There’s a lot of ground to cover in stage one of Super Castlevania IV—literally. This opening level sprawls even further, and introduces more game mechanics, than even the massive first stage of Castlevania III. Many of the tricks and lessons it teaches cover the same ground as the previous game, as we’ll see here in […]
The Anatomy of 16-Bit Castlevania: Phase One | Super Castlevania IV Once you pass through the castle gates, you really get a sense of what Konami was trying to bring to the table with Castlevania on this newer, more powerful hardware. You don’t immediately face a threat upon reaching the castle grounds, but everything seems… livelier. A […]
The Anatomy of 16-Bit Castlevania: Phase One | Super Castlevania IV Dracula is dead! Long live… Dracula!? It’s true: You can’t keep a good villain down. Or a good franchise. Especially when that franchise’s thin excuse for a plot revolves entirely around a specific villain. 1991’s Super Castlevania IV saw Konami extending its popular NES trilogy […]
Friends, meet Samus Aran. She got the band back together. With Ridley-X defeated, Samus is basically back at full fighting strength — the one absence from her arsenal of goodies being the Ice Beam, which remains somehow impossible for her to use because… metroids? Science? It’s never really explained, since she can use ice-powered missiles that send […]
Metroids are the first of many returning friends in this segment of the adventure. Well, the game’s name is Metroid, after all. It just wouldn’t do if the actual last metroid had been in captivity last time around. Two things really stand out here: One, whoops, the Federation is just as rotten as the Space Pirates! Two, wow, […]
Even after linking up again with Adam, and despite the continued linearity of this section of the game, Fusion continues to allow you to feel like you’re basically free-wheeling. It manages to hit the same sweet spot that certain parts of Super Metroid did, giving you a nudge toward your objectives but leaving you to sort […]
With the Gravity Suit in hand (not literally), unsurprisingly the next phase of the game takes you back to all the underwater areas you couldn’t proper explore last time. This comes much later in the game than Maridia did in Super Metroid, where you acquired the Gravity Suit at the midpoint. Here, you have only a […]
A few housekeeping notes following up on the previous entry. First, I forgot (or maybe never realized) that you can temporarily freeze the SA-X to give yourself a moment’s respite during the big chase scene. This doesn’t do that much to help, but some help is better than none whatsoever in such a deadly sequence. […]
When last we left Samus, she was dying horribly at her own hands. This latest encounter with SA-X is a particularly difficult one for a few reasons. For starters, it happens in the midst of the sector’s power outage; while you need to restore basic power to reach this point, that’s amounts to a save point and door […]
At long last, Adam has restored the lifts back to the initial zone of the station. Now that Samus is pretty heavily kitted out with skills and equipment, this means you’ll finally be able to poke around in all those areas of the administration zone that previously were unavailable to base-level Samus, right? A promising […]
I always like to see developers making conscious, and conscientious, use of their selected platform. For example, here we have the real path to Sector 5’s objective tucked behind a hidden block that offers a small, discreet visual cue at the very right edge of the screen. This is something that wouldn’t really have worked in console Metroid games […]
Hello, everyone. Sorry for the lack of activity here lately — I’ve been dealing with a nasty hand injury that’s made writing and video editing (not to mention playing for research) painful and difficult. In my downtime, though, I’ve been keeping myself productive by converting all the Anatomy of Games books to a format that […]