[Ren]

Yeah, they really did. I still have my Harmony of Dissonance poster on my wall years later! And I was always 198.9% complete, and I could never find out what I'd missed, which was very irritating, heh. And off topic I go...
_________________
Previous nicks: MidnightDreamer, The_Anarchist, Shroomasta.

ren-tek.net : BGC games and more!

[Gooseman]

The best Castlevania game is Super Castlevania IV on the Snes. The GBA ones rock, thats for sure, but Castlevania IV rocked the hardest! :D

[ThousandKnives]

I'm pretty much shocked that anyone would find either Zelda 2 or Castlevania 2 especially difficult. They were the 1st and 2nd games I ever bought for my NES. I was something like 10 years old and not very good at video games yet. But I didn't find it excessively difficult to beat either game. In fact, Castlevania 2 had to be beaten in less than 4 hours or so in order to get the good ending.

The trick to Zelda 2 was simply to make sure you had enough time to devote to it in order to gain your next level-up before you started playing (either that or leave the system on while you went to do whatever else you needed to do). The best place to gain exp was fighting the red ironknuckles that sometimes appeared when you stabbed the statue by the palace entrances (and other locations), but only after you got the life spell. Because stabbing the statues also randomly yielded a red magic potion, you could easily recover your health whenever you needed to.

Recently I played Zelda 2 on an emulator and beat the game without running out of lives once. The trick is to go through all the palaces recovering the items but not beating the bosses. Build yourself up to max level, then go back and beat all the bosses, using the free level-ups you get from each palace to get another 1-up. In the end you can get something like 9 lives with which to brave the last palace, which is WAY more than you need.

I've always liked Castlevania 2 because it was the only Castlevania game that took place predominantly outside Dracula's damn castle. Nowadays, Dracula's castle is all there is. I really would like to see a modern Castlevania game take the same approach, having villages and countryside instead of endless marble and stone.

[Nephilim]