Super Real Baseball ’88 Platform: Famicom Released July 30, 1988 Developed by Pax Softonica Published by Vap Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
The second baseman wasn’t at second base to turn this double play and I threw the ball into the outfield. This game tries SO HARD to be immersive, but it forgot to make the players, you know, know where to f*cking stand on defense!
Yep, this is an ambitious game of baseball that tries to earn the “real” in its name. Oh, it doesn’t, but I do admire the effort. I should probably note that this game comes from Pax Softonica. You might not recognize the name, but NES sports fans will recognize a game they worked on for Nintendo: Ice Hockey. Yea, the skinny/medium/fat one. That’s a really good game, as are games like the Game Boy Donkey Kong and Earthbound franchise launcher Mother for Famicom (if you’re into that sorta thing). Pax Softonica didn’t design those games but they helped build them. So Super Real Baseball comes with a legitimate pedigree. Part of me wonders if they pitched this to Nintendo and Nintendo was like “nah.” It does have the Nippon Professional Baseball license and, I assume, accurate rosters for the time period. It also is the first baseball game on the NES that feels like it’s trying to be a simulation of athletics and not a “video game.” What do I mean by that? Well, it’s an attempt at 3D gameplay where literally everything is done manually INCLUDING your batting stance.
Every batter who steps into the box already has their bat halfway through a swing and you have to manually complete the swing to take a normal stance in the two to three seconds before the pitch is thrown. This has to be done EVERY SINGLE PITCH! If you want to bunt, you just hold the A-button down without finishing the half swing you enter the batter’s box with.
Unlike other games where you just have to align a player sprite with the ball sprite and the player sprite takes possession of the ball, here, you have to press buttons to do everything. Buttons presses to pick up the ball. Button presses to throw the ball, and another button for the basemen to catch the ball. So throwing out a chopper to the shortstop requires you to (1) move towards the ball (2) press the A button when the ball is near you to catch the ball (3) hold left and press the A button to throw to first base (4) press the B button to catch the ball with the basemen. This is double the steps of any previous baseball game I’ve reviewed, which is normally just (1) move to the ball until it touches your player (2) hold left and press the throw button.
When you make a play, it sounds like an alarm. So far most of the NES baseball games I’ve reviewed have had terrible sound design, but this one is right up there with Major League Baseball in being outright annoying.
Okay, I get what they were aiming for and why they were trying it. I really do, and again, I tip my hat to them for trying to make it work. I assume the theory is that the more complicated the mechanics are, the more skill is required to master them, meaning the more it feels like a sport being played at the highest level, right? It’s not a terrible idea and, if they could have pulled it off, in theory it should enhance the immersion? Remember: sports games are fantasy games, the fantasy being you’re a real professional athlete. You’re not some lazy ass holding a game controller, or even someone pretending to be one ball player. Oh no, you’re every player having to actually work for your outs, gosh darn it! Too bad the batting is significantly easier than the fielding, so the immersion only works one-way and runs are too easy to get. In one game, I scored four runs on bean balls alone.
FOUR bases loaded plunks in a single game. Four. That’s not baseball. That’s a pitcher retiring in a blaze of glory.
But outs? THOSE you have to work for. Again, great.. if it works. It doesn’t. There’s an on-again/off-again pronounced lag between catching and throwing that I had to have my family test just to make sure it wasn’t something I was imagining. By the way, you can’t appreciate what a pain in the ass THAT was to set up. I had to wait for the ideal hit that could be thrown out, then use save states, teach them these relatively complex controls, then keep reloading the state for them to try to field the test. I did ALL of that for them to shrug and say “I dunno. Maybe?!” Thanks a ton, Fam. Very helpful.
The B-Button does this weird diving catch that has a massive delay. When the CPU hit shots that I knew damn well hadn’t bounced off the ground first, I tried using save states to catch the ball using this. Not only did it not call it an out but there was a massive delay in being able to throw. Stick to the A Button.
Super Real’s most stand-out feature is the illusion of a truly 3D game. For 1988 on the Famicom, it’s actually much more convincing than you would expect. When a batter hits the ball, the camera stays as far back towards the plate as it can while doing a television-like zoom. I had to double check with my guru Dave to make sure I understood how this was accomplished. It’s actually done using a pair of classic NES illusions: reloading an entire new screen while changing sprite sizes (pay attention to second base in the below clip) and having the background act like a matte painting. “When it ‘zooms’, it simply snaps to a different point for the camera. And the player sprites, ball and boundary action sell it,” Dave explained. Old tricks, but the classics are classics for a reason: they work, and Super Real does successfully create a sense of depth within a wide ballpark (with playfield dimensions modeled after, I kid you not, the brand spanking new-at-the-time Tokyo Dome). Take a look!
This came out before I was even born! That’s pretty dang good looking given the time frame. This is no half-assed effort, folks, and that’s why it pains me so much that nothing is fun about Super Real Baseball ’88. Defense has too steep of a learning curve. The steepest of any game baseball game I’ve reviewed so far, with nothing even close. But it wasn’t worth the effort to learn it. Even in my first game, I managed to shut out the CPU. Want to know what’s REALLY remarkable about that? I didn’t catch a single fly ball. I didn’t in the second game either, or during my warm-up. Every out I made, with the exception of one or two tags and one or two strikeouts was a force-out at bases. There were some infield “catches” that sure seemed like they should have been a fly out that weren’t. Here’s my first ever fly ball catch, all the way in the bottom of the 5th in the third game I played.
Same game where I’ve scored four total runs from getting hit by a pitch with the bases loaded.
How did I do it? You have to hold the button down. That.. makes sense, actually and I’m not sure how it took me three games to figure that out. Unlike the pitching, which is most certainly not intuitive. The normal D-pad assignments of “hold towards the plate for a fastball, away from the plate for a change up, or side-to-side for breaking balls” applies. But, in Super Real Baseball, you have to also tap the button while throwing the pitch. Do it too little and the ball will be low. Do it too much and you’ll throw too high. Again, their heart was in the right place and I appreciate that they didn’t just want players wiggling the D-pad. It just wanted to do too much for an NES game. I imagine this was probably better at the time it came out, but there’s also a reason why Super Real Baseball was one and done. It just doesn’t make for a fun game. For all its complexity, I had it clocked enough to win the third game 26 to nothing while holding the computer to only six hits. I respect ambition, but ambition isn’t fun all by itself. Verdict: NO!
Mega Man aka Rockman Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released December 17, 1987 Directed by Akira Kitamura Developed by Capcom Included in Mega Man Legacy Collection
This is only the second time I’ve ever really played through the first Mega Man game. Other than a few memorable elements, it was essentially playing it fresh. So when I encountered an ambitious-for-its-time set piece like this, I was taken back. That’s not too bad looking at all, gives Fire Man’s level’s a distinct personality, AND it works from a gameplay perspective.
The first Mega Man game isn’t exactly one of the most beloved installments in the franchise. It shares more in common with something like Metroid than it does Super Mario Bros. or Legend of Zelda in that people admire it from a distance for the groundwork it laid but stick to playing the more beloved sequels. But is that totally fair? I used to think so, but now I’m not so sure. I’m not going to argue that Mega Man 1 can go punch-for-punch with any of the future releases that followed it. They’re better games, period. What I’m saying is that, upon closer examination, Mega Man isn’t the black sheep I think a lot of people peg it as, myself included.
Because of how the graphics are handled, it’s kind of hard to get perfect screenshots of Mega Man. But, when I got ones I wanted, I had to admire how gosh darn good looking this is for a 1987 game. Jeez.
In terms of establishing a franchise formula, I dare say the original Mega Man does an even better job than the game I usually hold up as the gold standard of franchise starters, which is the first NES Castlevania. Mega Man is much more ambitious than that game, but not in a way where they bit off more than they could chew. Each of the six main levels has a unique theme that never feels like empty facades. Hell, they never even feel all that generic, even though they totally are boilerplate level themes when you get right down to it. That’s an INCREDIBLE accomplishment, especially for a 1987 game.
Okay, they weren’t TOTALLY successful in avoiding outright generic design. I guess there isn’t much you can do with an ice theme other than penguins, polar bears, and slippy-slidey ice physics, which are the bane of my existence. Hell, this didn’t even have the polar bears. Weirdly, Flash Man, which would also be an ice-themed level, would avoid feeling generic by going with a much more visually-striking “hi-tech ice factor” vibe in Mega Man II. So it CAN be done.
Elec Man’s level has architecture and challenges that feel hi-tech. Cut Man’s level takes place in a forest because, uh………. (checks) Apparently he’s a logger and he cuts down trees. Okay, that one is slightly forced. The Ice Man and Fire Man stages lean very heavily into temperature-based challenges. What’s more important is that the levels feel like quests specifically tailored to their end bosses. Even Castlevania doesn’t pull that off. Like, why does an underground cavern culminate in fighting Frankenstein’s Monster? I always thought the Grim Reaper and Frankenstein should have been swapped. Of course, that would wreck the scaling, proving that juggling themes and balance is tricky business. Mega Man’s non-linear gameplay didn’t have to stress that, but it’s non-linear with a method to the madness. You and I can look up the correct order you’re supposed to tackle levels, but kids in 1987 couldn’t and were expected to experiment to figure it out. It totally works, too.
I kind of like how there’s just a box here that spits out these cutting blades in the most inelegant fashion. It feels like a malfunctioning machine. It’s great!
Well, except in one aspect that has always bugged me about Mega Man: the boss balancing. Oh I love the idea that certain bosses are weak to certain types of attack. That’s one of the all-time great contributions to action games right there. It’s the amount of damage I object to. I expect this will be one of those opinions that gets me in trouble, but I don’t like the idea of being able to beat a boss in two or three shots if you use the right weapon. It takes the stakes out of the fight, and there’s really no benefit to the gameplay. I’d argue it would be more satisfying to see a health bar reduced by 1/8th instead of 1/2. That way, you still get the satisfaction of using the correct gun but you also get to, you know, FIGHT a boss instead of flattening it like it’s nothing. I’d also argue it’s more immersive if bosses, who are supposed to be world-threatening entities, actually require effort. The fact that Elec Man can be killed by three shots with Cut Man’s gun makes me believe that, if Mega Man weren’t available, a hyperactive third grader armed with a pair of scissors and a sugar rush could handle things just fine.
Bomb Man was originally going to be called “Bomber Man” but SAG rules require using different names. Peyton List Man from Mega Man 11 had a similar issue before changing his name to Tundra Man.
Everything I’ve talked about in the last few paragraphs could apply to the larger franchise, which tends to nail level themes and struggle with satisfying boss balance. But what about the very first game? Well, it’s rough. No doubt about it, there’s a lot of room to improve. But as a prototype of better things to come, it’s actually not that bad. Going into this review, I really expected Mega Man 1 to be a lot worse than it actually is. Where I think a lot of the dislike comes from is in its penchant for cheap shots and poorly balanced basic enemies. Like the the Big Eyes take a whopping 20 hit points to kill and can’t be jumped over, but they also don’t necessarily jump high enough for you to go under them. The area they’re placed in usually isn’t optimized to fight them, either. It’s an example of not getting the most out of their potential, especially when they gave me more problems than most of the bosses.
I’m surprised these didn’t become bigger icons of the franchise. The design is great. They look genuinely scary!
And then there’s lots of little moments of “well, maybe this is a good idea.” Like there’s a “magnetic gun” that allows you to create platforms and is necessary to complete the Dr. Wily stage. It’s just stuck in an arbitrary location in Elec Man’s stage and can only be obtained if you have Guts Man’s item. It’s so weird, and if nothing else, Capcom seemed to recognize how bad of an idea that is. In future Mega Man games, the items would usually be acquired by taking the heads of the correct Robot Masters. In this one, it’s literally just laying around and since you NEED IT to beat the game, that left a bad taste in my mouth. There’s also some really janky level design. Like these jumps here.
You can’t see me behind the block, but the important thing is the narrow jumps under the fire columns.
I think in 1987 it was too soon to know that there’s a difference between “challenging” and “awkwardness” and those jumping angles are just very awkward. There’s also a lot of life slap enemy placement when you enter new rooms. Thankfully, life refills are plentiful, both in the form of placement along the levels and random item drops from slain enemies. BUT, you can’t count on life drops quite as often as you can in future Mega Man games because of the oddest part of the original Mega Man: the scoring system. It sure seems like most of the basic enemy drops are points instead of the health or item refills you actually want. Item refills seemed especially rare, and since I heavily relied on Cut Man’s ultra-satisfying weapon in the levels, I had to actually stop and think about whether I really needed it while navigating Wily’s stages. Hell, maybe that’s actually a good thing in disguise. Something tells me I won’t think too hard about whether or not I need Metal Man’s weapon equipped while I play Mega Man 2.
You know Dr. Wily, maybe instead of sending an army of robots that just ultimately make Mega Man more powerful, you should make just one named “Tsar Bomba Man” that just blows up whatever continent Mega Man is on as soon as he enters its chamber. Oh who am I kidding? You’d probably also send in “Nuclear Test Ban Man” alongside him. Wily is one of those villains I’m convinced subconsciously wants to fail.
If I had to guess, I’d say the development team probably fell victim to the same pitfall so many indie devs in my lifetime have. A phenomenon where, while creating and testing a game, the people who make it forgot that they’re the world’s greatest players at their own game, so they kept adding stuff to challenge themselves, forgetting that others would play it and not have devoted the last year of their lives to placing enemies or rearranging the maps. I tend to think that’s the case with pretty much any game where enemies slap your lifebar as soon as you enter a room in a way that’s all but unavoidable, and Mega Man does it a few times. It’s also a safe bet that not every aspect of the game was given equal weight and consideration. Like, I really enjoyed Guts Man’s weapon, but it’s so underutilized that I can’t help but wonder if the devs didn’t enjoy it as much as I did.
Or maybe I’m wrong. After all, Guts Man’s weapon is the key to beating the first usage of a “Dr. Wily uses a hoard of generic machines” boss fight that a lot of future Mega Man games would utilize.
