/vr/ - Retro Games

>>3150606
The amount of trickery to squeeze the most out of these systems knew no end. But actually a lot of the tricks aren't complicated.

Castlevania looks good because each area is fairly small, so tiles don't have to be reused to the point where repetition is noticeable. In fact, almost every door, every elevator, every room transition etc. is a loading point in video games where graphics, palettes, and level data are updated.

When the screen can't be blacked out during a transition for a huge update, other techniques can be employed to extend the graphical detail. For instance, in OP's Castlevania image the gears rotate. Since every gear has the same phase, the same graphic can be applied to all the gears (duh, that's tiling). The trick though is that instead of having all the frames of the gear in memory at once, you can update the gear graphic data each frame such that one gear graphic needs to be in memory at a time. You trade away letting the gears have different phases, but you gain 64x64 pixels. Palettes could be updated per frame well for animation and special effects.

Special cart hardware (called mappers, although they did a lot more than memory map) also allowed special techniques to be applied to the game. OP's Castlevania uses such hardware to draw the status bar by generating an interrupt to tell the NES it's time to update some background scroll values. You can see the imperfect interrupt timing in OPs image (look at the slightly glitched scanline underneath ENEMY).

Lastly, it just takes a tremendous amount of skill to make good tile graphics. To be able to hide the redundancy of reused graphics and the regular grid of tiles takes experience and effort. Folks like at Konami got plenty of experience doing pixel art. Things like taking advantage of contrasting colors to bring out more detail are the hallmarks of good pixelmanship (Mario's famous mustache is an example).

Also, a big ole' ROM doesn't hurt either.

>>3092584
I've only played the SNES version, so this may not apply, but the game is very badly balanced. The only difficult mission is the Hell's Wall one, and that one is a joke because the AI is extremely bad. The slow gameplay becomes stale because there is so little variation and challenge over the course of the game. Not to mention the game itself is poorly designed; for instance you can only move then attack, not attack then move. It's a shame because I think this game had a lot of potential.

I don't ever recall the enemy attacking itself tho. Maybe just DS, but that seems weird. Are you sure it's not the enemy attacking an NPC?

>>3090626
I was incredibly disappointed by this game. I looked forward to playing it for a long time because I saw it in Nintendo Power as a kid. When emulation had come along far enough I eventually downloaded a copy and was completely floored by what a clunky piece of shit it was. : (