A Note on the Game Boy in the Konami Anniversary Collections

They might not have the profile of some of the other games in these wonderful compilations, but the Game Boy is well represented in Konami’s Castlevania Anniversary Collection with both The Castlevania Adventure and Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge included. And then we have Operation C, where C, of course, stands for Contra in the Contra Anniversary Collection.

I’m going to skip over The Castlevania Adventure because I recently covered it in a bit more detail here. Instead, we’ll take a very quick look at the other two, which I’ve also played all the way through on Nintendo Switch.

Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge is both a technical spectacle and an excellent game, and a perfect companion to Adventure. By this point the developers properly knew how to get the most out of the handheld hardware, so it looks even more wonderfully atmospheric, runs smoothly and sounds even more like a Castlevania game than its predecessor, despite the same limitations.

It’s pretty quick to get through the linear levels, which you can play most of the way through in any order, though the final boss fight is a bugger! You genuinely have to memorise every single move it’s going to make and every pixel on each of the on-screen platforms that you need to be positioned on for each move to counter it. Not to mention the untold experimentation to work out some of them. This is a real shock after the relative simplicity of getting that far, but it is a great feeling when you finally beat it.

Operation C was the first Contra game I jumped into from that collection – having dabbled with them all as a complete newcomer to the series, it seemed a bit easier than the rest, and as you can tell, I’m easily impressed when it comes to the Game Boy!

The classic run and gun design is all present in a compact form, but it did leave me struggling a bit until I tweaked the controls to be like Mega Man, then I sailed through the first area. I was then amazed that the second switched to top-down shooting like Ikari Warriors – not having any history with Contra beyond remembering a few screenshots and trying several first levels, I didn’t see that coming!

I think there were five gradually more bonkers stages in the end, including another top-down level with organic backgrounds and giant insects running about like something from Xenon 2! Some really cool jungle stages too in the classic Contra mould – just like Castlevania(s) on the Game Boy, the developers worked wonders with the monochrome visuals to generate just the right atmosphere.

Whether side-scrolling or top-down, none of the levels took more than a few goes to get through (apart from the first until I changed the buttons around), and the bosses were fairly easy until the (almost) last one, and that was also fairly straightforward once you worked out its couple of attack patterns. Which is how I like my bosses, and overall how I like my games!

In Defence of The Castlevania Adventure

I think Game Boy Castlevania Adventure gets a bum rap. Then again, I think that about Pit Fighter and the Spectrum version of Out Run too! (You can find out why here). Anyway, I remember being hugely impressed with it on the original hardware, and in retrospect, considering how early in the Game Boy’s life it came out, it really was an achievement. I’ve also just really enjoyed playing through it again in the Konami Castlevania Anniversary Collection on Switch…

The idea is that you make your way through four stages (or dark dungeons, torture chambers and vampire crypts as the description goes) of Dracula’s lair. After that, you enter what is called “the “dead” of night” to quote it exactly, to face off against Count Dracula and his multiple personalities. All with your “mystic” whip and mindful wits to sort you out.

A lot of the criticism I’ve seen of late relates to its inclusion on the aforementioned collection, on the basis of it being dull and poorly designed compared to the excellent sequel – also present – which renders it redundant, and no doubt taking the place of a GBA game or Symphony or whatever the missing favourite of the person criticising it is. I do get it, and wouldn’t have complained about an Aria of Sorrow or something being on here instead, or even the Game Boy Kid Dracula; actually, having just finished the NES version, I’d have really liked that! But I don’t think that makes it a bad game.

Admittedly the first stage is a bit sedate, but there’s some really challenging platforming, races against time and boss fights later on. Took me a few goes to remember how the end bit works, but the rest felt comfortably familiar, and more importantly, as fun as I remember. It looks really good too – very clean, very atmospheric, and it’s very clear where you need to be to make some of the more precise jumps that are called for later. It sounds like a Castlevania game too. And I for one am glad I got to play through it again on the collection!