The good news is, as far as glorified prototypes for better games yet to come, I think there’s still a lot of fun to be had in Mega Man. I thought the first game would be “the bad one” but instead, I found it to be a damn charming experience, warts and all. Plus, most of the problems with it don’t give me a mean-spirited vibe, but rather felt like a product of a development team that didn’t have a clue what they were doing. Thankfully, Capcom probably recognized they had a winner as soon as the movement physics and pea shooter were finished. Some of the level design might be a touch on the cruel side, but hey, I love the original six robot master designs, and I love that Elec Man’s weapon is just this gigantic, messy spray of electric beams in three different directions. For a 1987 game, this sure looks and sounds beautiful. The sound effects especially are probably the best on the NES this side of a Mario game. Most importantly, they made a game that you could easily build upward from. Mega Man 1 is a fun game, but it’s also the blueprint for a fantastic format. And, unlike Konami did with their first Castlevania sequels and spin-offs, Capcom didn’t immediately screw up their new tentpole franchise. Verdict: YES!
AND NOW GENERIC ACTION ONE-LINER THEATER
“Don’t blow your stack!”
“Cut it out!”
“You’re fired.”
“You’ll never get ELEC-ted dressed like that!”
F*ck you, Batman & Robin for taking the fun out of this one.
Castlevania Legends Platform: Game Boy – Super Game Boy Enhanced Released November 27, 1997 Directed by Kouki Yamashita Developed by Konami Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
There’s a couple spots in the game where you get locked in a room and have to defeat waves of enemies until they stop spawning. Then, late in the game, there’s a spot where you’re frozen in place and have to defend yourself from ghosts. At least they tried to find ways to freshen the experience.
My 2025 Halloween Castlevania marathon has been full of “weird ones.” Simon’s Quest, Vampire Killer, and Haunted Castle? Pretty weird. Legends isn’t really “weird” in the same way previous Game Boy titles Castlevania: The Adventure and Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge were, though it maintains a lot of the gameplay. The ropes are back. The big upgrade for the whip being a fireball projectile is back. There’s a lack of skeletons. But, of the three Game Boy titles, this one seems like it’s trying the hardest (and failing, but trying nonetheless) to feel like the console games. They wanted this so much that this was set up to be the ultimate origin story. The game’s heroine, Sonia Belmont, is implied to be the mother of Castlevania III hero Trevor Belmont. If you get the best ending, it’s also kind of implied Alucard is his father, which makes Dracula’s Curse really awkward, doesn’t it? Well, thank GOD that they erased that idea from existence and declared Legends to be non-canon. We wouldn’t want to spoil the integrity of a franchise that features skeletons doing double-dutch jump roping, would we?
“One potato! Two potato! Three potato! Four! Simon’s great-great grandmother was a filthy whore! Five potato! Six potato! Seven potato! Eight! Alucard slept with Sonia after their date! Nine potato! Ten potato! Eleven potato! Twelve! Now Belmont blood is tainted and you’re stuck in helloooo operator! We’re playing Simon’s game! He’s stuck fighting us because of Sonia’s secret shame!”
Actually, maybe the weirdest part of Legends was that it was one of the most negatively-received Castlevanias upon its release. It had FAR worse reviews than Adventure got upon its release, which blows me away. Seriously, if I was put on the spot to name the worst games I’ve ever played in my life, Castlevania Adventure would be one of the first titles to pop into my head. So Legends feels like it got hosed, because honestly it’s not that bad. It’s SLOW in terms of movement, but lots of Game Boy action games feature slow movement, presumably to accommodate the blur factor of the Game Boy screen. But, action isn’t about raw speed. It’s about tempo, and I think Legends maintains a fairly consistent tempo of quality combat and quality platforming, even if it botches most of the Castlevania elements, and it does. But hey, the whip feels pretty good, and they packed a lot of fun layouts, enemies, and boss battles into this thing. Then they sort of screwed it up, but not in a way that completely ruins things.
So long, ropes. We hardly knew thee. Legends added moving ropes, but they’re not as exciting as you would hope because they’re too short to really be anything but transportation.
In a truly bizarre decision, Legends doesn’t have any subweapon pick-ups. Instead, you get subweapons after beating bosses and can select which one you want to use, Mega Man-style. Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad, except only one of the standard Castlevania subweapons was used in this game: the stopwatch. And it’s not even presented like a stopwatch. For some reason, it’s a tornado. I’m not sure why a tornado would freeze all non-boss enemies. Either way, you get the stopwatch from the first boss. Then the second boss is a full life refill for only twenty hearts. This in a game where, if you have a full whip upgrade, candles only contain either hearts or, occasionally, health refills. You’re practically picking hearts out from the webbing between your toes in Castlevania Legends. The only way it could be worse is if they made the third item essentially be a cross and work to clear the screen of the bats that become annoying. You see where this is going.
Those had been bats a second earlier.
Now, that bomb is relatively expensive at five hearts and it only does as much damage as the fireball your whip throws, which is half-as-strong as a direct hit with the whip. So it’s not like you can just plow through levels with it because it can’t one-shot anything stronger than a bat. But the bats were one of the main challenge elements, and they’re rendered completely toothless by this upgrade. To really make it obvious how little they thought this whole thing out, the fourth item you get is a weak-ass projectile that seems like it does as much damage as a fully-upgraded whip’s projectile. It’s a little wider than that fireball and only costs one heart to use, but if you’re going to do that, you might as well use the whip and enjoy the satisfaction of one of gaming’s best weapons, right? I never found a good usage for it. So like, why wasn’t THAT the first thing you get? The scaling is all wrong.
This WOULD have been the part where I died if not for the health refill subweapon. Seriously, this was the toughest boss in the game, easily, and it exists in a goddamned bonus stage hidden in the fifth and final level.
And where the hell are the traditional Castlevania subweapons? There’s no axe, knife, boomerang, or holy water. Don’t tell me the Game Boy couldn’t handle them, because they were in the previous Game Boy title (depending on which region you played). Well, their sprites are in this game, but not as items you use. Instead, Legends has hidden them as magical trinkets, one per stage, and if you find all five, you get the fifth subweapon. I should note that the way they’re hidden isn’t very satisfying, as each stage has a few forks in the road, and the hidden item is just in one of the forks. There’s no way to logic out which one. Presumably this whole idea is in there to add replay value, but it’s not creative. I would have rather hidden them in walls along a strictly linear route that was more optimized.
Exploration is great, but there has to be logic behind it, even if I think the level design is good. Legends has probably the strongest level design of the three Game Boy titles, but I’d still call Belmont’s Revenge the best of the trilogy because of the subweapons.
Is finding all five hidden trinkets worth the effort? Well, in addition to getting a better ending that was so nonsensical they struck it and the entire game from the canon, you get a fifth subweapon that might as well give you a free pass to the last boss. Remember how I said the bomb can’t one-shot anything bigger than a bat? The final item is a screen-clearing bomb that takes out everything but Dracula himself for the same cost as the previous bomb: five hearts. Yep, it makes the home stretch before you reach the final boss a cakewalk. So none of the subweapons are particularly satisfying to use. I have no clue what they were thinking with any of this. It’s not imaginative and it’s not fun. The whole system adds nothing to the game at all and feels like it belongs to another property entirely. The funny thing is, the subweapons were always kind of nerfy to Castlevania, and getting rid of them could be a positive thing if what replaces them is more balanced. Replacing boomerangs and axes with any-time-you-need-it full health refills and screen-clearing bombs isn’t exactly balanced, is it?
Honestly, the graphics ain’t half bad, but I still think Belmont’s Revenge looks nicer.
BUT, for what it’s worth, I felt Legends had pretty dang decent level layouts and enjoyable enough boss battles that made Castlevania Legends worth playing at least once. I expected so much worse based on its reputation, and now I’m sitting here puzzled because it’s not a bad game. As of this writing, it’s part of the Switch Online lineup, and if you’ve skipped it because of its critical reception, yeah, take a chance on Legends. It’ll take you a little under an hour to finish, and it’s fine. Just don’t expect one of the stronger Castlevania games, because Legends feels more like a ripoff of Castlevania most of the time.
(shudder) It even gets creepy, something the other two Game Boy Castlevanias didn’t come close to doing.
Really, this feels like its closest kin is Haunted Castle because a lot of the enemy attack patterns are based on crowding you and keeping the combat at closed quarters. Bats and spirits attack in a way where they swoop in from above you. This makes scratching-out distance to get your attack off without taking damage the primary challenge. I hated that for Haunted Castle, but it feels like it works here because there’s a sense of claustrophobia. Otherwise, besides the whip and candles, it never really feels like it belongs in the franchise. But, if you imagine Legends not as an actual Castlevania game but rather as a Castlevania-inspired action tribute that had no clue how to implement subweapons, it’s fine. Really, Castlevania Legends only sucks in comparison to its console big brothers. But so what? What halfway decent Game Boy title that’s part of a legendary action franchise is that not true of? Verdict: YES!
Dracula never got over losing to Wolverine in the first X-Men movie.
Awww, Trevor Belmont was adorable. Who’s the little vampire killer? You are!
Haunted Castle aka Akumajou Dracula Platform: Arcade First Released December 26, 1987 Designed by Masaaki Kukino Developed by Konami Sold Separately via Arcade Archives
“I’m almost certain you don’t understand how flashing works.” By the way, his actual boss sprite looks nothing like this.
Sigh. Alright, let’s get this over with. Rip the bandage off. Pop this pimple. Yank out this white hair. You see, I just realized I’m only a few games away from having reviews posted for every 80s and 90s Castlevania game (not counting threeLCDgames or the cancelled Game.Com game, even though I have the ROM for it). I want to achieve that, but that means I have to actually sit down and review Haunted Castle, and it’s not exactly bad in a way that’s all that interesting. Hell, it doesn’t even have the benefit of being the worst Castlevania game. That honor goes to Castlevania Adventure on the Game Boy (which is technically called THE Castlevania Adventure), and I’d rather be stuck with Haunted Castle than that game. Don’t mistake that as a complement, though I do genuinely have a couple small complements to make in this game that my friend Dave speculates only exists because Konami was pissy of having to cut Nintendo in on a third of Vs. Castlevania’s profits (which I intended to also review but it wasn’t so interesting I could get a whole review out of it).
“Oh, real mature, Cathy!”
First Complement: the soundtrack is really good. Second Complement: some of the settings and enemy sprites aren’t too bad. Really! There’s a convincing fog effect. The game’s version of “The Creature” is probably the closest it ever looked to being like the famous version of the Universal Studios Frankenstein.
Even if it’s a boring boss fight. Then again ALL of Haunted Castle’s bosses are boring.
There’s a genuinely spooky haunted dining room, complete with dinner and kitchen utensils attacking you. A graveyard catches fire and it looks threatening and/or menacing. While MOST of the settings are boring, it’s not all boring. And even when the settings are at their most lifeless, heck, I’ve still seen a lot worse than Haunted Castle’s tour offers. Granted, Simon’s sprite is distracting and his walking animation doesn’t feel confident or heroic. A lot of the sprite work is solid, but others are laughably pathetic. Like, look at this screenshot of blue-haired He-Man battling sawed-off Benjamin Franklin:
It’s supposed to be the fleamen/hunchbacks, but it looks EXACTLY like Ben Franklin. Then again, they did find over 1,200 pieces of human skeletons in Benjamin Franklin’s home. I suppose we can’t completely rule out that he worked for Dracula and was possibly performing a ritual to bring him back in the Americas in the 1700s. If you’re reading this Konami, there’s your plot for the next Castlevania right there!
And now I’m out of nice things to say about Haunted Castle. No shortage of bad things to say, though to be honest, my heart isn’t even into that. It’s just not a very interesting game. The thing that stinks the most is probably the collision detection. Your hit box is just a square that feels much larger than you are, and then enemy attack patterns are tailored to take advantage of the wonky collision box. When it comes to enemies, their collision is much more sprite-accurate, so bats and projectiles require direct hits to kill. They also like to have enemies such as zombies or mummies spawn right next to you, and since ducking or jumping still feature a massive hit box, evasive maneuvers are too hard to pull off and defense is NEVER intuitive.
Platforming is kept to a bare minimum, which didn’t bother me. Most of the arcade barbarian subgenre of the late 80s had roughly the same amount of jumping and moving platforms. If nothing else, Haunted Castle’s maps are boilerplate. That’s all the proof you need that it’s the action that fails this game, not the settings.
So, for example, the mummies begin firing projectiles as soon as they finish spawning. They take multiple hits to kill, AND AGAIN, your box is massive. It’s not a guaranteed life loss, but the resulting gameplay isn’t fun because you’re reacting in anticipation of what this means for your collision box, and not the enemy itself. That’s TERRIBLE for immersion, and action games that aren’t immersive are in bad, bad shape regardless of anything else the game does right. It’s like starting a footrace by immediately stepping on a rusty nail. Even turning around to scratch-out enough distance to avoid their attacks, or to counterattack something else chasing you, usually isn’t effective because of how cramped everything is. Haunted Castle is remarkable because it does NOTHING right as an action game.
These things are an example of the developers crossing the line into full-on trollish design. You kill a skeleton and it turns into these ghosts that are too fast moving and too spongy to slay. Your only option is to start backing away as soon as you strike the killing blow on the skeleton and then duck out of the way of the glorified torpedo it launches at you. This isn’t actually a bad idea in a vacuum. If Haunted Castle had a larger variety of enemies, set-pieces or even styles of layout, this might actually be a great idea for a danger element, especially if you fine tune the layout based around the fact that this will happen. But given the flat, uninteresting layouts and overall lack of satisfying combat, these instead come across as the developer trolling for the sake of it.
It’s an example of counter-optimization, as your attacks are not suitable at all for closed-quarters combat, and almost all the basic enemies are fine-tuned specifically to crowd you and be just above or just below your attack box. The developers did such a good job of crafting and polishing the trollishness that there’s really no excuse for any bad aspect of Haunted Castle. It is polished, but not in a way that’s done for the benefit of entertainment. It’s a quarter-sucker, and nothing more. This was pretty foolish too, because somewhere along the way, they forgot that games that aren’t fun don’t suck as many quarters. Haunted Castle’s fixation on near-miss combat just makes it boring to the point of exhaustion. Even challenging arcade games need to be give-and-take, but this just takes. It skews too heavily in favor of the enemies. Because of that, literally everything else about the game would have to be amazing just to make Haunted Castle rise to the level of overall mediocrity.
