NEW GHOSTBUSTERS II (NES)

In the past, I have made reference to my youthful obsession with Ghostbusters, an obsession I think you could accurately describe as “all-encompassing” and which left an immutable psychic scar because I never owned the firehouse play set. I had the toys, the book, the VHS tapes, I asked for red glasses so I could look like the cartoon version of Egon and my first ever crush was on cartoon Janine. Too much information? Probably. Yet somehow, in the period when my twin obsessions were Ghostbusters and the NES, I managed to completely miss out on today’s game. Developed by HAL Labs and released in 1990, it’s New Ghostbusters II!

Here are some Ghostbusters now, as Peter, Egon and Winston chase Slimer out of a cinema screen because it can’t be the Ghostbusters if they’re not causing significant property damage while busting ghosts.
These aren’t new Ghostbusters, of course. They’re old Ghostbusters. The game’s called New Ghostbusters II because there was already an NES game based on Ghostbusters II, developed by Imagineering. The Imagineering version is a pretty terrible game that I wouldn’t recommend to even the most hardcore Ghostbusters fan, because it’s an overly-difficult slog with tedious driving sections. New Ghostbusters II is a completely different beast, as we shall see. For once it was European console owners who got the better deal, because New Ghostbusters II was never released in the US, presumably due to licensing issues. Naturally it was also released in Japan, being developed by HAL, (a Japanese company,) and I’m looking forward to seeing a Japanese take on what is a very American film franchise. I’m sure I wouldn’t be the first person to point out that Ghostbusters is about a business that becomes successful by flouting health and safety regulations, mocking due legal process and monopolising their industry, after all.

Before the action begins, you must select two Ghostbusters to play as. You can even play as the Ghostbusters’ accountant / lawyer Louis Tully, which I imagine marks the first time I’ve ever had the chance to play as Rick Moranis in a videogame. I’ll be going with Egon and Ray for this playthrough, because they feel like the two most Ghostbuster-y characters to me. Plus Egon’s my favourite.

The game wastes no time in breaking out the spooks, beginning with good ol’ Slimer – a floating, unthreatening target on which to practise your busting skills. NG2 has an unusual set-up where you have two characters but only control one of them directly, in this case Egon. You move around with the d-pad until you see a ghost, at which point you press the A button to fire your proton beam. If you hit the ghost they’ll be stunned so long as you hold the beam on them, at which point you can press the B button to make your CPU-controlled partner throw out a trap to capture the ghost. Your partner will follow you around fairly closely and make their way to a good trapping position once you’ve got a ghost in your beam… for the most part. Ray's definitely more reliable than I expected him to be, though.

As far as the core gameplay goes, that’s about it. Zap ‘em and trap ‘em, nice and easy. Each stage is split into a series of rooms, and eliminating all the ghosts in a room opens up the next, complete with a big on-screen arrow telling you where to go next. Let’s pretend the arrow represents the PKE Meter tracking ectoplasmic activity throughout this… wait, where are we?

With all the offices and scattered paperwork, it appears that New Ghostbusters II begins at around the end of the movie’s first act, when the courthouse is attacked by ghosts thanks to the emotion-manipulating pink slime. Perhaps that’s why there are so many Slimers about; slime sticks together. There are plenty of other ghosts here too, though, including the jogging ghost from the movie, pink blobs that split into even smaller pink blobs when zapped, spectral snakes that pop out of bathtubs and chainsaw maniacs.

There’s a chainsaw maniac now, with its chainsaw and its face that’s kind of difficult to interpret. Is it wearing a baseball catcher’s mask, for a Jason Voorhees riff? Possibly, although thanks to my over-consumption of horror movies I keep seeing it as the Chatterer cenobite from Hellraiser. Not that the Chatterer ever used a chainsaw. I don’t think Pinhead would stand for one of his crew torturing people with something so gauche as a chainsaw, he’d have a big speech about how it lacks the brutal elegance of chains with hooks on the end.
It’s been easy going thus far, but I should mention that you don’t have any kind of health bar in this game. One hit and you lose a life, although thankfully your CPU partner is invulnerable. This means that you should try to be careful, and my top tip for doing that is that you can catch ghosts through walls, so use that to your advantage whenever possible.

