Castlevania 64 was clearly an unfinished game. The first couple levels make their ambitions clear, and the rest of the game is just sort of slapped together. Legacy of Darkness added the rest of the game.
Nobody really celebrates these games. I grew up with them and can appreciate the experience they were offering, but they weren’t exactly my favorites, and I don’t feel they aged particularly well. Maybe take a look through a long play video before committing any real time to it.
They were a really impressive little piece of kit. With no extra peripherals, I was able to play NES on one core, and use FFMPEG on the other three to encode and stream to Twitch with mono sound. For $35. Probably my favorite gadget of it’s time.
Prices have come down in the last year. I see several on eBay listed tested/working for around $60. One even comes with a controller. Shopgoodwill.com has similar prices when they’re available. Prices for auction items with less than 10hrs look very reasonable.
I’ve been trying out The Universim recently. It has a lot of the same ideas, but gets rid of many which I felt didn’t work. Most notably, there is no creature bound to your will. I think the game is better for the omission. Version 1.0 is slated for January, and is supposed to include interplanetary colonization.
If the reduction in overhead, or any other optimizations it might offer, increases performance even more, I might go out of my way to set up a multi-boot.
It’s my point of view that they created so much friction in the gameplay loop that players generally prefer logging to get their materials or whatever they need, and FDev’s policy is “sure, whatever,” because then they don’t have to improve the gameplay.