It’s worth noting I played two versions of Haunted Castle (out of five total) for this feature, the ones known as VERSION N, which is the initial Japanese release, and VERSION M, which is the second North American ROM and the one notorious for its hard difficulty. Regardless of which version you play, the lack of intuitive collision detection is always the worst problem. I assure you in this shot, my sprite wasn’t anywhere near those fireballs or the bat. You can feel the difference regardless of the difficulty toggles by paying attention to the bats. Version M’s bats attack in a much more cruel, hard to avoid way.
Unfortunately, the rest of the game’s design is just really dull. Now I’m not expecting complicated or even ambitious level design from a coin-op, and I can put up with a game based around mostly flat corridors. Hell, I gave YES! verdicts to Rastan Saga and Cadash in Taito Milestones 3: The Definitive Review. Haunted Castle isn’t that different from those games, with its large sprites and flat, straight-line corridors, minimum jumping, and heavy combat focus. They’re all members of the same graduating class, more or less. But Taito’s beefy action arcaders had a better sense of timing and spacing with their straight line corridors, and even at their most unfair, they never felt as unfair as Haunted Castle. Those games have problems. LOTS of problems. But they also remembered to maintain the sense of entertainment that’s part of that agreement players have with coin-ops. You’re paying to have a good time, after all. Haunted Castle forgot the good time part. I think the design team assumed the settings and connection to the popular Famicom/NES game would be enough by itself to keep players pumping cash, and obviously myself and a lot of critics over the years think they were just plain wrong.
In the opening cutscene, Dracula was white, had jet black hair, and was clean shaven. Now he has green skin, gray hair, and wears a Vincent Price mustache. Simon, you know it gives me no pleasure to say this, but you have to consider the possibility that your new wife did this to him. And he has superpowers! You don’t, so imagine what she’ll do to you! Maybe you should just let her finish him off, because the dude looks downright sickly.
If Simon’s Quest is Exhibit A in the case of Konami not having a clue what they had with Castlevania, then Haunted Castle is clearly Exhibit B. I really think I’m on to something here. It’s not hard to imagine that Konami likely mistook Castlevania’s appeal as being ONLY tied to the superficial elements like the castle or Simon or Dracula and not to the fine-tuned, satisfying combat and heavily optimized level layouts. So perhaps the most positive thing I can say about Haunted Castle is the same thing I said about Simon’s Quest: they needed these failures to point them in the right direction.
This final lead-up to the Dracula fight is so embarrassing. It’s just a typical collapsing bridge sequence, maybe the longest example of this trope ever done in a game like this. You cannot stop to fight all the bats that are spaced out along the way and eventually have to accept a few life slaps. The collapsing bridge trope ALWAYS gets my heart racing, and it’s a damning indictment of how bad Haunted Castle is that it takes one of my favorite gimmicks and runs it into the ground so badly that it becomes boring AND THEN IT STILL KEEPS GOING! By the way, this is the ENTIRE final level of the game. It screams “we have no clue how to feel climatic!”
Haunted House might not be fun, then or now, but in a morbid way, we still owe it a lot. It showed Konami that Castlevania as a theme can’t work as an empty shell. That’s a lesson a lot of franchise owners never got. Sometimes it takes learning what a franchise shouldn’t be to realize what it can be. Or to put it another way, Konami had a red hot property Castlevania, and it’s a good thing they burned themselves on it a couple times very early in its existence, but in ways that didn’t damage the brand overall. I think that’s what allowed Castlevania to become one of the most consistently good franchises in gaming. It’s something like, say, Tomb Raider never got. Then when Tomb Raider suffered its first critical and commercial failures, those failures did real, lasting damage to the Tomb Raider brand. Castlevania’s early failures, on the other hand, were pretty much inconsequential to the brand, yet valuable lessons were still learned from a purely gameplay point of view. That’s why Haunted Castle is kind of a lucky break for gamers, because it allowed the owners of Castlevania to touch the stove while nobody was looking and say “yep, don’t want to do that again!” Verdict: NO!
Vampire Killer
aka Akumajou Dracula Platform: MSX2 Released October 30, 1986 Designed by Akihiko Nagata Developed by Konami Never Released in the United States
NO MODERN RELEASE
I played a patched version of the ROM created by developer FRS. The patch improved general performance without altering the core gameplay. It just readjusted the speed, more or less. WARNING: If you use this patch, you will need the ability to map keyboard commands to your controller or just outright use a keyboard (which can be used in addition to a controller) or you will NOT be able to finish Vampire Killer. You see, there’s a door/tunnel maze in one level that normally requires the ability to press both UP and DOWN at the same time, but this patch prevents that. Instead, you have to press “M” to enter the doors.
Get the patch HERE. And I apply patches using THIS TOOL. I should redo the MSX games in the Konami SHMUP feature using FRS’ patches.
If you’ve never heard of the MSX version of the original Castlevania, well, you’re in for a treat.
The original Castlevania wasn’t just released to the Famicom. Four days later, its cousin hit the MSX2 computer, and it’s, ahem, different. And this is why I love experiencing Konami’s output on the MSX, because they didn’t just shrug their shoulders and copy the maps from the more powerful NES. Instead, they took the base gameplay, roster of enemies/bosses, and level themes and settings and then reworked them to accommodate the MSX2’s hardware limitations. MSX in general is notorious for not handling scrolling all that well, and you can either roll with that and make side-scrollers that are played one screen at a time, or you can use it as an excuse to get creative. That’s what Vampire Killer does, turning the game into an exploration-based title where you search for keys to open doors and try to avoid soft-locking the game. Wait, what?
Weirdly, this carry-over from the NES game plays much smoother and more predictably on the MSX than on the NES. It’s MUCH easier to time the presses.
Yeah, soft locking is a legitimate possibility, and it’s not all that hard to do. First, let me explain what exactly is going on with Vampire Killer, because this isn’t Castlevania like anyone from America would be familiar with. Instead of just going from Point-A to Point-B, the MSX Castlevania features six levels, each of which is divided into three blocks. Each block has the standard Castlevania 1 door, just like the NES game, but there’s a twist: it’s locked. Hidden somewhere in the block is a silver key, which is not to be confused with gold keys like the one seen in the above screenshot. Gold keys can only be carried one-at-a-time and are only useful on treasure chests that lay around. The silver key looks like this:
Ignore the “Stage 20” thing because this screenshot is taken from the second loop after I beat Dracula, but this is really the first proper stage of Vampire Killer.
With a couple exceptions, the silver keys are usually hidden behind breakable walls and have to be searched out. It’s an inspired idea and it works fantastic. I mean, for the most part (she said as she eyes the rampaging elephant in the room). The blocks are never too big, either, and there’s one other twist: the maps wrap around. So when you reach the edge of the block you’re on, if it’s not walled off, you will come out the other end. So here’s the first screen in the first proper stage, and it’ll look familiar to NES fans:
Now, I could go to the right, like you would in the NES game. Or, I could go left, which won’t take me back outside the castle, but instead take me to this room on the far right side of the map.
Neat, huh? It’s not pointless, either. This is heavily incorporated into the level design and used for navigation-based puzzle solving, and it works vertically too. Well, sometimes. The vertical version of the map wrapping is a little more problematic because there’s also bottomless pits like any other Castlevania game. There are maps that you can find and pressing F2 calls them up, so you won’t necessarily have to jump blindly. But, I kind of wish they had just eliminated the potential for death by pits altogether and focused on the exploration, because it’s usually really well done otherwise. I enjoyed it so much I attempted to play this blind, with the only guide I used being StrategyWiki’s list of what all the items do.
See the person with a staff sitting on the ledge? They’re basically a shop, though you have to hit them over and over, which will eventually lead to them making a one-time offer to sell you an item. But it’s a LOT more complicated than that, because they change into different colors, and sometimes they’ll just give you hearts and sometimes they’ll take hearts from you. Even the sale mechanic itself has layers to it. Throughout the levels are two types of bibles: white ones and black ones. If you collect a black one, the price of the items in the shops will go up, but white ones make the price go down. It’s crazy how many extra layers of complexity they added to make this version stand out. They really went all out, which is in stark contrast to the elegant simplicity of the Castlevania that Famicom/NES owners got.
I highly recommend anyone who plays this for the first time keep that item page bookmarked, because there’s a TON of items that all work in a variety of ways, both passively and proactively, and almost never intuitively. In Vampire Killer, a whip isn’t even necessarily your primary weapon. The knife, axe, and boomerang REPLACE the whip once they’re picked up. Oh, and the axe doesn’t behave like the axe from the NES game and is instead a short-range boomerang, while the blue cross boomerang (which is fairly rare) goes faster and further. Oh, and if you don’t catch either of them on the return trip, you lose them and go back to your leather whip. Yep. I should also note the boomerangs and knife don’t use up hearts, but the two subweapons do, and they take “overpowered subweapons” to a whole new level.
I think Vampire Killer might earn the title “the weirdest 2D game in the franchise” because of how different it is from the typical Castlevania. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the whip was my least favorite weapon. I never use the throwing knives in most 2D Castlevania games, but I preferred them for this game because knives gave me range and speed without having to worry about losing them every time I used them. Plus, the knife was reliable in terms of collision, whereas whip was inconsistent. I was constantly whipping right through candles to no effect, and in general, the whip has none of the OOMPH you expect from a normal Castlevania game’s whip.
The subweapons are the holy water and the stopwatch. The stopwatch is another item I almost never use in Castlevania games that I got heavy usage out of in Vampire Killer, to the point that I actively sought it out. That’s weird, but not as weird as the method of activating the subweapons. To use the stopwatch, you have to jump in the air and press DOWN. Yes, really, but the holy water is even worse. To use the holy water, you have to jump in the air and tap LEFT or RIGHT. Now, I have twitchy fingers these days, so I was constantly throwing holy water accidentally while jumping at angles. Thankfully, hearts are plentiful and they’re not stripped from you between levels. That’s strange, because everything else is! Yep, ALL ITEMS wear off when you finish a level and you go back to your leather whip. Does it get weirder? Actually, yeah: you can possess the stopwatch AND the holy water at the same time, and they work on basically every boss except Dracula (because they can’t reach him). So five of the six bosses are pieces of cake in this game.
The bosses are CRAZY SPONGY if you try using your other weapons. But they have no invincibility frames at all, making the holy water’s fire extremely effective at quickly draining them. If your timing is true and you activate the stopwatch while throwing the holy water in a way where the fire is damaging them, one-shotting bosses is on the table for pretty much every non-Drac boss. My timing wasn’t, and I still beat Reapy McReapface with two bottles of water.
And it’s at this point I have to inform everyone that my ultimate verdict on Vampire Killer is a bizarre split decision based on how you play it. On the third block of the fourth level, I found myself unable to make progress and decided to use the StrategyWiki walkthrough to figure out what I was doing wrong, and I discovered I’d soft-locked the game. Right before you face the boss of the fourth level, Vampire Killer has the easiest-to-activate soft lock I’ve ever encountered in any game I’ve reviewed at IGC, and it makes this review much more complicated than it should be. I’m going to explain it, and if you know of an easier soft lock to activate in any game, meaning one that’s part of the natural game flow and not one you have to go out of your way to do, I want to hear it because I don’t think there’s ever been one.
SPLIT DECISION: PLAYING WITHOUT SAVE STATES OR REWIND
This is the room in question, and I should note that if you find a candle item (not to be confused with the candles you break with your weapon), it puts a highlight box around breakable walls. Keep in mind that all four blocks are destroyed at once, instead of one segment at a time. You can’t make a stagnated stepladder out of them.
See the key? You can’t jump up and get it, even if you have the item that lets you jump higher (which I don’t even think is located in the fourth level anyway). See the blocks in front of the skeleton dragon? If you break those before you get the key, you’re in BIG trouble, because now you have no way to reach the key. If the dragon is already dead and you break those blocks, you have soft locked yourself. The game is over and you have to reset from the beginning. If the dragon is not dead, you have to damage yourself using the dragon in a way where you pop upward and collect the key using the knock back, but it’s nowhere near as easy to pull off the knock back trick in the MSX game as it is in the NES game.
I’m 75% sure there’s a second potential soft lock in “Stage 17” where a player can render the game impassible if they collect a key before breaking blocks somewhere else on the map to create an escape route. The silver key is located behind the blocks to the right of the base of the stairs, but there’s no way to get out of the area unless you do other things first. I activated this one too, and while I think you can probably die on purpose and restart, I didn’t try it and just restarted the level from my save state.
This is inexcusable design and a critical failure of play-testing, but I think it’s even worse than that. Both potential soft locks feel kind of deliberate, like they were a planned part of the challenge. So either this is a deliberate design concept that nobody in their right mind would come up with or it’s just an example of why play testing is so crucial. Here’s the thing: I believe that a player’s natural instinct, in any game like this, is to smash every single block they see. Does everyone agree? Players shouldn’t expect to be able to end their entire run by breaking one block. Well, I did it, and if I hadn’t been using an emulator where I could rewind this mistake or load a prior save state, I would have been so furious beyond imagination. But it also feels like this is something a player could easily do by accident. First off, collision is NOT PERFECT. Second, if you have a boomerang weapon and try to smash the candle that’s right there in front of the blocks, you’ll break the blocks and that’s it. This is really bad design, and if you don’t have the means to play with an emulator that features rewind or save states, I don’t recommend even trying this game. This is completely unacceptable game design. Verdict: NO! But this review is not over.
SPLIT DECISION: USING AN EMULATOR
WITH SAVE/REWIND OPTIONS
Believe it or not, the red skeletons are probably the most threatening enemies in the entire game. They move super fast and they come back to life super fast.
Make sure you throw down plenty or save states or have your rewind set that it can go back several minutes. Did you? Cool. Let’s pretend those two soft lock sections aren’t a big deal, because they really aren’t if you have a nice emulator. I’m not trying to be wishy washy, but we’re not in the dark ages anymore and soft locks can be undone. So, what do I think of Vampire Killer overall?