Things get more difficult when projectiles are involved, such as in this room full of Slimers that chuck food at you. For whatever reason these lethal projectile pineapples cannot be stopped by blasting them with a highly-concentrated, nuclear-powered proton beam, so you’ll have to dodge them. Fortunately your chosen Buster handles well, with sharp, precise controls, although the perspective can sometimes make it difficult to tell if an attack is going to hit you even though it looks like it should pass “above” you.

Having cleared the building you arrive at the courtroom itself, where the jar of pink slime explodes and releases the game’s first boss – the Scoleri Brothers! A pair of murderers given the electric chair, they’re freed from Hell to enact their sinister plan of running around the screen in predictable patterns. Yeah, they’re not the most menacing pair. The difficulty comes from having to hold your beam on them for a little while before they turn pink and trappable, but you can move around while you’re zapping a ghost and your remain “tethered” to it up to a certain distance so you can still avoid the other brother.

Onwards to stage two, which takes place during the Ghostbusters' exploration of New York’s abandoned subway tunnels. It’s also where the ghosts of all the Mets that Mega Man ever destroyed have ended up. They’re happily working away down here with their pickaxes and pneumatic drills until you bust them. I’m sure they were working on something evil. I assume they were trying to cause as much pubic transport disruption as possible, driving ordinary people to contemplate all manner of terrible acts as they’re crushed against someone who hasn’t bathed in three weeks while their train is stuck in a siding – a diabolical plan indeed.

You can’t have small train tracks in a videogame without mine carts, can you? If an alien civilisation learned of Earth solely through videogames they’d have to assume that mine carts are a fundamental aspect of an Earthling’s everyday life, along with opening chests and killing each other. Uh, scratch that last one.
So yeah, mine carts that’ll kill you if they crash into you. You still have to bust the ghosts inside, of course, but you can hold out your beam as they pass and let them ride into it. This stage represents a good step up from the first, with the same basic gameplay that’s spiced up by having to pay attention to where you’re standing. It feels like an organic addition to the complexity of the game and is definitely preferably to the game simply dumping more ghosts on you, or bigger ghosts, or ghosts with guns.

Sadly this stage does suffer from being a bit dull to look at. Ninety-five percent of the stage is the same orange bricks and mine cart tracks patrolled by undead construction workers. I’d be more critical of it if I wasn’t having so much fun with the gameplay, but it could definitely use a bit of sprucing up. At least chuck in a bit of graffiti or something, maybe a giant albino alligator that was flushed down the sewers and grew to an enormous size beneath the city. This is New York, after all.

The final few screens take place aboard a train where you’re attacked by ghostly severed heads. I certainly hope they’re ghosts, anyway. If not, I think the Ghostbusters should also be keeping an eye out for Herbert West.
Right at the very end of the train is Slimer, except now he’s a locomotive engineer with a little hat and everything, and it is adorable. Less adorable when Slimer fired a spread-shot of projectiles that immediately killed Egon with no warning, but still a lovely sight to see. Then I blasted the old onionhead. I felt a little bad about it, but not bad enough to prevent me from seeing the rest of the game.

Stage three takes place in Peter Venkman’s apartment building, where he let Sigourney Weaver stay after an evil force tried to kidnap her baby. Unfortunately the lifts aren’t working, so you have to work your way up from the ground floor, trapping a ton of ghosts as you go because Peter apparently lives in the most haunted building in America. Common spooks in this stage include pink blobs, strange winged things that look like Cupid fell asleep on a tanning bed and, for some reason, ninja ghosts. I want to know how the spirits of an entire ninja clan ended up bound to the earthly confines of a New York apartment building, although as I type this I realise I already know the answer – this must be the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ doing. “Ghostbusters meet Turtles” is a crossover event that, had I read it as a child, would probably have killed me through raw excitement. A couple of years ago there was a Ghostbusters / Turtles crossover comic, but I can’t bring myself to read it. I know it won’t live up to my childhood fantasy of the Turtles meeting Zuul and thinking of Shredder so they have to fight a giant Shredder and then the Ghostbusters arrive in the Statue of Liberty and they fight and it is the best. Ahem.

The apartment building has minibosses at the end of each floor in the form of these flail-wielding cyclopses. A menacing sight at first, you’ll soon learn that they can only attack directly downwards so once you’ve gotten around the side of them they’re completely helpless.

