Still not finding a game I want to play seriously. Little Samson / Lickle has a lot of good points to it, and I'm quite interested by the bravura performance of the 360 character portraits. Lots of animation in this game and it doesn't interfere with play, unlike Moon Crystal. According to the
NES cart DB this didn't require any extra RAM.
Disknee's Little Mermaid turned out to be another Capcom game, and looks quite good for what it is too. Unfortunately this comes at the expense of literally floaty water physics, shell tossing, and very simple stage design (so far). It's no Ecco, at least.
The big one is Castlevania II.
This guy gets some of the right points. There are some neat points to the game (rush against time if you're playing for the best ending could be neat for extending play time) but mainly it's a sloppy game with mostly horrible map design and even worse enemy placement: Enemies patrolling two-block wide ledges immediately under you, or at the top of stairs, or very nearly at the screen edge as you cross over, or crowding all the space underneath a leap of faith in a mansion where you're already at a disadvantage due to having to recover from the drop and change direction -
wat, and additionally riddled with slowdown and other technical flaws. Unfortunately, the badness seems to extend to the community, which on the whole seems more welcoming of CV2 "because it's eerie and diff'rnt" (I.E. GOTH) than Bloodlines! Bad advice can be found on your
favorite game data dump sites, like this walkthrough's gem instruction to jump in order to send tarantula webs off in the wrong direction. Wrong way 'round, chief; doing that as a rule sacrifices Simon's mobility! Thankfully, Konami seems to have worked out most of the finer points in time for CV3...or maybe they didn't invite the core staff back.
Some notes on Cool Stuff (in addition to
these and
this):
- Wouldn't be terribly surprising if this is essentially the CV1 engine. Most everything was there already - instead of crouching in a particular point to spawn a treasure, here you crouch longer to play a little cutscene and trigger a map change. There are some definite mechanical changes, like Simon getting bounced when getting hit while on stairs (Dracula's Curse in action?), instead of just getting stunned in place as in CV1. I'm not going to look at that in detail yet.
-
First appearance of the standing "hit enemies behind you" whip (though it's possible to do this in Castlevania 1 via exploiting the turn-to-face on taking damage, see below).
- When you trigger a flickscreen boundary on the right screen edge (to cross over into the next section), it seems you can immediately hold Left to cancel the map change before rendering starts; the screen remains black. Load times seem roughly the same in either direction. When you move through a screen boundary on the left, the screen will draw. The reason for this is apparently that when Simon is put into the map from the right edge, he is a full block width from the edge; when he comes in from the left, he's only half a block away. If there are any screen boundaries that don't work this way, I'd expect they can be cancelled from drawing only if he only comes in half a block from the edge.
- Indoors, slimes aren't very dangerous because they constantly jump up and down from the ceiling.
Outdoors slimes are basically fleamen. I wouldn't be surprised if all that has changed is new sprites are drawn in place of the old ones; both enemies seem to animate at the same frenetic pace.
- Cycling from day to night shows some slightly amusing behavior: Surviving enemies take the same number of hits as they did at the previous time of day, but switch over to the new heart reward values (i.e., a Vrad Graveyard ghost surviving from day to night can drop a Big Heart after being one-shotted), while the screen itself can get cluttered up with different types of hearts that normally can't be seen together. Most fun, if you kill an enemy
just as the time of day shifts, you can watch Castlevania II's tiny, pathetic burning enemy sprite dance in place for a while.
- For all the careless placement of enemies in places that make you throw holy water for hours (especially fun when it's a Kagidume which soaks up tons of hits and keeps doubling back to you), it looks like they were very careful not to put any water pits in the towns directly under ledges. You should always be able to safely drop from a ledge in town by walking. Moving jumps are another matter, though; there's a nice spot in one of the towns where a missed jump up to another level will dunk Simon right into the drink.
-
You can run straight "through" werewolves; they hop when Simon gets close, and you can pass safely under. Can the jumping Mermen at the ferry ride ever hit Simon?
- If mirrored, the crumbling plaster design on the brick gates outside each Mansion would look a lot like a skull, Punisher-style (but the eye socket is repeated at the top, making the pattern harder to spot).
- In the first mansion to the right, the two illusionary floors have two-block-wide column designs immediately behind them.
- Horizontal
walls of spikes can be jumped on and used as ladders to get higher, so long as Simon doesn't go far into them. For some reason, getting hit by these juggles Simon to death almost instantly with multiple hits, instead of leaving him hurting over time like floor-bound ones. Do spikes on the ceiling hurt Simon in CV2?
- What the hell does the "Yoke" in "Yoke Roll" mean?
Incidentally, I've discovered two ways of
hurting an enemy behind you in Castlevania PRG1 (beyond luring enemies into hazards, of course):
- Throwing a weapon - holy water and knife can both achieve this. As best as I can guess, the critical point is to have the enemy reach you just as the frame of Simon's throwing hand forward is displayed. Stopwatch can't achieve this - throwing one causes Simon to execute a whip as normal, and the best you can do is stop an enemy from triggering damage at the limit, which seems to be six pixels into his idle standing sprite (i.e., only touching a line drawn just behind Simon's head; spare the face!).
- Timing the whip strike just so when / before (?) you get bumped - maybe there's a point where an attack is locked-in and getting hit doesn't cancel it.
-> Some enemies cause the vision of strange. A low bat attack can cancel the attack animation and sound, apparently vaporizing the enemy without cause and leaving a burning Holy Water pickup in its wake... (The window for the item drop - rng selection I guess - seems to be more than one frame, though you do need to kill the enemy at the right time.) Sometimes the cancelled attack actually extends further behind Simon than the enemy, i.e., it can sometimes hit a candle behind Simon, and sometimes just the enemy. Depending on exactly how close the enemy is, the effect looks rather different!
The standing whip destroying both high and low axes from the axe armor is interesting, since ducking makes Simon unable to hit a merman's fireball. Normally they pass harmlessly by overhead,
but if you try to whack them out of the air while crouched, Simon will get hit instead! Apparently a crouched whip actually makes Simon taller than just being in a crouch. On the plus side, hitting a merman's fireball gives you a chance of scoring the heart jackpot - 5 from the merman and an additional one from the fireball.