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The Fundamentals of Gaming
IGN has two great features up this week, looking back at two amazing gaming franchises. Their piece on the evolution of Final Fantasy takes in the changes and twists the iconic JRPG series has had over the years, while Castlevania: The Retrospective looks back on the last 20 years of vampire-hunting goodness. From the Castlevania piece: "Though Castlevania wasn't one of the original 18 launch titles for the NES, it was part of the unofficial second wave of games, and an integral part of the Nintendo Entertainment System's premiere years. From that point on, each Castlevania title (though still primarily a stand-alone adventure) was subsequently added into the overarching timeline, and while not every piece of the puzzle clicks from game to game, it remains to be one of the most prominent classic franchises still recognized today for its outstanding gameplay.
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but does anybody remember this
A controversy ensued upon publication of the second issue of the magazine. Parents called in to complain to the magazine's office that the cover, featuring Castlevania II: Simon's Quest with an image of Simon holding the severed head of Dracula, frightened their children and had resulted in many of them having nightmares. For a long time following, Nintendo Power steered clear of cover artwork that features such graphic imagery and instead now place it inside the magazine. This trend may be ending, however, as on the milestone issue No. 200, a picture of a gruesome zombie from Resident Evil: Deadly Silence was shown on the cover.wiki
That won it worst cover of nintendo power ever.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Since when did Castlevania become the fundamentals of gaming? I know it is a good game and the sequels have been nice. But fundamental? Not really. Not any more than Ninja Gaiden or Metroid or Zelda or Super Mario or Kid Icarius. And that's just the Nintendo Universe. Gaming goes far beyond that (no matter how much I like the Wii and think it is the current best offering on the market).
There seems to be some... dissent about the quality and veracity of that article. I mean, parts of that article are horribly wrong. Should IGN hold themselves to some shred of a standard for quality? Or do they get a free pass because they write about video games?
back in the day.
He was so into Castlevania that he taped pieces of paper together, length-wise (because that's the way it scrolled) to map a significant portion of the game in pencil.
Little did he know that I would grow up and whip naughty vampires for a living!
There have been other titles that were great. Starting with Zork and arching over Ultima to titles like Quake and the whole Mario franchise. Titles and games that sold just 'cause they had a certain name. It usually works until the developers start relying solely on the name and stop investing time to add new tricks, gadgets and twists to it.
In every franchise, there comes a time when all that's added is new graphics and some eye candy while leaving the game essentially unchanged. And that's when the title becomes stale and starts to erode.
And this puzzles me to no end. You have a title that you only have to ANNOUNCE to sell it. You don't even have to advertise. The game is already selling because people remember the other titles, and remember them fondly. Why do studios simply throw away great names just for a quick buck? Yes, you can sell that crappy game, but after that the name is destroyed, a name with a value that is usually by magnitudes greater than the meager reward you can reap.
All for the allmighty quarter report.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sometimes, authors of such articles need to remember that the global gaming community is a *lot* more than Japan and the USA. During the pre-PC years in Europe, the main focus was on home computers, not consoles, and by far the majority of good games that were produced for the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and ZX Spectrum (amongst others) were not "Officially Licensed" by the likes of Nintendo but happened because a few programmers in a bedroom somewhere came up with a good idea,
It could be argued that games like "Manic Miner" on the ZX Spectrum were a core influence for the Mario platformers and text adventures from the likes of Level 9 allowed graphical RPGs like Final Fantasy to come about.
Why no mention also of "Elite", "Dungeon Master", "Impossible Mission" or the Infocom adventures, all of which, in my opinion, had a much greater influence on modern gaming?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
That's not true. The original Castlevania was released for the Famicom Disk System (FDS), the Japan-only floppy disk add-on for the NES, in September 1986. The MSX2 version was released one month later. While the MSX version was released in Europe significantly before the NES/FDS version, the latter was developed first.
Konami had to port the FDS version to cartridge for the North American and European release, but it was for all intents and purposes a direct port: the only benefit the FDS had over the normal NES deck was an improved sound chip, and I'm not even sure that the original Castlevania made use of it. There were a lot of FDS-to-NES ports made in order to facilitate international release: Metroid, Doki Doki Panic (a.k.a. Super Mario Bros. 2), Kid Icarus, and The Legend of Zelda are probably the most notable. All were subsequently rereleased in Japan as cartridges, although often not for many years (Castlevania wasn't released as a cartridge in Japan until 1993 or so).
There's more information at Wikipedia's Castlevania article.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."