Much like the previous stage, this area does suffer from repetitiveness -  a feeling exacerbated by it being about three times longer than the previous stage. You move through the very similar looking rooms, fight a couple of cyclopses, repeat – and I repeated it for long enough that I was worried I was missing something, that I needed to do something special to break the cycle in a Zelda-Lost-Woods kind of deal. But no, you just have to keep plugging away until you reach the end of the stage.

I’m happy to keep plugging away, mind you, because I’m having a really fun time with New Ghostbusters II. The action’s slick and smooth, with just enough thought required to avoid boxing yourself in or getting surrounded that it avoids becoming stale. The range of your proton beam is long enough to give you room to manoeuvre but still short enough that you have to get involved and can’t just trap ghosts from a mile away, and when you’ve learned how the ghosts move you can use their patterns to your advantage. Plus it looks great, with endearingly chubby little sprites and simple but charming ghost designs. Oh, and the music is really good, too. You’ve got a fantastic NES recreation of the famous Ghostbusters theme, for starters, and all the stage music is a blast, from stage one’s bouncy use of motifs from the theme to stage four’s funky riff on “Entrance of the Gladiators.” Then there’s stage three’s theme, which is clearly from a Kirby game.

If you listened to that out of context, you’d definitely say “hey, that sure sounds a lot like music from a Kirby game.” I know I did. It’s because NG2’s soundtrack is by Kirby composer Jun Ishikawa. Having heard this track I’d have been amazed if Ishikawa wasn’t the composer.

Any complaints I may have had about this stage being repetitious were allayed once the Ghostbusters were attacked by these grim reapers with pumpkins for heads. They are, with only mild hyperbole, the greatest enemies in any videogame ever. I’d like to believe they’re based on the pumpkin-headed “Ghost of Halloween” Samhain from the Ghostbusters cartoon, but I don't have any evidence for that.

There’s no boss at the end of stage three, but you do get a cutscene showing Dana’s baby Oscar being abducted by the creepy Renfield-a-like Janosz. Like almost everything in this game, the cutscene is very cute.

Into the river of slime for the next stage, where our intrepid paranormal investigators must do battle with evil strawberry jam while avoiding the projectiles that come their way. You might also notice that NG2 does have some problems with sprite flickering, especially when you’re zapping a ghost / deadly emotion-enhancing fruit preserve. It’s a fairly minor issue, and overall I’d say that there’s very little to criticise in NG2. Once or twice Ray managed to get himself stuck behind a wall and I had to go back and fetch him, but the pathfinding on your CPU helper is generally very good. The stage backgrounds do get samey, and that’s probably the game’s biggest flaw. I’ve played games with a lot worse biggest flaws.

Hey, maybe there is something to the whole Slimer / slime connection in this game? There certainly are a lot of Slimers down here and not much else beside, you know, slime. Maybe Slimers are independent, fully-realised globs of emotion slime, and that emotion is “me at about 8pm when I suddenly realise I’ve forgotten to have any dinner.”
It was also around this point that I realised what other game NG2 is reminding me of – Sunsoft’s NES version of Gremlins 2. They’re both top-down games based on spooky comedy movies set in New York that I watched a lot when I was a kid. There’s no point to this revelation, it’s just nice to finally figure it out.

Something that didn’t appear in Ghostbusters II (the movie) is this stage’s boss, a pack of slimy… lizards? Dragons? Whatever they are, they seem to have been flayed alive, given that they’re red and you can see all their musculature. They can also breathe fire, so I’m going with dragons. Slime dragons, the worst kind of dragons. Like the Scoleri Brothers you have to keep your beam on a dragon for a while to defeat it, although you don’t have to trap them. I assume this is because they’re made of slime and not ectoplasm. It works out nicely for Ray, who can spend the entire battle doing bugger all and being invincible. Hang on, why doesn’t Ray join in with the zapping? Does he not have a proton pack? Were there budget cuts at Ghostbusters HQ? C’mon, Ray, start pulling your weight.

With the dragons defeated it’s time for the final stage – the art museum, where kidnapped baby Oscar has been taken so that the evil wizard Vigo the Carpathian can transfer his essence out of the painting he’s trapped in and into Oscar’s body. Oh yeah, Vigo the Carpathian. You remember him, he’s the driving force behind the events of Ghostbusters 2. Kinda weird that we haven’t seen him in the game yet, huh?
I like the exhibits on display in the museum. You can’t go wrong with pictures of Slimer and blank canvases that drip blood, can you? Plus I reckon that the pictures you can see just about Egon and Ray in the screenshot above are teeny-tiny recreations of the Ghostbusters 2 movie poster.

