RGB Plays: Super Castlevania IV

I really think they designed the game around the traditional whip motions and at some point late in development someone went “the whip needs to work in all 8 directions”. Alot of the enemy placements look like torture with the standard whip but are a complete joke with the 8 way whip.

I wonder if there’s a rom hack, or if it’d be possible to create one that limits the whip back to CV 1-3 style (Only left and right). Maybe when I play some more, I’ll try to limit myself. I don’t know if there’s any platforming sections that require 8-way directional whipping, like the brackets you attach and swing on, that sort of thing.

I’ve spent most of my time forgetting I can whip in the other directions.

Yeah i find the game to be too easy. Will try to complete it with Nes whip-direction, that should be a great challenge!

I like the 8 way whip. Man, its so clutch when you are about to land. I wouldn’t care if there wasn’t a bounce animation for C1-3. I don’t know if there is one for IV because I don’t know how often I am hit. This game is seriously easy compared to its older siblings.

Downwards diagonal whip strike while falling is the coolest looking animation in the entire Castlevania series.

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Not sure if this has already been done but I nominate Castlevania: SoTN.

I love it!

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Nah, unless very early. The swinging rings and the layouts of many stages are built around the multi-directional whip and mid-air direction changes to a large extent. It seems they didn’t know how to make it all work together being similar to the old games while controlling completely differently.

It’s just an easy game, the whip direction isn’t what makes it easy by itself. Enemies just stand a bit too still, you don’t get knocked back as much by a hit etc, many things add up.

The same reason (x10) is why SOTN is a complete mess design and action wise too, it’s not just the fluid movement (itself also making it a slog), but level design and enemy placement that is amateur hour there too. At least CV4 still has a bit of the classic arcade rhythm to it. Actually even just halving the number of hits taken for a life bar drain may have balanced it better.

I think “easy” is pushing it a little though. You can discount the deaths with a “Well, sometimes I fell into a pit, but otherwise I didn’t die” but those deaths cost lives like any other, and for the average player they’re often a lot more maddening than being worn down by a skeleton.

This game has a rather classic level of difficulty IMO. I think the folks in this thread are just rather good at videogames these days so it seems “easy” compared to other much harder games from the period. At the time, it was just right.

From a certain perspective, yes. But it said Castlevania 4 on the box. All previous games (1, 2, 3, adventure, MSX, Haunted Castle) were legendarily difficult (2 in a different way). So by the series standards it was very, very easy.

Are we still picking games to vote on? How about Shinobi 3?

Absolutely! I’ll edit the poll when I get a chance.

So apparently I can no longer edit or remove the poll. That’s great. I guess we will make a new thread for March and do it there. In the future I will hold off on making the poll until all nominations are in.

I had a chance to play some more CV4 tonight and I finally made it through stage A and beat Akmodan II. The difficulty definitely ramped up in this stage with some awful platforming on the fucking cogs. The staircases are alot more manageable then in the first 3 games and moon walking up and down them will never stop being fun! No time left to play tonight but I’m pretty sure I’ll be finishing the game up this weekend.

Never played CV4 before, despite playing the shit out of CV1,3 and the igavanias. I’ll start it later.

Any recommended hacks or patches?

I’m playing the vanilla version this time.

There’s very few differences between the NA and Japan release but there is a restoration patch if you really want your crosses and red blood with English text.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a slowdown fix like SGG has.

I also can’t seem to vote in the poll. Wanted to vote for Gauntlet Legends.

This might be something you or @Peltz could tweak on the backend.

There is no patch becuase the slowdown is caused by a CPU bottleneck rather than poor coding as is the case with SGG. The only way to remove it is to use an emulator with a CPU overclock option.

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“Slow down happens because this section is too hard, so the game makers wanted it to go slow so you can make the jump.” Tommy Lynch 1993

The poll was closed. I opened it. (@Socksfelloff, I hope that was okay. And voted for Mega Man 3, myself, because it’s awesome and Capcom’s music on the NES is totally amazing. Carry on everyone)