I stopped and counted to ten and then carried on, and reminded myself that I genuinely enjoyed the maze-like levels.
Keeping it real, a lot of the appeal in Vampire Killer is from a novelty point of view. It’s just so different, for better and for worse. And there’s a lot of “worse” in the conversation. The famously elegant Castlevania combat and enemy design just isn’t here. The actual action of Vampire Killer is pretty sloppy and it lacks the PUNCH that the NES games have that made their combat so satisfying. So most of the appeal, at least for me, is playing a game that’s like an alternative universe version of what is one of the most important games of my life. One thing about the NES Castlevania is it has very conservative level layouts that rely heavily on fine-tuned enemy placement. The MSX game isn’t like that. It has genuinely ambitious level design, which often feels downright puzzle-like. Of course, it can also be so haphazardly done that you can end your game by breaking a single block. Ambition comes at a price.
In my first attempt to beat Dracula, I had the blue boomerang, and I missed catching it during the first phase and had to jump up and whip at the jewel on his forehead with the goddamned leather whip one shot at a time. Eventually I died from the stream of bats. I rewound the game and tried again, missed the boomerang, but I figured out how to block the bats. After a few minutes, I’d barely put any damage at all into Drac himself. Nuts to that. I reloaded the level and found the knife, and then I allowed the continuous stream of bats that he pukes out to knock me back while facing the correct direction (since the ledge doesn’t have enough room to turn around), and that’s how I finished it. It’s worth noting this is easily the hardest of the 8-bit Castlevania games and, if you attempt to play this cleanly, be ready for a game that plays dirty and is still kind of janky. I couldn’t do it. I tried, folks, and Vampire Killer ate my butt.
There’s a voice in my head saying “oh come on, Cathy! If this were any other game, would you be so quick to forgive that god awful soft lock design?” Okay, fair, and the answer is “probably not.” But Vampire Killer isn’t any other game. If the charm of a one-off novelty-like Castlevania experience knocked my socks off, why wouldn’t that apply to other fans? I make no guarantees here, but I think it’s worth checking out at least once if you’re a fan of the series. And I’m not giving it a pity YES!, either. I really did enjoy the level design for 16 out of the 18 blocks. I enjoyed the search for the keys. I enjoyed playing a Castlevania game that’s played one screen at a time and does things other Castlevania games don’t do. There’s a f*cking door maze in this game, for goodness sake!
In fact, the door maze is part of the soft lock room. Now, this will require you to have a keyboard or unlimited button remapping, including the ability to map keyboard controls to game controllers. If you don’t use the ROM patch that I used, this requires players to press UP and DOWN, at the same time. It’s assumed that players are on an MSX with a keyboard right in front of them, and with directional keys, you can easily press UP and DOWN at the same time. Oh, it’s a very inconsiderate and sloppy design, but mind you, for those players using a keyboard, UP is also “JUMP.” Because I’m insane, I tried playing the first level using a keyboard, and I spent the next minute kissing my controller and telling it I will never take it for granted again. I would have taken it even further, but I assume controllers come to life when nobody is looking, Toy Story-style and I don’t want it to judge me.
Hey, I like door mazes! Isn’t it kind of weird Castlevania has never really done a lot with them? They seem like they would lend themselves to the haunted house vibe, and it’s not like I wouldn’t have enjoyed the maze a lot if not for the sour note that ended it. So, I really liked Vampire Killer when it didn’t play as dirty as any game ever has. At the end of the day, after years of being curious about Vampire Killer, I’m actually happy I put in the time to finish it. I can’t say that about Simon’s Quest or Castlevania: The Adventure. Just don’t expect a masterpiece, because Vampire Killer certainly isn’t. Okay, fine, it’s a novelty. But hey, gaming is a big tent, and novelties have their place in it. Verdict: YES!
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest aka Dorakyura II: Noroi no Fūin Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System, Famicom Disk System Released August 28, 1987 (FDS) November 24, 1988 (NES) Directed by Hitoshi Akamatsu Developed by Konami Included in Castlevania Anniversary Collection
If you’re saying “hey, wait a second, I don’t remember that map in the game” I would advise you to read past my verdict as I talk about quality of life ROM hacks, including the one I used for this review.
Disclaimer: I used a quality of life ROM hack for this review, but one that I feel didn’t fundamentally change the developer’s intent. There was no rebalancing of the experience system or the rate of hearts being dropped, no enemy rebalancing, no level design changes, and no changes to the items. The big changes were quicker day/night transitions, a better translated script, and more invincibility frames when you get hit. For the full review on the ROM hack I used, “Castlevania II English Re-translation (+Map)” by bisqwit, keep reading past my main verdict. NOTHING in the ROM hack I used changes how I feel about this game, so this is my definitive review of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, a game I’ve been putting off reviewing for two years.
Castlevania II has some of the worst Metroidvania-style maps in gaming history. Just totally nonsensical design that neither lends itself particularly well to exploration or action. There’s moments like this, where the path branches out into two paths that will eventually merge anyway, and the commonplace enemies just shamble back and forth instead of having enemies tailored to this area of the game.
Put yourself in the shoes of director Hitoshi Akamatsu and the team behind Simon’s Quest. When the original Castlevania was nearing completion, they must have had some idea that they just created an absolute masterpiece and legitimate contender for the best game on the Famicom/NES up to that point. Not only that, but in Castlevania, they had a game with obvious global appeal and sequel potential up the wazoo. A game that lends itself specifically to sequels from a development point of view, since Castlevania is a LOT simpler than most people realize on face value. It nailed the theme, combat, item design, enemy design, and enemy placement (a seriously underrated factor towards any game’s masterpiece status), but it also features level design that’s actually fairly conservative. Hell, there’s a stage that doesn’t even have a single pit to jump over. The boldest it gets is in the final stage, which is by far the shortest. So they left a LOT of room to grow while staying within a traditional linear format.
Later, you get Dracula’s ring. I wasn’t sure if I was trying to slay him or marry him.
While I admire this sequel’s ambition, it feels like it tries to be too big for its own britches. Simon’s Quest is a very early, very primitive example of a Metroidvania. The irony is, it would be the franchise’s next attempt at this formula that would cement the “Vania” part of the genre’s name with Symphony of the Night. That tells you everything you need to know about how successful Simon’s Quest was despite the fact that it predates Symphony of the Night by just under a full decade. I’m sure they made this game with the best of intentions, but it’s actually remarkable how the direct sequel to Castlevania, a game that got pretty much everything right, manages to get nothing right from a gameplay perspective. It strips out everything that made the first game fun EXCEPT the theme and the most basic combat. It’s fascinating for sure, and it’s also got fans out there which (shrug) I mean, everything has fans. Joe Dirt had enough fans that Crackle did a f*cking sequel to it. What I don’t get is how someone who loved the first game can feel any connection between the two games that isn’t purely superficial.
This is the type of confusing thing that doesn’t bother me. When this came out, especially in the United States, the poor translation made some of the items confusing on how they worked. That sucks and I feel sorry for gamers back then, but it’s not 1988 anymore. There’s strategy guides, like the one I used that’s so useful I got the best ending on my first attempt, though I admit I used rewind to undo false floor GOTCHA traps. But hell, even emulator-based cheating shows that players have plenty of options for solutions if they get stuck or jerked around by the game design. The question I’m asking with this review is “how good is Simon’s Quest when you strip away all the bullsh*t and get down to the nitty gritty gameplay?”
And I’m not even talking about the infamous mistranslated script with its obscure hints, or the agonizingly slow transition from day to night that interrupts gameplay. I just played a version of Simon’s Quest without those things. Once upon a time, they might have been a problem, but after playing through this twice for this feature without those factors, I’ve come to the conclusion they were never *THE* problem. And the Metroidvania formula obviously isn’t a bad idea since the franchise would get its second wind via that genre in the 90s and 2000s. The problem is there’s a total lack of polish to Castlevania II that’s likely the result of a very short development cycle. This was released less than a year after the first game, which is insane given the scope and ambition they had for Simon’s Quest. Instead of just making your way from Point A to Point B, you now have to do things like kneel at a lake while possessing a specific color crystal ball, which will cause the screen to lower and reveal a hidden pathway. Re-read that last sentence. Doesn’t that sound like a game that took at least a year-and-a-half to develop, and not a matter of months?
I won’t claim there’s NO satisfaction in seeing this happen. It’s a cool reveal! I just wish they’d taken their time with the entire quest. You can’t do a 100 meter dash with a game this ambitious!
The rush job explains the total lack of polish and lack of fine-tuned enemy attack patterns and placement. The result is Simon’s Quest is a game with no tempo or flow to it. This can also largely be blamed on the Metroidvania format, which they clearly didn’t know how to build around. For example, the leveling-up system is based not on killing enemies but picking up the hearts they drop. The problem is enemies don’t always drop hearts. While I have no objection to using RNG for currency or item drops, I don’t like the idea of experience points being all-or-nothing RNG random chance. It’s bad game design to leave luck up to heaven. It really doesn’t help that the variety of enemies doesn’t work in a Metroidvania. With one or two small exceptions, none of the enemies feel particularly optimized for the environments they’re placed in. The enemies feel completely arbitrary and often don’t feel like there was much consideration for logic in their design, locations, or attack patterns. Too many just kind of shamble back and forth. The only time I ever felt a sense of danger in the entire game were a few moving block jumps.
Near the end of the game, I was still only up to level three even though I slayed every enemy that I crossed paths with. This meant enemies were especially spongy. As a result, I found myself grinding on these guys, who had high full-heart payouts, to get my level up, and in doing so, I almost cost myself the perfect ending. I beat Dracula as a level 5 (max is 6) on the seventh day/night cycle, which is the very last one that scores you a perfect ending. By the way, that shield I’m holding is actually Dracula’s rib. Of all the bones in the human body, that would not be my first choice for a shield, but I never found Dracula’s hip. Sasha the Kid: “maybe they meant it’s his RIB CAGE and they screwed that up too.” Okay, I can buy that.
What’s strange is that the XP system actually does have a thoughtfulness that’s designed to eliminate the potential for screw grinding. Once you beat enemies in a certain section, they won’t fill up your XP anymore regardless of whether they drop hearts. You have to be near where the next mansion is at, or maybe even inside the next mansion. Also, enemies you’ve already fought become stronger as the game goes along. These are positive ideas, but the cast of enemies just aren’t as fun to battle in these environments. Maybe if they had cut and pasted the entire Castlevania 1 combat system it could have worked, but they didn’t. The whip is back, and although it’s still kind of satisfying, it doesn’t feel quite as impactful as Castlevania 1 or Castlevania III’s whip cracks. Complementary sub-weapons like the axe or boomerang are gone completely, while the holy water loses its combat effectiveness and becomes actively annoying thanks to being so heavily incorporated into the exploration elements. Only the dagger really carried over from the first game, and that’s by far the item I enjoy using the least in Castlevania games. Go figure, right?
One of the new items, the diamond, is just really weak and lacking in the satisfaction of unleashing boomerangs or the axe. It just sort of bounces around. Meanwhile, the sacred fire is overpowered as f*ck. I beat the game with it.
But I think it’s really the level design that drops Simon’s Quest into gaming’s sewer. These are boring maps, and without the pitch perfect enemy placement of Castlevania 1, the sense of claustrophobia the first game had is completely missing. I didn’t really mind the confusing navigation or the backtracking so much. If you use the most optimized game route (I used StrategyWiki to guide my way) there’s really only one MAJOR instance of backtracking and a couple small ones. That’s not too bad for the Metroidvania genre at this stage of its existence. Okay, so I can’t imagine trying to figure any of this stuff out without a guide or a ROM that told me the name of the location I was at, but the days where gamers have to do this stuff blindly are a thing of the past. The problem is there’s only a small handful of sections where I sat up in my chair and said “now this kind of feels like the original game” like seen in the screenshot below.
I won’t say Castlevania II NEVER feels like Castlevania I. Right here, there’s something about the timing of when these fishmen pop out that makes me feel like I’m finally, at long last, playing a sequel and not a spin-off. And yes, since I couldn’t find any other place to talk about it, shout-out to the historically awesome soundtrack. One of the best on the NES. But I don’t play games to listen to music. I play games to play games. Good music can only make a good game better, but it can’t make a bad game better. At least that’s how I feel.
The object of Simon’s Quest is to navigate your way to five mansions to locate body parts of Dracula. Or four body parts and his bling since the last thing you get is the “ring of Dracula” though as Sasha the Kid pointed at, maybe the ring is attached to his severed finger. This actually isn’t a bad idea (I mean the mansions, not Dracula’s finger being stuck in a ring, which is gross, Sasha) but the execution is beyond pathetic. I’m guessing they were aiming for Zelda or Kid Icarus-like dungeon mazes, but they all look basically the same with slightly different colors. There’s also only six total enemies that you’ll ever see in the mansions, not counting the two, yes, TWO bosses total that appear before you fight Dracula. The main two enemies you’ll encounter are skeleton knights and knight-knights, which are functionally the same in that they just sort of patrol back and forth. Two enemies, spiders and slime blobs, appear in the overworld. There’s also hopping devils that shoot projectiles and run of the mill Castlevania bats. That’s the entire roster of mansion enemies. I think that by itself assured the mansions would get old fast and Simon’s Quest would get a NO!
It’s safe to say the primary strategy used by the skeletons and knights in the mansions is to force players to walk into them on the stairs. That’s so unimaginative and boring, which is totally in contrast to, again, everything the first game did. Castlevania I *did* use this concept, but it had more going for it. Castlevania II just keeps leaning heavier and heavier into it. Mind you, Castlevania staples like mummies, ghosts, and the Medusa heads are in this game, but not in the mansions.
Because of the low variety of enemies and the lack of architecture to make one mansion stand apart from the other, they don’t feel like events. Hell, the mansions have absolutely no personality at all. I was F*CKING PUMPED every single time I reached the front gate of a new one. The entrances look like you’re doing something big and important.
No notes. Okay, well, maybe a note. They needed a sign to tell you the name of the place, and maybe they could have done a little more to make the fences look unique.