The museum takes everything that you’ve seen thus far during the course of the game and bundles it all into one stage. Almost every type of previously-encountered ghost makes a return, including the Scoleri Brothers and the pumpkin reapers, and it feels like one last section of “pure” gameplay before the final battles ahead. Nothing much has changed, but nothing really needed to change because the gameplay was perfectly enjoyable as it was.

The stage ends with a battle against Janosz, as portrayed by the actor Peter MacNicol and represented in-game as a sprite of Peter MacNicol with a gigantic forehead. There’s something I find very entertaining about doing battle with an American character actor who I associate most with Ally McBeal in a Japanese-developed NES game. Like, I wonder if Peter MacNicol has ever seen this? I’m far too British to ever do it, but part of me wants to get in touch with him on Twitter and let him know about this (please do not take this as a request to bother Peter MacNicol). He does have a Twitter. I just checked it out. He seems to really like Halloween, so he’s okay in my book.
As for the boss fight itself, it’s… not great. The game’s lowest ebb, as far as I’m concerned, mostly because it’s an enormous spike in difficulty compared to the rest of the game which, up until this point, has been relatively easy. To defeat Janosz, you have to zap one of his clones with your beam for fifteen seconds or so – but as soon as you hit one Janosz, the other two begin firing projectiles at you, so you have to try to avoid those missile while maintaining your beam and that is no easy task. It’s made worse by you having to eliminate about ten Janosz clones before the fight grinds to a halt, with any lapse in concentration or false move leading to the loss of a life because hey, it’s one-hit kills. A frustrating battle needlessly stretched into a gruelling slog, then – but those sprites are fantastic.

There’s Vigo, the Scourge of Carpathia, the Sorrow of Moldavia. About bloody time. He used to sit in a castle of pain on a throne of blood, now he’s reduced to possessing art restorers and looking like a sculpture of George Carlin carved from scabs. No wonder he’s so angry.

After getting my arse kicked into a brand new shape by Janosz, fighting Vigo was like skipping through a summer meadow by comparison. It seems that Vigo’s been telling fibs on his CV and by “dark sorcery” he means juggling. Vigo throws slow, easily dodged balls at the Ghostbusters and then spins a protective ball barrier around himself, and it’s a very simple task to avoid the projectiles, hit him with the proton beam and then simply walk backwards a little so the spinning balls don’t hit you. Vigo’s must be out of practise, because he’s the scourge of nothing in this state, except maybe people who have to tidy the ball pit at a kid’s soft play centre.

With Vigo defeated, baby Oscar is saved and the game is over. There’s not really an “ending” as such, but that’s fine by me – I know how Ghostbusters II ends, and instead you get a fun series of little skits over the credits, like the Statue of Liberty chasing Vigo down presumably so she can kick him right in his huddled masses.

My favourite is definitely when Egon steals the reaper’s jack o’lantern head.
I’ll use the obvious gag to sum up New Ghostbusters II – bustin’ made me feel good. HAL crafted an enjoyable little game that, unlike the Western Ghostbusters II game, does one thing and does it well. It’s extremely cute, and there’s a lot of fun to be had as you waddle around the stages hoovering up non-terminal repeating phantasms thanks to the solid controls and the smidgen of space for a bit of tactical play, especially when it comes to learning enemy patterns and grabbing ghosts through walls. It’s also not too difficult, Janosz fight excepted, and it’s nice to play through a NES action game that doesn’t spend every moment reminding me that I’m an old man with failing reflexes and encroaching baldness. New Ghostbusters II definitely gets my recommendation, and doubly so during the Halloween season. If only you could play as Janine, I’d be ordering myself a cartridge from eBay.

High marks of the Halloween-O-Meter for NG2, because hey, it’s Ghostbusters, and also I wouldn’t be surprised if that sprite of Peter MacNicol crept into my nightmares. Plus it’s got pumpkin-headed grim reapers, that’s worth an extra point all on its own.

