Haunted Castle III: Trevor's Quest
All right, so I know the site is Shoot The Core and the focus is on shmups. However 90% of the site is based on indy/doujin gaming, and I know a great homebrew game when I play one, so I have to bend the rules a bit and talk about Haunted Castle 3 by programmer Mig. He's the creator of Last Defender, and I finally got around to playing the Castlevania clones on his homepage, and they rock.
TQ is based on Simon's Quest, and features all the action/RPG elements that Castlevania fans have come to love (starting with CV 2 and running into current versions.) Simon's Quest always felt unfinished to me - lots of empty space, poor game progression and just an overall sense of "I don't know what's going on." Well, TQ is the game that SQ should have been. And it's HUGE - it took me 13 game hours to beat it, which translates to about 8 real time hours.
The music will take you right back to the 8-bit era, with both CV classics and new remixes. And you'll run into a ton of old friends, as the screenshots show.The game isn't without some nasty bugs though, so be warned. You can't use items at boss fights, entering the menu screen causes enemies to reappear, and the character keeps walking sometimes after you stop telling him to. Once you learn how to compensate for these drawbacks, the game really hits its stride.
You can grab the game from Mig's page here. You'll also need Joy2Key, some paper and pencil to map things out, a French translation page since the FAQ is in French, and lots of hours to put into this game. I didn't find it too difficult - if you know the series you will know how to solve most puzzles.
Slight spoiler: One of my favorite aspects of the game is that 85% is the quest to reach Castlevania. Once you reach the higher levels of the castle, the game drops the whole RPG element and turns into a tradition Castlevania game - no more item select screens or exploration nonsense. Strict action for the last section, and even Dracula X inspired intro screens. Nice touch! There is also Haunted Castle II for download, but I haven't played through that one yet.....it's a little more frustrating.
4 Comments:
I can't even get past the new game screen. Screw it!!!!
Are you using Joy2key?
I have tried Haunted Castle III, and the Double Dragon game he made as well. You can tell he tries hard. He completed EIGHT games. It looks like he drew all the graphics for those two remakes himself. Unfortunately, he is hampered by the game engines used (TGF 16.B & MMF 1.5) which are limited to 320 x 200 resolution. So all of his games look like those old EGA shareware games*.
It's a shame that so many homebrew game engines are so limited... it's actually easier to draw good-looking sprites when you have more pixels to work with.
All that said, HC3 is still better than many other Castlevania fan-made games, which re-cycle the graphics from Simon's Quest. That is the worst Castlevania ever... couldn't they steal the graphics from the arcade version, at least?
*as in "graphics that look like they were hewn with chisels".
I have to completely disagree with marco above. It is definitely NOT easier to make good-looking sprites with more pixels. I absolutely cannot stand hi-res pixel art games. They always look like butt. I have no plans of ever doing a sprite-based game that isn't 320 x 240, unless I can find a very good reason to go higher. As it is, it's easier to fill those pixels up with high quality art than it would be if I was using 640 x 480 or anything higher.
For reference: SotN, one of the most beautiful 2D games ever made, is barely over 200 pixels high.
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