Nowadays we think of all these games like classics with a well defined genre, but back then, just like Zelda I and II, they were still experimenting what to do with games. The MSX version feels like the missing link between Castlevania I and II for Famicom. Great video as always!
Also, something I might add, is that most of Konami's MSX cartridges has a region code that determined the country of the MSX computer it was running on, so the title "Vampire Killer" was something that the developers themselves came up with, hence why it became the track title of the first stage BGM, as well as the name of the Belmondo family heirloom.
Amazing video. I finished Vampire Killer for the MSX via emulation (on a PSP) a long time ago and loved it. I prefer Classicvanias but in many ways VK is the predecessor of Castlevania II and even Symphony of the night -with its non linear gameplay. Funny how a "failed" approach later become the standard in the series.Imagine if Ninja Gaiden and Megami Tensei reverted back to their original interations on the Arcade or japanese PC (MT for PC8801 was a dungeon crawler).
I remember this coming out in Europe. Played the hell out of it and after months and months finally completed it. Still own the original Euro version, one of my fonder gaming memories!
The visual design of a lot of the MSX and MSX2 systems always intrigued me. Looking up Metal Gear 1 and 2 and comparing those to what we got stateside always made me imagine these systems to be powerful juggernauts. Turns out they were more "budget" oriented than a lot of the competition.
Most people ignore that the MSX standard was entirely based on the Spectravideo SV-328 computer, through a partnership with Microsoft and ASCII. Despite providing the hardware architecture, Spectravideo themeselves never became a big MSX supporter, not like Sony in Japan or Philips in Europe.
@@Ryusennin Interesting, maybe they just weren't that interested in supporting more of a consumer directed device. Even IBM didn't really have much interest in developing for the home market, but that might be due to the lack of interest in the PC Jr.
10:35 Aaawwwww.....good old Bloodlines! Man, I love that game. Now I'm inspired to boot it up again on my Castlevania Anniversary Collection. That reminds me, why wasn't a slightly tweaked version of this MSX game ever included in the collection??! :?
it was good video, i have learned many new things about msx version. little puzzle to obtain key to exit level is very nice idea (but i would make it optional task to open door to exclusive level/weapon/boss/music/'all together'), falling down to reach some platforms reminds me '8 eyes' and i liked this feature there, merchants - I have heard that you can scare some merchants into lowering their prices, but others may raise them instead. but i cant appretiate weak boss battle design, just a maze made of portals/sewers,... and you didnt mentioned what items he has, why does he need them.
Well....this game looks better and more fun than Haunted Castle, which isn't saying much. However, I'm a die-hard Castlevania weirdo whom still enjoyed Haunted Castle for what it was.
Feels like a missed opportunity that you didn't even bring up the western home computer ports of Castlevania 1, even for a brief comparison or mention.
MSX contains AY-3-8910 PSG chip. (Though later computers integrate it into MSX Engine). YM2149 is basically a 1:1 clone of the AY, but no MSX has ever contained the 2149.
Well it’s true that both the msx,sg1000 and the colecovision do lack scrolling capability hardwarewise BUT it still could be done trough software instead,so i really don’t understand why konami among other company’s didn’t implanted scrolling trough software instead just to get around this limitation, Because there’re enough games for those mentioned systems wich proves that scrolling is possible🤣
@@BasementBrothers MSX1 and MSX2 are different generations. This game is for the MSX2. The MSX2 has fullscreen vertical hardware scroll, plus an horizontal offset register offset that works pretty much like the C64 hardware scroll registers. Konami just didn't use it in this game, and only began doing smooth scroll games for the MSX2/2+ much later. (See Pennant Race 2 and Space Manbow)
Man, do I ever have a lot to say about this one! Heheh. I LOVE LOVE LOVE this version of Castlevania. Like, hands down, I consider it the superior take on the first Castlevania to the NES version, and I also consider it EASIER in most regards, even with the default 3 lives and no continues. The trick is just... to change your approach to everything. And the one item you failed to mention that is 100% the most important item in this entire game -- much more worth pursuing at all costs in every single level than the dagger -- is the HOURGLASS. Because unlike the NES version, it works on bosses too (including Dracula!), so if you have the hourglass (and especially if you have both the hourglass AND the holy water, and lots of hearts!), you can basically defeat anything and everything that stands in your way without relying on any twitch reflexes whatsoever. Learn where the hourglass and holy water are located in every level and how best to get them, and you've learned to basically speedrun this game. You also mentioned the multiple keys in the first stage of level 6, but not only do you not want to bother with the second key -- you can't! It's a decoy. If you fall down to get it, you're dead, as there is literally no way back up; you have to fall to your death and restart the stage. It's literally there as a trap, to lure you into jumping down