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CASTLEVANIA: ORDER OF SHADOWS (MOBILE)

It’s hard to know what the future holds for the venerable Castlevania franchise. Konami themselves seem content to do nothing but re-release Symphony of the Night over and over again, former franchise head Iga has the just-about-legally-distinct Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night on the way and there’s the Netflix cartoon, but for honest-to-goodness Castlevania games? Who knows when we’ll see another. But this is the Halloween season and I want to try a Castlevania game that I’ve never played before, goddamnit – and that leaves me with only one option. It’s time for the 2007 game for mobile phones, Castlevania: Order of Shadows!

That’s right, back in the day you could pay about six bucks to download a Castlevania adventure created specifically for mobile phones, with a whole new plot and cast and everything. I say “new cast,” obviously Dracula and Death are in it. However, because this is the year 2018 I couldn’t just play Castlevania: Order of Shadows on my phone. Instead I had to go through a lot of faffing about to get it running well enough to play all the way through, a process that involved visiting shady Java download websites, wrangling various setting into place and, eventually, resorting to playing the bloody thing on my ancient laptop. That’s the laptop that I wrote the first ever VGJunk articles on, and it was old then. I had to have a desk fan blowing on it stop it from overheating. In retrospect, Castlevania: Order of Shadows was not worth the effort.

The all-expenses-spared prologue fills you in on the backstory to this latest climactic battle of good versus evil. A dark, sinister order – an order of shadows, if you like – are planning to resurrect Dracula, and a Belmont must head out and whip them until they stop doing that. It is not exactly a story that breaks the mould established by previous Castlevania games.

Here is the Belmont in question. His name is Desmond Belmont, and he’s assisted by his two sisters Zoe and Dolores. Desmond has inherited both the sacred monster-slaying mission of the Belmont clan and their curious posture, where arms are forever bent at the elbow and they walk in mighty strides. He’s also very orange. It makes him easier to see against the dark backgrounds, and I suppose that would be helpful if you were playing this on a mobile phone.

The action begins and hey, this is a Castlevania game! I’m in a hallway, there's a candle with a heart inside, I’m about to whip a zombie that’s waving its hands in the air like it just don’t care. It doesn’t get much more Castlevania-y than that. The gameplay in C:OoS will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s played a Castlevania game in the past, with Desmond making his way through a variety of locations, whipping monsters and using his stiff-legged jumping “skills” to clamber between platforms. You control the game using either the number pad keys or the little joystick-nub-thing that many mobile phones of the time had, with the main differences from real Castlevania games being that you press up to jump, rather than a button. This means that using your subweapon involves pressing a separate button, because up is reserved for jumping.

That’s right, there are subweapons – I managed to find the cross and the axe early on. They’re a little… strange. For starters, they’re far weaker than they used to be, with the cross taking three or four hits to defeat enemies that can be slain far more easily with a single flick of the whip. Oh, and the axe travels horizontally, rather than in the usual arc you’d see in traditional Castlevania games. The biggest departure from the familiar subweapon system is that you can carry more than one subweapon at a time. In fact, once you’ve grabbed them, you’ve got them forever, and you can change which one you have active by equipping it via the game’s pause menu. That’s an interesting feature, and after playing lots of Castlevania games where a chunk of the challenge came from actively avoiding certain subweapons I’m kinda glad of its inclusion.

After breezing through the early corridors, Desmond finds himself in the bone pit. You know, where they store all the bones. Is this like an assembly lines for skeletons? There are definitely skeletons around, you can see a pair of bony legs at the top the screenshot above. I suppose it’d be more like a scrapyard for skeletons, really. If you’re looking for a spare scapula from a 1758 Transylvania Peasant, this is where you’d come.

Slightly further on, and now we’re platforming thorough a series of caves while skeletons throw bones at us. “So, how’s that going?” you might ask, and the answer is the kind of low, throaty moan you might make if you unexpectedly stepped in something soft with no shoes on. You might not be surprised to hear this, but Castlevania: Order of Shadows is not the most enjoyable game to actually play. It’s leaden and ponderous, with Desmond lashing out his whip so slowly the only conclusion is that he’s trying to tickle his foes to death. Jumping is equally awkward, particularly when trying to avoid enemy attacks: pressing up will sometimes make Desmond jump straight upwards, as you’d expect, but then at other times it makes him jump diagonally forwards in the direction he’s facing. For the life of me I never figured out what triggered which jump, and that made the game’s (thankfully not-too-taxing otherwise) jumping sections a real chore. If you’re walking forwards and hit the attack button, you have let go of the movement key and then press it again before Desmond will resume walking after the attack, further slowing down the action. Desmond’s hitbox is not so much a box as a goddamn circus tent, with you taking damage from enemies that aren’t in the same sodding postcode, never mind touching you. All in all, the gameplay is bad. Did I get that across? And don't forget I'm playing this on a keyboard, so god only knows how it felt on a phone.

