#0013 – Fast Striker – 2010 – Dreamcast – NG:DEV.TEAM – Shmup

NG:DEV.TEAM's second shmup for the Dreamcast takes a completely different approach than Last Hope, and should be a more comfortable outing for most shmuppers as a result.  The boys from Germany have tossed out the slower, memorization-based gameplay and brought in the bullet-hell style popular in more recent shmups from Japan.  Think Cave.

Personally, I prefer this style to R-Type.  It doesn't require memorizing the entire stage, and instead encourages quick reflexes and familiarity with the nastier boss patterns.  (But hey, there's no accounting for tastes.)  Fast Striker also offers quite a bit more variety in the form of game modes that change the feel of the game.  At the main menu you can select from "Novice", "Original", "Maniac", and "Omake".  While those might sound like difficulty levels, they're actually a lot more than that.  Each mode adds new gameplay mechanics as well as overall difficulty, allowing shmup fans of all skill levels to find a gameplay experience that's right for them.  Novice is your basic nuts and bolts for beginners - you can shoot default guns and collect stars for points.  Original forces you to chain score items (gold nuggets) to maintain your multiplier, adds a one-time-use shield system, and the ability to hold the fire button down for more focused fire.  Maniac retains all the features of Original and adds a 'grind' mechanic where focused fire at close proximity prevents gives big points.  Omake is a more difficult version of Maniac.

Maniac is my favorite by far.  Omake is just too tough for this average shmupper, and the other modes seem dull and empty without the grind mechanic.  Seriously - chaining your score and getting in close to heavy enemies to activate your grinder beam is challenging and makes beating your high score a real treat.  It encourages risk/reward tradeoff and forces you to think about how you kill enemies in order to keep your chain going.  Usually in shmups I focus on how far I can get with one credit instead of trying to score big, but for some reason Fast Striker is one of the few that can coerce me to try for the big chains.  (Mars Matrix is another.)  There isn't much to unlock or strive for beyond score, but serious players can upload their scores to NG:DEV.TEAM's online leaderboards.

Fast Striker has endured a lot of complaints for the repetitive backgrounds.  If you look up a gameplay video you can see that they're all CG-rendered sprites that tile after a single screen.  The animation is quite smooth and provides a sense of depth, but I can definitely understand the complaint.  If you really appreciate little details and lost of hand-drawn luxury in stage backgrounds, Fast Striker is going to look like a budget title to you.  The ship designs are also a little generic - bulbous, and with a high-contrast, plastic vibe.  But the bullets are easily visible against the backgrounds this time, and the art has a cohesion from start to finish.  Sound isn't anything to comment on in a good or bad way.  It's perfunctory.  The music, however, is catchy European rave and isn't a bad listen at all.

The Neo-Geo version is notable because of how much it pushes the hardware.  NG:DEV.TEAM came up with some special techniques to get so many bullets to display at once.  Layered backgrounds and sprite illusions, from what I hear.  For the Dreamcast - home of several shmups with much higher bullet counts - it's not nearly as impressive.  Then again, that's a problem with most of these releases.  The Neo-Geo is impressive hardware to this day, but the Dreamcast has it beat when it comes to processing capability (not storage access speed, as can be seen in some of the SNK ports for the DC).  I'm still looking forward to Duranik's Sturmwind as an example of what can homebrew can really get out of the Dreamcast.

As of Valentine's Day, 2013, Fast Striker is out of stock at NG:DEV.TEAM's online shop and eBay listings are completing at around $45 dollars.  If you think Fast Striker is for you, I'd recommend waiting a while to see if NG:DEV.TEAM puts out another "Newcomer Bundle" package deal like they did for the Dreamcast release of GunLord.  It would be a much better value than dropping $45 for Fast Striker alone.  As with Last Hope, it's difficult to recommend Fast Striker to anyone who's still missing out on the Takumi Dreamcast shmups or other important genre staples.  But if you've played everything else and you're hungry for a solid indie Dreamcast shmup, Fast Striker will show you a good time.