only for you to die in humiliation. So diabolical! I love it. ;) There's a similar trap in the last stage of level 5. You mentioned that spot where you have to drop down two screens to collect the stage key, but what you DIDN'T mention is that if you walk off to the right instead of the left on the top floor of that tower, there's a pit in the same spot on the screen... but that one is bottomless, and just kills you. Every floor below the top one in this tower had been two screens wide, looping horizontally, but the top floor is three screens that don't loop at all, and the right-most screen has nothing beneath it -- it's a trap to make you fall to your death if you didn't use the map and/or environmental clues to confirm which screen to drop down from. That trap got me my first time through, and made me realize how valuable the map actually is during your first time through the game. Really, almost all the sub-items are. It's crucial to learn where to find white bibles and AVOID black bibles, for example, since white bibles decrease the cost of items the merchants are selling (by quite a bit!), while black bibles INCREASE that cost. Find enough white bibles and ignore all the black bibles, and you'll be able to buy the items you need throughout the game for absolute bargains! The shield, too, is really useful -- or rather, the wooden shield is, since it blocks all projectiles. It's great to have for bosses, if you can manage it, and is a fine substitute if you didn't quite manage to make it to the boss room with an hourglass in hand. (The other shield, sadly, does not block projectiles, but just increases the number of hits you can take, which is much less useful IMHO.) But yeah, I just absolutely love how diabolically evil this game is, and how much it delights in finding ways to trap you or make you suffer... until you go on expeditions and learn the level layouts, at which point you learn exactly which candles and walls to whip and which ones to leave alone, and can absolutely breeze through this game with zero difficulty. It's a very different experience from its NES counterpart, but as someone who's got little in the way of twitch reflexes but LOVES exploration and memorization, it ticks all the right boxes for me and just became an absolute OBSESSION until I finally beat it one day. Whereas to this day, I've never beaten the NES game.
@@ceticobr Just a few years ago for the first time, on a real MSX2+. I'm American, so MSX wasn't a thing when I grew up, but games like La-Mulana and Unepic got me interested in MSX gaming around a decade ago, and I wound up importing an MSX2+ back in 2015, which started me on a very long and very expensive collector's journey. ;) Now I live in Tokyo, and things have only gotten more dangerous for my wallet! Heheh.
Probably the most detailed video about MSX "Castlevania" I ever seen. I never found this game enough interesting to play it myself, and you mention few more reasons for me to skip it, but surely this is one of most unique (for good and bad reasons) entries in the series.
@25:30 Wait.. those are "Black Bible" and "White Bible" items! I wonder if theres a hidden "devotion" status or something that helps with bartering with the "holy" vendor, and if you an even bigger discount if you get more than 1.
18:36 The MSX2 actually does have support for hardware scrolling on the vertical axis (see, for example, the Aleste, Hinotori, Undead Line etc.), so this particular scene of falling down a shaft should have been perfectly doable in theory. It may have been omitted simply due to time constraints, the MSX version is just lacking in polish all around compared to the FDS/NES version.
Great video, but you should have put some "creepy" paper around the original game box.😉 Ah MSX2, or as I like to call it "That NES without scrolling and different system colors.".😄It's easy to see why both shared an affinity for cross platform titles with how similar the graphics were. Extra hardness aside(Hidden slimes.🙄) it's interesting to see the MSX leanings toward a more RPG like system over straight action platforming gameplay. While I'm a minority I still think SOTN forward Castlevania became too much of an RPG as I'd like something more in the middle between gameplay styles. Never quite understood why so many game developers want to punish players with unpleasant difficulties, what did we ever do to them personally? Even to this day the concept of a difficulty setting eludes many developers, they work on these complex self-adjusting AI systems and all I still want is Easy/Medium/Hard settings please.😐
Actually the MSX2 has hardware horizontal scroll capabilities, it's just that it was harder to use. Konami themselves used this feature in their later Space Manbow game. Nice video, thanks for taking the time to review this game!
@@PabloVasquesBravoVillalba Yes, but when people think about smooth scrolling, that tecnique is not what they are expecting. With proper programing even MSX1 can do super smooth scrolling, such as Uridium.
@@superdeadite I'm not sure what you mean. I'll agree Space Manbow isn't the smoothest thing ever (even on MSX2+), but Psycho World and Hydefos are super smooth and they use the VDP's adjustment register to achieve this, it has nothing to do with Uridium's technique. People like to say MSX2 has no hardware support for horizontal scroll, but this is simply untrue. The MSX2 scrolls horizontally very similarly to how the C64 does it (albeit it can shift 16 pixels, while the C64 only shifts 8 pixels), and yet no one says the C64 doesn't have hardware support for smooth horizontal scrolling.
