In the days when NES ruled the world, the Castlevania series was the best place to go for slaying ghosts, zombies, and other horrors. Despite their fiendish difficulty, the games are well deserving of their status as classics of the NES era. The plot was fairly simple: A guy with a whip sets out to fight his way through the monsters of Dracula’s castle and finally kill the Lord of the Vampires himself. For a young fan of Universal Horror monsters and all things Gothic and spooky the series was a no-brainer. I have great memories of going down to a friend’s unfinished basement to play the original Castlevania for the first time—if the shiny silver box and the cheesy picture of Dracula on the cover didn’t hook me, the game itself quickly removed any doubts. The atmosphere, the music, the gameplay, and yes, even the challenge made the experience memorable. In honor of Halloween I’m going to take a look back at the three NES Castlevanias, and even discuss the series’ triumphant entry into the newfangled sixteen bit era with Super Castlevania IV before examining where the series has gone since its heyday.
Castlevania (1987)
It started with Dracula, a castle, and some dude with a whip. If you read the instructions, you learned that the hero’s name was Simon Belmont, scion of a long line of vampire-fighters, and the whip was actually an enchanted artifact designed for one purpose—the eradication of vampires everywhere. Konami was already on my radar in a big way in the late 80s/early 90s when I first played this game. As the makers of Contra and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle arcade game, they were, as far as I was concerned, the only major 3rd party developer in town. Here was a game that had everything. Zombies? Check. Ghosts? Check. Medusa? Check. Dracula? Of course. The first Castlevania was only six stages, and if you’re a pro it can probably be beaten in about half an hour. But most of us were not pros at age 8, and in those early NES days six stages was more than worth the game’s fifty dollar pricetag. I was no terrible Nintendo player, but it took me years (years!) to finally beat the Grim Reaper and move on to stage six, and that’s when I was lucky enough even to get that far.
The game had no passwords, so if you turned off your Nintendo you were stuck going all the way back to beginning. Cheap deaths were common: Many times, fully powered up and charging through mighty enemies left and right, Simon Belmont found himself knocked off a platform by a run-of-the-mill bat, at which point he would plummet like a rock to his death. That’s right. Simon Belmont must have weighed somewhere in the vicinity of 500 pounds, because even a fall from a low platform would send him hurtling to the ground as though sucked there with a vacuum.
But aside from the punishing mechanics, the game was a blast to play. In addition to the whip, Simon could grab four subweapons—the useless knife, the axe, the cross shaped boomerang (I guess the cross helped put some added hurt on the legions of the damned), and the all powerful holy water, a weapon so mighty that proper use of it could even render the impossible Grim Reaper boss helpless. The levels themselves, all of which took place inside different parts of Dracula’s castle, were appropriately spooky, with ruined statues, crumbling walls and faded curtains making excellent use (for the time) of the Nintendo’s capabilities. Only Simon, who was a squat, all brown little blob, got less than stellar treatment from the graphics folks, but he serves his purpose well enough. Then of course there’s the wonderful music. Konami went all out with this, and it remains one of the series’ hallmarks. Sure, the Mario and Zelda themes were more iconic, but Castlevania managed to evoke the sound and fury of a full on pipe-organ into the tiny NES cartridge, and that’s just during the first stage. The music is evocative even today, and I’ve heard plenty of full orchestral soundtracks that don’t come close to matching its 8-bit simplicity.
If you somehow managed to climb through Dracula’s castle and defeat the Count himself in both his forms, you were treated to one of the most anticlimactic endings in an era of anticlimactic endings. The castle just falls down. That’s it.
That’s okay, though. Castlevania II was on its way.
To be continued. . .
No comments:
Post a Comment