Haunted Castle - the Forgotten Castlevania Arcade Game!

Revisiting Konami's peculiarly obscure coin-op that shares practically everything with Castlevania except its title.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

When I say the words "horror," "video game" and "not Resident Evil," the very first thing that should enter your mind is, of course, Castle-by-god-motherfucking-Vania (official title: just plain Castlevania.) The series has given us literally dozens of outstanding games over the last 30 years, covering just about every platform you can think of, from the Nintendo DS to the MSX2 to the PC Engine CD to the Sharp X68000. But as beloved and venerated as the series may be, there remain quite a few odd duck installments that are still swept under the proverbial rug. There's the platformer parody on the NES where you fight KKK members with swastikas drawn on their foreheads, that one GBA Mario Kart clone featuring Drac hisself as a playable character, fuck, there's even a Tony Hawk knockoff where you make Simon Belmont do 720s and shit. But as weird as those side-steps for the Castlevania mythos may be, they all pale in comparison to the strangest and wackiest 'vania game of 'em all - 1988's Haunted Castle.

Released just one year after the original Castlevania hit the Famicom/NES, Konami's Haunted Castle is - for all intents and purposes - an arcade remake of the classic monster mash that shares pretty much everything with its forerunner except its title. To be fair there are a lot of subtle differences here and there, but by and large, it's freakin' Castlevania: The Arcade Game and one has to wonder why those wacky Japs didn't just up and call the coin-op what it obviously was. Alas, it did get us this bitchin' beyond words arcade flyer, which alone justifies the game's whole existence, regardless of the titling peculiarities. 

But what about the game itself, you may be wondering? Well, old Jimbo has you covered, since I recently did a whole playthrough of the title ahead of this, the most glorious of seasons. Buckle up, buttercup - things are about to get really fucking weird (and really fucking awesome) quicker than you can say "it's a terrible night to have a curse." 

The game begins with an opening cinematic that shows some dude with a blue mullet getting married, only for Dracula himself to fly out of the sky and pluck his bride away from him. And that's not the only oblique homage to Ghosts 'n Goblins, as evident by the very second the game begins proper. 

Your character doesn't have an official name, but he looks like Conan the Barbarian in Egyptian garb cosplaying as Simon Belmont. The pace of the game is much slower than the Castlevania Nintendo game, making it feel like a fusion of 'vania and Capcom's iconic (and hard as hell) graveyard crossing simulator. And yes, as you will soon see, this game is every bit as teeth-grindingly hard as Ghosts 'n Goblins, so if you're a hardcore old school gamer you REALLY need to pay attention.

The core gameplay is identical to NES 'vania. You whack bats, zombies and bone-tossing skeletons with your whip and collect hearts to power-up your side-weapons. Those side-weapons include bombs, boomerangs, a stopwatch, projectile crucifixes and flaming torches - and obviously, at least three of those never made it into the Nintendo game. So you amble across a graveyard and avoid random fire obstacles and flying statue heads, and then these trees come alive and try to grab you. There's not a whole lot of emphasis on platforming upfront, but yeah, that all changes shortly. After a bit you walk into a church, smack a hundred or so bats and then, it's time to do battle with TOPLESS Medusa! Hey, we all know gazing into her eyes will turn you into a statue, but prey tell, what happens if you just ogle her snake-titties instead?

Shit ... at least the dude in Ghosts 'n Goblins got a blowjob in a cemetery before his woman got kidnapped!

Stage two defies genre convention by being a right to left side-scroller. There's a whole bunch of fog in the background, obfuscating Drac's castle and it definitely looks cool as fuck. So you go down some stairs, enter a blue cave with bloody water and a whole bunch of Creature from the Black Lagoon ripoffs jumping into you then do some light platforming across some moving stones, which sets up a mid-level boss fight against a giant pink and grey snake.

After that same clay monsters come out of the walls and attack you, and eventually you resurface under a spooky red sky and the geographical design becomes very, VERY Rygar-esque. Then the sky turns black and you fight a skeleton snake boss. I guess now's a good time to tell you that, like in every other Castlevania game ever made, you can also upgrade your whip, including adding a fucking spiked mace to it. Interestingly, you can also swap out your whip for a long-ass sword, which seemingly does more damage despite having apparently shorter range than your default weapon.