This game has marked my life since my childhood-I’ve been playing hours and hours till now every single game’s trick and move,now I have NES & Famicon version to spend nostalgic memories. Thanks for sharing!
I went through this when I went through every CV game I hadn't finished before about 5 years back. I found it interesting as a clear precursor to the design of Simon's Quest but didn't have a lot of fun with it otherwise. I think you had some solid points about the design though and I appreciate it a bit more in this context, even if I'll never be a huge fan of it. Good video.
The MSX2 has full support for fine line vertical scrolling (as opposed to the old 8x8 tile "choppy" scrolling). On top of that, the MSX 2+ also added support for fine line horizontal scrolling, which you can see in great games such as Laydock 2. My guess for 悪魔城ドラキュラ not having a good scrolling and also not making good use of the colorful MSX 2 palette is that it was originally coded for the MSX1 and hastily adapted for the MSX2. Also, regarding old games that you have previously reviewed and have briefly mentioned the MSX version, such as YS 3, these games play perfectly on a MSX Turbo-R, due to the fantastic speed boost. Thank you for these great reviews! Your channel is indeed a gem!
You can do fast coarse scrolling with games that use the pattern modes (with 2 colors per character row) but games like this use the 16 color bitmap mode. That's why the Nemesis scroll at 16 pixels instead of 8 - it takes about 16 frames to redraw the whole bitmap screen using the VDP blit commands. You can sort of do fine horizontal scrolling by abusing the screen position registers and doing something to mask the edges. Or just letting it flicker. But not a ton of games did that.
The Turbo-R speed boost for MSX2 games feels practically like cheating though. Few people actually owned a Turbo-R back in the day, and most had to suffer through these games on their MSX2's... which is what these games were primarily sold as anyway (even if they also had the Turbo-R logo), games to play on your MSX2! Nowadays of course we can easily switch an emulator to Turbo-R mode and enjoy the high speed, but people back then didn't have that luxury. True, though, I should probably make sure to mention the Turbo R enhancements where it applies in the future. Thanks. (I think I did mention it in the Xak 2 video.) - Mr. Jakes
@@BasementBrothers A Turbo-R is a cheat to run MSX2 games much like a Pentium is a cheat to run Doom. Most people had 386s at the time the Doom was released and had to suffer with slow frame rate even with a small window at low detail. ;) (And this also applies to the majority of the MS-DOS game releases. The majority of the games were tuned for "next generation hardware" that mere mortals didn't have.)
@fr_schmidlin At least with Doom most people eventually did upgrade to a machine that could play it faster. The Turbo-R was more like a final turbo-charged version of a platform already in decline. Definitely not as rare as a SuperGrafX or a PC-88VA, but still similar in that only a limited handful of people ever upgraded to a Turbo-R. It was more of an evolutionary dead end, so few people ever got to play the Turbo-R games or the Turbo-R enhanced games until worthy emulators happened over a decade later. The enhanced games were games sold with the "MSX2" logo slapped on them in large print ('cause of course the devs wanted to target the larger user base), and MSX2 owners bought them believing they could play them on their systems, only to be treated to a very slow-paced experience in many cases. But yeah, nowadays the enhancements are definitely worth mentioning so gallegoctba's overall point is well taken. I will mention it in future videos. - Mr. Jakes
@@BasementBrothers then again, 7MHz mods were a thing, and perhaps more common than tR's. I just wish we could've had less lazy speccy ports, and that the smooth scrolling patches came much sooner, before the commercial death of the platform.
I loved the classic Castlevania series. I have beaten every classic non-metroidvania Castlevania game in the franchise, except for this. Once I learned that the game did not have scrolled I was kind of turned off of the whole thing. I might give this game a chance one day in the future, but I'm sure I'm not missing out on too much for not experiencing it.
Thank you reminding me that I need to get both Dracula Battle CDs soon rather than later. Will not harm any merchants in the process (despite this game making a solid case for that.)
Well, one thing great about the msx2 is that because of it’s limitations, a game designer was forced to make an action game that allows you to avoid enemies as an incentive. It was called metal gear.
Great video. I grew up with MSX and I always liked the exploring part of Vampire Killer, searching the key. It adds some more depth. But it should've scrolled yeah, by today's MSX2 standards it's possible. But in 1986? Great game, great version!
H-Hey ? Where did my comment go ? The one where i theorize the order of developpment ? I know i received a new comment about that interview not being as legitimate as we could hope but i can't read it now...
