Hey good lookin’

Yep, sounds like Castlevania. That was my first impression after loading up the demo of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Wow, this game is beautiful, was my next thought. The familiar control scheme fit like a glove. When was the last Igavania? Order of Ecclesia? Eep, I remember barely being out of college when that game released. Too damn long in other words. Tychus Findlay would say: “Hell, it’s about time.” Sorry, random Starcraft II reference.

 I am more excited for Bloodstained than I have been for any game in a long time and, if the demo is anything to judge by, that excitement is well warranted.

Going back to first impressions, while Bloodstained played and sounded just like I would think it should, it’s really the stunning art direction and the very competent application of said art direction that were the real show stoppers. Everything looks great, from the environments to the monsters, and for a side scrolling game it has a surprising amount of “this is a living, breathing world” feel to it.

I’m very interested to see how the story will unfold, although unfortunately story cutscenes and such weren’t a feature for this E3 version of the demo.

Some I think were somewhat dubious of a 2.5D Igavania. I imagine those fears are well put to rest now, although it was never a fear I shared. I’d been hoping for a long time for a 2.5D Castlevania in this style. Konami hasn’t delivered, but IGA is. It’s still in development of course, and I can’t say if the final product will meet my admittedly high expectations. Still, it’s lookin’ good.

8-bit retrospective: 8 Eyes, the Castlevania clone that could have been good

Even if you have been gaming since the early 90s, I’d be a little surprised if you knew what game I was talking about when I say 8 Eyes. Somehow or another, child me ended up getting it for my NES collection. There are a lot of interesting and noteworthy things to say about 8 Eyes. Obviously the developers were looking at Castlevania as a template for their own game. Some factors of this include: the perspective of the action, the look of the protagonist and most enemies, the way stairs both look and function, and in particular the prevalence of a near exact looking stone block in level design. I don’t bring this up as a negative, just as an obvious note.

8 Eyes also has some flair from the Mega Man series thrown in, as there is a lineup of eight castle stages that can be picked among in any order. Also like in Mega Man, there is an advantageous order to do them in. The game is no slouch copy and paste though. Levels are varied and interesting looking, and enemies likewise look detailed and are well animated – for NES standards obviously. Music is likewise a high note, with music that stands out and fits the locales it’s paired with, even if sometimes stereotypically. It’s not really anything I’d seek out just to listen to it again, but it was memorable.

So we have a game taking cues from two popular side-scrolling action titles. It both looks and sounds good for its time. Why is this retrospective about to take a more downward tone? Despite its merits, 8 Eyes is punishingly difficult.

Game balance and difficulty were areas I think a lot of developers were really struggling with in the NES era, and that’s very much the case with 8 Eyes. For starters, you only get a single life. One … single… life. For a game with eight stages plus a final level, most of which are quite long, grueling slogs through dangerous enemies, that’s pretty extreme. Once you beat a level you can get a password allowing you to pick things up with your progress intact, although that still means you both have to beat a level on one life and necessitates entering a long password. Password-based saving isn’t around anymore for several good reasons, not least of which is that nobody wants to deal with that crap.

Next up on the extreme difficulty train: attacking. Whereas Castlevania provided a lengthy whip to fight enemies from a relatively safe distance, 8 Eyes offers no such amenity. You get a sword and its range is quite short. This requires some fancy footwork to adequately defeat enemies while avoiding damage, so lots of back and forth with hitting and retreating. Some adversaries are quite mobile too or possess a long-reaching attack, presenting significant challenges. Once you reach a boss though, if you do, care and precision tends to go out the window. The boss fights are wars of attrition: you need to do as much damage as fast as possible because these opponents are fast and unpredictable.

Assuming you are up to the challenge of triumphing over every obstacle in a single stage, you pretty much need to make use of an assortment of hidden items. These are randomly hidden, often in the middle of a wall with no clues. To help access the items, you have an animal friend. The bird is actually a pretty unique gameplay mechanic for its time. Mostly you’ll want to keep the bird perched on your character’s shoulder. At the right times though, he can be launched off to fly around and then be commanded to attack enemies or nab hidden items. The attacking part would be a lot more useful if he weren’t so fragile, hence it usually being a good idea to keep him benched.

In addition to all the things I’ve already mentioned, two levels are also particularly fiendish, requiring a very specific set of movements to proceed, naturally without any good clues.

If you beat 8 Eyes back in the day, that would be quite the accomplishment indeed. I managed it a few years ago, but only after watching a YouTube playthrough by a gamer who knew the game very well. 8 Eyes is an odd, easily overlooked page of gaming history. I wouldn’t recommend playing it and it doesn’t even have any contemporary ports to make playing it easily accessible. Giving it a watch may be interesting though. The sad part about 8 Eyes is there was a good amount of work put into the game, and with only a few easy changes it could have been much better.

Review: A new Castlevania approaches... in 3D!

