Castlevania Miscellanies

Sinful · Post by **Sinful** » Thu Dec 01, 2016 3:23 pm

Yeah, but being a sucker also means you support these outrages prices. For a crap game, no less.

Sumez · Post by **Sumez** » Thu Dec 01, 2016 3:27 pm

How is £10 outrageous?

Skykid · Post by **Skykid** » Thu Dec 01, 2016 4:40 pm

I think you may be overinflating its awfulness. It's pretty dull by CV standards, but not completely awful by GB platforming standards.

It's also worth a tenner - I just probably wouldn't pay today's prices for it in the event it wasn't in the collection.

copy-paster · Post by **copy-paster** » Sun Dec 04, 2016 8:32 am

Got a Rondo 1cc! (Upper route)

I personally don't think this game is easy as people say (the frequent extends, boss tactic demo, item crash, infinite continues, saves instead password is what makes the game "easy") maybe the difficulty is on par with SCIV imo.

Some sections are really punishing like Dullahan, Death (both are three times harder than in XX) and Shaft fight. Dracula is just pathetic, the pattern is same as he used in original game/SOTN prologue. Of course I want to play it again and clear the alternate route, as well as rescue all maidens.

Overall one of the best traditional CVs. I like it as much as bloodlines, x68k, SCIV. cv1, cv3/densetsu, etc..

Sinful · Post by **Sinful** » Sun Dec 04, 2016 2:07 pm

Going against popular opinion, but Rondo for PCE is one of my least fave classic Castlevania games.

Squire Grooktook · Post by **Squire Grooktook** » Sun Dec 04, 2016 2:16 pm

I'd say Rondo is kinda slightly harder than CV4. The actual challenge level is higher at the end, but CV4 can wear down your nerves with its length.

Sinful · Post by **Sinful** » Sun Dec 04, 2016 5:20 pm

I'm currently watching Castles Done Quick marathon on Twitch; https://www.twitch.tv/komradekontroll

At Lament for PS2, and in this game it really sticks out how bad this SotN pretty boy art style fares in 3D. Really miss the Hammer horror film look of older Castlevania games.

Austin · Post by **Austin** » Mon Dec 05, 2016 3:41 am

In regards to Legends, yeah, it's pretty mundane. Anyone that feels like trying it, I highly suggest choosing the Light Mode option. The standard game is way too long for what it is, you'll be bored to tears halfway through the second stage.

Interesting side note about this one though, it does seem to support the Super Game Boy at least. Nothing impressive, but if you're going to play it, that's probably the best way to do it.

copy-paster wrote:Some sections are really punishing like Dullahan, Death (both are three times harder than in XX) and Shaft fight. Dracula is just pathetic, the pattern is same as he used in original game/SOTN prologue. Of course I want to play it again and clear the alternate route, as well as rescue all maidens.

You just need to play it more. From the perspective of a first play, yeah, you might be right. But, with more experience on it, the more you realize how easy many sections are. It's just about figuring them out (Death for instance seems menacing when you first get to him, but it's an easy fight to deal with without taking damage once you get the hang of things, especially the second form).

Dracula himself supposedly has a much more difficult third form if you rescue all the maidens. It's been forever since I've done that so I can't chime in on it. If anyone knows more about this, I'm curious to hear about it.

BrianC · Post by **BrianC** » Mon Dec 05, 2016 4:14 am

Skykid wrote:
Sumez wrote:Legends is also still pretty cheap in Jap
Pointless to buy any other region anyway, JP has the nicest overall box/manual arrangement, and it's very humdrum in CV terms.

The JP version is also the only version of the game with battery save.

copy-paster · Post by **copy-paster** » Mon Dec 05, 2016 9:47 am

Austin wrote:You just need to play it more. From the perspective of a first play, yeah, you might be right. But, with more experience on it, the more you realize how easy many sections are. It's just about figuring them out (Death for instance seems menacing when you first get to him, but it's an easy fight to deal with without taking damage once you get the hang of things, especially the second form).

You're right! This game is all about trial and error (in a good terms), during my first few runs I just can't figure how to beat the st2 boss, yet I don't use boss tactic demo. As for Death, yeah he's easy to beat once you get cross but it's still challenging because he's thrown amount of sickles onscreen.

