subhumanzoids

Lots of stuff going on; I almost forgot about this!

I want to kick this entry off with a YouTube video that serves two purposes. One, it showcases the powerful effect of Holy Water in Castlevania; this video quite literally overhauled the way I look at the game. Two, it features one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite chiptune artists, Cheap Dinosaurs.

Now that you’ve chewed on that, you can see how handy this item is. Even if you were already well aware, I most certainly was not. In fact, my history with the series had my friends and I avoiding Holy Water by any means necessary, as if its essence would spill out into Belmont’s grip and burn him like the sinner he surely is.

So yes, it was Holy Water that got me over that ages-old obstacle of Death. Though my victory over every man’s inevitable defeat remains a programmed illusion, I found solace in the concept of besting the Reaper, even in this virtual world.

Death remains just that, though: an obstacle. The real Summit of Man’s Might rests atop Dracula’s castle, and the battle to get there offers up some of Castlevania‘s fiercest challenges yet. Against the odds, my accomplishment awoke in me a primal drive to finally see this game to its end, and see it I did.

Let’s talk about Dracula for a second. Though we won’t get to speak of the ULTIMATE Drac fight for a few more entries, the battle that goes down in Castlevania is pretty worthy of a final boss. Just look at that smug bastard!

But it’s not until you whip his freakin’ head off that he reveals his true form. As cartoons, comics and games have taught us, the Japanese have an interesting concept of Count Dracula. He is somewhat of a snaggletooth’d gremlin-devil here, and he’ll wallop ya! There’s nothing more crushing than facing defeat near the end of a boss’s second form, but it makes the win that much sweeter, and it’s one of many reasons I couldn’t stop talking about finally beating Castlevania after so many years.

For those wondering, I did indeed involuntarily pump my fist and exclaim “Yes!” like a sugar-struck child of roughly 11.

Most importantly, I feel like I can fully appreciate the game now. I’ve called it cheap many times in my life, but it’s really not. Like many NES games, it has its fair share of “issues,” but it’s pretty well designed and it holds up to repeat play. Best of all is the fact that you can start right at level one after the credits roll, kicking off a much more difficult version of the game.

While you bask in my personal glory, I leave you with another song:

Listen: Wicked Child

Coming up next: Simon’s Quest!

I thought long and hard about this, because as a freelance writer, that’s what I get paid to do. What good would I be if I couldn’t scoot my chair over to a window overlooking the marvelous vista of Hoboken and ponder important matters like “I wonder how I should go about blogging my Castlevania experience?”

Let’s get an executive order out of the way first. This shit’s going down in roman numerals. That’s the first thing I’m changing right off the “bat” (get it?). If you can’t read ’em, this is part 2. I’m also going long with this, because I don’t have anything else to write about on the JLR at the moment, so bear with me.

The original Castlevania has been a TV game thorn in my side since my youth. It became one of many classics that I wrote off as something I would just never finish. It wasn’t meant for me to complete; it was crafted for greater savages. The issue I always held with this, however, is that I love the series. Even in the face of great difficulty, it’s like something that was created specifically for my tastes. Dracula! Mummies! A freakin’ Frankenstein (or “The Monster” for you purist nerds)! Fleamen!

But no matter how hard I went at it, there was always a little roadblock by the name of Death. As in all ‘Vanias, he awaits the player in his chamber, where he proceeds to rain the terror of a dozen flying scythes upon their heroic person. By the time you get to him in stage 5, a mere four or so hits spells death for Simon Belmont (or Belmondo, if you like). This is maddening, and usually results in Simon bouncing around the room like a rag doll before collapsing in a pile of shame and embarrassment.

Previous attempts over the years had me doing just that, if I even made it there at all. However, somehow I had never been privy to knowledge of the “Holy Water trick.” Once I saw the above .gif, I knew I might actually have a chance of making it past Death, if not Dracula himself.

The next entry in this voluminous yarn will explore just how this opened the gates for conquering Dracula’s gnarly castle. For now, I leave you with a track from the game, something I’ll be doing with each post from here on out. This is probably my favorite song from Castlevania, and I think it took that title because I had to play stage 5 so many times that it burned itself into my mind like a searing brand against a horse’s ass.

Listen: Heart of Fire

I probably should have posted about this back when I was actually in the thick of it, but for a while there I was really stabbing hard at the Castlevania series in my free time. Yes, that long-rest’d, well worn, and notoriously difficult saga as first appeared in America on the Nintendo Entertainment System in the year 1987.

I was six years old. Head like a giant apple, hands stained with chocolate pudding snacks.

Frankly, I never was able to solve a single one of the original trilogy back in those glowing days of youth, no matter how long I sat plunked down in front of my NES. Odd then that now, when I probably have the least available time to do so—and about ten times less the appropriate level of patience—I plowed through Castlevania, Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, and the Japanese version of III, Akumajo Densetsu.

To say that these were hefty accomplishments to me would be a whopper of an understatement. Had you been unfortunate enough to live anywhere near me during that period, you would have no doubt heard me wax heroic about my exploits in Castle Dracul. I once not-so-famously held a very lengthy bar conversation regarding the difficulty of completing the first Castlevania (I had done so earlier that day), a chat that came equipped with so many personal pats on the back that, had you seen my bare skin, an embarrassingly red palm print would have pulsated and pounded your senses like the dancing lights of a crime scene.

It is with this humble opening that I begin this series, as much in the interest of reviving actual writing on this blog as it is concentrated and gloriously pulp-free braggadocio. It is a tale not only of victory over seemingly insurmountable odds, but of triumph over impatience and a presumably agéd degradation of TV game dexterity. Consider it your very own chalice through which your person may be reborn, free to conquer those sand-blasted challenges that humbled your bygone years.

This… is Luster’s Quest.

Here’s a treat I’ve been meaning to scan for ages. It’s the very first picture I ever drew of Slamm Dunk! This may be the only time he’s been depicted doing what he actually is supposed to do: dunking criminals into sub-space.

Click to enlarge!
I don’t know what I like more, that he’s not even looking down, or that the basket is right at crotch level.

I may have left all of my manga back home in Louisville, but that didn’t stop this from growing atop my entertainment center in Hoboken like some cosmic spore over the last year or two.

Click to enlarge
Can you spot your very favourite funny pages? Not pictured: Superhero comix and galactic Marvel mega-stories. They’re on another shelf because I live in a sardine can.