I decided to play all the good Castlevanias

[KalessinDB]

WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE

One of those magical quotes that I wish I could work into my life more often.

Also, is it wrong that I can hear the sound effect of text printing on the screen in my head as I read that?

[Xeogred]

Aria of Sorrow is a fun game, and so is Dawn of Sorrow, but I really didn't like the protagonist either.

Alucard wannabe!

Oh wait...

Incoming truth bombs...

Alucard sucks.

Whips or GTFO!

[Exhuminator]

Simon Belmont is the ne plus ultra Castlevania protagonist. Not coincidentally, he uses a whip.

[Haoie]

I liked Lords of Shadow [both of them] just fine.

Not everything can be a metroidvania.

[Anapan]

I've played through every official and (at the time) unofficial up to the PS2 and Xbox releases. It all comes down to what you consider "good". If anyone wants my tweaks to get Adlib music out of the commonly distributed dos releases I'm happy to provide. If you want some tips on the beetle-boss from the Amiga release: "don't play it"
If you want to play the Game Boy releases, there's speed hack patches on romhacking that make the original and SGB compilation releases playable by simply fixing Christopher/Sonia's speed

I'm surprised that over the years COTM didn't rise to the top, and people still feel that the others are superior. Granted, they are all superior castleroids when compared to other competition.

Once it fixed on 3D, I lost all interest. The new attempts @ 2d made me sad. horribly scaled sprites, a cash grab on my (CVO) idea of online multiplayer that costs ~ $250 to get all the DLC characters, and then some more derivative DMC 3D releases.

Do you know about the clones that are also "good"?
Rusy for the x68000 is awesome.
My friends online released a beta of a CV3 remake
http://castlevaniadungeon.net/features/ ... icles.html
Before you play too many bad "official" games, there's a ton of freeware clones:
How about NSphere?
http://mickmanx.blog71.fc2.com/

[Xeogred]

I liked Lords of Shadow [both of them] just fine.

Not everything can be a metroidvania.

Not to drag out negativity, but man I absolutely hated the first one. Insanely long and boring drawn out fights with colossus monsters. And never have I seen such an insanely linear forced designed game. There was one part where I killed a boss, and jumped over this ledge when I realized I forgot to get some treasure the boss dropped. Visually, that ledge looked like a mere hop to get back up there and not even half a full jump, but the game decided it was too late to backtrack 2 seconds and generated an invisible wall there so I couldn't get back over there. That blew my mind. Imagine jumping over a cliff in SMB1 and not being able to jump back because the invisible wall says no. Turned it off, and never looked back.

[Ziggy]

My friends online released a beta of a CV3 remake

Is that still actively being worked on? Because the screen shots look fantastic.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Simon Belmont is the ne plus ultra Castlevania protagonist. Not coincidentally, he uses a whip.

That was one of the reasons I loved Judgment so much, because everyone was so delightfully-campily dressed, not to mention voice acted. Even if I did change the voice acting to Japanese as soon as I found out I could, that was after like 10 hours. The costumes in that game are top-notch though. I love their reimagnings of the characters, and how pre-CV3 Sylpha interacts with post-CV3 Trevor, Alucard, etc. That game will always have a soft spot in my heart.

[Anapan]

No, it was abandoned many years ago. The programmer went on to more lucrative things and I wasn't interestd in it's limited engine (tho it does reproduce the NES game well) - it was not capable of being adapted to online gameplay without a complete rewrite which is what mine needed (at least I thought so, but mine needed multiple hub servers, no amount of tweaking could compensate for the inter-continental lag). At the time fan-interest was waning from all of our projects.
The lights went dim and we all lost interest.


Camp?

Gotta give props to the Haunted Castle (Akumajo Duracula) Arcade flier - I bet it wasn't even intentional - they actually tried hard!:


This is a good emulated Castlevania. I would not want to be in front of it with a pile of quarters. I've dumped over $40 into Stacker in a single night trying to win the "Big Prize" while my friends watched and ate wings.

[marurun]

Konami Kobe released Circle of the Moon and Konami Krazy Racers shortly before being disbanded. Konami Kobe also did the N64 Castlevania titles. Not sure they have the greatest rep. That said, they were more willing to actually use the GBA's color palette and audio hardware.

I would also like to say that, despite the misdirection and opaque secrets one must know to beat Castlevania 2, it was an ambitious title that was just as essential as Rondo of Blood in the eventual creation of Symphony of the Night. And the soundtrack was just AWESOME, especially the enhancements made for the US cartridge release. Part of me thinks that someone needs to go back to the Castlevania 2 model and release a retro Metroidvania that isn't "Oh, we're in some massive castle/complex of caves" and instead has long outdoor stretches leading to distinct structures. And even bring back some of the adventure-game style secrets. Just don't make them so obtuse as to be stupid.