Dracula himself supposedly has a much more difficult third form if you rescue all the maidens. It's been forever since I've done that so I can't chime in on it. If anyone knows more about this, I'm curious to hear about it.

Rondo's Dracula has a three forms? Unless you talked the PSP remake.

Austin · Post by **Austin** » Mon Dec 05, 2016 9:49 am

copy-paster wrote:Rondo's Dracula has a three forms? Unless you talked the PSP remake.

Ah, crap.. That might be what I was thinking about. I did just play through that one recently so I've still got it on my mind.

e_tank · Post by **e_tank** » Wed Dec 07, 2016 11:59 pm

Sinful wrote:
e_tank wrote:i'm gonna be playing this port a lot more over the coming days, so if ppl are interested in other differences i think i've found i might start listing them.
I'm interested in a list of differences.

i've been busy and haven't been able to get around to this yet, tho at this point i'm not sure if it's even worth it. i've played enough of the game to know with near certainty that the game isn't a direct from source code port, it's a recreation from the ground up. everything, nearly every single detail of the game is slightly off. every enemy and boss has something that's different, be it a spawn point, pattern, point of vulnerability, you name it, there's simply too much to list or even look at. here's a few ex's ottomh:

- sub weapons can break walls to expose hidden items
- hit boxes are altered, both player vs entity and player vs environment. ex's: your player character can walk up farther to a ledge w/o falling off in the x68k version. the debris thrown at you by she-wolf has a slightly larger hit boxes on psx (not 100% on this last one yet, but it's certainly a bit harder to dodge here)
- the trajectory of debris thrown at you by she-wolf is altered
- she-wolf can no longer be hit while grabbing parts of the clock tower to throw at you
- the axe armors can no longer be one hit killed from behind by sub weapons like the throwing axe
- the one-up in the church on the last level has different requirements for activating (you can't be kneeling, you must press nothing)
- the dolls point of activation is closer to your player and the actual camera viewport, they pretty much never start to attack before they're completely visible on screen.
... and the list could just keep going on and on and on.

castlevania chronicles is a truly awful port of the x68k original, but i still stand by my orig statement that it's not a bad game, at least not on its own. it's certainly not as polished as the original, it's missing a lot of little touches like better animation when walking on stairs, animation on the health bar when you get hit, boss animations, etc. but most of the other non-superficial changes one could easily adjust to given some time. just don't expect strats you've learned on one to translated 1-1 to the other. also, if you go from the x68k to psx version be prepared to fall off ledges, a lot.

if you have a choice you're better off with the x68k version, and since it works well enough in mame there's really no reason for most ppl here not to. just make sure you find/use a non altered dump of the game, as stated before in this thread some floating around are set on easy with one hit doing just one bar of damage for the entire game, instead of it being 2 on level 1, 3 on level 2, and 4 for the rest of the game.

CStarFlare · Post by **CStarFlare** » Thu Dec 08, 2016 8:41 am

Very informative post. Would be fantastic to see that information (or an even more complete list) added to something like TCRF for preservation though obviously that's dependent on someone with appropriate knowledge taking the time.

Sumez · Post by **Sumez** » Thu Dec 08, 2016 9:17 am

Thanks for the details! Really bummed out about the PS1 version now. It's weird that it turned out like that, considering how solid the PS1 port of Ghouls 'n Ghosts is. That would have me imagine that porting something from a 68K CPU is really easy, but apparently it's not so, if they had to rebuild it from the ground up.
(edit: apparantly PS1 is RISC based. That just makes Capcom's work on GnG really impressive)

There's no way I'm gonna get the x68k version though. I'm not gonna buy a huge Japanese home computer for just that game, and the game itself is super expensive. Too bad really.
I'm gonna just play the PS1 game and try to be happy about it :3

e_tank · Post by **e_tank** » Thu Dec 08, 2016 11:49 am

CStarFlare wrote:Very informative post. Would be fantastic to see that information (or an even more complete list) added to something like TCRF for preservation though obviously that's dependent on someone with appropriate knowledge taking the time.

i just looked up the game on TCRF and apparently there are quite a few little diffs between the us and jp versions of chronicles, keep in mind i'm playing on the jp ver so idk how much of these issues i've listed may or may not be present in the us version.

