Castlevania

The Good
Once you survive the not so pleasant first impressions, you have to realize there is nothing majorly wrong with it, and it's actually quite playable.

Technical wise, it works well. It has smooth scrolling and movements, good sprite action, manageable joystick controls, and simultaneous musics and sound effects. Also included a savegame feature which allows to record your progress onto the floppy at checkpoints - this comes very handy!

The Bad
The graphics and sound quality is the biggest let down of this conversion. The contrast is aching if you come to here straight after looking at the NES version. The graphics is very blocky. The music sounds raw. It could be so much better. They tried too hard to copy the Nintendo-ness instead of adapt it to the quirks of the system.

Other things to complain about like sprite flickering when the screen is crowded, 1 button joystick controls, respawning enemies, disk read/write is slow, no possibility to load the saved game unless you are at the title screen and such.

The difficulty can get sadistic! And falling back when getting hurt feature is a pain the every organ.

The Bottom Line
The original Castlevania still shines thru. The backgrounds are not dull, they make the place "alive" as much as they can. There is a good sense of progress. Beside bashing monsters, there is a looting system, upgrades to your whip, and different secondary weapons, which also may appear randomly from some slain enemies. The foes are memorable and each require different tactics. Extremely tight level design with some random hazards too. Secrets. Thrilling music. The intro and outro animation also stayed intact.