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 This image is about a thousand times more action-packed than the game itself Hello everybody! This is a short but hopefully sweet look at a short and rather bitter classic Game Boy title. Four videos, as in-depth as I can present this shallow-rear end game, and that's it. I have not experienced even a second of the sequel, but if you find my presentation here exciting enough, I guess I could be convinced to do Chillstopher II: Decidedly Unchill Edition.  This is only the fifth entry in the Castlevania franchise, and that is including an MSX and arcade title most people probably don't know. It was released shortly after Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, just half a year into the Game Boy's lifespan. Considering how early that is, I wouldn't call it a typical example of NES games being "downported" to the handheld, but maybe it was a trendsetter? Similarly to other games I've LP'd, like Mega Man I-V and Donkey Kong Land, Castlevania: The Adventure is also not a straight port, but a completely standalone game with new levels, systems and story. The latter is your typical "Dracula has arisen again, kill his rear end" Castlevania fare, with the only point of interest being that this game's point in the storyline has apparently the source of some confusion, because originally, both it and CVIII were supposed to be 100 years before CVI, but with different protagonists. To the best of my knowledge, it was later retconned to be in fact in-between the two, keeping with the tenuous theme of "Dracula comes back every 100 years". Though the sequel is set 15 years after Adventure, with the antagonist being...Dracula again. You know, whatever.  Meet Chillstopher Belmont.  He does not want to be in this game, but he has to because he is a Belmont. Granddad (?) Trevor failed to properly prepare this lazy bastard for his destiny of vampire hunting, I'm afraid. Chillstopher is the most relatable protagonist in video game history, because he is exactly as agile, motivated and strong as your average player would be in his situation. His only reprieve is that the game is mercifully short, but that is the only mercy he'll get.  I found and uploaded scans for you! It's important because it's 1989 and you had to read this to figure out what all the buttons do...not really. But check out those hot tips like "look up but also down you blind loving idiot". I'm also moderately sure that it's "Mud Man", and "Zeldo" is not a       I don't think these stages have official names, so I'm gonna invent some.     Bonus: All candles in the right to left part of Stage 3, including a useless hidden wallcandle.  It's pretty dope for how little there is, a definite high point of the game! The only track I don't like is the second level's BGM. Battle of the Holy [Stage 1] Darkness [Stage 2] Death Fair [Stage 3] Revenge [Stage 4] Kill! Kill! Kill! [Boss Theme] Gate to Hell [Final Boss Pt 1] Evil Devil [Final Boss Pt 2] The Legend of Dracula [Staff Roll] Reprise [The End] Extra Comments
Simply Simon fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Apr 23, 2018 |
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Apr 16, 2018 21:24
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Simply Simon posted:Castlevania This game, while not that great, has the honor of being what our friends from the US had on their Gameboy when they came to visit us in the early 90's. We loved it for the 5 minutes they let each of us play it.
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Apr 16, 2018 22:00
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How funny; Slowbeef just posted a video about the Wii remake on his channel the other day. Neat to finally see the original.
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Apr 16, 2018 22:17
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The remake is actually pretty good and could be considered the last classicvania game. I think it’d definitely be worth a look when this game’s all said and done!
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Apr 16, 2018 22:28
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Good lord, do I remember this game. Some guy in high school traded me this for an e-reader and the cards I had for it, mostly because he knew I liked Castlevania and I honestly didn't care about the E-Reader at all. I'm unsure which of us got the better end of the stick. I mean, I got an obscure bit of Castlevania history that controls like poo poo....but the other guy got an E-Reader, so who really lost in the end? I never got that far into it, so seeing it played out in full is going to be interesting.
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Apr 16, 2018 22:58
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Oh, Adventure. It's not a good game but somehow I've grown to like it. There is a patch out there that speeds up Christopher's walking considerably, but as the game was designed around moving so slow, it kind of breaks the thing. Oh yeah, and then they colorized it for one of the Konami GB Collections. The colors look pretty nice. That's a fairly neat version. Looking forward to the rest of this and hopefully you do Belmont's Revenge; it's underrated and actually quite good.
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Apr 17, 2018 01:53
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FreezingInferno posted:Oh, Adventure. It's not a good game but somehow I've grown to like it. There is a patch out there that speeds up Christopher's walking considerably, but as the game was designed around moving so slow, it kind of breaks the thing. I wanted to at least download and play Belmont's Revenge for my 3DS yesterday, but it seems only the first game is on Virtual Console. Maybe they used it as a test to gauge interest, but then for some reason nobody actually wanted to play it, haha. Well, I can't record off a 3DS anyway iykwim. ChaosArgate posted:The remake is actually pretty good and could be considered the last classicvania game. I think it’d definitely be worth a look when this game’s all said and done!
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Apr 17, 2018 09:27
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Simply Simon posted:Extra Comments You're probably thinking of Zeratanis' Castlevania series LP. He never submitted it for archiving for whatever reason.
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Apr 17, 2018 09:37
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DoubleNegative posted:You're probably thinking of Zeratanis' Castlevania series LP. He never submitted it for archiving for whatever reason.
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Apr 17, 2018 09:44
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Ugh this game. I could never beat stage 2, the controls are just so hideous. I also forgot how insulting the manual was.
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Apr 17, 2018 13:41
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Simply Simon posted:I just checked my options to obtain that game, and it's a little more complicated than a simple Game Boy game. My Wii is in another country and I wouldn't want to buy a capture card just for this anyway. Maybe I'll figure it out; first, let's finish this one, though. Sorry if I got your hopes up with the OP, I thought it'd be easier. You also cannot add more points to the Wii Shop Channel, at least in America, so buying it probably isn't an option anymore. I think it's supposed to run smooth enough in Dolphin though?
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Apr 17, 2018 14:34
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I never got to play the first Castlevania on my game boy, but I owned Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge. It was brutally hard but I loved it. I also own Castlevania IV on my SNES and enjoyed the poo poo out of it and still play it from time to time. Are you planning on doing more Castlevania LP's after you finish this one?
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Apr 17, 2018 15:25
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Choco1980 posted:Ugh this game. I could never beat stage 2, the controls are just so hideous. I also forgot how insulting the manual was. Guillermus posted:I never got to play the first Castlevania on my game boy, but I owned Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge. It was brutally hard but I loved it. I also own Castlevania IV on my SNES and enjoyed the poo poo out of it and still play it from time to time.  .
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Apr 17, 2018 16:27
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Pretty wild to see the sprites for the timer, score, and health bar overload the GameBoy and start to flicker. Also pretty wild to see the enemies and falling platforms scroll slightly out of sync with the background. Guess they didn't quite know their way around the hardware yet, huh?
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Apr 17, 2018 16:33
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Brilliant idea: go into a cave, destroy all sources of light with a whip. The game begins to show its teeth, read: it's blatantly unfair how much faster everything moves than Chillstopher does. Music: Darkness [Stage 2] Simply Simon fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 20:34
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This is the video game equivalent of keying your car.
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Apr 18, 2018 23:35
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Man, I sure love looping mazes that give you absolutely no indication of where you should go or even if you hosed up until you've wasted a lot of time.
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Apr 19, 2018 02:57
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I'm excited for the next stage as the outro implies that the unfair bullshit hasn't already started
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Apr 19, 2018 03:39
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That secret may have been super stupid but I can guarantee that if I found that as a kid I would have thought it was so cool and tell everyone during recess 
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Apr 19, 2018 04:10
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Well, they had their engine and they decided to make challenges in it. Hoo boy this is going to get interesting to watch. Platforming on the Gameboy is still kind of in its infancy at this point, isn't it?
