Waiting for Silksong, like many, so I’ve finally played through Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. I bought the Castlevania Advance Collection years ago, but it didn’t work on my desktop PC for some reason. I played the game for a few hours on my Steam Deck years ago, but never felt like finishing it. Since I got nothing else going on right now, I might as well go through these games, since I managed to make them work.
The “port” itself is nothing special. You get a pretty basic emulator, that just plays the old games as they were. Save states and a rewind are as good as it’s gonna get, the rest is kinda half-baked.
As for the game, it’s kinda mediocre to bad. Controls don’t feel great, everything’s pretty stiff, and you’re stuck with sprint being on double-tapping a direction, which never stops being a complete pain, so getting around just isn’t that fun. It also feels like the devs wanted to pad out the relatively short runtime as much as possible, by placing the save rooms and teleporters in the most inconvenient places, so if you die, you’ll have to go through the same sections over and over again. Save states or the rewind help here of course, depending on how much you wanna use those features. At least the game looks decent enough and the music is pretty good.
BTW, in case anyone cares, the reason I could never play this game on my desktop was because of my keyboard layout. If you use a custom one and maybe even something that doesn’t match your Windows language/region/dunno, you get an instant VC++ error on launch. Once I changed it to default US QWERTY it works normally. Only found this out recently, through a comment on the Steam forums.
Maybe I manage to finish the next game in the collection, Harmony of Dissonance, over the next couple of days, probably not, but then I’ll just come back to it.
I’ve dug up my New3DS again and am ordering some games for it. Castlevania is somewhat of a gaming blind spot for me, is there one playable on the 3DS you’d recommend?
I haven’t played most Castlevania games myself, I mainly know the DS games, and played two of them like 10 years ago, Portrait of Ruin and Dawn of Sorrow. I remember them being pretty good. The third DS game, Order of Ecclesia didn’t work for me back then, because of anti-piracy stuff. Any of those three games should be fine on the 3DS (Dawn of Sorrow is a sequel to the GBA game Aria of Sorrow, but I don’t think it really matters plot wise)
This is actually why I got the Advance Collection and the more recent Dominus Collection, because I wanted to go back and check out a few of the games I missed and re-play the DS games, to see how well they held up.
If you hacked your 3DS, you can of course also try games for other systems, like the GBA games (mostly for the aforementioned Aria of Sorrow) or maybe even Symphony of the Night, which supposedly runs fine with some tinkering.
If you’re not into the whole Metroidvania stuff and want more classic, linear side scrollers, then the old NES/SNES games are also available somehow (but maybe not anymore, unless you’re doing homebrew stuff). The standout here is probably Super Castlevania IV, but tbh I never really played these myself.
How hard is it to hack your 3DS? I haven’t done it and I haven’t really experimented with stuff like that for like 20 years. I feel like it could be a good idea to look into after Nintendo closed the eShop and second hand 3DS games are getting more and more expensive.
I could see it being alright back in the day, and it has some neat stuff, like the graphics and music, and the magic system is ok (lots of repeating stuff though, just in a different color). It just didn’t hold up, I think.
Persona 5 still, if you can believe it. It appears to be a very long game I’m noticing 100 hours in, but I’m still enjoying it and invested in the plot.
Got a steam deck in preparation of Silksong, having fun playing Untitled Geese Game, the couch coop is awesome. Also thinking I will try to finally finish Portal, hopefully before Thursday
Very cool. I’ve got an old Dell mini PC running batocera and I very much like it. My only gripe is that scraping the art for a large library takes an obscene amount of time.
Playing a bunch of Crusader Kings 3 and Civ V. Have half a mind to learn EU4 right as (relatively) EU5 is coming out for some reason. Also played some Lost Eidolons which is kinda fun, the between combat stuff isn’t very fun however.
This past weekend Steam had a Darkest Dungeon 2 free weekend and I finally realised that those games weren’t roguelite deckbuilders (ohhh i hate those so much). So I finally tried them and they are…fine. The “I’m so edgy and dark” aesthetic gets stale really quickly, as does the slightly-but-deliberately-obtuse UX that appears in games that are supposed to be “difficult and unforgiving”.
I haven’t played anything recently but have been enjoying watching YouTube videos on the creation and history of classic games like Donkey Kong, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and others
bin.pol.social
Gorące