by MrPopo Tue Mar 17, 2015 2:19 am
1. Painkiller - PC
2. Front Mission 4 - PS2
3. Wasteland 2 - PC
4. Arcanum - PC
5. X-COM Terror from the Deep - PC
6. Military Madness - TurboGrafx-16
7. Unreal - PC
8. Shadowrun - SNES
9. Warcraft III - PC
10. Dungeon Keeper - PC
11. Final Fantasy X-2 HD - PS3
12. Descent - PC
13. Quake Mission Pack 2 - Dissolution of Eternity - PC
14. Quake 2 Mission Pack 2 - Ground Zero - PC
15. Sokobond - PC
16. Hybrid Heaven - N64
17. Sonic the Hedgehog - Genesis
18. Castlevania - NES
I was waiting for the oven to preheat over the weekend (and then for the food to finish baking) so I popped this in to my NES which is in my bedroom, while everything else is in the media room a flight below the kitchen. I had dabbled in this a bit back when our TR was Castlevania but the furthest I ever got was to the mummies. This time I found I had the patience and willingness to use items to first make it to Frankenstein, then midway through Death's level, but I was hitting a real roadblock there. I went and watched the current record on Speed Demos and saw just how critical the holy water was for Death's level (not to mention Death) and decided to push forward tonight. After a few tries I managed to get a good run where I kept the holy water from beginning to end and made Death my bitch. Then it was on to Dracula's level, which took a few tries before I realized that spamming the stopwatch was the way to go. Then came the many many retries against Dracula until I got the timing down for his first form. I spent several continues fruitlessly trying to do a pattern of jump and crouch under the aimed fireballs but I kept getting screwed whenever he would teleport close. Then I had an epiphany and switched it up to the jump over the fireballs and hit strategy. On my best run I only took two hits, which gave me more than enough buffer for his second form with the holy water. Since I started off without the double I wasn't able to keep him stunlocked, but in one moment where he could attack I killed a few fireballs and got a double, and from there he was locked down until I won.
The game is quite tightly designed and you can get a lot if you know the right tools for the job. In that way it reminds me of Final Fantasy V, where many really hard fights become trivial if you know what you're doing. There were definitely a few bullshit deaths, but most of the time I died because I was getting careless.

Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.