Stage three kicks off and "Bloody Tears" starts playing and it's awesome. I'm not sure whether this game technically came out before or after Simon's Quest, but this might just be the BOSSEST version of the song I've ever heard. So, you're ambling around a castle, and knights and these little midgets start attacking you. There are portraits of Dracula on the wall and at one point you enter a portal to another dimension, fight a few shirtless harpies (yep, you get to see more pixelized nipples) and then you get shat back out into the real world so you can dodge falling chandeliers (thank you, Phantom of the Opera, for such a wonderful, easily reusable trope) and hit wraiths (or is it banshees?) in the fucking face, hard. 

So you go up some more stairs and fight more knights and midgets then fucking eyeballs start rolling after you. This leads to a boss fight against this stained glass mirror dude who looks like Ed Sheerhan dressed up as a lumberjack. Yeah, I have no idea what kind of crack cocaine the kids at Konami were smoking there. 

Enter stage four! It's another underground cavern, this one littered with mummies. There's a bit more platforming in this stage than in the previous levels, and it's starting to get a lot more challenging, too. Alas, the whole castle is a dull coffee brown color - talk about some boring level design. A new enemy type is introduced - this annoying ass, constantly cawing raven - and since it's only a few pixels wide it's ridiculously hard to hit. You keep moving down the iconic 'vania stairs and the boss fight is against this giant pulsating rock monster that for all the Rubles in Russia looks like he shoots shit globs at you. 

Stage five starts off with your avatar riding an elevator in front of a light green backdrop for about 20 seconds. There are no enemies during the section, so you just have to sit there and twiddle your thumbs with nothing to do - kind of a pointless sequence, ain't it? This time around there's a lot of Castlevania III-esque cog-work in the background, and of course, there's a fuck-ton more mummies and kamikaze skulls to deal with. So you keep going up the stairs until you have a boss battle with Frankenstein's monster, who is chained to a wall and just keeps shaking the screen so ceiling tiles fall on you. All in all, he's surprisingly easy to beat (just as long as you have a good projectile subweapon) and after you defeat him, he melts into a pile of bloody bones and it's really awesome-looking.

And that's our prelude for the sixth and final stage. You begin by crossing this dilapidated bridge in broad daylight, while killing a billion ravens and avoiding falling into the abyss when the bridge begins crumbling. Oh, and this part drags on for three minutes. Then you finally enter the castle, kill a solitary harpy and Dracula shows up - green skinned and rocking a bushy ass mustache, looking more like a Martian Pablo Escobar than Vlad the Impaler. Anyway, he pulls off all the usual Castlevania tricks. He turns into a colony of bats and teleports across the screen, then he turns into a giant glowing orb that then turns into a giant grey Dracula head that tries to bite you. Hit him approximately 657 more times in the nose and he finally dies, and as per franchise tradition, the final shot of the game is your avatar watching Dracula's castle crumble to the ground. But wait - they never tell you what happened to the dude's wife? Did she get rescued beforehand or are we to assume that Dracula just raped her and ate her? I mean, goddamn, that's not just a humongous plot hole, that's the VERY catalyst for the game in the first place - shit, at least Capcom had the basic human decency to give us some kind of closure, you cold, cold-blooded motherfuckers.

Oh, so that's why it's called "Bloody Tears!"

Even though Haunted Castle is a game with some very big problems - the stages are redundant, the jumping feels awkward, your character moves like he weighs 800 pounds and has a broomstick thoroughly embedded in his asshole, the enemies are cheap as fucking shit, etc. - it's still a really, really fun experience, pending you play it as a ROM and don't have to keep feeding the machine quarters every 15 fucking seconds. Feasibly, you can beat the whole thing in 20 minutes, but since you'll be dying every 20 seconds, I assure you this one will take you much longer than a half hour to finish.