So I guess I'm going to talk about another game for the Nintendo 3DS, that game being Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - Mirror of Fate this week. A few times now I think I've mentioned that Castlevania is among my favorite series. However, I don't feel that completely includes the Lords of Shadow games, which are practically a different beast altogether. Lords of Shadow is a reboot essentially, although I like to think of it more as a project of some new hands trying to get in and do their own thing and then get out before they overstay their welcome.

All that said however, I enjoyed the first Lords of Shadow game and I enjoyed this one as well. Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation review of the game on The Escapist heavily compared this game to God of War and at one point jokingly calls it 'God of War: Germanic Mythology Edition'. Honestly, that's relatively accurate. It does feel like God of War in many ways. While there are token Castlevania elements like a guy whose last name is Belmont and many of the standard vampire hunter weapons, a significant portion of the game felt like it had no business being named Castlevania.

I mention this because Mirror of Fate feels significantly more like a Castlevania game. There are familiar faces like Simon Belmont and Alucard (not the same versions of them but still), and now the entirety of the game takes place in and around Dracula's castle. That's actually a pretty bad explanation of how it has the good old Castlevania feel, but maybe it will become clearer as I go along. You explore the areas of the game in a method similar to the 'Metroidvania' titles like Symphony of the Night. Unfortunately, although there are many side paths and little nooks tucked away, most of the areas of the game are very linear. It's more like if a series entry such as Super Castlevania IV were mapped out but the game allowed you to backtrack to earlier areas, with the added utility of things like unlocking shortcuts and the rare teleporter. Also unfortunately, the most interesting things you come across in the trouble spent exploring and backtracking are mostly boring old upgrades to your maximum life, magic and item capacity.

What didn't change from the first Lords of Shadow was the combat, which I didn't really mind. Granted the combat is now in a side-scrolling environment and you don't need to worry about enemies coming at you from every direction, but it still has the same combo-able feel and it's pretty fun to just wale on things. Attacks chain together fluidly, they feel like they have some real power to them, and it's easy to go into and out of aerial techniques. I didn't find the game very challenging overall and most enemies are easy to deal with. Keeping an eye open for a white glow (signaling an un-blockable attack that typically also cannot be interrupted) and a finger over the dodge button is enough to casually deflect most of the danger the typical enemy offers. Bosses are another story as their massive amount of life and powerful attacks mean memorizing their attacks and looking for openings is the way to go usually. The frequency of checkpoints does offset the difficulty the bosses offer by a lot though.

The look of the game is one of its' strengths I think. Plenty of interesting architecture, varied areas and relatively detailed environments along with some nice enemy design all go toward this strength. Castlevania games are generally known for looking and sounding pretty good, but I didn't think as highly of Mirror of Fate's music. I'm not saying it was bad, but I found almost instantly forgettable. Sound effects were better.

Mirror of Fate's story is relatively interesting, although difficult to talk about without revealing certain things. You play Simon Belmont, Trevor Belmont and Alucard, taking different paths through the castle and dealing with different challenges. After the rather unique ending of Lords of Shadow, I went into this game expecting something similar. In this I was disappointed. I saw the story's big twist coming a mile away. Other parts like the explanation of the masked creature and the titular Mirror of Fate itself fell completely flat for me.

I have my complaints with the game, but I will say I enjoyed it for what it is. I wouldn't be against seeing another game like it. However, it in no way replaces the 'Metroidvania' games of the series. These offer a certain something that Mirror of Fate just can't.

My rating: 7.5/10

Update on this blog thing

So it has been about a month and a half since I started 8-bit Smirk. I think it's been working out alright, although it feels like there's always so much I have to do and so much else I want to do. That's pretty typical though. I started the blog to essentially be a journal of sorts and in this respect it's been a success. Not so very long ago I had a friend tell me he wanted to start cutting gaming out of his life to focus on other pursuits, not least of all the noble goal of improving himself to be a more well rounded and knowledgeable person. I respect that decision, but it's not one I would ever see myself making. If this makes sense, removing gaming from my life would amount of removing much of me from myself. Gaming is more than just a hobby, it's one of the few things I have passion for and gives me motivation to deal with the things I don't want to be bothered with. More than that though, it is one of the things that defines me as a person. I am a writer, I am an outsider, and I am a gamer. For a more general defense of gaming, refer to my introductory post.

It often feels like there are so many games and so little time, especially when I think of big series I've yet to really explore like Mass Effect and Persona, and when it comes to writing this blog it seems like I'm always getting behind on what I'd like to get posted. That has particularly been the case for about a month now due to some major disruptions in my life. I had to change apartments and I have also been undergoing what I would term epic computer problems. Due to these things I was a bit scattered in what I felt like playing while my Diablo project fell by the wayside.

Recently I started a third character, a mage, in the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. While I liked playing from a new perspective, the character has been the most difficult to play as and so far the least enjoyable. I've played and beaten all the main Elder Scrolls games and I've never really enjoyed magic-using characters in the series, so it's nothing new for me. Eventually I want to do a whole writeup on Skyrim and really get into some details, but that time is not now. Perhaps sometime around when the first DLC, Dawnguard, is released. I will say at this time that the game will be a strong contender for one of my top favorite games ever, although that's a decision for after some time has passed.