#0012 – Last Hope: Pink Bullets – 2009 – Dreamcast – NG:DEV.TEAM – Shmup

How does "in a few days" turn into an entire month?  When it's summer, that's how!  Too many games, too much work, too many projects!  Anyway, I've been able to put some playtime into all of NG:DEV.TEAM's games for the Sega Dreamcast, and this is the first of three mini-reviews.  No promises this time on when the others are coming.

Last Hope: Pink Bullets is technically an updated version of the original Last Hope, but it's kind of wrong to think of it that way.  It's not like this version is a bugfix release for major flaws or game-breaking glitches.  Really, it's more of a case where the original game was not very well received and the designers took a step back and tried to make their game more fun.  Specifically, the original Last Hope was perceived as being unreasonably difficult.  And when I say 'unreasonable' I mean cheap.  The list of new features in Pink Bullets include such things as higher ship speed, instant respawn, a more powerful protection unit, pink enemy bullets, and "overall less hard difficulty [sic]".  Most of those are alterations to general design choices rather than updates and fixes.

On the other hand, don't worry if you're wondering if Pink Bullets will be too easy for you.  It's not.  The game is still tough - R-Type tough - where success is based on level memorization and preemptive maneuvering rather than sheer reflexes.  I play a lot of shmups, but they're usually of the later, mid-90s style. Not quite bullet hell, but a lot twitchier than these sorts of games.  In other words, Pink Bullets hands me my butt on a silver platter.  A lot like DUX, but that's a different review.  I'll admit that this is wholly due to the lack of serious time I've put into the game so far, but I have to say it like it is.  Buyer be warned: Last Hope isn't really a pick up and play game.  If you want to get far on it without credit spamming, be prepared to replay the stages until you have the hazards and enemy patterns memorized.

The good thing is that Last Hope is a very enjoyable game to put time into if you're so inclined.  The prerendered sprite graphics are reminiscent of other Neo-Geo shmups like Pulstar and Blazing Star, with bright lighting glare patches and fluid animations.  The backgrounds sport a more hand-drawn, pixel art look, but the overall vibe is more coherent than you'd expect.  The music is especially good.  The game's OST is mellow and catchy.  If you were into '80s and '90s European PC games you know what to expect, but the execution is very slick and well produced.  If you've got a lot of money to spend, you wouldn't go wrong picking up the soundtrack album.

I'll leave it to you to check out videos of the gameplay for a better feel of how exactly Last Hope plays.  Or, as I said, you can just think of it as R-Type for your Dreamcast with some tweaked features and brighter colors.  I will say that using the protection unit didn't come easily to me, but I grew to love it after I realized that it makes you nigh-invincible to oncoming bullets as well as inflict huge damage to enemies.  The beam chain scoring multiplier definitely makes the game much more complex if you're going for score, but so far I can barely clear the stages - much less worry about racking up a big multiplier!

Pink Bullets is the definitive release of NG.DEV:TEAM's very first game, and it plays well on the Dreamcast with either a pad or a stick.  It works with VGA (and looks fantastic) and isn't that expensive anymore because of the recent reprint.  Unless you're specifically into R-Type style games or Euroshmups it's a little hard to recommend buying this one over the stable of Dreamcast (or, more generally, Saturn) shmups already available, but it's a solid approach to a subgenre of shmups that isn't very well explored on the system post-2001.  And if you already have most of the must-buy shmups for the platform, well...what are you waiting for?

NG:DEV.TEAM's Newcomer Bundle

NG:DEV.TEAM has been the premiere indie games company for both the Neo-Geo and the Dreamcast since their first release in 2006.  That's not quite as dramatic as it sounds, since they have no competition on the Neo-Geo and very little (recently) on the Dreamcast.  NG:DEV.TEAM's trilogy of action games are certainly flawed and highly controversial in certain communities, but there's no denying that they have a level of polish that outstrips other Dreamcast indie titles such as Cool Herders, Rush Rush Rally Racing, and even DUX.  This year will hopefully see the release of Duranik's stunning Sturmwind for Sega's "Console That Could", and maybe then NG:DEV.TEAM will get some competition.

