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[Bullet Club]

And now for something a little different - a Digital Foundry Retro Let's Play! In this video, John returns to play some of the controversial Castlevania 64. Is it really a series low point? Audi Sorlie guests.

 

[angelic]

Spoiler: yes

 

[Lukin1978]

I played this abomination when it came out my buddy bought this and doom 64. We got a lot more use out of doom 64.

 

[stranno]

I wonder how Symphony of the Night 64 would have been.

Even Gamecom was going to have a SOTN port.

Edit: Regarding the stairs, yeah, simple geometry + plain textures. Most angles break the illusion but it works, especially in the low N64 resolution.

 

[Trimesh]

I wonder how Symphony of the Night 64 would have been.

Even Gamecom was going to have a SOTN port.

It would probably have been pretty bad, at least in performance terms. Moving around large 2D bitmaps is something that the N64 was not at all good at because it hammed the memory subsystem. The N64 had 4MB of unified memory and the old Rambus memory it used could only have a single page open at once - rendering large bitmaps resulted in a lot of memory accesses:

Read cart, decompress -> main memory
Read main memory -> frame buffer
Read frame buffer -> display

This is significant because a page miss (especially on Rambus) really kills performance - you have to close the existing page, put the chip into precharge mode, then send the page address, then the address in page and finally start the read cycle and transfer the data. So if you have a whole bunch of transfers going on at once and you end up page thrashing you lose most of the performance of the memory.

The other consideration is political - Nintendo have been known to refuse approval for games they think make their systems look bad - and a seriously degraded frame rate version of a game that ran smoothly on PS1 might well be considered to be in that category.

 

[kingbean]

Boy this was not good. They clearly aren't ready to do a video like this.

 

[Lux R7]

i loved it so much and i was thinking to start a nostalgia playthrough these days

 

[EightBit Man]

Decided to skip this the moment I saw it. Man, it was around this time I seriously began to question my console of choice, and asked myself the question "why didn't I get a SEGA Saturn instead?". Then, when I got a Dreamcast...the console that exceeded every single expectation I had, it was also going to have a 3D Castlevania...a canceled 3D Castlevania, which looked stunning in magazines...

 

[Tesseract]

i remember hating the original and loving the sequel

 

[Fake]

Is it really a series low point?

Yes. I played the 'werewolf' version of this game btw. Still an enjoyable video. Thx D dark10x

 

[Nickolaidas]

I never played it back then, but I recently played it a bit on a N64 emulator on my PC. The camera is horrible and the platforming is atrocious. Still, there's an undeniable charm to it, and its attempt to pull a Metal Gear PSX era cutscene-style looked quite nice for its time.

I can see myself playing this game to the end.

 

[Barakov]

Yeah, it was. Still I enjoyed the game regardless. It has this weird charm that I can't quite explain.

 

[#Phonepunk#]

Cool game. I missed it on release but checking it out a few years ago was surprised by how ahead of its time it was. The giant skeleton boss felt very Dark souls.

One of these days I want to play through all the way.

 

[nkarafo]

I enjoyed it more than any other 3D entry.

 

[Saber]

I sincerelly think that Jon was kinda giving this game way too praise for its own good.

And it's not like I'm against liking this game. But this game has some serious flaws that even Jon touch during his own playthrough. The plataforming in this game is mediocre, the controls aren't exactly fit for what the game demands(which can result in cheap deaths for dead pits) and the camera isn't exactly friendly.

As I mentioned in the twitter, the first time I played this game it felt like they were doing this game just to go with the flow. 3D explorable stages and plataforming were a thing in that time I think.