But the contents inside let me down every single time. They’re complete f*cking slogs to work your way through. Beating a dungeon in Legend of Zelda feels like a big deal. Beating mansions in Simon’s Quest feels like busy work. You’ve got a sacred flame, Simon. Just burn the f*cking building down and grab the bag with the relic in it. It’s not like there’s anything else to do inside of them! Okay, so you have to find and purchase an oak stake to collect the relic, but even that is botched. Even though you can only carry one oak stake at a time, you can prepay for the next mansion’s stake after collecting the relic. The stakes should have been like the big keys in Zelda, IE unique to each mansion. Even if you pretend like that’s the case, the locations of where the stakes are purchased inside the mansions have no sense of discovery about them. They’re usually in arbitrary spots, with only one or two placed in a way that makes it feel like consideration was given towards incentivizing exploration.
This is a great example of Castlevania II’s development team not understanding how to handle progress. The above screenshot shows me getting the flame whip, which is the best weapon in the game and the final upgrade of the whip. This should be a huge, huge moment that’s built towards. There should be a boss fight attached to it, or a quest to retrieve macguffins associated with it, or hell, at this point I would settle for making it the most expensive item in the game since there’s really not a whole ton of sh*t to buy. Something, anything to make the morning star feel like a big deal. There’s none of that! It’s a free upgrade that’s just in the middle of an arbitrary spot. The best thing I can say is the backdrop is unique, but so what? It’s nuts that the people who did such a great job pacing Castlevania 1, to the point that it feels like it was calculated by f*cking NASA, didn’t understand how to present or pace these moments. And don’t tell me it’s because they swapped genres, because big moments in games should have an intuitive lead-up to them. You don’t just spring them on players like this. You build suspense. It’s storytelling 101.
For the most part, mansions are built around sprawling, dull layouts that rely on placing enemies at the top of staircases in a way where you have to wait a long time for them to move out of the way, or false floors. Castlevania II has an obsession with false floors. The only way to really tell if a floor is fake or not is to throw holy water at the ground (you have an unlimited supply of it) and if it goes through the floor, you know to jump over that spot. This is unjustifiable. I swear to you that I hate going back to this point over and over, but the first Castlevania cut a tempo like few games ever did, and here’s the sequel telling players to heel-toe it while gingerly throwing water at the ground like the flower girl dropping pedals at a wedding. It’s unimaginable that they believed this was an effective way to build upon Castlevania’s foundation. And it’s not like the level layouts would be fun without this. In the second mansion, “Rover Mansion”, the level is basically divided into two sides, and the side you start on has NOTHING in it. Okay, so I need to use a map that I’m borrowing from StrategyWiki that was originally created by Procyon. I added the arrow and circle.
Rover Mansion. Not pictured is Fido Mansion and Spot Mansion.
You start Rover Mansion in the bottom left hand corner, where the base of the arrow is. Everything in the circle is a gigantic, winding dead end. The idea is supposed to be that players will eventually discover a false wall. Except, as far as I can tell, there’s no practical clue towards this. I went through every bit of dialog in the game and nothing points towards this. It has to be discovered completely organically by throwing holy water at every solid surface until the player sees one of the jars pass through it. I have NO objection to that, besides the fact that it sounds kind of boring on its face value. What I do object to is the entire circled area in the above map serving ZERO PURPOSE! It’s there only for the sake of a wild goose chase, and that’s just NEVER fun in video games. Granted, they might not have realized that in 1987 and it took games like Simon’s Quest to make that a hard rule, but again, this is the same dev team who, with Castlevania 1, optimized a conservative layout like few games ever have, AND THIS IS WHAT THEY CAME UP WITH? This is some of the least optimized map design in the history of the medium. It’s a bad use of real estate, and inexcusable given what they did with so little in Castlevania 1.
The wall behind me is the false wall in question that’s the key to solving this level. It won’t be the last usage of this gag, but this is by far the least optimized version of it, because it renders half of a level completely pointless.
You can’t even say that sending a player off in a dead end adds to the replay value because it eats up time and could cost players the best ending. Time stops ticking in the mansions. There’s plenty of things that COULD have been done with that area. Why not locate the seller of the oak stake up in there? Why not hide the sacred flame, located in an arbitrary spot on the overworld map, in the furthest dead-end of that area? Why not stick a clue to the false wall being a thing up in there? EVEN IF that would have been bungled in the translation, the dev team isn’t responsible for that. What they are responsible for is a nonsense map, but Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is full of those. What’s becoming apparent is they fundamentally didn’t have a good game plan for creating this interconnected world or building an exploration-based experience. Simon’s Quest isn’t lacking for big events. Things like lowering the lake with the crystal, or summoning a whirlwind to teleport you to a previously inaccessible point of the graveyard absolutely work as big moments. It’s all the sh*t in between that fails as an action game and an adventure game.
Okay, so kneeling for several seconds is not a great means of activation. With events like this, I prefer a single press of the button, which is intuitive, to any form of delayed activation, which isn’t. But the whirlwind does show that they understood, at least on some level, the importance of a big, sprawling adventure having great big “ta-dah!” moments. That’s why I can’t excuse any of the mistakes. They weren’t completely clueless. If they were, this wouldn’t even have been in the game.
And to really hammer home how unprepared and misguided Simon’s Quest is, look no further than the lack of bosses. The first Castlevania was defined by its boss encounters. Even the MSX game was. Simon’s Quest, before Dracula, has two bosses, which appear in the 3rd and 5th mansions. Yep, you have to wait until the game is nearly halfway done before you even encounter your first boss. Presumably they based that on Metroid only having two bosses before Mother Brain. Except, I think the designers of Castlevania 1 should have known better and understood the importance of boss fights and building up to them. TWO bosses? Are you f*cking kidding me? And they’re not even good bosses. One of them is the Grim Reaper, who is the FIRST BOSS IN THE GAME! You don’t even fight him, the actual first boss, until the third goddamned mansion, and he’s a total sponge. The second boss is a spooky mask that’s apparently supposed to be the Castlevania debut of Carmilla. That should be a big deal, except it doesn’t look or feel like Carmilla, or even the skull version of Carmilla that would really debut in Rondo of Blood.
I don’t know if it’s THE worst Grim Reaper fight, but it’s up there for sure.
It floors me that they didn’t recognize the role boss fights played in the original game. And it gets even worse, because they’re not even really framed like bosses. They just appear in the room before the room with the Dracula relic. You can walk right past them since the door isn’t locked. Hell, the music doesn’t even change. There’s no showmanship to them at all. They even respawn after you collect the relic, like basic enemies do! It’s beyond belief that this is what they came up with. In this relatively massive game, THREE bosses, two of which aren’t even given music, and one of which (Reapy McReapface) is basically entirely optional? Because you can beat the game without killing the Grim Reaper. Carmilla has to be beaten because she holds a cross that gates off the entrance to Castlevania itself.
The sad part? This is probably THE highlight of the entire game.
Only the final boss is given the proper weight of a boss fight, but even Dracula himself isn’t very fun to battle. First off, he looks like the Grim Reaper instead of Dracula. Even the kids even said it when I said “hey, who wants to see me fight Dracula?” Second: he’s boring looking in general, but then again, a lot of the enemy sprites are. Third, he’s the easiest Dracula fight in the franchise’s history. I stun-locked him almost immediately with the magic flame sub-weapon and the game ended seconds later. I’ve been saying for a long time that bosses are the metronome of gaming. Simon’s Quest is the proof, because this is a game that feels like it never keeps a beat. In terms of raw gameplay, it’s not close to the worst NES game, but I still would like to nominate it for consideration anyway. They laid the perfect foundation for a sequel and squandered it. Unlike other bad games, they had every reason to do better and no excuses for how bad this is. And it’s HORRIBLE!
“You now possess Dracula’s maidenhead.”
Castlevania II misses the point of the first game so badly that I have to figure this is in the same boat as Super Pac-Man. When you read interviews with Pac-Man creator Tōru Iwatani, it’s plainly obvious he didn’t even understand why Pac-Man was a big hit and chalked it up to “people like to eat” even though there were plenty of other games where you eat stuff. He fixated on “eating is the attraction” for the first two sequels, Super Pac-Man and Pac & Pal and they bombed badly because they featured boring mazes that were unoptimized for chasing and turning the tables (Ms. Pac-Man was made by someone else). It wasn’t until Pac-Mania years later that he seemed to finally realize eating dots was just a means to an end and it’s the chase and the pitch-perfect way of turning-the-tables that made Pac-Man blow up. I assume that’s what happened here as well. I’m guessing Konami and Akamatsu fundamentally didn’t understand what they’d accomplished with the original Castlevania. They probably chalked it up to the whip or the undead setting, but those were a means to an end. Castlevania was a masterpiece because it featured precisely fine-tuned, elegant action that was paced perfectly. All of that is gone here. Castlevania II has no polish and features maps and a game flow that doesn’t seem particularly well thought-out. It could have been salvaged, but they didn’t have time! They wanted to get this out ASAP. My theory is that Simon’s Quest is a victim of gold rush mentality.
You’ll notice a LOT of flat ground in these screenshots. Now, Castlevania 1 is a game that I’ve probably played more than any other NES game and it has a lot more of these straight corridors than people realize, but it can get away with it by utilizing a linear format with PERFECTLY placed enemies, which is to say nothing of the haunted house setting doing a lot of the heavy lifting and the boss fights to serve as checkpoints. You can’t get away with that type of design in a Metroidvania, and especially one that didn’t care one iota about boss fights. The result is a mostly boring landscape to travel.
I get it, by the way and can even see where they’re coming from. You have to consider the circumstances. Konami probably wanted to quickly establish a flagship franchise on the smoking-hot Famicom/NES, which was a new type of cultural touchstone that gamers of 2025 can’t really appreciate. Like, we saw the launch of the Switch 2 this year, right? Now imagine if Switch 2 completely pulled video games from the brink of death to become the single hottest consumer electronics item in the two biggest global markets for consumer electronics and there was a gap of major “brand names” associated with software for the platform. Brand names in this case being franchises. Now finally, I want you to imagine if the Switch 2 launch was as successful as it was (apparently historically successful), only without any established franchises and every hit game being the first game ever in that series. It’s hard to imagine, right? But that’s basically the situation Konami found themselves in with Castlevania.
Simon’s Quest shares blood with The Maze of Galious, a Famicom exclusive they developed which I will review sometime soon at IGC. I have no clue if it’s good or not, but while finishing editing this review, it occurred to me that Konami did do an unsung Metroidvania that I enjoy very much: Goonies II, which ironically I also reviewed (sort of) using a quality of life ROM hack. A full, stand-alone Goonies II review is also coming to IGC because I really want to try to get it re-released. I think it’s fantastic and one of the NES’ most underrated games. It also released half-a-year before Castlevania II did, which shows there’s no excuses for how badly done Simon’s Quest is since Konami knew what a good non-linear platform adventure should look like.
And again, they *had* to know Castlevania was their best piece of software by a country mile up to that point and that it had “marquee franchise” written all over it. So I totally understand the sense of urgency they must have felt to quickly, unequivocally establish the franchise as a brand name that consumers would associate with the world’s hottest brand. Hell, they probably felt being #2 to Super Mario Bros. in terms of direct association with the Famicom/NES was on the table, because it probably was. I don’t think Castlevania was ever that. If you’re an older reader of mine who grew up and went to school in the 1980s and early 90s, I’d LOVE for you to leave a comment and let me know how big Castlevania was among you and your friends in terms of status. Because I think that’s what happened here, and their plan didn’t fail, whether I liked Simon’s Quest or not. It was released just weeks after Super Mario Bros. 2 and sold pretty well, and Castlevania is a famous gaming franchise in the 2020s even with children who haven’t seen brand new Castlevania games in their gaming lives. Simon’s Quest played a part in that. And I’m not naive. I know Dracula’s Curse, my favorite NES game, was as good as it was because they had to make up for Simon’s Quest. We don’t get Castlevania III as good as it is if they don’t completely, utterly, epically, stupendously f*ck up Castlevania II first. So if nothing else, thanks for that, Simon’s Quest! Verdict: NO!
If it was *me* bringing Dracula back to life by assembling his dismembered body, including his heart, I think I would take a sh*t in Dracula’s heart before I started the re-assembly ritual. It’d be messy and gross, especially in the centuries before wet wipes were invented, but it’d be worth it. Then he comes back to life and is like “I, Dracula, prince of darkness, have returned! I vill now conquer zee world using my army of….. vhat are snickering at? Vhat’s so funny, Simon? Vhat, do I have a booger in my nose? And vhy is my chest so lumpy? Vait….. Oh no! Vhat have you done?! YOU SICK SON OF A VITCH!”
BONUS: QUALITY OF LIFE ROM HACK REVIEW
I already knew I hated Simon’s Quest going into this review. I’d tried playing it multiple times for an IGC review, and I just hate the f*cking game. But, it’s one of my most requested reviews, and it is Halloween and it’s tradition for me to do Castlevania games for Halloween. If I MUST do Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, I wanted to be able to examine the game at its peak potential, which meant utilizing a ROM hack. The problem is, there were SO MANY quality of life ROM hacks for Simon’s Quest to choose. It has to be one of the biggest bad games that people have tried to fix, and the volume of ROM hacks is pretty overwhelming to sort through. I wish I had time to review them all because I know how hard the ROM hacking community works, so I’m going to encourage everyone to check out ROMHacking.Net’s Castlevania II page. I went through the list and selected “Castlevania II English Re-translation (+Map)” by bisqwit. I chose it because bisqwit’s translation is cited at places like StrategyWiki and the Castlevania Wiki, and because his version of the game seemed to include the most quality of life upgrades while staying truest to the original intent (IE not improving heart drops, rebalancing enemies).
Bisqwit’s effort not only includes the map above and better translations of the text, but a fully done original prologue. Holy smokes! This goes so far above and beyond the call of duty that I kind of want to give bisqwit a hug, but hopefully being featured in one of my most requested reviews will suffice.