The first boss is the Order Knight, an armoured chap with disproportionately tiny legs and a pair of big swords. Oh, and he can throw daggers that are basically unavoidable thanks to to the lag on the controls. I tried throwing my own projectile weapons at the boss, but they do very little damage so in the end I had to go toe-to-toe with the knight, hoping that he’d run out of health before I did.

It didn’t go great. “Well, you really ballsed that up,” says Death as he drifts down from the top of the screen to claim Desmond’s immortal soul. Admittedly this is neat death animation, with a nice sprite of capital-D Death that’s clearly not up to the graphical level of Symphony of the Night but possesses its own bony charm.
Also nice is the fact that running out of health is essentially meaningless in this game. You hit continue and you’re dropped back at the start of the screen you died on with a full health bar. This time when I whipped the knight it did run out of health before me, so that’s the first area complete.

Defeating the knight grants Desmond access to the back dash. Don’t believe the lies of that description, it is not useful for anything. The most interesting thing about the back dash is that, hey, what’s the first thing you’re going to do when you’re given a new move? You’re going to try it out, right? So I backdashed on the first screen of the new area and I backdashed off the screen and into the previous boss arena. Thankfully I didn’t have to fight the knight again. But hey, C:OoS has backtracking! It’s a Metroidvania! No, it is not. There’s one place in the game where you might have to revisit an earlier area. As much as this game wants you to think it’s cut from the same cloth as Symphony of the Night, with its collectable weapons and ability to travel back to previously-cleared areas, in reality it’s a very linear game. You do get experience points and level up as you play, but it seems to have a very minor effect on the gameplay aside from raising Desmond’s maximum health.

Pressing ever onwards, Desmond negotiates a crumbling waterway and faces some fleamen, one of Castlevania’s most hated monsters due to their erratic bouncing movements. I’ll admit I was worried. How was I going to avoid these capering bastards when Desmond has all the grace and agility of a suitcase full of bricks? It turned out not to be a problem, because Desmond’s whip stays extended for a long time and the fleaman were perfectly willing to jump straight into it and die. I think the one pictured above was the closest a fleaman ever got to me.

Also starring in this stage are these familiar witches. Sadly they do not turn into cats and run away when you defeat them like they do in Symphony of the Night. I know, I know, there are a lot of limitations thanks to this being a mobile game, but still.

The rest of the stage comprises a tedious slog through the kind of barren, grey rooms you can see above. The occasional bat flutters past, disinterested in the entire sorry affair. I tried to hit some of the bats with my new secondary weapon, the Platinum Blade. Unusually for the series, C:OoS features subweapons that are melee rather than projectile attacks: in this case, the Platinum Blade allows you to sweep a sword in front of you. I think it’s supposed to be weaker than your whip but faster to activate, but the range advantage of the whip is so important that almost all of the close-range subweapons are a waste of hearts.

Pictured above is another strange aspect of the gameplay engine. Desmond is standing next to a slightly raised block, and he wants to jump up there but it’s tricky with the fixed-trajectory Castlevania jumps. Instead you just have to jump upwards. You’d think that’d cause you to travel straight upwards and then land in the same spot…

...but you actually land “on” the platform above, with this somehow counting as Desmond standing on the platform. Is an unintended quirk of the engine, or was it included intentionally to make it a bit easier to get around? I have no idea, but if for some reason you decide to play this game then I recommend making the most of it.

The boss is two bats. Big bats, granted, but still just bats. I sure wish that the axe in this game arced upwards when you throw it. I’m kidding, of course: just use the whip. It really is all you need.

Are they, though? Because I’m not really seeing any difficulty curve at all in this game. A difficulty plain, maybe. A plateau of challenge. I was going to say that the twin bats were actually easier to defeat than the Order Knight, but I was making that first battle more challenging for myself by trying to avoid the boss’ attacks when I should have just stood there and furiously whipped away like a Pharaoh trying to get his pyramid built ahead of schedule.

