Mako Crab
Cryptographer
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Re: Castlevania series
It's true, but I found that when I played it, most of the game's most talked about problems didn't hinder me much.
1. Hearts farming
- Can be a pain, but I didn't have to do this except right at the start of the game, when I needed to buy a white crystal and holy water. Other than that, I found that most of the time, I had plenty of hearts to buy whatever I needed by the time I reached the next town.
2. Losing all hearts when you die
- I swear the AVGN mislead people when he said this. You don't lose all your hearts if you die. You lose all your hearts if you have to use a continue. This did happen to me once, and it was annoying having to spam the same couple monsters in a mansion so I could buy an oak stake. But the times this happened to me a critical moment were few.
3. The day to night transition
- Doesn't bother me. But it would be cool if the game didn't pause while the sun set and the text box appeared. It'd be cool if it all happened while you were still playing.
4. The bosses were super weak
- They totally were. Though they become tougher if you don't collect the right weapons along the way. In that way, exploring becomes the key to defeating the bosses rather than learning their patterns or anything.
Just my opinion, of course. I'd fix all these problems in a heartbeat if I had the chance to remake it. But they weren't deal breakers either.
Last edited by Mako Crab, 8/13/2014, 11:42 pm
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8/13/2014, 11:37 pm
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Trium Shockwave
Head Systems Tech
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Re: Castlevania series
The day/night transition I'm pretty sure is a result of it being a Famicom Disk System game. Odd as it sounds talking about NES games, the FDS had load times. When the day/night thing happened, it had to load a whole new set of graphics from the disk into the CHR-RAM on the FDS RAM cart, replacing what was there before, then switch over. That's why it has to stop and black out. I don't have the FDS disk myself to check, but I'd imagine that the text crawl is covering for some of the time it takes the data to actually load. When the game was ported to cart format for US release, it probably used one of the later mappers that allows bank switching on the CHR-ROM, which is much faster than loading from disk. The text crawl was just left as it was, carried over from the disk version. That's probably why mods of the game are able to considerably speed up that transition, without the floppy disk slowing it down there's no reason it couldn't have been faster.
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8/14/2014, 5:35 pm
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Mako Crab
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Re: Castlevania series
Very interesting to know. I did notice that if there were a couple monsters on-screen during the day-night transition, that they'd still be as tough or as weak as they were before the transition. Then any new monsters that appeared after that would take the number of hits appropriate for the night or day scenarios. Thought it was interesting that the monsters on-screen during the transition didn't become tougher, and that it must've had something to do with the limitations of the hardware.
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8/15/2014, 4:29 am
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Trium Shockwave
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Re: Castlevania series
Possibly that, or just the programmers not wanting to deal with the implications of it. Each enemy spawns with so many HP, probably equal to the number of basic whip hits it takes to kill. Let's say your enemy has 2 HP, and you've hit it once, so current HP is 1/2. At night, that doubles to 4. When the cycle switches to night, you run a bit of math.
New Current HP = Max HP + Current HP
New Max HP = Max HP x 2
So, for our 2 HP guy, he's now at 3/4 (1+2 / 2+2). No problem. Now, take the same situation, but opposite. It's night, so Max HP is 4, but he's taken 3 hits so he's at 1/4. Cycle changes to day, but you want to make sure the player keeps credit for the 3 hits she put in:
New Current HP = Current HP - Max HP / 2
New Max HP = Max HP / 2
So work the math out and... oh !@#$, we're at -1 / 2. Since current HP is <0, our monster would just immediately die. Or, if current HP is an unsigned integer, it could do really weird stuff like recording it as a +1. Like, if our monster was 1/10, then we reduce his Max HP by 5, he actually winds up at +4 and gains 3 HP. Either way, not what we want. So, now what? Do we take current HP as a percentage of max? Not only is that more math the system has to do, what do we do with fractions of an HP point? Round up or down?
At this point the developers probably said F it, it's not worth the trouble, and just didn't change the current HP when the day/night changes. They may not then even bother to refresh the max HP for currently spawned monsters, and just leave it as is. Worst case the player has to whack a couple monsters who are the wrong level, then move on.
Last edited by Trium Shockwave, 8/16/2014, 1:02 am
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8/15/2014, 7:54 pm
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Mako Crab
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Re: Castlevania series
Yeah. No bid deal in the long run.
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8/16/2014, 2:42 pm
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iacon45
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Location: Recalculating....
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Re: Castlevania series
Has anyone tried Mirrors of Fate for 3DS? Saw it at Walmart and thought about getting it.
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2/9/2015, 6:13 pm
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Mako Crab
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Re: Castlevania series
I've only tried the demo on the PSN. It's a short demo, but it seemed alright from what I was able to play. I was thinking of getting it myself, especially now that it's going fairly cheap.
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2/10/2015, 6:39 pm
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iacon45
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Re: Castlevania series
With a good possibility of getting iced in for a day or two, picked it up at Walmart in case the power goes out.
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2/15/2015, 7:35 pm
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Mako Crab
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Re: Castlevania series
Cool. So? How is it?!
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2/17/2015, 2:10 pm
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iacon45
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Re: Castlevania series
quote:
Mako Crab wrote:
Cool. So? How is it?!
I wouldn't know. Opened it and the cartridge had a crack in it. That is a first for me and surprising since it was in hard plastic security box. I took it back and since they didn't have anymore copies for a direct exchange, they gave me my money back.
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2/17/2015, 4:00 pm
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