Until then, we have the recent Dreamcast release of GunLord to celebrate, and how better to celebrate than with a series of reviews?  The Newcomer Bundle is a great way to pick up all of NG:DEV.TEAM's games for Dreamcast, and the pricing isn't bad, either.  With the package you get the best versions of all of the company's games: Last Hope: Pink Bullets, Fast Striker 1.5, and the aforementioned GunLord.  My copy arrived yesterday, and though I'd played burned CD-Rs of Last Hope and Fast Striker before, it was great to support the company and bag some legit copies to satisfy my inner collector.  I'll also be getting Redux: Dark Matters and Sturmwind later this year or early 2013 when they release, so look out for more Dreamcast indie reviews on this blog in the future.

My Newcomer Bundle arrived quite quickly from Germany via DHL Airmail, and in general I was pleased with the construction of the actual products.  GunLord suffered from a notably cheaper DVD case than the other two games, but these are all universal-sized inserts.  The first thing I did was switch out the box for a higher-quality commercial-grade case from an old DVD movie.  Fast Striker and Last Hope were fine as-is.  The CD art and manuals are glossy, offset printed, and full of great art.  The GunLord manual especially has some amazing boss art and a two-page spread with cherry blossoms and dragons (you can see a bit of it below).  I think I still prefer the Limited Edition art for the cover, but I didn't want to shell out for it.  C'est la vie.

I also recently got a Hori Sega Saturn stick modded with a Sanwa lever and buttons as well as an additional Playstation 1/2 plug, so playing these arcade-style games was a real treat.  Just use the Total Control 3 for Saturn -> Dreamcast controller compatibility or Total Control Plus for PS1/2 -> Dreamcast.  At any rate, I'll be posting a few reviews for these games in the coming days, so just keep an eye on this space.

Saturn Metal Slug: Another Look

Nazca's first Metal Slug game stands tall as an inherently pure experience.  The numerous sequels added on more and more 'stuff' - new Slug designs, new weapons, new enemies, and even new afflictions like Zombie and Fat modes.  The original game continues to impress even now with its sheer focus.  The levels are short and sweet, with a difficulty balanced so that even mere mortals can attempt 1cc runs.  It might not have as many bells and whistles, but it's clean arcade fun that never feels cheap or bloated.  I might be in a minority when I say this, but I'll take the first Metal Slug game over Metal Slug X or Metal Slug 3 every time.  Since I'm also a huge retro Sega fan and a ardent Saturn enthusiast, it should be no surprise that I've put more than my fair share of time into Metal Slug for Sega's 32-bit console.

You don't hear much about the Saturn port of Slug 1, but when you do you'll usually get a few people saying how it suffers from tremendous slowdown - "almost as bad as Metal Slug 2", they'll say.  I never quite agreed with them, but I could understand where they're coming from.  Anyone who's been introduced to Metal Slug through emulation or compilations on the PS2 or Wii probably doesn't realize how much slowdown there was on the original Neo-Geo hardware.  So when you see Metal Slug Saturn grinding into Matrix-style bullet time halfway through the first level - and you're comparing it to the silky emulation experience - then it can be a big downer.

Pictured above is the way that Metal Slug Saturn was meant to be played.  Thing is, very few people ever actually have!  Most people who are playing Metal Slug on their Sega Saturn are using one of the two expansion cartridges pictured below:

On the left is the official Sega 4MB RAM cart (HSS-0157), created at the request of Capcom late in the Saturn's lifespan.  It provides 4MB of additional memory space for the console to use with intensive arcade ports.  On the right is one of the many variants of perhaps the most popular Sega Saturn expansion cart - the unofficial Action Replay Plus from EMS.  This cart offers import support, cheats, backup save storage, as well as both 1MB and 4MB RAM modes.  Basically everything except burned/pirate game support, all in a single cartridge.  You'll notice that neither of these cartridges is the one that was intended for use with Metal Slug Saturn and displayed in this post's first picture, the HSS-0150 1MB RAM cart:

This cart is almost identical to the 4MB RAM cart pictured above, except that it was created at the request of SNK instead of Capcom, it predates the 4MB RAM cart by a few years, and it offers a fraction of the memory expansion.  Makes it sound like the 4MB cart is better, right?  Well, no.  You see, while most games that work with the 1MB RAM cart also work with the 4MB RAM cart, several games run into problems when they try to address the extra memory.  Some of the games have really obvious issues.  Samurai Spirits III and IV, as well as the Real Bout Fatal Fury games, have corrupted graphics.  You can't miss it.

The Action Replay Plus switches between 1MB and 4MB modes as needed by the game, and it seems to be the perfect solution.  1MB for your SNK games that need it, and 4MB for everything else.  The problem is that when it comes to Metal Slug Saturn, neither the Action Replay Plus nor the 4MB RAM cart work correctly.  Worse yet, the issue that Metal Slug has isn't nearly as obvious as corrupted graphics.  It's slowdown.  And now we come to the reason why Metal Slug Saturn has a worse rep online than it really deserves.

If you're playing Metal Slug Saturn with any cartridge other than the HSS-0150 1MB RAM cart, you're not doing it right.  Both the Action Replay Plus (I own the last revision released, with the dual 1MB/4MB modes and the fixes for Vampire Savior) and the HSS-0157 4MB RAM cart introduce additional slowdown despite seeming to work with the game just fine.  This is really obvious with some simple tests.  Load up the game with a 4MB cart or an Action Replay and check out the slowdown in two crucial areas: the Mission One boss and the section with the boats in Mission Two.  You'll notice how much slower it runs than when you use the official 1MB RAM cart meant for the game.  Here are the areas I'm talking about (click for bigger versions):


Hopefully this clears up some of the misconceptions about the Saturn port of Metal Slug.  It's really a great version, far better than the Playstation version (also on PSN) due to the 1MB RAM cart support and the Saturn's built in memory advantage.  In terms of slowdown, it's actually very close to the original arcade performance - once you stop using the wrong expansion cartridges.  With the AES version of this game selling for $3,000 or more when it appears, the Sega Saturn version of Metal Slug is about as good as it gets if you want a physical, standalone release.  This is especially handy since many retro gamers probably already own a Sega Saturn but might not own a Neo-Geo MVS or CD system.

It's probably important to note that Metal Slug only came out for the Sega Saturn in Japan, which means that running Metal Slug on a Sega Saturn using the intended 1MB RAM cart (as explained in this post) is going to require one of a few different routes:

1) A region modchip installed in a US or EU Saturn.
2) An actual JP region Saturn.
3) A properly region-patched ISO of the game used in conjunction with a backup modchip.

I'd recommend Racketboy.com (especially the forums) as a great starting point for any Saturn modding adventures.  A friend and I were able to install a switchless region mod in my US region Model 2 Saturn without too much sweat and blood, and it's definitely an awesome thing to have considering the strength of the JP Saturn library.

Burning the Library of Alexandria

I'm not sure if it's really dawned on people yet that the retro gaming world suffered a horrific blow this January. I'm talking about the fall of Megaupload and the subsequent abandonment of Snesorama.us - a crippling one-two punch to the archival of classic video games as an art form.