Sumez wrote:Thanks for the details! Really bummed out about the PS1 version now. It's weird that it turned out like that, considering how solid the PS1 port of Ghouls 'n Ghosts is. That would have me imagine that porting something from a 68K CPU is really easy, but apparently it's not so, if they had to rebuild it from the ground up.
(edit: apparantly PS1 is RISC based. That just makes Capcom's work on GnG really impressive)

i must stress i'm speaking casually / sort of off the record here, i can't say for certain they didn't base the port on the orig source code for the game, it's an educated guess based on 3 factors:

1. first and foremost, to me it's the only logical explanation as to how they could've gotten so many of the (mostly) little details wrong that i've noticed so far.
2. the orig game was programmed by just 2 ppl, the port lists 5 programmers in the credits.
3. from what i've read over the years from interviews with devs and other ppl in the know, game studios (jp ones in particular) were/are notoriously bad at preserving their games and even worse the source code to said games. irem lost the source for r-type 3. sega lost the source code for panzer dragoon saga. capcom lost the source for the gb rockman's. hell, nintendo grabs roms off the internet for their vc releases. and konami, the dev studio in question here, lost the source code for the final versions of sh2 and sh3, and keep in mind that this was at a time when they should've known better and had their shit together, who knows what it was like for them in the 90's.

based on these points imo it's certainly reasonable to assume they either didn't have the source code (likely) or perhaps it was so cumbersome that they decided it would require less effort to start from scratch, or at least from one of their in house game engine templates (for instance, i seem to recall some interview with koji igarashi where he stated that sotn was built using one of these templates).

confirmation of this statement would of course require some level of disassembly between both versions, locating key variables and game logic and then comparing to see if it's roughly the same or not. i'm no expert in this area so i can only speak for myself, but even with access to good tools this would require a fairly large amount of time and dedicated effort to do.

Sumez wrote:There's no way I'm gonna get the x68k version though. I'm not gonna buy a huge Japanese home computer for just that game, and the game itself is super expensive. Too bad really.

why not emulation?

Sumez wrote:I'm gonna just play the PS1 game and try to be happy about it :3

don't worry, you'll have a good time, as i said it's still a good game. i'm just saying accuracy wise, like the amount of changes i have to make to how i play and the threats i need to be aware of between versions, this is what makes me say it's bad. there's no real big issues that make me say "fuck this game", it's more like death from a million paper cuts. for example, gng on the megadrive i consider to be a good port b/c i barely have to adjust how i play and what i need to be aware of between versions. really, as long as you pick one and stick to it you'll be fine. also, difficulty wise they're pretty close, tho psx version might be a smidge harder mostly due to things i've already mentioned in my last 2 posts. however, i've only played the first 2 loops on the psx so far so idk how long that may hold true.

BIL · Post by **BIL** » Thu Dec 08, 2016 1:38 pm

Nice detective work on those posts.

Post by **BulletMagnet** » Sat Dec 17, 2016 1:19 am

Interview with the Lecard Chronicles 2 team.

evil_ash_xero · Post by **evil_ash_xero** » Sun Dec 25, 2016 11:19 am

Anyone here play Simon's Quest with these two hacks?

http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/1032/
http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/912/

I was wondering if it solved all the game's problems. I know it can be pretty cryptic. Does the retranslation help?

Austin · Post by **Austin** » Mon Dec 26, 2016 1:52 am

Yeah, it helps.

evil_ash_xero · Post by **evil_ash_xero** » Mon Dec 26, 2016 2:38 am

Austin wrote:Yeah, it helps.

It seems like the game has a whole lot going for it, but some stupid issues. So, I'll go and check out the patched rom.

Shoryukev · Post by **Shoryukev** » Tue Dec 27, 2016 1:02 pm

Got my wii hooked up with component cables this weekend to a CRT, finally playing Rondo of Blood in 240p!!! The emulation is pretty good IMO, definitely helping me get my Turbografx/PC-Engine fix until I bite the financial bullet that is the Turbo Duo...LOL

On a side note my 3 year old daughter saw that I could select Maria, and from then on Rondo was her "princess castle game" lmao. Is it just me or does playing as Maria absolutely break the game? Being able to fire two birds at a time and the way they circle back ensures supreme celestial death for all foes that enter your vicinity. Between that and the double-jump it's almost like an easy mode, Richter is the only way to go.