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Apr 19, 2018 04:38
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During early gameboy development there basically were no programming tools. Everything was done in raw assembly without even properly knowing the limitations of the engine or how to optimize it. I mean look at the difference between Super Mario Land (which, wasn't quite as bad as this Castlevania game even though it was released a couple months earlier, but that can be explained by the fact that Mario Land was created by the folks who invented the Gameboy) and Wario Land 2 (technically a GBC game but it worked on an original Gameboy so the hardware limitations were comparable).
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Apr 19, 2018 07:02
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^^^^^Super Mario Land and Wario Land were fantastic platformers, they looked great considering the limitations of the gameboy. I think the last time I played Castlevania II was like 10 years ago and I remember it being brutal and unfair in some bits but my rose tinted glassed makes it look better. Castlevania is goddamn unfair and I look forward for your suffering while playing it. 
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Apr 19, 2018 08:48
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Carbon dioxide posted:During early gameboy development there basically were no programming tools. Everything was done in raw assembly without even properly knowing the limitations of the engine or how to optimize it. It is very obvious though that this game's code is held together with string and hope, which is nothing particularly unique to CV:TA of course (see Pokemon again in an actually less favorable comparison, probably), but it's rarely this openly visible. Someone on YT pointed out that there's some quite iffy looking frames when the eyeballs go down the stairs, and I took a closer look and yeah, turns out the eyeballs tend to just "get ahead of themselves" quite often during their rolling animation:  Which is btw not unique to this particular frame, they do that just whenever. Feel free to make up your own jokes about these trash-tier (if iconic, I guess) enemies having vastly better animation and debatably sprite than the loving main character. Anyway, sometimes things go a little more awry than just a pixel of split eyeball...  I guess you could chalk this up to an emulator glitch, but let's be honest here, it's very probably the game's fault. To address other comments: Craig K posted:I'm excited for the next stage as the outro implies that the unfair bullshit hasn't already started But, and this realization is what made me eventually able to push through this when playing it on hardware, you actually only have to deal with this level's challenge in relatively managable segments. The first three bats are nonsense, but then you get the Invincibility and can just ignore the next set (if one doesn't follow you...then you're hosed. It's not perfect okay). The Punaguchi corridors are terrible, but you get two small hearts after the first set of them, and, crucially, a guaranteed full heal after the second set. This means that no matter how much they frustrate you with their shitballs, if you don't outright die, you'll always be able to start fresh almost a third of the way through the stage. This eases a lot of tension. Similarly, once you know how to deal with the eyeballs, the bridge is a complete non-issue. The maze part is stupid, but over in three seconds if you know the right way, and you will...eventually. You will also eventually realize that going the loop, even though there's goodies inside, is not a good idea and you'll skip it and suddenly the level is easier because you took the Chillstopher route of least resistance. Then you "only" have to learn how to deal with Zeldos, but if you gently caress up enough at the end, you can actually practice that at the level's start after a Game Over plops you back there .This way, you can compartmentalize the challenge and basically convince yourself that this is, in fact, possible. It's also how I dealt with poo poo like the Mega Man 1 bossrush at the end: you have one healthbar for four bosses which otherwise would have an entire lifebar just for one of them. The solution is to split the challenge: you will get hit be Fire Man about three times, that means you absolutely have to not get hit by Ice Man, but that's not hard with his weakness. It would be ill-advised to get hit by Bomb Man, and you can't fast-track his fight because even with the weakness, he'll take seven shots, but he's first in line so you can actually get good at dodging him and just kill yourself if you gently caress up too much. Guts Man's then your final obstacle, but if you were diligent before in avoiding hits again Bomb and Fire Man as much as possible, you have one or even two hits of leeway, and it's not so bad. Of course, Wily himself is directly afterwards, but you get a checkpoint before the fight, so make sure to bring an extra life and you should be good. Doing Wily on a full health bar is...okay. Coming up with this plan is part of how the game wants to be played, and while this is not catering to modern tastes, it can still work and lead to a genuinely satisfying experience. The one problem, and that's a gigantic problem, is that the game does not save. That means for every attempt to come up with a consistent "stage 2 strategy", you have to beat the first level again, and that will get old fast. Then, whenever you want to come up with a stage 3 strategy, you have to execute the stage 2 strategy again, and at the end of the day, you can't make Chillstopher run any quicker. A small mercy, as I've alluded to above, is that a Game Over does not erase your progress completely, you start at the beginning of a stage, and there's unlimited continues. So theoretically, you could just leave your Gameboy running forever (if not for the batteries...) until you succeed. Fortunately, the 3DS gives you one save state which I put down solely at a level transition to emulate the continue situation on hardware, and this alleviates this particular problem quite nicely. Of course, that's a lot of words which ultimately can be dispelled by the completely true admittance that yes, this game does loving suck overall but I think it gives a little clearer insight into why I did find it fascinating to play and worth presenting.
