Andy Marsolais

You might be asking yourself “why should I try some old video games just because Andy said I should?” Well I’ll tell you why, it’s because right now I’m typing this blog while wearing a power glove in my right hand and carrying a light gun in my left hand just in case any of you bitches decide to make a sudden movement. I do collect these games but for the most part I play ROM’s for 3 reasons.

#1. Dependability
#2. GOTTA HAVE’EM ALL!
#3. NES had a lot of games where it’s helpful to have a good turbo button which I will speak to in this first review.

About 7 years ago I dated a girl with awesome super nerd brothers who liked hiding out at home and working on computers so they gladly took my original xbox for a weekend to added a 250gb hd, emulators for Gameboy, Atari, Master system, Genesis, Nes, Snes, N64, Turbo graphix, every game made for them including Japanese, Euro, unreleased and a bunch of abilities like using your xbox controller to control fan speeds and switching colors on the power button for some unnecessary reason. At first I was more interested in being able to rent xbox games and save them to the console but slowly I began to discover games from my childhood.
One of the first games I played as an emulator was Castlevania 2 and I was shocked to find out how much more fun it was when I could look it up online instead of calling some guy at the Nintendo Hotline which I can only assume was a game tester on break.

Game: Castlevania 2 Simon's Quest
Pre-Internet Rating: 5/10
Post-Internet Rating: 8/10
Fun Factor: 8/10 Super Mario 3 Bear Suits
Walkthrough used: http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Castlev...#Town_of_Aldra

Castlevania 2 was one of those games that had great success the first time but instead of giving us another one they had the balls to try something completely different. In the 2^nd game creators tried to add some light RPG elements to it like talking to villagers, picking your weapons and buying items from shops. Where they screwed up in this game is the writing, they added puzzle like parts to the game that are impossible to figure out because the clues either make no sense or there is no clue at all. Most of the problems have to do with the white, blue and red crystals which need to be selected at certain parts of the game but without a good explanation you have no way of knowing what to do. At some parts you need to drop a garlic clove to receive an item or for a man to appear, you have to have the right crystal selected and bow down at the edge of a lake for it to empty and reveal a passage but there are 2 parts of the game that stand out the most and we can only assume that these 2 parts made Nintendo a ton of money on their hotline.



The Boat Man

The point of the game is to beat all of the different castles which hold a piece of Dracula such as his rib, eye, heart and so on before facing Dracula himself in a castle which for some reason has no bad guys in it. All of these body parts become your weapons or answers to clues and in the case of the boatman, Draculas heart is important because even though the game is a sidescroller, the boatman has the ability to bring you into 2 completely different areas depending on whether or not you have Draculas heart selected (cue the Rambo style confusion). By not selecting the heart the Ferryman takes you to the Town of Aldra but if you had ESPN you would know that by selecting Draculas heart the Ferryman takes you somewhere special which ends up being Braham Mansion. Both locations are needed to finish the game but when I was a kid I had no clue how to figure that out.



The Tornado

Now this was ridiculous and was the reason why a lot of people including myself quit the game and wait for Draculas Curse to come out. This trick was just plain designed wrong, it made people think that they forgot to do something so we kept turning back trotting aimlessly through the game over and over again looking for a magical answer. During the game you will come to a point on the left where it seems you can’t go any farther, these are called Deborah’s Cliffs. The trick here is that you have to have the red crystal activated and now get this, I’m not even kidding. Kneel down about 2-3 blocks from the cliff, hold your position for 5-10 seconds and wait.....wait for it......a tornado appears from the right side of the screen, picks you up and takes you to the next part of the game. Yeah I know, I totally saw that coming too.

Conclusion

I enjoyed this game a lot and found it to be much more enjoyable now that I can look things up when I get lost. The main benefit to playing on the emulator is for the night time segments of the game that they introduced in Castlevania 2 and quickly got rid of due to complaints. At night shops aren’t open and the sequences are long which leaves you vulnerable to stronger enemies especially if you are low on health or haven’t been leveling up. The emulator allowed me to quickly skip through night sequences with the turbo button which I also use for games with too much text. I think you lose all experience points when you continue and after a while the easy enemies don't give you any experience at all so I don’t think many people even know that Castlevania 2 had a leveling system that stopped at level 6. Leveling your character didn’t seem to make him hit any harder but I did notice a drop in damage taken and you also get a larger health bar so that helps a lot. Something that is quite frustrating are the invisible blocks that you can fall through especially in a game where if you miss a ledge you lose a man, the trick here is to watch the bad guys movements, they typically only move forward so if he all of a sudden it makes a B-line in the other direction it probably means that he reached an invisible block so you need to jump over that part. When you get to the end you will get 1 of 3 possible endings depending on how fast you finished the game, I don’t know how many games did something like that back in the day but I thought it was a pretty cool feature. This game isn’t the easiest to find if you want to play the real thing but it isn’t super rare either, here in Canada you can pick it up for around $10-$15 and since it’s only going to go up in value I say pick it up and give it a try. ANDY APPROVED! UP TOP!

All 3 endings: