It seems everyone is doing a Castlevania bit at the moment. Angry Video Game Nerd did his excellent marathon spanning the first 7 odd games and Egoraptor did his amazing Sequelitis episode on the differences between Castlevania 1 and 2. Irate gamer has done one or two, RPG fanatic did his, basically Youtube is full of people expressing their love for the series but most of them only talk about the old ones and I find that funny because it’s one of the longest running video game franchises and the series has taken so many turns from it’s original formula that there is ample material to rant about for both positives and negatives. So why break tradition?! Here’s my personal history with the Castlevania series.
My first encounter with Castlevania was about 3rd grade. A friend of mine had a NES with about a half dozen games. We’d usually play Mario, Duck Hunt or Excite Bike but every now and then, we’d chuck in Castlevania. It wouldn’t stay in there long since the game was so damn hard that we’d get sick of dying before even seeing the first boss battle. I had another friend I used to swap black and white Gameboy games with for a week and through him I got to try Castlevania Adventure but I didn’t get very far in the first bloody level without running out of lives. Those of you that remember the part near the end of the first level where you have to dodge or kill the flying bats while jumping from brick to brick at that precise moment otherwise you fall down, have to trek back and the bloody bats respawn again will know what I mean. So it stuck with me that Castlevania basically meant FUCKING HARD GAME! Continue reading
