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Castlevania: Bloodlines (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Just in case I was misremembering that this was one of the good linear Castlevania games, and my thoughts on Vampire’s Kiss were based on warped memories, I decided to give this a go. It’s on the Switch Online Mega Drive collection too so it wasn’t difficult figuring out a way of running it.

And, I was completely right. It is so much better than Vampire’s Kiss it makes that game look like a dodgy c-tier “Dracula’s Castle” knock-off and not a legitimate title in the series at all. Bloodlines (or “The New Generation”, if you prefer) is faster, slicker, more varied, longer, less frustrating, and much more fun. The bosses are excellent, there are all sorts of nifty graphical effects that the Mega Drive can’t do except it can – tilting towers, sprite scaling, splitting the screen up and shunting bits of it around, and so on.

I played through as Eric Lecarde – the one with the trident – as I think I played as Mr Whippy last time, and the reach of his tool (careful now) makes certain sections much more doable – he can stab baddies on platforms above him, for a start.

I’d probably go as far to say that this is the best linear (rather than SOTN style) Castlevania game. Yes, even better than Super Castlevania IV.

Puyo Puyo (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Yes, it’s essentially the same game as Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, which I completed a couple of days ago. But this one has cute Japanese character voices and cuter graphics and no stupid fake Sonic enemies.

Other than that, though, it was no different to play. I didn’t find the end boss as difficult, but that’s probably luck and/or practice rather than it being easier than the Sonic reskin.

M.U.S.H.A. (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Until this appeared on the Switch Online Mega Drive collection thing, I’d never realised that “MUSHA”, “Aleste”, and “Musha Aleste” are the same game. I’d never played any of them before, either.

It’s a vertically scrolling shooter with big robots and great music and impressive graphics. And it’s hard. And I completed it, eventually.

The bosses were, mostly, much easier than some bits of the actually levels, it turned out. Aside from the “final” 1 one with the almost unavoidable things that stick out of the wall, with the walls already having become really narrow!

Notes:

  1. Spoiler: it’s not final. ↩

Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Just in case I didn’t have enough games to play already, and I have a copy of this already on my Switch in the Sega Mega Drive Collection thing, I decided to play the one in the new Sega Nintendo Online collection. No, I don’t know either.

I’ve played it before. And completed it before. But not for a while.

Mean Bean Machine is just a reskin of Puyo Puyo, and I have to say, I prefer Puyo Puyo. This Sonic themed version is full of the stupid badniks from (presumably) Sonic the Comic and/or one of the cartoon series and I don’t like them. That makes no difference to to the gameplay of course, but still.

The game was really easy until the final three opponents, where the speed is just too fast. Robotnik himself, especially, seemed to fill my well (careful now) before I had a chance to even drop a few beans, so it was only by blind luck I managed to nail him in the end, I’m sure.

Quest Arrest (Evercade): COMPLETED!

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OK, the bad points out of the way with this first. The graphics are poor (yes, it’s a Game Boy Colour game, but still), the writing is awful and it is full of bugs. There’s no end of swearing which doesn’t even work in context, and the JRPG style fighting system is random and broken (not least because your health bar doesn’t physically change half the time, even though the value of it does). What you have to do is vague and often doesn’t make sense. Every time you change location it pauses the game and pops up to tell you where you are. There are spelling mistakes galore.

It very much feels like a “my first game” project by someone younger than the material they’re producing would be aimed at. It’s all f-this and kill that and murder the other without any of the dialogue to surround it.

It’s not big and it’s not clever, sorry.

But, if that is indeed the situation with its creation, then the output is laudable. There’s a lot going on here and although much of it is unsuccessful there’s a good base behind it. In fact, if the text was just edited well, perhaps made adult in context rather than adult in content, that would fix most of the issues I had with it.

Aside from that, the main aim of the game is to deal with (either kill or arrest) all of the members of some gang causing problems in the local area. Once you’ve done that, you can take down Athena, their boss, who is a badly signposted twist in the story. It’s a short game, and apart from the randomness and occasional inability to see what is a door and what isn’t, not especially hard. I just with it was a bit more toned down and polished.