It's not quite the perfect medley of Castlevania and Ghosts 'n Goblins we've always wanted, but it does come kinda' sorta' close. The gameplay (although occasionally frustrating) is definitely solid, and if you're looking for a Viagra overdose-hard old school challenge, this one will beat your ass ragged for days. In the overall pantheon of Castlevania games, it has to be somewhere in the top 20 - Lord knows, it's definitely better than just about all of the 3D games in the series, and after 20 years of MetroidVania, it is kind of refreshing to play a more linear 'vania outing again. 

Again, I can't say Haunted Castle is a game sans some issues, but as long as you can overlook some clunky controls and learn how to work around the game's iffy platforming, you'll probably find it to be a rather enjoyable - albeit often irritating - arcade sidescroller. Besides, it's a game that lets you kill a shit-flinging rock monster and bondage Frankenstein in back-to-back boss battles ... you really think I'm going to say anything bad about a title that delivers something like that? 

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An All-American Tribute to MERCS!

Looking for a most-excellent way to celebrate July the Fourth?  There may not be a more American way to honor the holiday than firing up this nearly 30-year-old Capcom arcade killfest ... and here's the proof.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Although it may seem odd to celebrate America's founding by paying homage to a nearly 30-year-old video game designed by the Japs, if you've ever actually played Mercs, you already know the classic Capcom coin-op is pretty much the most American thing ever invented that isn't actually American. 

Do you think all of those Japanese game designers in the 1980s secretly wanted to be Americans just like you and me? Go ahead, take a gander at the panoply of arcade classics - Final Fight, Contra, Double Dragon, Rush'n Attack ... all games where the main character wasn't some pencil thin rice eater, but some musclebound, wide-eyed Caucasoid-American death machine. For fuck's sake, those programmers admired the Americans so much that when it came time to make a game about the Battle of Midway, they chose to let you play as the people who royally fucked up Japan instead of the people who were trying to defend it.

So even in the heat of battle, you're never too far 
away from Fred Flintstone food.

In that, Mercs may represent the absolute apex of Japanese game developers' obsession with testosterone-addled Americanism. Originally released in arcades in 1990, the game - which was a sequel to the 1985 coin-op Commando - came out right when the roided-up, Ruskie-hating awesomeness of the Reagan Years was being supplanted by the sad-sack, self-loathing not-so-awesomeness of the Clinton Years. In ten years' time, the unrepentant masculinity of Ah-nold and Rambo would be a thing of the past, and the era of the effeminate and effete - why, hello there Keanu Reeves! - would become the archetype for action heroes across all forms of media, video games included. That makes Mercs something of a last hurrah for the muscular, hyper-violent manliness of '80s gaming, and to say it goes out with a bang isn't just an understatement, it's ... well, a really big understatement, I suppose.

Mercs was one of those games that kinda sorta fell through the cracks back in the day. It came out in that weird coin-op dead zone period between Final Fight and Street Fighter II, and since Robotron and Smash TV style kill-a-thons were starting to get passe, I suppose it makes sense that it was relatively forgotten by retro gaming enthusiasts. Although I played it and enjoyed it quite a few times in my youth, I really couldn't appreciate the game for its instant gratification genius until recently. Not only is this one of the greatest top-down arcade shooters ever, it might just be THE BEST top-down arcade shooter ever ... and trust me, that is some lofty praise, indeed.

There aren't a whole lot of retro arcade games I find myself emulating repeatedly, but Mercs, for whatever reason, is one of those rare titles I just have to play through a couple of times a year. Barely 20 minutes long, the game is perfect for pick-up and play, blast-the-shit-out-of-everything fun, and I can't tell you how many times I've killed time waiting for emails and virtual conferences to start by plowing through Mercs as fast as humanly possible. I'm hesitant to declare anything truly timeless, but if the game remains just as ass-kicking a quarter century down the road as it did when it was brand new, I reckon that's pretty dadgum close to being timeless, ain't it?

Let's start with the basics. Mercs is a game that allows up to three players simultaneously (and yes, each character has a different canonical name, but like you really give a fuck.) You've got one joystick with eight-way movement, one button that shoots and one button that detonates a screen-clearing bomb. And that, kids, is all there is to it. Each stage is littered with enemies, bullets and tons of shit that can be exploded real good. Pretty much everything in the game - from walls to crates to bamboo huts to enemy vehicles - can go boom, and the designers of the title have given you four distinct tools of mass destruction to tinker around with:

This is actually the game's idea of taking it easy on you.