I intended for this to be my definitive Simon’s Quest review and the last time I ever play Simon’s Quest unless Konami puts out an official remake. So please keep in mind that the NO! verdict was not for Bisqwit’s ROM hack. He did a fantastic job improving a game that is, simply put, terrible and I’m bestowing an honorary YES! verdict to his work. If you’re a fan of Simon’s Quest, you’re weird, and also you really should check it out, along with other quality of life efforts for Castlevania II. By the way, I salute the entire ROM hacking community for their hard work. I seriously love and admire all of you and wish that more gaming media covered your work, but as long as I’m around, I intend to use my platform to spotlight your work. So, what made this version of Simon’s Quest different? The biggest change is the transition from day to night is instantaneous. Here’s what it (and the map) look like:
He also added more invincibility frames (what I normally call “blinking”) and the ability to jump off stairs but I didn’t even realize that and never used it until after I’d already beaten the game. Those are the only real efforts towards rebalancing I believe bisqwit did, and he also added a save system to replace the password system. Finally, the dialog is properly translated. Apparently some characters are meant to lie to Simon and provide red herrings that aren’t helpful to players, and I have no problem with bisqwit not changing that. He stayed true to the developer’s intent, whether that intent was stupid or not. The clue books you find in the mansions are much more clear, and you can go back and re-read them in the menu. Even the sign posts are better handled. Here’s some examples of the new dialog, which is based directly on the original Japanese text:
I’m grateful for his effort, because it confirmed to me that my problems with Simon’s Quest are related to nonsensical level design and terrible pacing that goes far beyond a slow transition from day to night. The version I played altered NONE of the level design, enemy difficulty, heart drop rates, experience system, etc. I’m confident that nothing I covered in the main review is going to be different whether you play the normal retail version of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest or the version I played. So what’s here WAS my definitive review, and I’m glad to finally be done with it. This game sucks, but bisqwit’s effort does not. Thank you again bisqwit for your effort! YES! to your patch, even if the game itself is still a NO! And seriously, compilations need to do things like this. There is nothing inherently sacred about old versions of games and including OPTIONAL quality of life fixes is ALWAYS worth the effort, even if the game isn’t that much better for it.
Castlevania: Bloodlines aka Castlevania: The Next Generation (Europe) aka Vampire Killer (Japan) Platform: Sega Genesis Released March 17, 1994 Designed by Teisaku Seki Developed by Konami Available with a Switch Online Expansion Pack Subscription
To be honest, I’m surprised the enemies don’t mistake you as an ally. John Morris is built like one of those flea men wished upon a star and became a real boy.
This is my fifteenth review related to Castlevania, and hell, that doesn’t even count all the games inspired by it, for better (like Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon) and for worse (like Master of Darkness). Yet, I don’t think I’m close to running out of things to say about one of my all-time favorite action franchises. Good thing, because I’m not really close to running out of Castlevania games to review, either. And it IS an action franchise, or at least that’s why I’m into it. The awesome undead settings and bonkers mythos is just a bonus, because it’s the combat and the pace and the often clever enemy design and placement that keeps me coming back. I love the whip, and the boomerang and holy water and axe and the predictability of it. This is a strange thing to say about a game where you fight skeletons and the Grim Reaper itself, but Castlevania reminds me of slipping on my robe fresh out of the dryer. It’s comfort, in gaming form. I wanted to note that because Bloodlines is probably the most traditional and conservative Castlevania that also counts as “one of the weird ones.”
Boy, did I lose my sh*t on this part, because my up-to-this-point perfect run ended because I went right instead of left before the screen scrolled up enough to show me I was going the wrong way. I’m certain that I’ve played Bloodlines all the way through because I remembered certain aspects of the Grim Reaper and Dracula battles, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember any of the levels, even though there’s a couple spots that seem memorable. I’ll chalk it up to the bug zapper in my head.
Unique to the franchise, at least at the time this came out, is that this Castlevania was set in the 20th century, with the idea being that a witch accidentally re-alived Elizabeth Bartley, who is based on Elizabeth Báthory, who probably did kill a lot of people but the tales are largely exaggerated. No, she didn’t bathe in the blood of people to stay young, which does NOTHING for your looks anyway and makes you stink of iron for about a week though don’t ask how I know that. Those stories were first reported well over a century after the fact. There’s a modern effort to prove she was framed and the victim of a politically motivated smear campaign, but all the evidence says she killed between 30 and 300 girls, for which her reward is being the Lenny Luthor to Dracula’s Lex in the Genesis version of Castlevania. Which proves there’s no divine justice because a crime like that warrants being the second-to-last boss of Castlevania Adventure for the Game Boy.
Only the fourth level feels like it builds upon the war setting, and it does this by leaning into the camouflage colors, putting up some chain link fences and donning the skeletons in army helmets. Meh.
Why all this REALLY matters is because Bloodlines is set during World War I and has far and away the most unhinged story of the franchise. Get this: according to Bloodlines, it was actually Bartley who assassinated Franz Ferdinand using sorcery and started the Great War so she can use all the souls collected from the casualties of the war to bring back Dracula. Talk about devotion. All that effort to bring back one evil guy with an uncanny knack for coming back from the dead only to immediately die again at the hands of a family armed with what is really just enchanted cow hide on a stick when you stop and think about it.
Bartley also doubles as one of the most boring Castlevania bosses ever. You just smack her back and forth before her magic balls ripen.
Like so many other ideas in the franchise, the World War I setting sounds exciting, but doesn’t really amount to all that much. Only the fourth level, which has a couple steel drums laying around, reminded me “oh right, this is a 20th century setting.” Not that you should ever play Castlevania for the story because it’s too silly to take all that seriously. But I guess I was hoping for something like the Grim Reaper driving a tank or Frankenstein (excuse me, “The Creature”) in a biplane. It feels like a missed opportunity, and it’s not like this game was afraid to embrace the comically absurd silliness. One of the bosses is a downright playful set of sentient gears that I’d swear is more like a boss from a Toy Story game.
It’s a hard boss to get a good screenshot of, but this is the Pixar-like boss and you can sort of make out its body in this shot. It’s very animated and has a playful personality too. I actually felt bad killing it, so naturally the game makes you do it a second time during the home stretch. Now whether or not a boss that can be described as “whimsical” belongs in a game where a woman starts a war that killed twenty million people to bring her cousin back from the dead is another matter. Hey Thanos, if Lady Death spurns your wooing, I know someone who would probably be into you!
So ignore the theme, because this is a mostly boilerplate Castlevania with six levels, but a lot more bosses than levels. And I say “mostly boilerplate” because when this Castlevania experiments for one section of the final level, it’s completely out of its mind. I don’t even know how to describe the pictures you’re about to see, except to say I thought my emulator might have been broken at first.
In a nutshell, the screen is divided into three horizontal slices that aren’t in sync with each-other. The best I can describe it is like playing Castlevania in a fun house mirror, and it’s VERY confusing and disorienting, and I sort of like it and I sort of think it’s the worst idea ever. It’s rare that something is both those things, and I think the problem is it’s just not staged right. It doesn’t work as a set-piece because it’s in the room right from the start, so it feels like a glitch, when what they were REALLY aiming for, I think, is for it to sort of feel like a prototype for Eternal Darkness’ insanity effects. This really needed a graphic of Bartley casting a spell after the room starts to show what is happening. The same with the upside-down room that follows. It’s not the same as the famous “slam scrolling” from Dracula’s Curse, because that’s a very intuitive set-piece. This looks like something is wrong with your television in a bad way. It’s a magic act with only “the turn” and no “pledge” or “prestige.” So what should be a dazzling set-piece is reduced to confusion.
What’s especially frustrating about how badly they bungled those “magic trick” rooms is that they’d already shown they knew how to set up a high concept set-piece (well, for Castlevania) in this very game. I really thought this whole sequence was fantastic, and it’s staged correctly. There’s a lead-up with these blocks that’s a typical Castlevania style challenge and kind of mundane, then it starts raining these blocks, and it does it in a way that keeps you on your toes AND you don’t know where they’re going with it. The sequence then stops and returns back to normalcy in the same room. That’s how you do it! You have to lull a player into those types of gags. You can’t just do it willy nilly.
Is Bloodlines a good Castlevania game? Sure. It does Castlevania mostly right with few surprises, but few mistakes as well. Okay, so the Grim Reaper/Bartley fights were disasters. Actually, let’s just call level six a disaster saved by a decent Dracula fight, even if they gave Dracula’s final form the world’s most menacing vagina. SERIOUSLY WHY DID THEY DESIGN HIS CROTCH TO LOOK THAT WAY?! THEY EVEN GAVE IT LIPS, FOR F*CK’S SAKE!!
Probably literally for f*ck’s sake. I’d say “a little penicillin will clear up whatever form of demonic clap that is” but he was raised from the dead about a decade too early.
And there’s a second character, Eric, who uses “Alucard’s Spear” and he’s just not as fun to use. The stick has less OOMPH to it, so the combat’s satisfaction is significantly, dare I say catastrophically, muted. Thankfully he’s completely optional and I think a single run through the game with main character John Morris should be enough for any fan, though Eric’s addition did require one brief branching path that feels like a last-second band-aid more than something that was planned out. John Morris (son of Quincy Morris of the Dracula novel’s fame) can swing with his whip, something I didn’t realize until I reached this section where I reached a gigantic, unjumpable gap and was like “how the hell do you get past this?”
Answer: this way.
Meanwhile, Eric can do the Super Mario 2 charge jump thing, but the charge jump thing doesn’t move Eric horizontally. It’s basically only good for jumping directly above you, though you can jump VERY high with it and even bypass entire sections of the game with it. Of course, since you can’t swing and you can’t move horizontally, Eric can’t get past the room in the above screenshot, so what to do? Well, in the room BEFORE that room, you have to spring-jump up a series of slanted platforms.
Eric often looks more like an exotic dancer than a hero, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Hell, I feel like someone should stick a $20 in his underwear. This is seriously the most erotic review I’ve ever had.
I wish they had optimized the game JUST for John Morris, because they clearly didn’t. The whip swinging goes largely underutilized presumably to accommodate Eric. It’s like, if you go to all the trouble of programming a whip swing, you want a lot more than one or two notable usages out of it, right? I got a LOT more usage out of Eric’s exotic super jump. Like, these rooms with gigantic clock gears that are one of my favorite Castlevania tropes? Yeah, they’re a little on the janky side in Bloodlines and I had trouble working them with John Morris. But Eric could just circumvent it by springing up to the target platform and ignoring the gears entirely.
Did I have fun? Sure. Do I get why this is so beloved? Uh…….. Kind of? Hell, my friend Matthew calls it his favorite Castlevania (well, “arguably” his favorite which I think means “I know, I know, but..”) and that made me stop and think how this ended up THAT. I think a lot of it, along with the idea that Bloodlines is one of the “weird ones” is tied to this being the first Castlevania for a non-Nintendo platform (if you don’t count MSX or Haunted Castle in the arcades). By the time I got deeply into gaming in 1998, the idea that Nintendo and Sega were at war seemed downright quaint, but now that I’ve got amazing friends who big parts of Sega during the SNES/Genesis war, I do get it, because I know how proud they were to land Castlevania. How earned it felt for them. Castlevania was a huge prize for Sega to nab, and for a lot of gamers, this was their first Castlevania. I’m sure to Nintendo, it felt like a shot across their bow. None of that matters in 2025 though. Bloodlines is not a great Castlevania game, and it’s not even a weird one. A deeply flawed one? Sure. But it’s also a good one. No arguments there. Verdict: YES!
If you live in Europe, this didn’t happen and so you should be cool and not read the following joke. I won’t be held responsible for warping your brain. If you live in the US, proceed. Ahem. “What the Red Cross does with their blood overstock.” Really, I feel Europeans probably could have read that and lived otherwise normal lives. Censorship is weird.
Kyuukyoku Harikiri Stadium* Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released June 28, 1988 Developed by Taito Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
*This review includes ROM update Kyuukyoku Harikiri Stadium: ’88 Senshu Shin Data Version (Released Dec. 16, 1988 exclusively in Japan)
This is the home run derby and it’s, you know, bland. I don’t get video home run derbies. Home Run Derbies are fun to watch, and only exactly once a year and not a single derby more. I’d rather the players save it for the all-star game anyway, which are so fun that, to this day, my father bitches about missing the 1989 All-Star Game. Without fail, every summer when the All-Star Game comes around, he’ll look at me and say “you just HAD to be born right then!” Yep, I was born the day of the 1989 All-Star Game. A lot of All-Star games happen on my birthday, which is cool but still not as cool as the human resistance being set to achieve victory over Skynet on what will be my 40th birthday in the Terminator franchise.
The first Japanese baseball exclusive where I was legitimately perplexed as to why nobody licensed this for a US release. Kyuukyoku Harikiri Stadium, which I’ll refer to as KHS for my own sanity, is a quality baseball video game. What’s astonishing is that this was the launching point in the Harisuta franchise, which was probably the #2 baseball franchise (behind Namco’s Family Stadium) in Japan and certainly one of the bigger Japanese-exclusive Nintendo franchises. There are a LOT of these games, and there’s a reason for that. KHS has a very solid baseball engine, albeit a slower paced one. The slow pace isn’t GENUINELY slow, but rather calculated to accommodate the dimensions of the field or distance between bases. Like Nintendo’s Baseball, KHS attempts to account for things like the relative size of the playfield and the distance between bases when determining how fast players should move. This is NOT a high-energy game. Then again, it’s baseball so that should track, right?
Even with slow outfielder speed, the base runners don’t seem to move at the same speed, so making outfield throw-outs IS possible if the ball is hit where you could expect to be able to make a throw in real life baseball. The closer the ball is hit to the infield, the less 1-to-1 the scale accuracy feels. I’m guessing that Taito had to choose between fine tuning the infield or outfield and decided to go with outfield. If you have to do one or the other, I’d say they made the right call because if you flipped it around, you’d probably be able to run-up the score much, much more easily, which makes it feel less like real baseball.
However, unlike Nintendo’s game, Taito did a much better job with the timing. So while defenders and their throws are slow, the resulting game play feels accurate to how real baseball should work. IE balls hit to specific locations in the field should result in the same amount of bases you would expect real life baseballs hit at those angles to generate. It’s well done, but not perfect. I think batters can beat out just a little too many infield hits. And I mean just a little. Otherwise, this is the first game in this entire feature where it feels like consideration for fielding was given a premium over the pitcher/batter duel. My second game went all the way to the ninth inning without a single run scored by me or the CPU, and that was the result of well adjusted defensive gameplay. Trust me, it sure as hell wasn’t from the pitching!
