Ezio Jensen The 3rd

So last night I played Castlevania 3 Draculas Curse past midnight. I didnt check the news later because theres only one bit of news to talk about. Today is the last day for Cohost before it gets converted to read-only and eventually shut down. So for this edition of Midnight Gaming, I decided to check out a game that user @boneroni suggested playing.

So here you go buddy, this one is for you.

So after the success of Castlevania 1 and the controversy of Simons quest, konami decided to try and take things back a bit with a prequel following Simons grandfather, Trevor Belmont, in his own crusade against Dracula. So before I complained about how Castlevania was a bit frustrating to play since it relied on difficulty to increase its longevity and to ensure you re-rent from rental stores. I have heard about Castlevania 3 being pretty damn hard but from what i've played, its honestly feels a bit more manageable compared to the first game.

One big thing is the whip, in 1 there was a delay between pressing B, seeing simon wind up an attack and then the whip is whupped for the attack. It was pretty common to be hit by something before you manage to whip them. Here though, the delay is a bit shorter and that makes a whole world of difference as I'm able to get an attack out and save myself from an enemy or a projectile. Jumping is still the same though so you need to watch your jumps, though oddly enough, theres quite a few areas where it feels like the devs held back a bit. Just some areas that have no enemies, maybe a small bit of platforming but are just..... simple? Castlevania 1 would have spared no punches and had every area contain monsters that would make getting through a hassle but 3? Nah heres a few candles for some hearts and power ups, the only threat thats here is the stairs.

And to be honest? Fuck the stairs. Fuck. Them. Gonna just say it, stairs are the worst thing in classicvania. They are the absolute bane of my existence in these games. You go up or down them slowly, making it hard to avoid some enemies. Attacking is too stiff even if you wanna use your item and if you're on top of some stairs and you wanna duck under a projectile, guess what happens? Go on guess what happens! And of course you can easily walk off to your death if you're too slow to press up on them when you're walking towards them. They are worse than medusa heads because atleast with those they always have a consistent pattern that you can plan for and they go down in 1 hit and arent in every level. Stairs though? Nah fuckem. Their only saving grace is that you're immune to knockback when you take damage.

Alot of the deaths/reloads I got from this is usually down to me either being impatient and not taking my time, being on the godforsaken stairs, or I picked up an item. This still has that issue of if you wanna keep your item, you have to be careful of every candle you whip incase an item drops, in which case you need to wait a bit for it to despawn before its safe to move on. God forbid I wanna keep my crosses with the III upgrade.

The game does feel like a continuation of 1, no doubt due to the reception of simons quest, though there are some notable features that was introduced here. One of which being branching paths you can choose in the early game which can lead to one of three potential partners, another innovation of the series. The partner you end up getting can be switched to at any time during gameplay and they do have some unique abilties. The mystic can get spell items that they can cast, Grant can jump higher and move fast as a climb on walls and Alucard has a ranged attack and can turn into a bat. Heres the thing, by the time you get these partners, you will assumingly have a Trevor with a maxed out whip and your perferred item, hopefully with an upgrade attached to that item. So you end up with a partner whos weaker, needing items to power them up in order to compete with the belmont boy.

I say assumingly cause if you can't tell, I was using the quicksave feature of this collection to play through this game so I ended up keeping my items. In a normal game, there would definitely be a better arguement for switching to your partner since with thier unique traits, they could help get you past a section you had trouble with. But if you used quicksaves or are skilled enough to make it far, you wont really need those partners much.

Actually lets talks about the castlevania collection for a bit. For some reason according to the collection, castlevania 1 came out in 87 but its japanese version was only out in 93? Even though wikipedia says japans version came in 86. While 3 came out in 89 for there but in the west it was in 90? Why is the collection displaying such misinformation? And why is simons quest jp version not included? Dammit konami.

Well thats that. If you reading this on cohost then thanks again, for everything. My time on cohost wasnt much but it was pleasant. Its unfortunate for things to be how they are but I atleast hope y'all are able to find each other on other places. Im still posting Midnight Gaming on Tumblr and on Pillowfort and i'll see about getting that rss feed up finally. Godspeed lil eggbug, god speed.

Feel free to leave feedback and game suggestions. Anons are currently on. See you all tomorrow.

WEALTHY FURRIES!!!

GRANT THE COHOST DEVS A LARGE SUM OF WEALTH AND MY LIFE IS YOURS!!!!!

So last night I played Atari 50th anniversary collection, checked socials later to find.... cohost will shut down by the end of the year... aww..