The Assault Rifle - your standard all-purpose killing implement. Each shot fires off a steady stream of bright blue laser beams. A pretty good weapon for when there's a whole bunch of stuff onscreen you want to kill in one fell swoop.

The Shotgun - don't ask me why, but instead of firing buckshot, it fears big fat globs of green plasma. It's not as fast as the assault rifle, but its bullets cover a wider area. Good for up-close combat. 

The Flamethrower - hold down the "fire" button and you basically turn into an unstoppable death machine. This weapon incinerates all the enemies you encounter, but it doesn't really provide solid cover for your foes' bullets. A good offensive weapon, but it certainly leaves you vulnerable to attacks from the flank.

The Grenade Launcher - basically it fires fast, fat ass missiles. It's faster than the shotgun and does more damage than the assault rifle, but the timing between bullets sometimes leaves you open for a frontal attack. Great for taking down huge vehicles, but not the best for one-on-one firefights.

Throughout the game you can also pick up more smart bombs, and trust me, you will be needing as many of these fuckers as you can get your hands on. Pretty much every boss you encounter needs at least one hit from a smart bomb before you can bump it off, and there's usually at least one or two super heavy duty firefights in each stage before the boss fight where you will have to use up your precious explosives just to save your own rear-end. Thankfully, the game is pretty liberal with the power-ups, with ample cans of spinach and hamburgers all over the place to refill your health. You can also pick up some medals scattered about the playing field, too, but that's only to bump up your high score. And since this is a '90s game, like you give a shit about getting the high score on anything ... you just want to watch shit GO BOOM and GO BOOM often.

This game throws you into the thick of the action from the very first second of stage one. Literally the moment your character pops up there's already a billion dudes on screen trying to shoot your ass, and of course, there are ample power-ups scattered around the bamboo huts to even the odds. Following a rock slide, you cross a bridge and come nose-to-nose with the game's first boss enemy - an attack helicopter. Still have those insta-kill bombs? Good, because you're going to need them. Oddly enough, the entire level can be completed in less than a minute. That may seem like shitty game design at first, but just you wait - Capcom clearly wanted to lull you into a false sense of security, and good God almighty, do they ever crank shit up to 11 in stage 2.

Oh, the irony of napalming some motherfuckers in the
middle of a lake...

The second level begins in sort of a Bavarian-looking village. You get ambushed by some dudes in a Jeep, but wait a minute, what is this little development? That's right, amigos, 11 years before Halo THIS GAME gave you the ability to commandeer enemy weapons and blow da' fuck outta' everything you encounter. Of course, your ride won't last too long, since you're about to find yourself knee-deep in a battlefield glutted with tanks and snipers on patrol towers. So yeah, you pretty much have to use your bombs to escape, and once you do, it's time for a boss battle against an EVEN BIGGER TANK. At this point, even the most hardcore of gamers have already dumped about six quarters into the machine, and trust me, there's going to be a whole hell of a lot more coinage getting plunked in stage 3. 

Interestingly, every stage in the game is twice as long as the one before it. Here, you make your way aboard a naval destroyer, complete with stationary turrets you can man to kill, kill and then kill some more. After monkeying around on some moving platforms, you have a boss fight with a huge ass fighter jet that takes roughly 41,000 shots to kill. Odds are, you're going to die five or six times before you finish off this fucker, so you better have that change purse preemptively pried open.

Stage four starts off in a lagoon, and here you finally get to play around with the flamethrower ( and take it from a retro gaming pro - incinerating foes with this sucker is every bit as enjoyable as charging up the Blue Bomber's arm cannon in Mega Man 4 and blasting a Volvo-sized hole in whatever Robo-Fucker had the misfortune of standing in your way.) There's a new vehicle introduced (a boat) and the final boss fight is against, well, an even bigger boat that has an impossible number of guns on it. Estimated number of quarters you will need to vanquish it: four dollars' worth.