@@Haganeren I have to wonder if it's my fault, since I wrote a reply and revealed the identity of Hitoshi Akamatsu's former coworker. Perhaps not, but who knows.
I don't mean to be nitpicky or anything, forgive me if I come across as such, but I don't think the lack of scrolling is as a result of the MSX's software capabilities. Well, it was for the MSX1, but this is an MSX2 game. Hell, Konami's even made shooters for the MSX2 like Hinotori which scroll well (which I would love to see you talk about). My personal theory is that they wanted Vampire Killer to be more similar in style to Maze of Galious. It would make sense to me because there are other elements borrowed in like the more open ended stage design. All in all, I only recently discovered this channel but I love what you guys are doing. Keep it up BB, and keep it up Neo-Alec!!!
I think you're right that it's a design choice. I do think making this and Contra non-scrolling was a design choice that came out of hardware limitations. The original Metal Gear famously didn't scroll probably for the same reason. Basically on MSX/2 you have to either find a way to program around the lack of hardware scrolling or make a game that works well without it. I think the design choice in this case was choosing the latter.
@@BasementBrothers I should probably add an addendum about the MSX2 games that scroll, games like Space Manbow: it's simply a result of the "shifting" of tiles just like the MSX1. It's simply that, done fast enough, it gives the illusion of smooth scrolling. The MSX1 has games that utilize this as well, like Hype from 1987. It's been a while since I last played an MSX game.
Oh man, Nemesis 2 for the MSX. I grew to hate most of the other Gradius games, but this one despite flaws is one of my favorites. As for Vampire Killer, I can't say much, as I am yet to beat it. I didn't know the second cartridge adds a continue feature - they really wanted people to pay for that cartridge, didn't they? It makes sense as to why the Stage 4 theme is used as the last stage one - it sounds really similar to the castle entrance music.
Not a bad video at all. I tried this game in the early 2010's, but even with savestates, i wasn't having much fun so i stopped playing.I guess that cheat cartridge is the equivalent to microtransactions.
Oh man, The Count Censored. I haven't thought of that in a long time. Also, the Dracula Battle CDs were great, I still love their rendition of Beginning to this day. Either way, it's cool to see how the MSX team remixed Castlevania. I'm also glad you pointed out that bits from this game made it into Simon's Quest. As for that remaster patch, the SCC music sounds amazing, and I am now off to go find it.
Konami could have done a much better job on the MSX2 version...With a bit of effort it's perfectly possible to achieve a horizontal scrolling (quasi) hardware assisted on the MSX2, as although its VDP doesn't have specific registers for horizontal scrolling at least it has the feature of being able to horizontally shift some columns of the image on the monitor to adjust the image monitor offset, which, with some additional code, which works as a hardware assist for fine and smooth horizontal scrolling! and this with very little CPU usage!
Happy to see a good comparison of this and the NES version. Have always been curious, now I wonder if I might like this more despite its quirks. I really wish Simon's Quest had had better translations, I think it would have been a classic for more people. The adventure aspects seem to fit the gothic theme a bit more for me.
This is a good game with some very interesting ideas. It does suffer from its bad hit detection though. One thing about the last part of the fourth level. One of the items you can find in a level is the map. After you find it you can press M to look at the map up to three times per life (you have to find the map again if you die). It helps immensely with this part of the game. It also seems to me that the continue feature is locked behind the Konami Game Master in order to sell the cheat cartridge. I have no idea how anyone could beat this game without it. The Konami Game Master 2 also allows you to set the number of live you have and has level select, but the continue feature does not work with it. It especially unfortunate that they did this because from what I have seen you really need real hardware to play this. Any PC emulator I have tried unfortunately has bad input lag for this game.
Wow, I didn't even know about that fan hack...........ahh too bad the hack don't fix the horrible hit detection. I play this game lil bit on an emulator and just gave up on 1st stage...it was too horrible for me to continue.
Loved the What We Do In the Shadows and muppet Count gags, that last one took me back. Also good coverage on the game, I'm surprised as to how many versions there are of Castlevania.
Great video! I always look forward to your videos, and have gone through most, if not all, of your backlogs. I'm glad you are still making long form videos, I can wait months for a good video. Most channels I watch have switched to shorts that are doing nothing more than regurgitating what I consider common knowledge, but your videos are always of a fresh thing that I've little to no knowledge of, just like this one. I complained about this on another channel's comments and basically got yelled at. I hope this community is a !little different. Keep up the great work, keep me laughing, and keep me coming back!
This was very interesting. I wasn't aware of all these differences and always thought the MSX version was just NES Castlevania but playable on a keyboard. Also I think you have a very cool watch sir.