If you're unfamiliar with the whole situation, Megaupload was one of the most popular file lockers on the internet from 2005 until January of this year.  In addition to countless legal files and personal content, Megaupload was the host of choice for pirates and file-sharers the world over.  You almost couldn't run a Google search for an album, movie, or game without turning up dozens of blogs and forums dedicated to uploading digital content to Megaupload.  Kim Dotcom's brainchild offered it all - huge file limits, nearly unlimited download speeds, unobtrusive ads, and short wait times.  There were even freeware utilities (JDownloader) designed to make Megaupload and its imitators completely automated affairs.

One of the communities that eventually grew around Megaupload was Snesorama.us.  The site started out as a small-time ROM outlet, offering the same throttled direct downloads of illegal ROMs that countless other sites in the early 2000s served up.  Thanks to the encouragement of the site administration, however, the site's forum members began uploaded games to file lockers and cataloging them by platform, genre, and file type.  It was a limited effort at first, but - thanks to some mysterious kind of obsessive internet zeitgeist - it turned into one of the greatest retro community archival efforts in recent memory.

At the height of its popularity in late 2011, Snesorama's tireless volunteers had uploaded essentially complete sets for every system under the sun to online file lockers - mostly Megaupload and a few others.  PSX, PS2, Xbox, Gamecube - you name it. Most importantly for retro gaming, the site offered a stunning variety of Sega CD, Saturn, Dreamcast, PC-Engine CD, and NeoGeo games.  The site was a digital Library of Alexandria for retro gaming, allowing curious gamers to experience the most impossibly obscure games for obscure systems.  Want to play Stellar Assault or Hyper Duel for the Sega Saturn, but don't want to spend $200+ to import it used from a Japanese game shop?  Snesorama.  Want to experience insanely rare, impossible-to-find games like many of the PC-Engine CD releases?  Snesorama.

Even more amazing than its archival effort, Snesorama was home to a variety of homebrew and original hobbyist efforts for older systems.  TuxtheWise's Dreamcast Resurrection project offered streamlined Dreamcast ISOs with re-ordered, optimized file layouts that actually provided better performance than the original retail GD-ROMs.  The original Xbox's vast array of hard-to-find, grey-area homebrew projects such as the fantastic Streets of Rage Remake v5.0, Quake 1, 2, and III: Arena ports, Beats of Rage mods, and obscure emulator builds were all easily available as well.

The point of all this is that - regardless of your beliefs on file-sharing and copyright law - Snesorama and Megaupload together had achieved something that isn't even attempted by the video game industry at large: a meaningful archive of video game history.  Bits and boards are rotting as the months turn to years, and only certain privileged retro games are seeing re-releases in newer mediums.  But even then, petty legal conflicts are changing the very nature of the games we know and love.  Yes, Crazy Taxi is on XBLA, but what's Crazy Taxi without the Offspring soundtrack?  The only way to truly preserve these games is to preserve the original releases in timeless digital formats, accessible to future generations.

Snesorama was working to achieve that.  But a combination of media panic and corporate greed led to the shutdown of Megaupload and the destruction of a retro gaming heaven.  While some of those rare games and homebrew projects maintain an Internet presence through other sites, many others existed on Snesorama/Megaupload and nowhere else, and are lost...for now.  There certainly is no alternative that provides the same level of documentation and organization that Snesorama featured in its prime.

Please understand that I'm not condoning piracy of modern consoles and other media.  I see sharing ISOs and ROMs of old, abandoned games as largely a victimless crime.  When you download an ISO of Thunder Force V for the Saturn - a game that is out of print in all formats - who are you hurting?  Even the aforementioned Japanese resellers coexisted with sites like Snesorama - there will always be a collector community that demands physical copies to satisfy their desires.  The digital duplicates live on for everyone else.

This is an issue that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.  When I consider the number of legal obstacles (and apparent lack of interest) that are hindering large-scale archival and preservation of video games through official channels, the cynic in me is already looking for the next Snesorama.

