What the fuck is this: Castlevania SOTN is now going for like $70?!!

FFVII going for about that much last I checked.

About a year ago, I realized I could sell the thing on eBay and make some cash, so I called the friend. He had lost it. *Slaps forehead*

"lost it"

I don't see why they couldn't keep the big PS1 games in print. People still want to buy them, obv.

Am currently playing Aria of Sorrow, having beaten Harmony of Dissonance last week. I also picked up Circle of the Moon over the weekend, but it's used and a bit dodgy. Still, the cart is rare enough that i'm going to hang on to the thing.

JUST SAYYYIINGGGG. don't steal

He paid $110 for FFVII.

Yeah, I think these are the three I've played, I love these games.

AB, how is C2 hugely flawed? Not that I disagree, but it's been years.

I think someone had to tell me before I got it, but I hadn't really played it much yet at that point

Castlevania III is pretty great. I bought it about a year ago, and play it off and on every month or so, getting a little farther each time.

It's standard trial-and-error, talk to everyone, "lots of places to go, only one correct order to visit them" garbage, but also adds in an annoying day/night system and some 'puzzles' you'd have to be psychic to figure out. (disclaimer: I didn't get halfway through it, so maybe it improves later on)

CV 64: players hate it, and the CV creators have pretty much disowned it. if you still want to play it, get legacy of darkness instead.

The CV Dungeon is an excellent resource for the series: http://castlevania.classicgaming.gamespy.com/dungeon.html

Holy shit yes, esp. if you have Suik 2.

lotsa late SNES/Genesis-era anime, too

oh yeah if by open world you meant a big fancy 3d gothic horror game then you gotta look elsewhere, bloodstained is a sidescroller like the classic ones

thought this bump was going to be for the new saturn rom hack

for all those with a saturn (lol) and a ram expansion cart (lmao)

Is Bloodborne not just a Dark Souls game by another name? Yes a lush 3D open world game not too dissimilar to Witcher 3 but with more castles and vampires and stuff would be logical. Seems they've missed a trick considering the show is now 3 seasons in.

Have to say I was not a fan of Super Castlevania then or now. Found it quite monotonous for a game that still gets good contemporaneous reviews. that was a hundred years ago though and I've never played another CV game since, so interested in how subsequent ones compare

Play SOTN!

No interviews or anything but this is a competent history of Super Castlevania IV and Bloodlines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB1-AKS3S0g

I think all these Castlevania-like games is an ideal situation. Videogames is the place I'm most tempted to defend franchises, because it doesn't seem obvious to me that completely new teams could make new games to fill a void left by Mario and Zelda being knocked off, there are other similar games of course but I never felt most of the games inspired by 3d Zelda had the ingredients I liked.

But I'm extremely out of touch with games now.

tim rogers has observed that Zelda-likes are the hardest kind of game to make and that sounds right to me, on the evidence. On the other hand, Celeste is the best Super Mario game.

3D mario is probably harder since no one outside of nintendo has managed to replicate it yet afaic, but it's a much more specific formula than zelda

depends how specific you're being but there were loads of 3d cartoon platformers following Mario 64... what about Spyro etc?

celeste is a negroni to SMB’s aperol spritz

3D mario is probably harder since no one outside of nintendo has managed to replicate it yet afaic

tbf nor has anyone inside of nintendo

dog latin have you played all of these? https://www.polygon.com/features/2018/10/10/17952674/the-12-best-indie-metroidvania-games

this is about my most hated genre, the nearest i get to liking any is the procedurally generated dead cells. but that's not about exploration so much as movement and combat. apparently on ps4 symphony of the night is available in a resissue packaged with the actually good rondo of blood. play that instead.

(caveat: i don't know how lazy of a job the emulation is. the first couple reviews i saw had no complaints but they also complained that rondo 'doesn't hold up as well' so they are obviously deeply untrustworthy individuals.)

don't listen to thomp lol

play hollow knight

I did the whole emulator + SotN thing a couple years ago. It's baffling that they hid the 2nd half of the game behind secret requirements.

it was the '90s, man

‘the second half of this game is lazy and bad’ : well, who’d play that.

‘this game has a whole secret second half’ = cult classic material

lazy???!!! those boss designs! those backgrounds! those sprites!

depends how specific you're being but there were loads of 3d cartoon platformers following Mario 64... what about Spyro etc?

