Commercial Critique - Castlevania

[Probo]

Man I love me some CV1. I always liked how a lot of the graphics have a drawn look to them, a lot of art not looking like they put much thought into single-pixel placement when being made. Maybe they did more than I can know, but it definitely has that impression on me. I dislike some of the art though, for example the leaves of the trees at the beginning or the rocks in the waterways with the mermen. They can be pretty badly realised, not looking much like real rocks or leaves. Also not much effort was put into hiding the tiles in some places. CV3 did a much better job overall, but maybe lost a smidge of the charm of CV1?

[Patton]

I'm interested to see PhenQ in action like in this review.  I didn't play this game when it came out, but I imagine that those pastel-ish colors mixed with the dark backgrounds would have set the game apart graphically from most other games at the time.

That's what I notice most about it now, anyway.

This game almost has a luminous feel to it. I like the graphics but there's not a huge amount of attention to detail.

[NickPrick]

Ryumaru, I'm sorry for necroposting, but do you mind telling me what program do you use to get those graphics that you posted in spoiler? When using Tile layer pro or YY-CHR I get something sligtly different. Some gfx are the same like yours (letters and HUD), but sprites and backgrounds are messed up.

[Kasumi]

I got those graphics. The "gameplay" ones in the animated gif were taken from current memory using FCEUX's PPU viewer.

The very tall image was taken using YYCHR. Because Castlevania is CHR RAM, it is under no obligation to have its graphics byte aligned (or even uncompressed) in the ROM itself, since it writes the proper data to PPU memory at run time.


Your YYCHR GUI might look slightly different, but the arrows/+/- on the right shift where it starts looking for graphics by various amounts. For CHR ROM games it starts at the right place because where CHR ROM is is a feature of the .NES file format.

[NickPrick]

Oh my, I didn't even try out those + and - buttons.
Thank you, Kasumi.

[RamonBurke]

I'm interested to see where the conversation goes as well.  I didn't play this game but I imagine that those pastel-ish colors mixed with the dark backgrounds would have set the game apart graphically from most other games at the time.

That's what I notice most about it now, anyway.

This game almost has a luminous feel to it. I like the graphics but there's not a huge amount of attention to detail.

Yes, I too feel that the game has a luminous feel. I find it too bright for my eyes.