My First Time: Castlevania

I had what I thought was a great idea for a recurring feature for this space. There's a vast number of classic video games that I've never played so I thought it'd be fun to play them for the first time and write about the experience. The obvious place to start was to check out the games on the Wii Virtual Console since I can easily download the games, play them with actual controllers (as opposed to using the keyboard for emulators), and as long as I stick with NES games, it's cheap. Spending five bucks a month to have some fun and write a blog post is worth it to me.

The first game up is Castlevania. I owned the second in the series, Simon's Quest, but didn't know at the time or even until a few years ago that it's widely considered to be one of the worst games ever and was actually the Angry Video Game Nerd's first ever review. I never got too far in Simon's Quest and nothing really hooked me into the subject matter, though now I'd probably be all over it. Once Castlevania finished downloading, I was ready to go and quickly realized the problems with this feature...

For one, it's hard to talk about video games without having video (which as AVGN and numerous others show, is already well-worn territory). There's only so much about the experience that can be related through words and if the reader isn't already familiar with the material, then it's even harder. Maybe if I played more video games I'd have a firmer grasp on how to write about them, but I feel like I've already reached my first hurdle.

Secondly, a lot of these early games (and judging by some of the tomes you can buy for new games) there's a lot to be gained from say, a Nintendo Power subscription (or at least back catalogue). I know I never would have accomplished a thing in The Legend of Zelda without some assistance. That assistance also includes the social experience. I know I learned a lot from watching friends play, playing with them, and trading at every death. I'm flying solo through this game and know that there are plenty of secrets that are going unfound because I don't know to look for them. This was certainly the case when I played Super Mario World with a younger cousin. That's not to say the game is a complete mystery as many of these games follow similar tropes. If you have a history of playing video games, it's pretty easy to guess where some of the mysteries are hidden. I'd go to GameFAQs, but that seems like taking the Nintendo Power assistance to an extreme level. It's too much like cheating.

Lastly, I forgot how frustrating these games can be. I'm not very good with one player games to begin with. I tend to get bored if I don't have someone to share the experience with. It starts to feel like I'm just wasting time for the sake of wasting time instead of having fun (with a few exceptions). Add to that the ceaseless repetition of those levels and scenes that you just... can't... get... past... and my tolerance of the experience drops. I was never one of those kids who broke controllers playing video games, but I did get angry at times and frequently blamed the controller for not working right and would throw my hands in the air in exasperation yelling some mild to harsh expletive to the heavens. So, how did Castlevania go?

It was a lot simpler than I thought it'd be game play wise. As far as I know, there are no doors to enter or secret passageways to deal with. Just a basic side-scroller (with occasional scrolls on the y-axis). Weapons are easy to come by and the monsters are straight forward. Things progressively get harder and more hectic which is when frustration begins. There's a strategy to learn as to which special weapon you should keep (the time freezer, the throwing sword, the boomerang cross, etc) and the walls are where the secrets are found, but it's pretty basic.

The biggest surprise of the experience was that it's relatively unexciting. By design, you have to move cautiously, so things slow down quite a bit no matter what the threat is. It's totally unlike Contra or Mario Brothers in that respect (to bring in other side-scrollers). The pace made it feel pretty redundant to me because there's a lot of time to think about how each step of the game feels like the step before. Even when the monsters are overwhelming me, I thought that I died because of my impatience or not hitting the controller at the right time (or mishitting it) and not because the game was actually challenging. Even the point at which I stopped wasn't because I was overwhelmed but because when you get hit by something, it doesn't kill you but it does knock you backwards and I kept getting knocked into holes and fell to my death, which doesn't really feel like it's my fault. It was simply annoying to keep dying due to stuff that felt like it was out of my control.



The music is pretty cool though and writing about it now does make me want to give it another shot since I know more about the gameplay and could probably get much further this time around without having to continue (the continues, thankfully, don't start you back at the beginning of the game and are unending, at least in the Virtual Console version. Much appreciated in lieu of the ability to save). I don't know if I should be surprised that I'm no in love with the game, but it's hard not to appreciate the fact that I can just pick up the controller and play as opposed to any game now where you have to contend with 8+ buttons and any number of variations and combinations of those to do certain things.