― thomasintrouble, Friday, May 29, 2020 4:15 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

aria of sorrow is the best castlevania btw

was gonna say i feel like it peaked with that one but i haven't given all the DS entries a fair shot yet

I find Celeste to be a painful chore TBRH, although I do go back to it occasionally.
I absolutely love the aesthetic, the art, the music, but it's all so fiddly and just thinking about it makes my nape ache.
Other than being a platformer, I couldn't compare it to SMB. It's about having lightning-quick reflexes and doing the same sequence of movements over and over and over again, which is probably why I also find it hard to love things like Dark Souls.
SMB by comparison has become such a well-realised world with its own lore and mythos. While the gameplay is always top notch, I think I play those games because I'm excited to be enveloped into its world of pipes, toadstools, turtles and ghosts.

i love celeste and SMB3 with all my heart. to me, the similarities are in the perfection of the mechanics (especially the jump), the 1:1 feeling of "being" the character on the screen and being able to make them move exactly as you want to, in near real-time. that's a very hard thing to get right.

but yeah, otherwise i don't think celeste is any sort of replacement for mario. they're very different

the jump in celeste should be in the louvre

the jump on one side of the mona lisa, then the dash right horizontally across it to the other side

that's what the mona lisa is smiling about, that sick jump+dash

lazy???!!! those boss designs! those backgrounds! those sprites!

― Doctor Casino, Friday, May 29, 2020 10:18 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's more that the level design is lazy -- you can fly anywhere, so they add a ton of spikes and lasers, the end. but also most of the sprites are ripped from rondo of blood, beelzebub and the optional boss being exceptions.

I always thought the abilities+map accessibility stuff in the Iga games must have been a nightmare to plan and possibly the reason he started experimenting with fighting games and a more linear Castlevania at the end of his time at Konami. Were all abilities definitely unlocked by the second half of Symphony?

Big 2d games tend to have lots of reused sprites because it takes forever to make them, sadly.

Spyro was particularly different from Mario. I think there's maybe as many as 15 amazing Mario games (including the Yoshi and Wario games) or maybe 40, haha.

You need to get the mist and bat forms in the first castle. The double jump can be skipped by exploiting a bug with the wolf form. The down-up super jump can easily be skipped.

the more forms the betta tho, looove that stuff

I didn't know there was a bug with the wolf. Wolf was only fun for running down large halls. Super jump was great fun.

Did you ever try climbing the clock tower with the wolf? Pretty hard and fun. Seems like it was unintentional as it would crash the original japanese version.

No, I never even heard of that.

it's more that the level design is lazy -- you can fly anywhere, so they add a ton of spikes and lasers, the end. but also most of the sprites are ripped from rondo of blood, beelzebub and the optional boss being exceptions.

― wasdnous (abanana), Friday, 29 May 2020 17:24 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

thanks that’s what i would have posted if I hadn’t been in bed

i like Celeste mechanically but wish i could excise between 80 and 100% of the script

i feel like its lineage isn’t particularly Mario tho. it feels more like a ZX spectrum platformer (though obviously , yes, much better) than a console one.

tbf i haven't played rondo of blood since the late 90s when i foolishly let my original copy slip into a friend's hands. i did remember a bunch of the sprites going over to SOTN so that's fair. but not all of them surely!! i dunno i had a blast in the second half, love all those environments, shit was cool. def not as "tight" as the first half but that's true of tons of games that open up in terms of linearity as you go on.

The Last Faith
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN3Opf27zto
It's amazing how many of these games there are, I find most of them on this channel, but see this playlist in particular.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7eMqz_fn4BpW8BEBUQcmHtAi3Xc77ef4

SOTN and another CV game is cheap on PS Store at the moment so I grabbed them. Worth it?

Certainly. Rondo of Blood is my favorite of the "classic" gameplay style. It placed #44 on this recent forum poll of platformers: https://www.resetera.com/threads/reseteras-101-essential-platformers-top-101-posted-hm-voting-in-progress.217215/

I picked up the collection with 1-4 and Bloodlines. I've never played Bloodlines before.

Bloodlines is totally dope. One of the best classic era titles.

Interesting that Wallachia goes for a specifically early 90s look
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8CPL7Y4aAw

And the new Record Of Lodoss War game looks modeled on Iga era Castlevania
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdmKbXx6gtU

A Lodoss War game? in 2020??
All for it, but surprised. Lol at that "Item Get" animation being a carbon copy of the Igavania message style

the lodossvania is by the same folks that made the touhouvania game a year or two ago that was pretty good

I didn't realize that the first Lodoss book (Grey Witch?) appeared in english a few years ago, some reviewers say it's completely generic but I'm putting it on my endless list of things I'd like to but probably wont read.
Actually I didn't know there was a book series that came out of another table top rpg.

I had no idea that in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - the gradient in the UI flips based on which castle you are in (normal or upside down) pic.twitter.com/tSpORA19cz

— Derek Daniels (@derek_omni) May 18, 2021

They should flipped the text as well for the full upside-down experience

literally had the same thought

people would have hated it, but now, in retrospect, they would have loved it