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Apr 19, 2018 09:37
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Simply Simon posted:I think this stage's difficulty is mostly a psychological thing, there's actually a neat progression of skill you can have when playing this, and it's one of the times where I'd argue that oldschool-rear end game design can actually succeed in a way. We'll talk about that on video more in the final level, but here's the deal with this stage: it is a huge jump in difficulty from the first one, because in the first level, if you figure out how to deal with the birds, realistically only the bats at the very end will be trouble enemies, and you can consistently alpha strike those at least. The boss can almost be facetanked from full health, so you will probably succeed in the first level after a few deaths to the nonsense that is falling platform jumps in this engine. The second level however showers you with enemies that chip away at your health, so you feel completely overwhelmed, and for very correct reasons: Chillstopher's movement is hilariously unsuitable to the obstacles presented, as I said. You're right, every game is just a copy of Dark Souls, especially the games that came out 25 years before Dark Souls. Except the face tanking bosses at full health part.
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Apr 19, 2018 11:07
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I went from playing Castlevania II on GB, to Castlevania IV on SNES and many years after that, Aria of Sorrow on my GBA. I think that the main character always being so drat slow is a tradition of the series at least until de GBA games. On Mega Drive (or Genesis depending on region) one of the two characters available at least had some help for jumping. One thing it always bugged me was the respawn rate of enemies more when you get to newer entries where exploration is key.
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Apr 19, 2018 11:44
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Guillermus posted:I went from playing Castlevania II on GB, to Castlevania IV on SNES and many years after that, Aria of Sorrow on my GBA. I think that the main character always being so drat slow is a tradition of the series at least until de GBA games. On Mega Drive (or Genesis depending on region) one of the two characters available at least had some help for jumping. One thing it always bugged me was the respawn rate of enemies more when you get to newer entries where exploration is key. The shift was on PS1, in Symphony of the Night. That was the first game to do something more akin to Metroid and shift the gameplay from slow, but very fine tuned platforming, which is what Aria of Sorrow builds on. Everything before that is more like what we've got here with Castlevania: The Adventure, but this game is especially slow for Castlevania standards. The other games can feel pretty slow too, but you never get the sense that they're inept or anything, they're just power-strutting their way up to Drac. Chillstopher, on the other hand, is a lazy boy and is even slower than the rest of his clan because he just does not want to (read: the incredibly early game boy engine was too inept for the task).
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Apr 19, 2018 11:58
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I own Symphony of the Night on my 360 and I really should play it. Also I agree. The early GB games were all drat clunky but then they really stepped up the game in quality (and less screen tearing). Paperboy was loving insane as sometimes stuff hit you without being there due to the tearing.