#0011 – Bioshock – 2007 – Multiplatform – Irrational Games – FPS

I don't know whether it's the game's fault for being different or my fault for forcing expectations on it, but Bioshock wasn't what I expected at all, even after playing the XBL demo back in the day.  As an avid FPS gamer, I've been told about a billion times I should have played Bioshock three years ago when it came out.  The underwater world of Rapture was advertised as exquisite, the plot was called subtly compelling, and everyone said the combat was liberating.  So I had high expectations from a GOTY winner and apparently revolutionary effort from Irrational.  I guess as with everything else there were things I liked and things that I didn't like - or maybe just didn't get.

On the positives list is the world of Rapture and the characters inside it.  I doubt you'll find anyone who doesn't really feel the same way.  The art-deco design, licensed oldies tunes, and whimsical retro kitsch combine to make an extremely unique environment, especially for a genre dominated with spaceship corridors and military bases.  Rapture really did feel like a genuine world that was in decay.  You could see traces of the old gilded exterior and the 'ghost replays' (mirages of now-dead citizens at the moment of tragedy) contributed a sort of mystical sense of nostalgia.  Though I'd never seen Rapture as it originally was, I felt sincerely sorry it had collapsed.  The locales you journey through - old theaters, dance halls, metros, apartments, markets, science labs - are dotted with this generation's favorite storytelling device: audio logs.  I loved these as well.  You could listen to them while you were playing the game instead of being forced to sit on a menu.  Each was cleverly written and delivered with convincing emotion.  If you play the game I suggest you pay attention to them - not only do they sometimes have passwords and key combos you'll need for precious ammo and EVE (more on that later), they're the primary plot device.  If you ignore them you're not going to have as good a grasp of Rapture and what happened to it.

Enjoying the plot and art is going to be a bit of a problem, though, because Bioshock brings the tension of survival horror resource management back to the FPS with a vengeance.  This isn't a game where you'll have more clips than you can carry and ammo restocks between cutscenes.  I swear, if I ever had more than twenty antipersonnel bullets for my pistol then I don't remember it.  Having to constantly scrounge ammo and goodies is a bit of chore and makes the game feel longer than it really is, but it definitely adds to the suspense and keeps you on your toes.  You have to learn how to use your plasmid powers (like psychic or biotic powers from other games) efficiently and combine them with your weapons for max damage, and maxing your money and ADAM is a must.  If you buy the right upgrades, keep your eyes peeled for loot, hack everything, and learn what weapons hurt what enemies then you'll be fine.  It just demanded more thought from me than I'm used to delivering.

Between the agile enemies and ever-present security systems I died quite a bit, and at first it was frustrating.  Then I became acquainted with the Vita Chambers, perhaps Bioshock's most bizarre design choice.  When you die, you are reanimated inside a nearby Vita Chamber with all of your health and ammo and gear intact.  Furthermore, the Vita Chambers aren't like checkpoints or game reload points - the game continues as if you'd never died, which means that all enemies have whatever health they had when you died.  So the harshest of fights could essentially be taken care of without a single bullet or drop of plasmid juice by whacking things with your hammer until you die, then coming back and whittling them down some more.  With Vita Chambers always so close to the action and so few ways for enemies to heal themselves, the unmotivated gamer is going to find Bioshock to be a pretty easy thing to slog through.  The final boss was a joke, too.

The Vita Chambers pretty much stole all the tension from the 'only one bullet left' resource management.  That was my main thought.  The story was solid, the atmosphere was impressive, and the game clearly had a lot of love put into it.  I'm interested to see 2K's take on things without Irrational's creative vision, so Bioshock 2 is on the radar.  But more than that I want to see how Irrational itself deals with these issues.  So bring on Bioshock Infinite, although I think we have more than just a little wait.  In the meantime, I recommend you try the first bit of Bioshock if you haven't played it yet.  I'm positive the thinking man will find some of the mechanics to their liking and pretty much everyone should get pleasure from the non-combat side of things.

