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

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