When I am out and about on the weekend I typically like to keep a pick up and play sort of game with me, and for the last couple weeks that game has been Castlevania: Circle of the Moon in my trusty Game Boy Advance SP. Sometime I'd like to really write on the Castlevania series, which has many games that rank highly with me. Circle of the Moon is among this number and it's position has considerably improved over time. When it came out alongside the Game Boy Advance, the system it was designed for, played it in a way that was just barely visible. Every other system afterward that could play GBA games has been an improvement on visibility and this has helped the game greatly. It also has great replayability: I'm currently toward the end of my fourth playthrough. How the different unlocked modes switch up how the game plays offers some good variety. The player character, Nathan Graves, is also among my favorites of the series' vampire hunters. He has a great name, great look and he pretty much ignores the game's annoying rival character who eventually just ends up embarrassing himself basically. Anyway, great game.

I mentioned my Diablo project a bit ago, which I will be resuming where I left off at now that I have a computer I can use for it. First I will be completing Diablo 2, which I stopped playing shortly after the end of Act I when the epic problems began more than a month ago, and write a similar overview of my thoughts on it that I did for the first game. Don't worry, it'll be quite a bit more positive. The idea of the project was I fully go through D1 and D2 before finally getting to Diablo III. I'd intended to be ready for this eagerly anticipated game when it was released May 15, not a month later, but as Philip J. Fry once said: time makes fools of us all.

Easter memories of Castlevania and monsters

Happy belated Easter. In my previous post I mentioned I would be posting a "somewhat amusing gaming-related anecdote from my childhood" and I now intend to do so. I'll eventually be talking about a game from one of my all-time favorite video game series, Castlevania.

The story goes back to the year 1991 (I think) and I was 7 years old at the time. Easter came around again as it had before. I enjoyed coloring eggs, getting some candy and maybe some type of special treat, but as far as holidays went I don't think it was ever as important to me as Halloween or Christmas. As far as I'm concerned, the Easter I'm thinking of was by far the best and I owe it to my parents (or the Easter Bunny). That year my parents had some surprises for me in colored plastic eggs and then hid the eggs all over the house. Now it could have been candy in those eggs and even that would have been great, but by some amazing inspiration my parents decided to fill the eggs with little Monster in my Pocket toys.

You might need to have also been a boy around the same time to know what I'm talking about, but they were these little rubber toys of classic monsters. I think they changed and became more complex as the franchise continued, but the ones in the eggs were from the first series of toys. Small, approximately 1 inch tall, and one solid color (awesomely red, nearly lime, slightly lighter purple than I would prefer, and blatantly yellow is how I would now describe the original colors they came in). I loved them then and even now I still think they're pretty cool when it comes to toys. There was something very memorable about exploring the house I'd always lived in on my own scavenger hunt, like everything was transformed into something more special than its everyday form. Simply speaking, it was a magical experience for a dorky child.

I scoured every nook of the house I could think of to come up with what in my mind was a great collection of the tiny monsters (probably about 12 or maybe less, but I certainly would later get more at stores). What made all this even more memorable was my video game interest at the time happened to be Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse. I've come again to a point where my memory is a bit hazy, because I can't recall if I also received the game as some type of Easter gift, received it sometime earlier or if I just was currently renting the game from Blockbuster while I had extra time off school. Regardless, I was into the game at the time and it worked very well to have a bunch of tiny monsters not unlike the mostly single color enemies in the game. The natural progression was to play with the Monster in my Pocket toys as if they were Dracula and his creatures, which I indeed remember doing. I used an old He-man play set of Castle Grayskull, acquired at a yard sale or flea market sometime previously, as Dracula's castle. Not sure what I used for a Belmont, but I'm sure I figured something out. Maybe monsters and such may not sound holiday appropriate, but to a 7-year-old boy it was the best Easter ever.

Castlevania is indeed one of my favorite video game series. I'll admit even though I was psyched about Castlevania III back in 1991, it doesn't rank particularly high with me now compared to other entries. Yes, it was good, and every now and then I get the urge to go back and play it (an urge I've resisted the last several times it crept up). It doesn't have quite as much nostalgia for me as the first two entries and I enjoyed many of the ones that came after it more. For a series sometimes known for its difficult, the third may well be either the hardest or a close second (not counting two obscure remakes of the first game that never made it to the U.S.). When I'm in the mood for Castlevania again, I'd diffidently like to go into more detail on the series.

There was actually a Monster in my Pocket video game for the NES and it was made by Konami, the creator of the Castlevania series. I never owned it, though I did play it once upon a time, but I don't have any thoughts to share. Just wanted to mention it because it'd be remiss not to given the content of this post.

Some content in this post is being used under the fair use exception of copyright law. Monster in my Pocket is copyright of Matchbox. Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse is copyright of Konami.