There’s no complicated pitches. Like so many early baseball games, you manually apply the curve yourself. Also fast balls are incredibly rare. I never quite learned how to do them.
So yeah, the pitching feels almost cricket-like in its delivery and, instead, the game relies on making most hits playable by the defense. This is a very true to baseball way of handling things, by the way. This is a sport where a player who fails only 66% of the time at the bat is likely to make an all-star team. I didn’t even hit my first in-game home run until the top of the 9th inning in my second full game. The defense uses a hybrid system similar to Bases Loaded, only without the speed boost when you take manual control. You WILL want to take manual control anyway. The system is more about getting defenders ready for the players, not about doing the heavy lifting for you. Most fly outs you’ll have to grab yourself. But, I mean, it works! After giving up two runs in my practice session, my first two real games were shut-outs and that was based entirely on how intuitive fielding is.
Okay, so there’s the occasional brain dead moment that would result in the summary execution of the player by their teammates and possibly fans if it were a home game. The left fielder gets the ball, throws to second to make the force out. It’s going to be close, but then the shortstop ends up inside the throwing angle and HE catches the ball instead right next to the base, preventing the out. If a shortstop did this in real life, he would be treated to the world’s first act of involuntary sodomy with a baseball bat committed on live television. You know who I would feel for in that situation? The stadium’s organ player. Do you play the theme to Jaws or Baby Elephant Walk? Do you start playing BEFORE the bat is inserted or after the tears start flowing?
Since I’m focusing on single player experiences, the key addition to Taito’s take on the sport is a smarter CPU. It knows how to turn double plays, hit relay men, and make the throw to prevent extra bases. It also occasionally does the RBI Baseball “protect home when there’s an easy out at first” thing. It’s rare, but it happens, and it kills the immersion. I’m going to guess that none of these early 8-bit games will be able to perfectly keep up the fantasy for an entire nine inning stretch, so all I can hope for is as few bumps in the road as possible. But for what it’s worth, this feels like a step-forward, and the only reason I’m not calling it the best NES baseball game yet is because Bases Loaded’s duel is just much more versatile.
The sprites for snagging line-drives are great. I mean, if you imagine there’s angels in the outfield, and in the infield too!
Taito’s KHS isn’t amazing or anything. The pitcher/batter duel is very generic and uninspired while also likely being clockable. I played four full games (one of which was for the updated cart) and I think if I kept playing just a couple more games longer, I probably would have reached the point of being able to turn the offense into an unrealistic freak show. But, I did have fun with my time with it. Beware, though: the season mode has upgradable stats. In a game where I already held the CPU to an under one-run-a-game scoring average over four games, I think it might be possible to turn the game into a mockery of the sport. BUT, if you want to have fun for an hour playing an old timey video baseball game that you’ve probably never played before, I find it unlikely a baseball fan wouldn’t have fun playing this. I seriously can’t wait to play the rest of these and see where they take the franchise from here. Verdict: YES!
As I continue to cannibalize the aborted Baseball Games for NES/Famicom: The Definitive Review, I’ve reached the two games that were so putrid that they’re genuinely contenders for the worst video games I’ve ever played. Not sports games. Not NES games. The worst video games, period. Baseball bat wielded by Jose Canseco to my head? I’d probably say Exciting Baseball is the worst of the two and likely the very worst video game I’ve ever played in my life. Now, I didn’t go through the extra features too much, but come on. Who gives a f*ck if you can customize rosters when the actual baseball mechanics are THIS BAD?!
The tagline “no matter who wins, we lose” was already taken by Alien v Predator.
But really, both these games far exceed the lows of previous “worst NES games I’ve reviewed” like Blues Brothers, Hudson Hawk, Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II, Back to the Future, Defenders of Dynatron City and Cheetahmen (which I lumped together because they’re just about the most soulless, cynical games ever made), Wolverine, and the reigning kings of awful, Where’s Waldo and Fox’s Peter Pan & The Pirates: The Revenge of Captain Hook. The fact that not one, but two baseball games (released back-to-back nonetheless) are worse than Where’s Waldo or Peter Pan & The Pirates was almost beyond belief. The only positive thing I can say about today’s baseball games is that I genuinely don’t think I’ll ever play worse NES games. I think these will be as bad as it ever gets. It just doesn’t seem physically possible to be worse. So, I hope you enjoy this feature, because I sure as hell didn’t!
Exciting Baseball Platform: Famicom Disk System Released December 8, 1987 Designed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
You can see in this picture that this routine pop fly, which had quite a bit of airtime to it (enough to count a few Mississippis before it landed) could have easily been caught by the second baseman. He could have reached out his arm and got it. At the maximum, he might have needed to take a step backwards. Now look closely at first base, because I retreated my base runners. This was a double play at second and third. I only have one out. Even though it lands outside the infield, this is still by definition an infield fly, which is one of the most misunderstood rules in the sport. The “infield” part actually refers to the PLAYER and not the location or trajectory of the fly ball. The actual definition, even in Japanese baseball, is “catchable by an infielder with ordinary effort.” There is no doubt about it that the second baseman could have moved a step back to catch that ball. This is not a nothingburger, folks. The infield fly rule exists because baseball really, really sucks without it.
The Konami “Exciting Sports” franchise got five releases in Japan for baseball, billiards, boxing, soccer, and basketball. Only one of those came out in the United States, as “Exciting Basket” is better known globally as the famous gold standard of video basketball: Double Dribble. That got me really excited, no pun intended. Double Dribble? People loved Double Dribble, right? It was the first console simulation of basketball that felt authentically like basketball. Yeah, well, I should have known there was a reason why nobody licensed a finished Famicom baseball game when the NES started picking up steam in 1988. Exciting Baseball was the first Nintendo baseball release with a competitive edge based around extra features. The big one is the ability to edit rosters. Instead of taking the expensive Nippon Professional Baseball licenses, it just created generic teams that are fully editable, right down to the team name. While it would probably take players hours and hours to fill in all the names, it also means rosters could be updated year-to-year. That should only be considered a positive if the game is fun. This is the polar opposite of fun.
This was a line drive that just landed. Balls can come to a dead stop on a dime in this game. PHYSICS!
Exciting Baseball is, simply put, a TERRIBLE game of baseball. Far worse than Nintendo’s version from years earlier and one of the worst video games I’ve ever played in my entire life. It’s bad, folks. I’m talking swinging and missing pitches, only for the umpire to call it a “ball” levels of bad. Yep, that really happened quite a lot, meaning that the hypothetical advantage of fast balls and change-ups is lost. The window to make the call isn’t long enough, so any delayed reaction to swinging (meaning not simply swinging at the wrong angle) will be called a ball instead of a strike because the umpire has a faster reaction time than the human player doing the swinging late does. I never imagined a game could get THAT part so wrong. We’re not talking about missing the infield fly rule here (though it doesn’t have that, either). A swing and a miss IS A STRIKE! If you can’t get that right, what the F*CK are you doing making a video baseball game? It happens at the end of this 29 second clip.
That by itself makes Exciting Baseball a contender for the worst sports game ever made, but I’m just getting started. The base running responsiveness will make you long for Nintendo’s 1983 game, because these players DON’T LISTEN TO YOU. If you give the run signal it could be three or four seconds before they actually start moving. This meant any shot that would be a double in any normal circumstance instead became a single, and that any fly ball I hit with runners on base was almost certain to be a double play. Well, provided it was in the outfield. Infield? That’s another story. The basemen, as far as I could tell, don’t move on defense. Additionally, CPU infielders are seemingly confused by pop flies, so stuff like this happens:
LOOK AT THAT! That was not a one off instance, either. The CPU defense will do everything in its power to give you the win. The only infielder who caught hit balls was the catcher, who ended an astonishing amount of at-bats by catching foul tips. Unlike a lot of problems in baseball video games, this wasn’t a two-way problem. I had no trouble fielding in the infield. Outfielders also occasionally get hung up, though. Like, this happened a couple times every game:
With so many terrible things going wrong, we have to start talking about Exciting Baseball as a legitimate “worst video game ever made” contender. It’s actually pretty embarrassing given the studio involved. This isn’t some nobody that threw this thing out there. It’s f*cking Konami, for God’s sake! Exciting Baseball released over a year after Castlevania. They knew how to make quality games by this point, and yet, they made a woefully inept baseball game here, and an UGLY one at that. The sprites and models are really bad. When you catch fly balls, it almost looks like you’re catching them with your ass (meaning the body part, not the fielders, though if they’re in this game they’re probably asses in the figurative sense). Then, in my second game, I got hit by over ten pitches. Here’s me getting hit by a pitch with consecutive batters in the first inning.
With the next batter, I got a base hit that should have been an out at second base but the CPU threw to third instead. The next batter after that, now with the bases juiced?
Bases Loaded Plunk.
And the batter after that?
Bases Loaded Plunk 2: The Secret of the Ooze
Base hit after that, and then I swear I’m not kidding, the ball was thrown right at my head BUT THIS TIME it went through my head. Twice.
Maybe there’s a hard cap on how many times you can be smacked by a pitch, because several more pitches went through my batter. That was fine. I ended up going up 13 to zip in the first inning, including some bases loaded walks besides the plunks. I didn’t score any runs in the second inning, and to celebrate, at the start of the third inning…… you know where this is going.
First pitch. Does the other team have money on me or something?
The fourth inning also started with getting hit on consecutive pitches. And the sixth inning. And the seventh. I mean seriously, if a game had this many bean balls, there would be a riot. Ultimately though, it feels appropriate for this game of baseball. Besides giving players a LOT of control over the curve of the ball, the pitching is too limited, and the pitcher/batting duel is too clockable. It’s a REALLY choppy game too, lacking the smooth scrolling that both RBI Baseball and Bases Loaded featured. Exciting Baseball looks and feels like a game from a previous generation console. Had this gotten an American release, I sincerely think it’d be remembered today as one of the worst sports games ever made and possibly one of the worst video games ever made. Howard Scott Warshaw should use it in defense of E.T. “Oh you think I made the worst video game ever, do you? Well at least *I* know that when you swing at a ball and miss, it’s a f*cking strike!” Verdict: NO!
Major League Baseball Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released April, 1988 Developed by Atlus Published by LJN Never Released Outside of North America NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Little infield tap. Easiest play ever to first base, right? Nope. The CPU threw to third and everyone was safe. Sigh.
In the World Series of Bad Baseball Video Games, Konami’s Exciting Baseball is facing LJN’s Major League Baseball for the World Championship of Awfulness. I dare say that this game has even more problems than Konami’s retched title and it’s only by virtue of knowing that swinging and missing counts as a strike that MLB is better overall. But, it’s sadly very close, as this is yet another contender for worst video game ever made. The AI doesn’t know how to play baseball. In a baseball game! In a Major League Baseball game! The CPU doesn’t try to throw out runners who get caught trying for extra bases, so there’s no penalty at all for exploring the option. Or hell, why just let the runner make it to first base? The following tactic works every single goddamned time. Here’s me, advancing the runner from first to second after allowing a significant amount of time for the play to die down. It goes completely unchallenged:
I should have probably warned you to mute your device first. This sounds like the soundtrack for a guided tour of Hell itself.
Anyway, once you understand that the basics of the sport are the foundation of the fantasy, it doesn’t take long to understand why this is so bad. It’s IMPOSSIBLE to get immersed in Major League Baseball. It might have the team names (no player names, just numbers because it lacked the player’s union license) but nobody can suspend their disbelief and make believe that gameplay like seen in that video is authentic professional baseball players having another day on the job at the ballpark. Nobody is going to sit there and watch a guy run to second. And that’s hardly the only example. I smacked multiple catchable fly balls that the AI didn’t even move on until the ball hit the ground, and it never once attempted a double play when that was a possibility. In fairness, that’s probably because double plays don’t seem possible. Thrown balls don’t travel fast enough. For every routine double play in any normal baseball game, I converted maybe 1 out of 8. Maybe.
This is a weirdly common problem with NES/Famicom baseball games I’ve played so far: tagging the bases with the ball doesn’t cause an out. Your fielders have to tag the player directly. Weird.
It’s one of those things you never really think about: the speed of runners and thrown balls, and the dimensions of the field. These should be the things that, ideally, you wouldn’t even notice. In Major League Baseball, they’re ruinous. The traveling speed of thrown balls especially. Routine doubles? Hell, they’re triples in this game. In the time that a ball is thrown by an outfielder, you have more than enough time to round second base and make it to third before the ball even arrives in the second baseman’s glove. I did this multiple times. Amazingly, the ball kept landing in the same small handful of spots in the field so I had plenty of time to get this down to a science.
While MLB’s CPU doesn’t know how to play baseball, in fairness, it doesn’t seem to know the rules of baseball to begin with. There’s no infield flies, and fair balls are called foul. Ones that aren’t really even close calls. Like, look at this little dink along the third base line. The shadow is in. The ball lands literally right next to third base on the positive side. I’m grateful because this would have been a force out for me, but come on!
Even if you had a real life opponent, there’s no way to overcome the technical shortcomings of Major League Baseball. Base runners are too fast for ball movement this slow, thus runs are just too easy to come by, and thus games drag on without any excitement. The Pitcher/Batter duel is too limited to overcome that. From a gameplay perspective, it feels very similar to the Konami game’s set-up, only with less direct control over the curve of the ball. I gave up three home runs because there really aren’t many pitching options.
It’s like an uglier version of RBI Baseball, isn’t it?
As for batting, in my only full game (I intended to review 40+ baseball games, but I did put at least 20 minutes practice into every game before starting the full game), I had eight home runs, including a whopping three grand slams. Hell, I even had a grand slam during the twenty-minute warm-up period. The weird thing is, graphically it looks more like RBI Baseball/Family Stadium, but in terms of gameplay Major League Baseball sure seems to build off the fundamental gameplay style of the horrible Konami game that came directly before it. It’s especially noticeable in the batting/pitching. Really, the most notable thing about MLB is that, in 1990, a 9 year old boy sued Nintendo, LJN, and the real Major League Baseball over it because it didn’t have player names and wasn’t up to date. The case was dismissed. Nobody won with Major League Baseball. Verdict: NO!
