Skip to main content

Retro Reviews:Super Castlevania IV

Hello everybody, welcome to my first review of my new page RetroGazette.

We're going back all the way back to the time of the SNES, 1991 with a classic series most of you may know or remember.

Super Castlevania IV

The side-scrolling whip crazy plat-former, many Nintendo faithful from the time of the Super Nintendo might remember this classic gem in gaming or many of you might of played it through the virtual console on the Nintendo Wii.

For those of you who read my modern game reviews these reviews will be relatively smaller, most of these games back in the SNES era were simple, short but fun. Now in today's gaming market a lot of gamers want games that is packed with hours of gameplay, story, graphics and replay-ability. These games were not like that.

It was a Friday night, you bought a new game for the SNES after you got your allowance and played the game all weekend next week you talked to your friends about it and kept playing it over and over again.

Let's begin.

Story

Graphics

Castlevania IV with it's 16-Bit presentation(don't ask me what a Bit is) was stunning for it's time. With all the color and details put into the world around you and Simon himself, was stunning and you would be either awed or terrified of the surrounding area.

From ancient ruins, treasure rooms and ghastly dungeons with skeletons hanging from the wall Castlevania IV will immerse you into the world around you.

Gameplay
The game play is very smooth and is easy to control.

That's the aspect of Castlevania IV which makes the game really good, the control.

You feel like you are playing as Simon Belmont and you're really using his whip Vampire Killer, during the NES era Castlevania was stale in control and movement, here it is perfected. Jumping, whipping, throwing the special weapons to the enemies is easy.

You can even control which direction Simon uses the whip, side ways, up, down, up to the right in a diagonal direction, in a circle. You can attack everything around you with a simple push of any two direction buttons on the D-pad.

In Castlevania IV you find an assortment of special weapons, a Knife, Axe, Combat Cross, Holy Water and a watch that stops time. These items will give you an advantage in either taking enemies out at range, above you or up close, the Stop Watch is somewhere in between as you'll have the opportunity to kill the monsters in front of you without any opposition.

However this leads to the one negative aspect of Castlevania IV. The items are somewhat useless as the whip is made more useful at any direction and up close, you could defeat a boss using only the whip, no matter what special weapon you have the boss you face could be beaten only with the whip.

Items are simplified to personal choice rather than what they used to be in the original Castlevania, an item that will grant you a better advantage in the fight. Here the whip could replace said weapon almost in any direction the enemy is coming from.

The Verdict

Super Castlevania IV is the side scrolling plat-former that is a must own for fans of the Super Nintendo and side-scroller games in general.

A game that plays smooth, looks fantastic and is simple fun.

I give Super Castlevania IV a 4 out of 5

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Call of Duty Black Ops 2 Weapon Guide:M-TAR Assault Rifle

Hello everyone, time for my first weapon guide of Black Ops 2. Today we're looking at the starting assault rifle, the M-TAR. History The Micro-Tar is a micro version of the TAR-21 rifle. It's designed to take advantage of a shorter barrel which means decreased recoil but increased accuracy. Designed for special fores units, it is capable of converting to different ammo variants such as the NATO standard 5.56 cartridge and the 9mm submachine gun round. It is also designed to be capable of attaching a Suppressor, as of 2009 a grenade launcher was being designed to attach to the M-TAR, the M-TAR can attach the M203PI grenade launcher. If you're a FPS veteran then you saw this weapon first in Battlefield 3 as part of the Close Quarters DLC, for COD veterans we saw this weapon's bigger brother, the TAR-21 in Modern Warfare 2. I'm warning you now, the M-TAR is not the TAR-21 we saw in Modern Warfare 2. Multiplayer Stats, Attachments and Performance In gam

Retro Gazette Reviews:Batman Returns SNES Review

Hello everyone. Welcome to another one of my Retro Reviews. Today we're going to be looking at a personal favorite of mine from the Super Nintendo era. Batman Returns. Story Music If you can't tell all ready from the intro video above, the music to Batman Returns for the SNES sounds great and does a good job of recreating some of the songs we heard in the film. My personal favorite stage music is from Stage 7 when you enter Arctic World, The Liberation of Gotham track sounds amazing in 16 bit audio. It's strange to review the music in a video game but the audio stands out so much and does an amazing job, again of recreating the films' soundtrack. Presentation The graphics and detail of Batman Returns is very good and ironically is much more colorful than the Tim Burton film. Gotham City, although currently suffering from a clown riot looks fantastic and Konami yet again does a good job of recreating scenes from the film, you see all these backgro

L.A. Noire Review

Hello everyone, I hope you've been enjoying my reviews and I'm here to review one of my personal favorites. L.A. Noire. L.A. Noire by Rockstar Games, developed by Team Bondi is a very unique open-world game. L.A. Noire is the total opposite of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto series, this time you play to bring law to L.A. Let's jump right into L.A. Noire. Story It's the late 1940s' in Los Angeles, historically recorded as the most violent time in LA history. You play as Cole Phelps a "war hero" of WWII and returns to L.A. and still wants to continue to fight the good fight by joining the L.A.P.D. you come in when Cole starts to take the initiative on his duties, he starts off as a regular patrol officer then quickly starts to be known as the L.A.P.D.'s golden boy and quickly becomes an L.A.P.D. detective. The story is told out through the cases you play on when you reach certain police desks in the game, each police desk has it's