The beginning of the next stage is no more interesting than the end of the last, with more extremely simple platforming and backgrounds for which the concept art must have been a picture of someone shrugging non-committally. Not wanting to be outdone by the bats, some Medusa Heads put in a shift as this area’s lazy, unthreatening hazard.

Then I got a few screens further in and this minotaur flattened me in seconds. This took me by surprise, because every other enemy in the game thus far has done negligible amounts of damage if they somehow managed to slip past my whip, whereas the minotaur can kill Desmond in three hits and barely takes any damage from your attacks. My experience playing other Castlevania games told me that the best strategy would be to bait out the minotaur’s attacks, especially his dashing attack, and then hit him while he recovers – but this strategy proved useless because the minotaur’s hitboxes are seemingly made up on the fly and bear no connection to the position of either the minotaur or his axe.

In the end I toughed it out by eating all the health-restoring chicken legs that I’d squirrelled away in my inventory and whipping repeatedly, and my reward was… the Crissaegrim? The most powerful weapon in Symphony of the Night, a whirling vortex of blades that transforms the wielder into a cross between a ribbon-waving gymnast and a combine harvester? Yes, that Crissaegrim. Except in C:OoS it’s a subweapon that gives you a medium-strength, short range attack as Desmond swings the blade once. The saddest thing is that this is probably the best subweapon.

It turned out that beyond the minotaur was a dead end, so I had to go back a little and start exploring these underground caves. Skeleton archers are the new threat here, but to balance things out there are suddenly magic spells dropping from every other candle. You can see one in use above, the Firestorm spell that drops a carpet of lingering flames from the sky. They’re all single-use items as opposed to the equippable subweapons, but there are quite a lot spells to collect, from simple projectile attacks to projectile-repelling barriers and even limited invulnerability. You might think these spells would hammer the final nail into the subweapons’ coffin, but the problem is that you have to get into the right position, pause the game, scroll down to the inventory, select your spell and then use it. This rather takes you out of the game, and C:OoS is already such a slow, plodding experience that spending twenty seconds navigating menus just to throw a fireball at a bat is a ludicrous proposition.

Waiting at the bottom is Medusa. She’s staring at you, with her eyes. She can indeed turn Desmond to stone with a glance, but he gets over it fairly quickly and Medusa’s sword has nothing like the range of your whip, so it ends up being a rather one-sided battle. Far more interesting is that victim in the background. It seems that at some point in the past Medusa managed to defeat Simon Belmont. Given that Medusa is easily beaten by Desmond – an arthritic, shambling warrior whose whip-arm travels with all the power of Ratty from Wind in the Willows rowing his little boat – there must be something more to that statue. Maybe it is a statue, carved to commemorate Simon Belmont’s many victories, and Medusa grabbed it so that people would think she overpowered the famous vampire killer. If it is Simon Belmont, let’s hope he stays petrified, because the alternative is dying from embarrassment.

The reward for beating Medusa was the double jump ability, so now I can travel back to where I fought the minotaur and jump to the high platform that leads onwards. Oh, and I found a fire whip. That’s nice.
The next zone is more of the same, with the faintest hint of a maze-like layout half-heartedly dribbled on top. There are a few places where if you fall down you have to climb up a few screens to get back to where you were, and if you think that sounds like pointless filler then you’re absolutely correct.

For all its flaws, and they are numerous, Castlevania: Order of Shadows features huge ghosts that take the form of spectral skulls and float around menacingly and thus deserves some measure of our affection. Granted, there’s not much else a giant ghost skull can do besides float around menacingly, and again they don’t look as good as their Symphony of the Night counterparts, but I’m still very pleased to see them.

This hooded chap is Rohan Krause, the latest in a long line of people hoping to be Dracula's alarm clock. He also killed Desmond’s parents, so this time it’s personal. I’m trying really hard to care, I swear.

Rohan’s a wizard, and he attacks using the same arsenal of spells that Desmond’s been collecting on his travels: here you can see me getting immolated and shot in the back. This is the only time in the game I got any use out of the spells, specifically the “Reflect” spell that provided a barrier that was very temporary but lasted long enough for me to get a bunch of whipping done while Rohan mumbled some incantation or whatever it is wizards do. I did die the first time I tried this battle, but that’s hardly a bad thing – as mentioned previously you just restart the fight with a full health bar, and you have infinite lives. Oh, and pockets full of delicious roast chicken, should you need it.

