This is not worth reading
In the course of human history, it has fallen upon the jobs of the common man to let his opinion be heard, so as to prevent tyranny. Thus, I feel it is integral for me to share my views of something so important that it would be downright negligent for me not to. In this landscape where hyperbole (the root word of hype, FYI) and corporate exaggeration are commonplace for increased revenues and marketability, it has come to my attention that one such concern be flagged for your well being, and any less on my part would therefore be a shortcoming for my own sense of social responsibility. This, as you've guessed by now, is about Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse.
Now, you're probably saying, Jeremy, why does a game released in 1990 concern me? Good question, and I can't adequately answer it, but if you're still reading this then you'll be rewarded; you might learn something from my insightful yet incoherent rambling.
Nintendo's sustained success apparently lies in the name it has made for itself in its franchises. Over the years, Nintendo has survived competition that featured superior technological capabilities. I don't know anyone who didn't love his Dreamcast and I don't know anyone who never wiled away his time on his or his friends Sega Genesis. Sony has replaced Sega as Nintendo's main competitor, and one cannot count on one hand the Playstation 2's qualities that exceed the Gamecube's. However, Nintendo has the Marios, the Links: to a lesser extent and seemingly arbitrarily, the Castlevania series.
The Castlevania series in its initial days was your typical platform adventure game. Think Mario fighting Bowser, except that Mario's apparently a Romanian with an English surname and Bowser is Dracula. Your character, Simon Belmont (or any Belmont, for that matter, since the games jump around chronologically), is armed with a whip, although he can also weild throwing daggers, throwing axes, and an endless supply of holy water.
I had never before played Castlevania 3, although I had beaten 1 and 2. 1 was sort of stupid but acceptable for the initial release in a campy arcade kind of way. Castlevania 2 was okay, they made it more into a story but that was cool. Because I had never played before and knew that 3 was a pimped-out version of the original, I expected more.
As with early games, the control of your character was not yet perfected. However, this being the third installment of a popular series, I would have expected better. As with early games, jumping is realistic to the point where you try to walk as much as possible. You cannot jump far, and you cannot change direction midjump as one counter-intuitively can do quite normally in video games. Furthermore, your character walks slowly. Your character also falls mid-jump insanely quickly. A jump not perfectly timed may not even register because your character is well on his way into pits half the time. In addition as with other downright annoying NES games, your character gets knocked backwards and makes a "Guh!" sound every time you get hit. Sometimes one does not even get knocked backwards. Something that hits you from the front can somehow knock you forward if there is a pit present. The programmers of this game just didn't try to improve upon the physics shortcomings of the earlier games and that's annoying because that is the worst thing about video games: when they're only difficult because you cannot adequately control your dude.
Oh, Castlevania. You make a boy that has bought the same Run DMC style Adidases every year since 2000 blush with your disregard for originality. The storyline is such that Dracula always finds a way to come back to his undead state and then you have to go kill him. In the third installment, Simon Belmont's ancestor Trevor is the protagonist. You start off in a Wallachian village and have to fight through about 8 different kinds of monsters to get to the vampire. You fight (ad nauseum) a bat... a zombie... a skeleton.... a red skeleton... a skeleton with a whip... a red skeleton with a whip..... a skeleton with a sword..... a dude that throws axes.... crows... owls... knights that walk back and forth without really doing anything... and flying head things. Clearly the men at Konami enjoyed their 4AM Chinese food since they were up late thinking of things that could challenge you. Because they know that the said monsters/disgruntled flying animals were not challenging, they made it so that each hit from them takes off 4 of your 16 bars of life. I am not sure why they did not simply give you 4 bars of life but don't ask me, I'm just a crank complaining about the game and not the programmers.
The bosses are also questionable at best. There are a couple of them that I did not remember from the first Castlevania, but most were just unoriginal monsters that don't normally belong in medieval Romania fighting for Dracula. Here are some that you might remember from typical vampire stories:
Level 3 Boss: A Cyclops with a hammer. Not sure how cyclopes made the jump from the Odyssey to Bram Stoker's imagination but okay. The hammer's the best part.
Level 5 Boss: Mummies AND a cyclops with a hammer. Grade? C+. The mummies are alright. I think on the Travel Channel I saw Egyptian mummies used to be all over Transylvania. Because the mummified pharaohs of yesterday are not difficult enough, they reprise the cyclops with the hammer.
Level 6 Boss: Frankenstein. Grade? D. Questionable how Mary Shelley's unnatural yet brilliant misfit who turned to violence as a means of revenge after humiliating rejections ended up working for Dracula.
Level 8 Boss: Mummies AND a cyclops with a hammer AND a gargoyle that jumps around sometimes. Grade? F. These suck, they couldn't have ripped off more gothic authors or more ideas from whatever Halloween costume store they got the other bosses from? They seriously had to use these again?
Level 9 Boss: Death AKA Grim Reaper. Grade? D. Now, don't get me wrong, but isn't the personification of Death a machine of God? You know, deus ex machina? If not that, then at least a necessary figure for people not rational enough to believe in existentialism? Anyways, I'm not sure why some guy that touches people when they are fated to die is necessarily evil and defending Dracula. If he's just doing his job, you know? Kind of like an IRS guy. Anyways, I hate people that call the personification of Death the Grim Reaper.
Level 11 Boss: Dracula. So you've already fought Boo Berry, Yummy Mummy, and Franken Berry so it's about damn time we get to Count Chocula. You beat him, only for him to come back in Castlevania 4. Now wasn't that a sensible quest?
