Topic: 2008/10: Castlevania: Bloodlines (Genesis) - TerraEsperZ

[JonLeung]

Castlevania: Bloodlines

For this month's "Maps of the Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to TerraEsperZ's Castlevania: Bloodlines maps.



As Hallowe'en draws near, it's fitting to revisit some video games that feature ghouls and ghosts and goblins.  And here's one game whose honour here as Maps Of The Month is long overdue: Castlevania: Bloodlines (or Castlevania: The New Generation for those of you in Europe), as mapped by TerraEsperZ.



The only Castlevania game on the Sega Genesis is set in 1917, and sees John Morris and Eric LeCarde on a quest to stop Countess Elizabeth Bartley from reviving Count Dracula (again).  As ancestors of the Belmonts, Morris and LeCarde have the skills necessary to take down all the baddies that threaten WWI-era Europe.  And thanks to TerraEsperZ, we have the maps to help them out!



The stages are few, but they are long and varied.  From Romania to England, every pixel of every leg of the journey is here.  Check out the bizarreness of the Leaning Tower Of Pisa!  And the Munitions Factory in Germany provides the requisite climb up giant gears.  This game may not be as well-loved as other games in the series, but it's still classic Castlevania.



So to recognize the effort put into mapping a Castlevania game (and who doesn't love Castlevania?), TerraEsperZ's Castlevania: Bloodlines maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps of the Month for October 2008.

[TerraEsperZ]

Ah, the memories... I can say with certainty that this game was the one I had the most fun mapping.



It was made by a team of people at Konami that went on to form Treasure, which went on to make a lot of 2D games full of sprites animation, rotation and crazy effects that pushed the envelope of how good a 2D game can look.



As such, the stages are varied and a lot of effects were tricky to capture and reproduce on a static map, but the challenges encountered are why I loved this project so much. Among those are the first part of Greece with the reflection on the rising water, the fifth part of Italy where you climb the Tower of Pisa which keeps leaning left and right while moving upwards, the part in France with the rotating stairs and the second part in England where a sort of "hall of mirror" illusion separates the screen in four parts that each scroll with a slightly different speed so you might jump and misjudge where your feet are going to land (sadly, the effect is impossible to represent on the map).



Anyway, I had a lot of fun doing this, and if I ever go back to it, Bucky O'Hare for the NES (also by Konami) featured about the same amount of variety in its stages and thus would be a lot of fun to finish mapping as well.



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Current projects: Metal Storm (NES), Clock Tower (SNES), Ristar-The Shooting Star (Gen), Sonic The Hedgehog (Gen), Sonic CD (Sega CD), Mega Man Zero (GBA), Battletoads (NES), Bucky O'Hare (NES)

[DarkWolf]

Hurray for Genesis.  Congrats Terra.