So Atari is a company thats been around for a long while in the gaming industry, all the way back in the 70's with pong and asteroids, leading to the atari 2600 or vcs as it was called and finally leading to thier last console, the atari jaguar which flopped hard. It was a console that was advertised as a true 64 bit console even though it was really just 2 custom 32 bit processors, making it difficult to make games that run well, in the same decade that has the playstation and the nintendo 64. Yeah, "do the math".

Never really got to experience much of Atari when they were a contender in the scene, heck I wasn't even a year old when the Jaguar was launched so it wasn't really a part of gaming that I had a hands on experience with but I have heard of them. In my general interest in all things gaming in my youth, Atari was brought up sometimes in some gaming mags and online media, AVGN is probably for many people how they heard about Atari as he covered some games on the 2600, even did an episode on the failed 5200 and the Jaguar consoles.

So Digital Eclipse (not to be confused with digital extremes, the warframe folks) has done a 50th anniversary collection that has various games from atari's history, including some unreleased games. Naturally since these games can be easily emulated, a collection of old games wouldnt mean much but theres more to this than just that. You also get a bunch supplemental material such as artwork, behind the scenes documents and videos of interviews with several employees and key figures in atari's history, talking about various things. Cliffy B is there too for some reason.

For me its damn fascinating to follow along a timeline of events, looking at various media and playing some games, getting a feel on Atari's journey over the years. You do learn a few things about the company and how it ran at the time and uhhh.. it certanly looks a bit familiar. Developers having to work overtime, upper management ignoring concerns from thier employees, games being marketed beyond what could actually be delivered leading to consumer backlash, employees losing their jobs in mass. Yeah those problems are still around nowadays huh. 50 years later and nobody has really learnt anything, still making the same mistakes that one time led to the most infamous market crashes in history. Funny thing tho, while the games market did indeed crash in 83, leading to several businesses going bankrupt, for the average 2600 player it was just an odd time in which new 2600 games werent made. Because the 2600 had such a massive install base, eventually new 2600 games got made again, even during the time when the Sega Master System and the Nintendo Entertainment System were leading the console scene. To quote one Garry Kitchen "No one told consumers that there had been a crash. No one went to their house and said "You don't like video games anymore"".

Digital Eclipse also did some other games in the documentary style, the art of karateka and llamasoft. I wouldn't mind checking those out as I feel a documentary that covers a particular subject sounds fascinating to put the lenses of an interactive game, though I suppose it does veer a bit close to "edutainment" territory.

So now with that done, lets move onto the.... news. Cohost is announced to be closing down at the end of year with it converting to a read only format in October. I genuinly enjoyed my time on cohost even if it was short. From looking for alternatives to Tumblr, I stumbled onto it and found a chill sort of site that I felt comfortable browsing, chatting with peeps and sharing posts. It was a site that had an independent vibe that was unique and humble compared to some of its contemporaries. Tumblr weared the mask of being queer friendly despite nuking the odd trans blog every now and then, twitter is a cesspit run by that nepobaby bastard, discord seems to have issues with power tripping mods and creeps. A lot of social media seems to either be.full of techbro crypto ai weirdos or algorithmic data-harvesting software or both! But cohost had the vision of a place that didnt had user-unfriendly practices, instead of just making a site that demands engagement from the user for the sake of profit, the team made the site comfortable to browse and post on, letting people build up communities to hang out and chill in. Sadly that ambition wasnt sustainable due to the issues with both work and finance and in the end, it'll all be shut down.

I'll still be posting Midnight Gaming on Cohost until October as well as on tumblr until I find another site to host this series. Maybe I'll try that dreamwidth place I heard about, maybe i'll actually make a neocities site. We'll see what the future holds.

Until then, Rest in Piece Cohost. Hug your local eggbug today.... oh yeah james earl jones passed away too... awful lot of death lately, an old friend on my fathers side recently lost thier wife too. September what the hell you doing?

Hey whatever happened to those prizes that were won during the Swordquest contest?

Thats all for today, see you tomorrow. Feel free to leave any game suggestions or feedbacks. Anons are currently on.

im actually very afraid of tumblr mass exodus because this is the only place ive felt safe to speak with other trans and queer people in a very long time. i don't want to lose that, or for that matter, any of you.

Speaking as someone who came from tumblr, i dont think a lot of people on tumblr are hateful folk. There are some bad eggs on there sure but i imagine they'd perfer to stay there since the ceo allows them to fester. Most folks who are leaving tend to be those belonging in queer/trans places and artists avoiding the ai crap.

But if its still a concern, just be cringe as hell. The weak will scatter while the strong shall survive.
No seriously when muskrat bought twitter, folks on tumblr started warrior cats posting with twitter and tumblr as feral cats to try and keep people out. It managed to make its way to twitter and convinced some folks to avoid tumblr like the plague.