![]() Play alone and you're all but certain to fail repeatedly and be unceremoniously chucked back to the start of the level. ![]() At worst these feel like cursory inclusions, but at times they open up genuinely useful alternate paths, allowing dawdling players to catch up, or advancing players to clear out rooms of enemies before the rest of the team show up.īut perhaps the strangest design choice is simply in how you progress through Castlevania HD's chapters - or more accurately, how you don't. Using the full-view camera in this instance allows you to pre-empt his movements and make your way to the appropriate part of the level.Ĭhapters also sport various switches and levers intended for use by multiple players, allowing fast access across the map or rewarding you with previously inaccessible treasure chests. The demonic Gergoth boss from chapter one, for example, can fire his white-hot mouth-beams across the entire map, while the Puppet Master, another returning boss character, tends to crawl about the castle in search of iron maidens in which to trap you. The new wide-angle world-view allows for some level-spanning threats. You've got thirty minutes to find and defeat the chapter's boss by traversing the heavily compartmentalised, room-based castles, thwacking preset enemies and triggering switches, traps and chests. ![]() It's essentially like playing an interactive Prima Guide while somebody stands behind you with a stopwatch, shouting at you to hurry up. One is impractical, and one is medically inadvisable, but both are an undeniably novel means of viewing the game world, especially when multiple players are flitting about the place. The HD acronym speaks not to any increase in the resolution of the sprites - in fact, most of the art remains identical - but to a camera mode that displays the entire level at once, as well as an "actual size" mode that invites you to sit really close to your TV to see what's going on. On the surface, Castlevania HD bears a striking resemblance to previous titles in the series, to the extent that visually there's very little originality here to speak of. There's a tiny but crucial sense of achievement with every monster killed, every bat whipped and every boss defeated - and that's precisely what's missing from Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, a multiplayer adaptation of the series for XBLA that scraps several of the platformer's tenets in the name of introducing six-way co-op. The genius of Castlevania resides in a relatively straightforward routine of persistent progression: levelling up, making bigger numbers pop out of enemies' heads when you smack them, and grinding for rare item drops.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |