Topic: What a horrible night to have a curse.

[Revned]

Ah, that's a great point. I'll stick with it, then!

Someday I really need to play the 3D games in the series. I've only managed to get through Lament of Innocence, and that felt like a chore. I just can't get past the mediocre gameplay to get more than a few minutes into the rest.

[Revned]

The revisions are now done and posted. Mostly minor stuff, but here's a summary:

For Castlevania 3, I had originally used strict alignment based on the screen sizes - even if that resulted in misaligned staircases. This time around, I decided to handle each one on a case-by-case basis. If the backgrounds weren't really continuous, then I went ahead and shifted things to make the staircases align. It's still not particularly elegant, but at least there are only a couple of discontinuous staircases now.

I added moving platforms, as well as the characters at the beginning of each stage. I was originally unsure how to do that "fairly" since there are four characters, but the numbers actually worked out nicely: Trevor gets the first 3 and last 3 levels, while Grant/Sypha/Alucard each get the 4 levels immediately after they are unlocked.

I also adjusted the palette so that now it matches all of my other NES maps. I recently found out that there's been a lot of research into NES palettes since I last looked into it 10 years ago, but I decided to keep things consistent so that I wouldn't feel compelled to update all of my other maps as well.

The final list of level names is below. Some additional details after the previous discussion:

• I gave the branching paths disambiguating suffixes: the upper path follows all of the -a levels, the lower path follows -b and then optionally branches to -c
• What I had previously called "The Underground Catacombs", I took the liberty to rename to "The Cursed Catacombs". I felt "Underground" was redundant, and "Cursed" is consistent with "Curse Castle".
• "The Inner Halls" became "The Outer Wall", because there's nothing "inner" or "hall"-like about this level. This name is also used in SotN, but seems appropriate

Level 1: Warakiya
Level 2: The Clock Tower of Untimely Death
Level 3 - Part 1: The Forest of Darkness
Level 3 - Part 2: The Forest of Darkness
Level 4a: The Haunted Ship of Fools
Level 4b: The Murky Marsh of Morbid Morons
Level 5a: The Tower of Terror
Level 5b - Part 1: The Lost Son of Dracula
Level 5b - Part 2: The Hall of the Skull Knight King
Level 6a: The Causeway of Chaos
Level 6b: The Cursed Catacombs
Level 6c: The Sunken City of Poltergeists
Level 7a: The Castle Courtyard
Level 7b: The Cliffside Entrance
Level 8: The Main Hall
Level 9: The Outer Wall
Level 10: The Castle Keep

[TerraEsperZ]

Wow, those are definitely good improvements!

The new names are very good but more importantly, denoting the paths with a letter was very much needed. The only name I'm not crazy about is "The Outer Wall" but that's mostly because that level doesn't seem to fit aesthetically with the rest of the castle and no other name would really fit better. It's more like a mishmash of some previous levels that don't feel at all like they belong together, or inside a castle, much less in the upper parts of it (a forest, a waterfall *and* an aquaduct near the top of the castle?). At least "The Outer Wall" is consistent with the series as a whole.

As for the graphical improvements, aligning the staircases when the backgrounds don't clash looks a lot better, and I've always found it weird how prevalent this misalignment is. It's like a constant example of "so close, yet so far". And it's amazing how much more vibrant this new palette is, so thanks for bringing it to my attention. By the way, which is the two newest palettes are you using? I can't seen much difference between the two but that's mostly because I'm not that good with subtle colours.

[Revned]

The new names are very good but more importantly, denoting the paths with a letter was very much needed. The only name I'm not crazy about is "The Outer Wall" but that's mostly because that level doesn't seem to fit aesthetically with the rest of the castle and no other name would really fit better. It's more like a mishmash of some previous levels that don't feel at all like they belong together, or inside a castle, much less in the upper parts of it (a forest, a waterfall *and* an aquaduct near the top of the castle?).

Agreed. Lack of a better idea, honestly. In general I used more plainly descriptive names for most of the unnamed sections, since it wouldn't feel right to introduce my own artistic interpretations. I'd rather go with things like "Main Hall" than try to rival "Murky Marsh of Morbid Morons"

By the way, which is the two newest palettes are you using?

I'm not using either of the two from that link, but rather this one which I settled on ~10 years ago. It's just a slight tweak to the "ntsc" one in that folder, which someone at the time had claimed was highly accurate. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case; the actually accurate palettes I linked previously are much duller. Maybe I'll revisit this choice someday, but for now I thought it was better just to stick with my status quo.