davyK wrote:

Just tried Shinobi III on MD courtesy of the old Everdrive. It's a bit tasty.

Best Shinobi for me, seems to get a bit overlooked.

Shadow Dancer is very underrated too, plays a lot more like the original Shinobi than Revenge and III.

Neither of the stadium collections seems to have Gunsmoke unfortunately.

Could go in the 101 things thread, but a pet peeve of mine is when retro compilations don't have a complete list of included games in the blurb on storefronts. There's a 30 game Midway one dirt cheap on XBL at the moment, but it does that 'including such classics as *list of a handful of games* and many more!' thing. I'll Google it at some point, still annoying though.

Not the Master System port though. I borrowed that as a kid, yikes. Hadn't had my MS long at that point but it was bad even when everything seemed amazing.

Check your PS Classic though, pretty sure I put a Capcom Collection on there that has Gun.Smoke on it.

New game anyone?  Another Megadrive one to put Davy's Everdrive through its paces, perhaps...

The Wii VC was ahead of its time in a way.  I'm sure it had far more choice than you can (officially) find elsewhere these days.

I bought a good twenty or so but Vigilante is the first one that springs to mind. I'd only played the MS port. Basic game, very enjoyable though.

You played Rocket Knight Adventures?

If not stop everything else you're doing and make that your no.1 priority.

Top Konami stuff and one of their best MD exclusives.

Yeah, that's on my MD list of games I need to play along with Ristar.

Rocket Knight Adventures would probably be my pick for Konami's best MD game. I've got the XBLA game to play at some point but whenever I look at it I remember it looks horrible and change my mind.

Ranger X and Robocop vs Terminator both worth a look too davy!

Twinkle Tale is a lesser known gem too, I reckon that'd be arcadey enough for Davy to get into.

Good shout on Gauntlet IV, best version I've ever played of Gauntlet.

Flicky, Sub terrania and Quackshot are well known to me. Among my MD favourites. Original Desert Strike is a real MD classic for me too.

Castlevania II: Simons Quest (NES)

Shameless guide assisted run through what is often considered the worst Castlevania. For the record I played the ROM hack ‘Redaction’, which changes NPC dialog to significantly improve clues, such as ‘Wait for a soul with a red crystal on Deborah cliff’ becoming ‘Kneel at the end of the wastes with a red crystal’.

For those who don’t know this is the first non-linear entry in the series and is basically a Metroidvania title that came before that horrible term was coined. At first glance everything is fine, it looks and plays great, in fact in places the graphics are perhaps the best in the series on NES, and the music is also top notch, as is common for the series.

The problems come with the cryptic nature of the NPC clues, these are largely fixed in this ROM hack, although clues aren’t only told by the villagers you talk to. There are books hidden in brick walls that also contain clues. Now to be fair these brick walls are only hidden in rooms in villages or one of the games five Mansions, so it kind of becomes second nature where to look, not to dissimilar from getting a good idea of where wall meat is in the linear entries, but it's still a poor way to discover where to go and what to do. Then there’s the overabundance of fake floors that can only be discovered by throwing Holy Water everywhere. This is something the ROM hack did not fix, although I believe there are hacks out there that have simply removed the fake floors. Outside of some cheap deaths to prolong the play time I see no reason why the developers added it, terrible idea.

Straight off the bat, these issues alone essentially break the game, and is why it’s regarded so negatively. Thing is if (and it’s a big if) you can get past that, there’s actually a decent game in here that along with games like Zelda and Metroid is quite ahead of it’s time for the system.

The concept itself is interesting, Dracula has not only placed a curse on Simon Belmont, but the land and all of its inhabitants. This is the reason the clues in the game are so broken. The NPC’s are actually lying to you because of the curse on them. I was always under the impression the Western release was gimped to force kids to call the Nintendo Hotline or buy Nintendo Power, turns out its actually the way it was designed, although I’m unsure if the original Japanese version was quite as bad. To seal the curse you must find Dracula’s five body parts/belongings; his nail, eye, rib, ring and heart, to resurrect him to kill him again and break the curse – yeah bit silly that bit but plenty of Hammer Horror’s were just as bonkers. There are even three different endings depending on completion time.

This was actually the first game in the series I owned, way back in about 1990, so I have a little soft spot for it. The ROM hack just about makes it playable, you could stumble through it but it’s still very cryptic and unintuitive, no amount of hacking can completely fix this game. What I find annoying is we constantly get remakes and remasters of great games, where are the remakes of games like this that have a good core but ultimately miss the mark. Like I said earlier, there’s a decent game in here, with a few tweaks here and there it could be amazing.

I'm a huge fan of the series and did enjoy my playthrough, I wish I could rate it higher, but it is what it is.


2/5

My reviews