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Apr 19, 2018 12:17
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FeyerbrandX posted:You're right, every game is just a copy of Dark Souls, especially the games that came out 25 years before Dark Souls. .Though there is a definite case to be made that people initially considered Dark Souls' design "old-school" not because of the memetic difficulty or as a backlash against the percieved handholdiness of other games around the time when it came out, but because it is very good at evoking this kind of basic game design philosophy: that you don't grind a character until he can overcome an obstacle, you grind yourself. The key difference between actual old-school games like this and Dark Souls is that while both demand this kind of playstyle and it can work for CV:TA but Chillstopher himself mostly hampers that, it works almost all the time in Dark Souls because it is meticulously crafted to do exactly this: work. This is not meant to read like CV:TA is completely unworkable; I'll show on video that it's perfectly possible to finish, after all. But I'd like to call back to many situations in both videos now where Chillstopher's slow climbing speed coupled with eyeballs falling down the rope out of nowhere means that the only solution the developers came up with is put an Invincibility in every room where this happens. A truly terrible game would not do this because technically, you can find the right timing, maybe. Ultimately, they want you to finish this game and designed it that way. But it's not elegant in any way. There is nothing clever about the way these sections are made, and that is the true contrast between this and good games with smart enemy placement.
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Apr 19, 2018 12:24
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As someone that owns the cart, I can confirm that the eyeballs aren't a product of emulator screwups, but have always been that way.
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Apr 19, 2018 13:01
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Did you ever get a chance to play the WiiWare remake of this game? *edit* Whoops, you said that you did in episode 2 TheJayOfSpade fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 14:55
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Thoroughly enjoying this in-depth analysis of garbage.
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Apr 19, 2018 21:03
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placid saviour posted:Thoroughly enjoying this in-depth analysis of garbage.
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Apr 19, 2018 23:12
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This reminds me of a pretty terrible GBC Action Man game I emulated once. It was surprisingly interesting due to having multiple paths for each level so you had to keep returning to old levels with new items to beat the paths you hadn't been to yet.
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Apr 20, 2018 03:34
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This is the video that defines the LP, I think. Music: Death Fair [Stage 3] You'll find out soon that the deaths in this video are anything but fair!
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Apr 20, 2018 15:56
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At around 10:00 in the video, there's a candle hidden in the wall where you can see some blinking in the bricks. I wonder if there was a way to approach that from the right or if it's another gently caress you trap that you try to get from the left.
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Apr 20, 2018 17:31
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Ramos posted:At around 10:00 in the video, there's a candle hidden in the wall where you can see some blinking in the bricks. I wonder if there was a way to approach that from the right or if it's another gently caress you trap that you try to get from the left. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpapVtWrK2w The wallcandle contains one single coin (you can see it as the terribly done death wall scrolls over it), and there is no way to get to it. You can even go back from the next screen, check it out in peace: the wall is impenetrable from the left. I tried falling from the right a bunch, but that only nets you death as well, unless you have to do a super well timed jump from the falling platform or something  .
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Apr 20, 2018 18:26
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I also got this game from the 3DS eShop Halloween sale for the hell of it and because I kinda like most CV games I've played, that was indeed the last stage I reached and that made me abandon the game, believe me, I tried, I memorized those brickwalls like the palm of my hand to learn when to jump from the ropes and still couldn't get the vertical scrolling half, any small mistake is death, it's like a game forcing you to play with speedrun strats from the get go.
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Apr 20, 2018 19:06
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Simply Simon posted:Good catch! You made me curious about this and the other candles, so I went back to investigate. Found out that you can absolutely get all the candles in that section if you do it almost perfectly; you have room for exactly one error (I commit that). Oh boy, a coin! It's interesting to know that you can get everything if you do the room perfectly, that reeks of no play testers other than the developers themselves who did it so many times, they were bound to be perfect at their own game. At least that's going off my own experience of trying to make games in middle school.
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Apr 20, 2018 19:44
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Wow this stage looks miserable. I was feeling morbidly curious about trying this one out, but after that mess, gently caress that noise.
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Apr 20, 2018 20:02
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ChaosArgate posted:Wow this stage looks miserable. I was feeling morbidly curious about trying this one out, but after that mess, gently caress that noise.
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Apr 20, 2018 20:18
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