But alas, killing Rohan has provided the blood required to resurrect Dracula! This is why the Belmonts should invest in some less-lethal weaponry like, I dunno, rubber throwing knives or a whip with a taser sellotaped to the end. Desmond doesn’t believe Rohan’s claims, but Rohan tells him to venture to Castlevania and see for himself. Oh boy, Castlevania! At last! Surely this is where C:OoS is going to pick up, and I can’t wait to explore the nightmare halls and dank catacombs of Dracula’s castle itself!

Okay, so Castlevania isn’t quite the sprawling labyrinth it used to be. In fact, it’s just a couple of rooms containing a surprisingly large amount of fermented soy beans, plus the iconic staircase leading up to Dracula’s chambers. Making a Castlevania game where you travel to Dracula’s castle and said castle is made up of three monster-free rooms is a bold choice, but I can’t pretend to be disappointed. I’m more than ready for this game to be done with, so let’s go and deal with Dracula.

Desmond is very surprised that his actions have helped in Dracula’s resurrection, despite being told five minutes ago that this was the case. He’s a Belmont, too, so it’s not like he should be shocked that Dracula’s up and about. I’m beginning to suspect there’s a reason the other games never include Desmond in the great pantheon of legendary vampire killers.

You know that fight against Dracula’s first form? The one that any Castlevania fan has played through umpteen times before, where Dracula teleports around the screen, popping back to the material realm to throw fireballs? Yeah, it’s that battle again, with a few important changes. One is that you don’t have to whip Dracula in the head to hurt him, any blow will do. I assume this is to counteract that fact that Desmond’s glacial reactions and the abysmal controls make it almost impossible to avoid any of Dracula’s attacks. The other is that you can chow down on fermented soy beans and the one solitary taco in the game to keep your health topped up, and if the mental image of a Belmont pausing mid-Dracula-battle to wolf down a taco doesn’t make you smile then there’s something wrong with you.

Perhaps feeling slightly embarrassed to be involved with this game, Dracula forgoes his usual second form transformation and goes straight to the “not actually being killed” part of most Castlevania games. The day is saved, Desmond swears that there’ll always be another, more competent Belmont around to stop Dracula and Castlevania: Order of Shadows is over.

You get a bit of epilogue text explaining that Castlevania is still around, and then a picture of Desmond looking at the castle. He seems to be wearing shorts. Look, after a long day of monster-slaying and making the game think you’re standing on a platform when you’re actually levitating nearby, the first thing you’ll want to do is slip into some more comfortable clothes.

Well, that was a heck of a thing, wasn’t it? It tried, bless it, but Castlevania: Order of Shadows ended up being somehow worse than I expected. On a basic level it’s a real chore to play, with no sense of power behind any of your attacks and none of the relentless, rhythmic aggression of the classic Castlevanias. It seems to be caught in two minds, unable to decide whether it wants to be a more open explore-em-up like Symphony of the Night or a straight-ahead action-platformer, and sadly it fails at both. The controls are awful, the graphics mostly bland and the music – and this is a cardinal sin for a Castlevania game – is terrible. Once you’ve cleared the game you are given the option to switch on “Classic” music, which replaces the soundtrack with music from the original NES Castlevania, but there are two problems with that: coming from a mobile phone it’s a horrible squeaky mess, and to hear it you’d have to play Castlevania: Order of Shadows again. Nobody should have to suffer through that.
Really the only saving grace is that the game is so easy, with the infinite lives and very generous checkpoints. If the game had been any more difficult I doubt I’d have had the willpower to finish it. Not when I was controlling what feels like Pinocchio if he said “I wish I was not quite a real boy.” So, in conclusion, Castlevania: Order of Shadows is a bad game. Probably could have saved myself three and a half thousands words there, huh?

As for the Halloween-O-Meter, this game was difficult to rank. I mean, it is technically a Castlevania game and that usually means a guaranteed ten out of ten, but because C:OoS is lacking in so many departments I think an eight is the highest I can go. It’s got witches and bats and malevolent hovering skulls, but it’s missing that certain something that would push it higher.

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