Anyways, because you were thinking about it I'll tell you now that Castlevania 3 wasn't worth the time scattered over a few days when my unemployed ass had nothing better to do that I played it while people were talking to me. I'm also sorry that you read this but I just had to get it off my chest and onto yours. Skeet skeet skeet skeet!
Now, you're probably saying, Jeremy, why does a game released in 1990 concern me? Good question, and I can't adequately answer it, but if you're still reading this then you'll be rewarded; you might learn something from my insightful yet incoherent rambling.
Nintendo's sustained success apparently lies in the name it has made for itself in its franchises. Over the years, Nintendo has survived competition that featured superior technological capabilities. I don't know anyone who didn't love his Dreamcast and I don't know anyone who never wiled away his time on his or his friends Sega Genesis. Sony has replaced Sega as Nintendo's main competitor, and one cannot count on one hand the Playstation 2's qualities that exceed the Gamecube's. However, Nintendo has the Marios, the Links: to a lesser extent and seemingly arbitrarily, the Castlevania series.
The Castlevania series in its initial days was your typical platform adventure game. Think Mario fighting Bowser, except that Mario's apparently a Romanian with an English surname and Bowser is Dracula. Your character, Simon Belmont (or any Belmont, for that matter, since the games jump around chronologically), is armed with a whip, although he can also weild throwing daggers, throwing axes, and an endless supply of holy water.
I had never before played Castlevania 3, although I had beaten 1 and 2. 1 was sort of stupid but acceptable for the initial release in a campy arcade kind of way. Castlevania 2 was okay, they made it more into a story but that was cool. Because I had never played before and knew that 3 was a pimped-out version of the original, I expected more.
As with early games, the control of your character was not yet perfected. However, this being the third installment of a popular series, I would have expected better. As with early games, jumping is realistic to the point where you try to walk as much as possible. You cannot jump far, and you cannot change direction midjump as one counter-intuitively can do quite normally in video games. Furthermore, your character walks slowly. Your character also falls mid-jump insanely quickly. A jump not perfectly timed may not even register because your character is well on his way into pits half the time. In addition as with other downright annoying NES games, your character gets knocked backwards and makes a "Guh!" sound every time you get hit. Sometimes one does not even get knocked backwards. Something that hits you from the front can somehow knock you forward if there is a pit present. The programmers of this game just didn't try to improve upon the physics shortcomings of the earlier games and that's annoying because that is the worst thing about video games: when they're only difficult because you cannot adequately control your dude.
Oh, Castlevania. You make a boy that has bought the same Run DMC style Adidases every year since 2000 blush with your disregard for originality. The storyline is such that Dracula always finds a way to come back to his undead state and then you have to go kill him. In the third installment, Simon Belmont's ancestor Trevor is the protagonist. You start off in a Wallachian village and have to fight through about 8 different kinds of monsters to get to the vampire. You fight (ad nauseum) a bat... a zombie... a skeleton.... a red skeleton... a skeleton with a whip... a red skeleton with a whip..... a skeleton with a sword..... a dude that throws axes.... crows... owls... knights that walk back and forth without really doing anything... and flying head things. Clearly the men at Konami enjoyed their 4AM Chinese food since they were up late thinking of things that could challenge you. Because they know that the said monsters/disgruntled flying animals were not challenging, they made it so that each hit from them takes off 4 of your 16 bars of life. I am not sure why they did not simply give you 4 bars of life but don't ask me, I'm just a crank complaining about the game and not the programmers.
The bosses are also questionable at best. There are a couple of them that I did not remember from the first Castlevania, but most were just unoriginal monsters that don't normally belong in medieval Romania fighting for Dracula. Here are some that you might remember from typical vampire stories:
Level 3 Boss: A Cyclops with a hammer. Not sure how cyclopes made the jump from the Odyssey to Bram Stoker's imagination but okay. The hammer's the best part.
Level 5 Boss: Mummies AND a cyclops with a hammer. Grade? C+. The mummies are alright. I think on the Travel Channel I saw Egyptian mummies used to be all over Transylvania. Because the mummified pharaohs of yesterday are not difficult enough, they reprise the cyclops with the hammer.
Level 6 Boss: Frankenstein. Grade? D. Questionable how Mary Shelley's unnatural yet brilliant misfit who turned to violence as a means of revenge after humiliating rejections ended up working for Dracula.
Level 8 Boss: Mummies AND a cyclops with a hammer AND a gargoyle that jumps around sometimes. Grade? F. These suck, they couldn't have ripped off more gothic authors or more ideas from whatever Halloween costume store they got the other bosses from? They seriously had to use these again?
Level 9 Boss: Death AKA Grim Reaper. Grade? D. Now, don't get me wrong, but isn't the personification of Death a machine of God? You know, deus ex machina? If not that, then at least a necessary figure for people not rational enough to believe in existentialism? Anyways, I'm not sure why some guy that touches people when they are fated to die is necessarily evil and defending Dracula. If he's just doing his job, you know? Kind of like an IRS guy. Anyways, I hate people that call the personification of Death the Grim Reaper.
Level 11 Boss: Dracula. So you've already fought Boo Berry, Yummy Mummy, and Franken Berry so it's about damn time we get to Count Chocula. You beat him, only for him to come back in Castlevania 4. Now wasn't that a sensible quest?
Anyways, because you were thinking about it I'll tell you now that Castlevania 3 wasn't worth the time scattered over a few days when my unemployed ass had nothing better to do that I played it while people were talking to me. I'm also sorry that you read this but I just had to get it off my chest and onto yours. Skeet skeet skeet skeet!