Haunted castle game

It is the first exclusive arcade game in the Castlevania series. It was later re-released on the Sony PlayStation 2 exclusively in Japan.

Haunted Castle is a typical platform game with six levels, which are played through in a linear progression. The player controls the main character, whose primary mode of attack is via his whip. He must fight various enemies which consist partially of skeletons, zombies, fishmen, and hunchbacks. By destroying certain enemies, he can switch his weapon to a more powerful spiked mace or sword. In addition, various "sub-weapons" can be obtained which provide different means of attack which consist of bombs, boomerangs, stopwatches, crosses, and torches.

Hearts are collected to use each of these "sub-weapons. Truly, the fate of the world is much less compelling a motivator than rescuing yet another damsel in distress. Luckily, this lame story is told in possibly the funniest way possible, with one of the most ridiculous game introductions in the history of arcades. Suddenly, the sky turns grey and thunder destroys the cross atop the Church, allowing Dracula to make his dramatic entrance. Simon and Selena remain completely oblivious to all this, and are more than content to continue to walk in place as the world around them goes to hell.

And almost immediately after that, you are confronted with your first enemies, who can steal away nearly half your health in a single blow right out the gate. You know; like a standard difficulty curve.

But seeing as this is an arcade game designed to relieve you of your quarters, it maintains a near-constant level of ridiculously high difficulty. The primary change I noticed is that in the Japanese revision, enemies tend to do less damage until later in the game and have a better chance of dropping hearts or items for you. Small changes, but significant ones considering just how brutal the American revision can be.

So far, so good! You may notice a lack of candles and breakable walls in the level design, with enemies now made to drop all manner of pick-ups. Additionally, stages here are mostly flat in their layouts, and the whole point of incorporating candles into the original Castlevania was to take advantage of the multi-levelled stage design, by making some items inaccessible if a player took a certain route. Chalk it up to a combination of character sprites being a bit too big, colors being a bit too gaudy, and backgrounds bordering on being eyesores.

There are stage backdrops that consist entirely of one small, overly-detailed texture repeated dozens of times directly adjacent to each other, creating an awful eye-straining effect. These are particularly abhorrent in the second and fourth stages, with some stone walls that are frankly hideous. Speaking of hideous, none of the characters are much of lookers either! Say what you will about the classic renditions of Simon on the NES, with their limited colors and awkward gaits, but this blue-haired swole-as-shit Simon is by far the goofiest so in the franchise.

It cannot be overstated just how effective the original NES Castlevania trilogy was at utilizing minimal color palettes and sized tiles in the most effective of ways.

The limitations imposed gave way to some beautiful, moody level design and distinct, recognizable monsters. On the other hand, having the freedom to implement more colors into larger sprites for Haunted Castle results in an altogether more gaudy experience.

This can include grass, fire, running water, or any other graphical effect that would generally be placed on a layer in front of Simon. While those are harmless cosmetic errors, issues with the camera scrolling can be far more problematic. There are some additional issues with stages that incorporate vertical scrolling, where falling below the camera — even in spots where there is ground beneath you — will result in death as if you fell down a bottomless pit.

Gone are throwing knives and axes or anything similar to them to take their place: Instead, you get two variations on the holy water with the bomb and torch, two variations on the cross including a boomerang neither of which travel back to you , and the old stand-by in the stopwatch. Furthermore, the whip upgrades are further between one another, with the third and final upgrade somehow turning the Vampire Killer into a sword? Sure, that latter change is totally cosmetic and not really worth making a fuss over, but the changes to the subweapons are altogether ill-advised.

At least the large bulk of the enemies are pulled from the original entry. As a consolation prize, we get… a goofy-looking stone golem , who is also the only boss to not even have a death animation for when you finish him off.

Also, after facing off against a decently difficult first-form Dracula, you are confronted with an incredibly easy to defeat second-form where he transforms into a giant disembodied head , and can be killed in a matter of seconds so long as you have any of the subweapons on hand.

The first stage alone features two such traps, including a wall that hurls itself at you brick by brick, as well as a flaming graveyard forcing you to dodge shooting flames as you jump across from pedestal to pedestal. Conceptually, these are fine little action set pieces, but in execution they give you too little time to prepare yourself and almost no room for error. He spent years refining the game, learning how to approach testing and design, and how to scale the game.

Eventually, in September of , Assad approached his best friend, Lionel, and ask if the two of them would pair together to bring Origins to the public. To do this, they had to make serious revisions to the game, and they scrapped a lot of the critical design concepts to make the game easier to comprehend.

These changes were large enough that they had to rename the game, and that was when they landed on calling the game Genesis: Battle of Champions. Shortly afterwards, they recruited Arthur to do the initial visual design and some of the artwork.

In they launched the first set of Genesis, called Alpha, at SkyCon. Their initial success lead Assad to quit his full-time job and pursue Haunted Castle Gaming. As of , they have launched four sets, and Genesis is now selling in retail stores in Ontario, Quebec, Ohio, and New York. This school was best known for two things:. For access to the store website, please email contactus hauntedcastlegaming. Our Mission. Our Values.

This allowed arcade system boards to produce more complex graphics and sound than what was then possible on video game consoles or personal computers, which is no longer the case in the s.

This emulation is powered by MAME Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator project, an open-source emulator designed to recreate the hardware of arcade game systems in software on modern personal computers and other platforms. Its intention is to preserve gaming history by preventing vintage games from being lost or forgotten.

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