One of the less intense moments from Mercs.

Stage five takes you back to the Bavarian village, but now YOU are the one that gets to operate a huge freakin' tank (at one point, you even engage in a tank on tank dogfight, which yeah, I figger is scientifically impossible for the human player to win.) Thankfully, there are ample opportunities to jack some Jeeps later on, and you won't have to wait too long to get your flamethrower back. After dodging some technically impossible to dodge landmines, you're asked to blow up a wall and enter a mysterious elevator shaft, which - naturally - puts you on a railroad to do battle with a giant train end-boss that is literally made up of nothing but impossibly huge guns. Jeez - you think the bad guys in this game are trying to cover up for some genetic shortcomings or something? 

In stage six, you begin by breaking into the enemy stronghold (oddly enough, the game never tells you the nationality of the bad guys, so I'm just going to take a wild guess and assume it's the Germans fucking things up, like always.) You take a trolley ride where you have to blow up these giant robotic tendrils, then you go down a couple of corridors (almost all of which are metal grated bridges hovering over bottomless pits) and blast holes in walls and make a whole lot of dudes die. Then you blow up some more tanks and fighter jets and then you have another boss fight against a giant gun with about seventy smaller guns welded onto it. Yeah, it may be a little redundant, but come on - there's only so much originality you expect out of an early '90s 2D shooter, isn't there?

After that we get a bulletin saying the leader of the Revolutionary Corps. has taken the "former President" hostage in an attempt to flee the country. What does that mean for you, Joe Q. Button Masher? Well, it means we've got ourselves one more boss battle, this time against a giant plane that spans about three full screens and has about 100 different turrets on it. After making it go kablooey, we get a cutscene in which all three color-coded Mercs rescue the former prez (he's white, thin and grey-headed, so maybe he's a stand-in for Ronnie Reagan), and then the screen fades to sepia as text crawls letting us know that while the former POTUS is safe and sound, no official information on the Mercs' top-secret mission was ever published. Then it's time to roll the end credits, as the silhouettes of our three heroes on Jeeps cruise across a giant, Grand Canyon-like background on a loop (which, from my perspective, may be meant to depict the mountains of Afghanistan, but I could be wrong) while oddly soothing music plays in the background. And that, lads and lasses, is all she wrote.

So yeah, you can blast through Mercs in about 20 minutes, but that's hardly a slight against the game. Even now, I consider it one of the best top down 2D shooters of all-time; in fact, I'd put it neck and neck with the supremely underrated Guerrilla War as the frontrunners for the best two-dimensional, God's-eye-view shoot-a-thons ever.

Even now I can't really put a finger on what exactly makes Mercs so awesome. Maybe it's the non-stop action, or maybe it's the bare-bones, ultra-twitch gameplay. Either way, it's a game that totally outdoes Robotron, Smash TV and Total Carnage in the two-dimensional blast-a-rama department, and if you haven't played it, for goddamn, motherfuckin' shame. 

Beyond the arcade iteration, Mercs was ported to the Sega Genesis, but for some reason, it lost the co-op mode. That said, it's still a damn fine shrunken down version of the game made a million times more awesome by the inclusion of an all new "mission" mode which, effectively, represents a full-fledged, totally all-new, built-from-the-ground-up game. The version that made it to the Master System, however, is pretty disappointing, with crappy sprites and really unwieldy controls. Still, it's probably worth playing through at least once, maybe even twice if you're on some really good drugs. And I'd probably be remiss if I didn't bring up the 2008 Xbox Live spiritual sequel Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3, which I've never played but judging from the videos on YouTube, looks decent enough, I suppose.

So here, on the birthday of America (and by proxy, the de facto birthday of freedom, liberty and the right to be as fat as you want), I honestly can't think of a more fitting way to celebrate the Fourth than by cramming a grilled tofu dog down your gullet (with the extra spicy golden mustard, of course), cracking open an ice cold off-brand soda and blasting through Mercs as fast as humanly possible, preferably while Manowar's version of "An American Trilogy" blares at full volume in the background.

Which, come to think of it, might just be the best way to celebrate ALL holidays moving forward, in my humblest o' opinions...

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