![]() ![]() ![]() Instead the focus is much more on combat, with exploration taking a back seat. Indeed, the feeling of accomplishment that came from gaining a new ability, enabling you to reach previously inaccessible areas of the castle, is pretty much gone. While the portraits have enabled Konami to flex its creative muscle and break out of the traditional Castlevania settings, the downside is that they hamper a lot of the freedom to explore which made Dawn of Sorrow so great. Players access these areas by jumping through the portraits and, once the boss for each area has been defeated, warp back to the castle before progressing to the next painting. ![]() Each has its own distinctive style: the gothic town is plagued by ghouls while the pyramid is infested with mummies that ensnare our intrepid duo with bandages the haunted forest is packed with possessed animals and finally there's the freak show, which is enough to give anyone with a fear of clowns nightmares for a week. ![]() Although you do spend a fair amount of time exploring Dracula's castle, it's really just a hub that contains four portraits leading off to different realms. However, a new feature that does work well is the inclusion of portraits. True, some puzzles require players to use Jonathan and Charlotte together - like standing on a switch to enable the other to walk through a gate - but they're often clumsily implemented and feel forced, like shoving a melon through a letterbox. While the dual character system works well, mainly because you can wade through enemies in half the time, it's never an essential part of the gameplay and occassionally feels far too superfluous for its own good. Players can control the two either individually, fighting as one while the other provides AI back-up, or they can combine forces to really lay the boot in. Joanthan Morris is a close-combat specialist who excels at getting stuck in while spell caster Charlotte Aulin is better at hanging back and dispatching with enemies from afar using magic. You can also defrag your card and format with 64k clusters (or bigger if you are using FAT32).As for the game itself, Castlevania's trademark bat-slapping, skeleton-bashing gameplay is still very much intact, but now there are two characters dishing out the death. Sound file hacking (also in the rom hacking docs in my signature), the technique will be similar to the tetris sound hacking: Castlevania portrait of ruin zing patch Patch#You can either hack off the end of the sound file (all the big streaming audio stuff is at the end as I recall) or you can use a bit more finesse and alter the pointers to make the game unable to read the large files (Kenghot made a patch for the US rom which should not be too hard to find as it was spread fairly widely). There was a big thread the other day (I have not got the time to go searching but I posted in it if you fancy going back through my post history) but if you are willing to butcher the sound file and/or lose some of the sound you can get it to run (sound is not very important). The problem lies in flash carts being slower than normal carts (usually in the getting from the call by the DS to pulling it off the ?SD stage but anything method of crashing (as in the project management term crashing) the process helps) and the game not liking the delay. ![]()
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