#0010 – Akumajō Dracula X: Chi no Rondo – 1993 – PC-Engine – Konami – Action

Remember how Castlevania: Symphony of the Night began? You hit start and all of a sudden you were playing as this guy named Richter and it said "Final Stage: Bloodlines". This Richter definitely wasn't the guy on the front of the box, and how the heck were you already at the final stage? Where was the rest of the game? It was definitely an attention-grabbing way to start out an awesome experience, and it threw me for a loop the first time I saw it. I thought I must have accidentally loaded someone else's save off of my PS1 memory card! But after I reset the console and started over - sure enough, it began on the Final Stage. Once you beat Dracula it all makes sense - Symphony of the Night's opener is a flashback to the events that predate the game.

People who had played Castlevania: Dracula X on the SNES a few years earlier, of course, recognized Richter and his blue tunic instantly. But...the final stage as shown in Symphony of the Night was totally different from the final stage in Dracula X. Sure, you fought the Count, but what was with the steps outside the castle, and where were the platforms? And besides, Dracula had transformed into a flying thing before, not a stompy beast... Revisionism at work? Not really. You see, Dracula X on the SNES was just a watered-down remake of a Castlevania game for NEC's PC-Engine, titled "Chi no Rondo", or "Rondo of Blood". Konami hadn't been able to negotiate a straight port from the PCE to the SNES, so they had remade it and changed the most important parts to avoid legal issues.

Well, today I got to play the real deal, Chi no Rondo on the CD-ROM expansion for the PC-Engine. And holy crap, what a game! The SNES version we got in the United States just pales in comparison to this game, and suddenly you realize that Symphony of the Night wasn't as much of a radical leap as we had thought back in the 1990s. Sure, Symphony ripped off Metroid to great effect and changed the whole gameplay style of the franchise, but the mechanics and the assets are all right here in Rondo of Blood. The killer pop-baroque Redbook soundtrack, the slick scaling and rotation effects, many of the enemies and the artwork, even the level designs of Dracula's castle and the bosses - all taken straight from this underplayed PC-Engine game.

It probably helps that the game runs upwards of $150 on eBay, and the actual hardware to run it can get into the $500s - that CD-ROM expansion module isn't cheap. So I recommend you opt for the emulation route. I prefer a TV, couch, and controller for my old school games, so I pulled out the latest version of the Mednafenx-PCE emulator on the original Xbox. It runs like a dream, and in 720p the sprites look absolutely fantastic. So much color, so crisp and vibrant. The PC-Engine clearly isn't pushing as many pixels and snazzy effects as Symphony of the Night, but it's still remarkable how good CD-based 16-bit games can look. And the music! Good grief, the music! Many of the tracks are infectious remakes of the NES tunes, including 'Bloody Tears', and the haunting choir music at the main menu is going to give you deja vu if you've played Symphony. It's fantastic stuff - check out the OST at least if you're into old gaming synth.

Another plus of emulation is save states - dang, it's a tough game. I guess the NES ones were as well, but to be honest it's been so long since I played any of these balls-to-the-wall classics... Modern gaming challenges you in entirely different ways, and to be honest the game just humiliated me over and over in the first level until I got my fingers woken up. Luckily there's a trick to beating all of the enemies and the bosses are pattern based, so repetition is rewarded. Just don't expect a relaxing experience - do, however, expect to play through more than once in search of 100% completion and the 'perfect' ending sequence. I only got 62% my first time through...

A sweet aspect of the CD format is that there's room for fully-animated cutscenes for the important plot moments - something that was definitely hobbled on the SNES. It's all very cinematic, with an actual opening sequence and several interstitials to build up to the big showdown. Unfortunately it's entirely in Japanese (well, with a bit of German at the beginning), but if you own a PSP then go check out Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles, which updates both Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night with full English localizations and revamped graphics, mechanics, and controls. It's definitely a lot cheaper than going after the original, and probably is more acceptable for some than emulation. Either way, do yourself a favor and play this game! Pure classic gaming quality here, you can't go wrong.