Overall I'm enjoying the game. I also had CV Adventure Rebirth on my wii when I booted it up, though the first few levels were fairly boring and the graphics were a smeared mess in 480i (maybe it looks better in 480p, might have to hook it up to an LCD instead) so I didn't give it much of a chance. The music on the other hand was pretty awesome, I'm going to have to revisit it at some point for that alone.

GaijinPunch · Post by **GaijinPunch** » Tue Dec 27, 2016 1:15 pm

Shoryukev wrote:Got my wii hooked up with component cables this weekend to a CRT, finally playing Rondo of Blood in 240p!!! The emulation is pretty good IMO, definitely helping me get my Turbografx/PC-Engine fix until I bite the financial bullet that is the Turbo Duo...LOL

How did you pull this off? Is it a Euro Wii? I was under the impression the US one did not support 240p. I'm WAY out of the loop though.

Sumez · Post by **Sumez** » Tue Dec 27, 2016 1:51 pm

Shoryukev wrote:Is it just me or does playing as Maria absolutely break the game? Being able to fire two birds at a time and the way they circle back ensures supreme celestial death for all foes that enter your vicinity. Between that and the double-jump it's almost like an easy mode, Richter is the only way to go.

Maria -IS- easy mode. That's exactly the point. She's a bit of a joke, too.

Shoryukev · Post by **Shoryukev** » Tue Dec 27, 2016 1:53 pm

GaijinPunch wrote:How did you pull this off? Is it a Euro Wii? I was under the impression the US one did not support 240p. I'm WAY out of the loop though.

It's an american NTSC wii (a black one if that matters). All I did was set it to 480i in the menus and it worked like a charm. I searched just now and it seems that it is game specific, some games are emulated at 240p and some 480i...even for the same console (which is odd). My wii is not soft modded (yet), but it is my understanding that when you use homebrew to load your own emulators it is easy to unlock 240p for other games.

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=57691

Here is a couple pictures of Rondo vs Adventure Rebirth on my CRT. I could be wrong but I am getting the gap between scanlines and I don't notice any flicker so it seems to be 240p when playing Rondo, you can see Rebirth looks just awful on my display and is definitely interlaced LOL.

Spoiler

Sumez wrote:Maria -IS- easy mode. That's exactly the point. She's a bit of a joke, too.

Ahh so it was intentional then. It would have been kinda cool to include another maiden that had this same play-style, but with offsetting characteristics to make the difficulty equal to a regular playthrough.

BrianC · Post by **BrianC** » Tue Dec 27, 2016 2:45 pm

GaijinPunch wrote: How did you pull this off? Is it a Euro Wii? I was under the impression the US one did not support 240p. I'm WAY out of the loop though.

US Wii supports 240p, it's WiiU that dropped 240p support.

GaijinPunch · Post by **GaijinPunch** » Tue Dec 27, 2016 4:22 pm

Good to know... guess I was mistaken.
Alas... no CRT these days.

FinalBaton · Post by **FinalBaton** » Tue Dec 27, 2016 5:57 pm

GaijinPunch wrote: Alas... no CRT these days.

FinalBaton · Post by **FinalBaton** » Wed Dec 28, 2016 2:48 am

GP are you in Chicago as of now? And are you interested in picking up a crt?

Austin · Post by **Austin** » Wed Dec 28, 2016 6:18 am

Shoryukev wrote:On a side note my 3 year old daughter saw that I could select Maria, and from then on Rondo was her "princess castle game" lmao. Is it just me or does playing as Maria absolutely break the game? Being able to fire two birds at a time and the way they circle back ensures supreme celestial death for all foes that enter your vicinity. Between that and the double-jump it's almost like an easy mode, Richter is the only way to go.

Maria is certainly easier. Broken? Perhaps--I tend to look at it as a totally different gameplay style, not something I avoid because it's not "hard". She's just fun to wreck sh*t with.

SuperDeadite · Post by **SuperDeadite** » Wed Dec 28, 2016 7:38 am

Maria is broken, her special attack just destroys everything and it has no limits, you can spam it over and over. Fun though.

shmups.system11.org

Castlevania Miscellanies

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