I had planned to do Baseball Games for NES & Famicom: The Definitive Review and made it ten reviews into a 40+ game feature when, frankly, it just became kind of exhausting. I do plan on finishing a lot of the games featured, but the reviews that are finished are going to be posted as normal reviews. I’ve already done the Nintendo version of Baseball, but all my Definitive Reviews have re-reviews, and Nintendo Baseball was no exception. And I was REALLY happy with the re-review, so why let it go to waste? So, following my review of Bases Loaded, be sure to check out that re-review. It’s all-new. I hope everyone enjoys!
I laid down a sacrifice bunt here. You can CLEARLY see the runner beat the ball to second base with time to spare, but the umpire called this an out. And you can’t even coldcock them.
Golly, my decision on Bases Loaded was a tough one. I don’t even know why I’m surprised. There were a whopping FOUR games in the Bases Loaded series on the NES alone. You don’t get THAT many sequels unless the original game had a solid foundation to build off of, right? And Bases Loaded is solid. In fact, I thought it was a much better simulation of baseball than the more iconic RBI Baseball. It’s certainly smarter, at least from player behavior. Defensive is handled semi-automatically, so routine situations like most pop flies allow you to just sit back and enjoy seeing the fielder catch the ball. However, you can take control at any time, and fielders move faster if you directly control them. If it’s questionable whether or not a fly ball is playable, you probably should be proactive in going for it, and you HAVE to go for any balls hopping along the ground. I like that method for hybrid defense, though. It keeps you honest. The way defense is handled here will be the gold standard for all future baseball game reviews, actually.
It didn’t take me very long in RBI Baseball to realize how easy it was to manipulate the CPU into chasing down a runner instead of getting the automatic out. You can’t do that in Bases Loaded. Here, the third baseman and catcher have caught my runner in a routine trap play. It’s not EXACTLY like real life baseball since the two defenders don’t (can’t) close the gap. They just throw back and forth until they get you from a stationary position. But, if it’s possible to fool them or inch your way back to the safety of the base, I never got the timing of it right. I tried, too. The next logical evolution of this leap forward is the defenders closing the space, so I’ll be on the lookout for that.
Why I’m struggling with my verdict is because my stated rule for earning a YES! is “I have to like a game more than I dislike it.” For everyone who thinks I’m an ogre, I really think I have the lowest hurdle of any “major” publication to get over. I just want to have more fun than not! And I DID have more fun than not with Bases Loaded. I really enjoyed the pitcher/batter duel, which I know Jaleco took inspiration from Intellivision’s World Series Baseball (1983) and Accolade’s Hardball! (1985). The pitcher is essentially given an invisible tic-tac-toe grid to throw at, and the batter has to swing at the square the pitcher selects. It’s really well done. I loved it, except I wish there was a little less delay between the moment of impact and the transition to running/defense. But the system feels true to the psychology of the pitcher/batter dynamic. It also highlights the problem with Bases Loaded. In this screenshot, taken a single frame before the umpire makes his call, you can see the pitched ball is literally encompassing my stance. It looks like a white wristwatch on the batter.
That was called a strike. So was this one:
This is the first game in this feature where you can’t move around the batter’s box. The pitcher can adjust their position, but not the batter, and there were plenty of high pitches that were called strikes that were, ahem, suspect. I rewound and examined a few, and even attempted to swing at them, where I literally don’t think I could have done anything to hit them. I know that you’re supposed to actually watch the catcher’s mitt and not the ball (the mitt is actually just floating there like it’s being held by a g-g-g-ghost!), but even then, it still didn’t always seem to match. But that’s nowhere near as frustrating as some of the basic baseball rules that Bases Loaded doesn’t have right. In real baseball, if the ball bounces inside the diamond but clears first base OUTSIDE the diamond in foul territory, the hit is a foul ball and a strike. This is an INCREDIBLY important rule because hits down the foul line are almost always doubles or more, since defenders are not in position to make a play. The rules are rules for reasons. With that said, take a look:
That’s actually me hitting, but with these baseball games, bad programming works both ways. In my first game, a similar occurrence happened with me on defense. In the clip, you can clearly see this is a foul ball. There’s no doubt about it: the shadow is on the wrong side of first base. I didn’t even bother to run because I was waiting for the pitcher/batter duel to restart and was caught off guard when the fielder was chasing the ball down. Since it happened twice, it’s not a fluke. It’s a thing. Even worse is how much extra time defenders have to make outs when runners sure look like they’re safe. In fact, the act of a runner sliding into base seems to add more time to reaching base than it shaves off, which defeats the point of sliding at all, right? Over three games and a twenty minute warm-up, I never saw a single runner who slid into base actually be called safe when an attempt at a play was made even if they CLEARLY beat the throw. Again, this is me playing defense turning a fly-out into a double play. The runner on second had to return to second. They slide in and beat my throw but are called out. I rewind to show you what being called safe looks like.
Basically, the person sliding has to also then stand up on the base for it to count as safe. Which would, you know, negate the whole point of sliding into a base in the first place. This applies to home plate as well. This time, it’s me getting thrown out. You can see, without a shadow of a doubt, I’m scoring here. I beat the throw and touched home plate, then the person catches the ball, then I’m called out, then I’m given the electric chair for the murder of the umpire. Okay, not that last one, only because I suppose Jaleco had to save something for the sequel.
At first I thought “well, maybe they programmed umpires to make mistakes.” I hate it when sports games do that (unless they make it a toggle you can turn on and off), but that’s not the case in Bases Loaded anyway. This is what happens whenever a player slides. It’s very frustrating, and the only silver lining is that no advantage is given since this type of thing happens consistently. My anger is more about the loss of immersion. For all the sh*t we give umpires, none are THIS bad, and so these simple baseball rules and standards not being correctly implemented screws with my suspension of disbelief, thus breaking the golden rule: all sports games ARE fantasy games. The fantasy is you’re playing the sport at a professional level. For the fantasy to work, the rules and behavior have to resemble the real rules of the sport. I can’t make believe that if the game is calling foul balls as fair, balls as strikes, or calling players who beat the throw to a base “out.” The shame is, Bases Loaded gets more right than any baseball game before it.
SPLIT DECISION – Moero!! Pro Yakyuu (JP)
When I threw my first pitch in the Japanese version and saw that the pitcher I’d picked was throwing a SUBMARINE, I was so overjoyed that I was practically doing cartwheels. Non-baseball fans will recognize the submarine from the Brad Pitt flick Moneyball, where Pitcher Chad Bradford’s “defect” was that he “throws funny.” I don’t even remember if they identified “funny” as “the submarine” which literally every single baseball fan knows about, but that’s what it was. There’s nothing funny about the submarine though. Ask any player if they would want to face a submarine thrower who has a change-up in their arsenal and they’ll tell you “no way!” Especially if it’s a same-side batter (IE a right-handed pitcher going against a right-handed batter). The amazing thing about Bases Loaded is that they animated the delivery of the submarine nearly flawlessly, and it legitimately creates the timing-based optical illusion the pitch is intended to create. It’s not 100% perfect. I imagine it wasn’t possible to create the “sink” that the real life submarine relies on with these physics, but the illusion of the delivery is convincing.
Unlike RBI Baseball, these aren’t characters that look like Fisher-Price figures. They LOOK like human baseball players, and they even have personality. Bases Loaded features a wide variety of batting stances and pitching animations that make the roster look and feel like a team of ballplayers and not toys. The US version controls really well. So, I want to give Bases Loaded a YES!, but I kind of want to give it a NO! too. Why not both? I have a valid excuse to, as well. For the Japanese version, I couldn’t get base runners to retreat on fly balls, leading to double plays galore. The runners wanted to go and all my instruction to return to base did was make them freeze-up on the baseline. It happened EVERY SINGLE TIME, and I couldn’t figure out why. I checked my settings and nothing was wrong. This didn’t happen on the US build, so I’m giving the Japanese build a NO! Also, this is nitpicky but the Japanese version is missing a lot of key sound effects that make it feel unfinished. Verdict: NO! but this review is not over.
Interesting choice of uniform colors, Jaleco. What’s this team’s name? The Jaybirds?
SPLIT DECISION – BASES LOADED (US)
For the US version, there’s no getting around the issues with sliding into base or the rules not being correct. Bases Loaded’s numerous problems are unavoidable and maddening. But, I don’t think they ruin the experience. They’re blips on an otherwise pretty dang fun game of baseball. The battle/pitcher dynamic is much harder to clock than previous games. You have to work for runs in Bases Loaded. I even lost a game for the first time in this feature, and the games I won were all by a single run. In order to win, I had to use actual baseball tactics. I stole a base at one point. I sacrificed with a bunt. It DOES make the fantasy real, with the occasional sh*ting of the bed. If my review criteria were based only on games not needing a change of bed sheets, Bases Loaded would be a NO! and that would be all there is to it. But I don’t review that way. I just want to have fun, and Bases Loaded’s actual baseball mechanics are solid and the batting/pitching/running system is hard to clock and not so easy to learn to cheese that it can be done near-instantly. I had fun. I cursed a blue streak. Well goddammit, one of those things should be more important than the other, shouldn’t it? Verdict: YES! Final Score 1 (US): Cathy 5, CPU 6 (Home Runs: Cathy 1, CPU 3) BOX SCORE Final Score 2 (JP): Cathy 5, CPU 4 (Home Runs: Cathy 3, CPU 2) BOX SCORE Final Score 3 (US): Cathy 6, CPU 5 (Home Runs: Cathy 3, CPU 2) BOX SCORE
Baseball Platform: Famicom Disk System (Famicom and NES) Famicom Build Released December 7, 1983 Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto Developed by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard) Read the Original IGC Review
I just reviewed the Nintendo version of Baseball, which inspired this feature. But, as always with Definitive Reviews, every previously reviewed game gets a new play session for me to look for new talking points for a fresh review. So what if I cancelled the feature? I did this re-review and I’m posting it. This time, I played the FDS build and I swear the fielders had a full frontal lobotomy. In the first inning my defense let slow moving grounders go right between their legs. This culminated with the CPU hitting a three-run inside the park homer for what should have been a routine ground-out while I watched in stupefied awe. If you’re going to have automatic defense, it has to be good, you know?
Nice hustle. Not.
Re-reading the first review, I don’t think I stressed enough how ineffective Baseball’s defense algorithm is. Fielders don’t really move diagonally and they rarely take the most efficient straight line path to the ball. Especially the outfielders, as sometimes two will run to one ball and then suddenly the closest one to the ball will stop chasing it and just sit there and stare at it like the thing just pulled a gun on them. In these three screenshots, pics 1 & 2 show the center fielder chasing the ball that’s clearly in his defensive territory. After the ball hits the wall (the ball originally touched down inside the diamond, mind you) he still goes for the play, but in pic 3, he’s now just watching while the right fielder runs for the ball even though he’s clearly not closer. There’s NOTHING you can do about this! It’s all automatic! All you do is wait to throw the ball.
Now that might have screwed me, but it works both ways. Here’s the CPU’s shortstop running away from a little blooper I hit to left field. If you’re not a baseball person (and if that’s the case, seriously, thanks for reading this) I can’t stress enough this is the most trained defensive angle in the sport, by far. If you watch practice at any level, little league to pros, this is the type of hit that fielders are given to warm-up with. It’s THAT routine. The shortstop had actually started in position to make the play, but it’s like their ability to predict where the ball is going for anything but a pop fly is broken. As if the players are running to where the ball will ultimately end up when it comes to a rest and not where it will be in a few frames relative to its position NOW, because it sure looks like the shortstop could have moved one direction, grabbed it, and prevented extra bases. Instead, he moved away from the ball’s trajectory (Pic 2). It then slowly rolled up into left field, including past the fielder until three f*cking players converged on it. Look where the ball lands (Pic 1), look where the shortstop was, and look where the play was ultimately made at (Pic 3). It’s like they based the AI on those children in little league who’re afraid of the ball. Again, players are totally helpless to prevent this. A semi-automatic scheme (like the upcoming Bases Loaded has) would have prevented this.
There’s no adjustable difficulty, either, and I have to assume there’s some kind of switch the CPU throws where they put on their rally caps and will light you up. BUT, even that works two ways. I noticed during this session and the session I put in for the original review that both myself and the CPU tended to get specific styles of hits in clusters. We’d trade the occasional one run inning, but then suddenly, BAM, one extra-bases shot after another for a massive scoring spurt. As soon as I noticed this phenomena, I even began to recognize rally innings were in progress as they were just starting, and I was almost always right. There’s also a few eye-opening quirks that don’t feel like a coincidence. In my full game, I hit six home runs. Four out of those six happened immediately after the pitcher threw a ball. In my sole grand slam hit during the original review, I remember it happened after watching a ball because my father said “see, the game rewarded you for a good eye.” (shrug) Maybe he was right.
Ultimately, I go back to what I seek out: just the basics. If the basics are good enough, I can make believe I’m playing real professional baseball. Sometimes there’s a moment that’ll make me tilt my head like I just saw something that looks borderline realistic. For example, pitchers can’t just throw smoke the entire game. There’s a noticeable cool down for the fastest fastballs, so you’ll lose them and regain them throughout the game. It almost feels like phantom calls to the bullpen are happening. As for play-making, both me and the CPU successfully sacrificed to get a runner from first base to second, and it looked just like the real thing when it happened. Too bad second base doesn’t feel like scoring position, which takes all the urgency out of trying to reach it and negates the value of bunts. Over both play sessions, none of my attempts at a sacrifice fly worked. The ball travels too quickly and base runners are too slow and too unresponsive to pull it off. Finally, the game doesn’t tell you how many hits you got in the box score. Nit picky, I know, but NOW I think I’ve covered everything. Hey, thanks for helping launch the NES in North America, Baseball. But I’m happy I never have to play you again. Verdict: NO! Final Score (Only Game): Cathy 16, CPU 6 (Home Runs: Cathy 6, CPU 2) BOX SCORE
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