I really liked the unlimited continues, and the fact that when you got to the final showdown with the Count, and failed, the game would start you just down the stairs from the Count's chamber. This is particularly advantageous since the first time I ever met the Count, it took me the better part of an entire day of trial and error to beat him.

I enjoy the fact that Castlevania plays like an encyclopedia of classic monsters and horror movie adversaries: You have your basic ghosts, ghouls, zombies, and bats. There are the fish monsters, Medusa heads, hunchbacks, Frankenstein monsters, and unkillable skeleton warriors. Even the Grim Reaper makes an appearance pulling sentry duty for the big Drac-man.

It's amazing to play this game and appreciate how well all of the best gameplay elements came together. Not only were the graphics top-tier, they were incredibly well-designed and consistent. At the start of the game, you scan Dracula's castle, including the tower that you must eventually hike up to. During level 3, you hike across a long bridge and you see the tower again in the background. I just think touches like that are genius in graphical design.

The tunes are all classic, which explains why they seem to be re-used in every subsequent Castlevania game. Hey, don't mess with success!

The Bad
Hunchbacks and floating Medusa heads. I did not like the hunchbacks or floating Medusa heads in this game. They had an alarming tendency to knock you around at the least opportune times.

Simon has also been rather difficult to control during his NES adventures. He's very slow and clunky, has no jump control, and his whip only goes in one direction (forward). At the very least, the designers took this into account and programmed the game's enemies and challenges accordingly.

And I was always frustrated that using the boomerang weapon depleted hard-earned heart points. The thing comes back to you, right? So you should receive some kind of reimbursement on your heart points. It only seems fair.

The Bottom Line
Experience the creepy glory of the original Castlevania.

The Good
Ahh, the 80's - when we wanted our games to HURT us. Make us bleed and sweat and cry and throw the controller across the room. No saving every five seconds, no health packs around every corner, a great early-generation platformer like CASTLEVANIA punished failure, clumsiness, inattentiveness, hell, they even punished SUCCESS by ratcheting up the difficulty yet another agonizing notch every step you progressed. And here you've got six levels of beautiful raggedy-Gothic 8-Bit visuals and palm-sweating jumps, capped by boss fights that demanded the best (at the time) in pattern recognition and twitch-timing. The continues, sending you to the beginning of the level, gave you just enough reason to hope you could learn from your mistakes and take that boss down this time. But you had to earn your way back.

The CASTLEVANIA franchise has always thrived on theatrical atmosphere, colorful monsters, and stirring musical themes - and that formula arrived here fully intact. Given how few colors and patterns the designers had to work with, the pacing and foreboding sense of place they managed to coax out of the old Famicom is a marvel, one that pointed the way towards a more mature breed of gaming.

The Bad
The clunky controls have been voluminously documented in more comprehensive forums than this, and the Medusas and Hunchbacks put up a good fight against the birds from NINJA GAIDEN as "Most Annoying 80's Game Scrub Monster Ever". But you could argue that without these agonies, the triumph wouldn't taste so sweet.

The Bottom Line
The doesn't-need-to-be-humble start to one of the greatest franchises in video games, and a masterful artifact of the time when platform games were designed to take on in one brutal sitting.