Talk about a fangtastic adventure! Let's Play Kid Dracula!

Stage three puts us up in the clouds above the forest. It’s not really clear how we got here from Jason’s hut.


The first section of stage three is pretty straightforward and kinda boring. Vultures fly in a straight line; just don’t jump into them.


Witches will drop crystal balls on you when they pass directly above you.

(I had thought there was manual art of these witches, but I was wrong. Which is a shame, I feel like they could be rather iconic.)




Then there’s a bunch of platforming off these face-clouds, which drop while you’re standing on them (making that SHOCKED face the whole way down—“OMG! There’s a vampire on my head!”)


Swoosh!


Then we get to the real meat of the stage, the roller coaster. I love this segment, though it took me quite a while to get good at it, back in the day.


You have two platforms that move along the rails, and it’s actually relatively hard to fall off of your own accord.


Which means the game puts obstacles in your way to encourage you to fall off. You need to jump over this rocket turtle as you pass it, for instance.


The vultures also reappear, though they’re fairly easy to avoid.

The HOM is a more useful weapon in this segment than most others, because it gives you a prayer of hitting something without pixel-perfect accuracy, but it still requires some amount of timing and knowledge of when enemies are coming up.


Then a maniac on a cloud will catch up and start pelting you with lightning bolts.


Rod will dog your heels through pretty much the rest of the stage.


The loop-the-loops are actually a brief respite, because if you do nothing, the UFO will float harmlessly past you.


This is the halfway point. How do I know?


Because this is where one of Rod’s lightning bolts takes out the back platform (this is scripted and unavoidable).


Rod will bounce around the top track, tossing lightning at you. I don’t think he’s actually killable here.


Eventually he’ll come up after you on the bottom track, and bounce off, sending him flying back (and/or sending you forward).


There are a couple of tricky jumps after that, including one to a new single platform. You can also snag a flashing heart a bit after this, which I missed screenshotting.


The UFOs in the last loop-the-loop are a bit more aggressive, but you could still in theory ignore them.


At the end, you’ll go over a ramp and the board will fall away, and the Kid will land on some clouds.


Where the chickens attack.

This area’s boss is a giant, flying ghost chicken.


He attacks by dropping smaller chickens on your head.


This is actually the second-best coin-grinding spot in the game, after that first room. Remember, the HOM is a charged attack, so enemies killed by it drop coins, which include the mini-chickens that this guy drops on you. Basically, all you need to do is stand far enough away to avoid getting hit, and keep firing the HOM and collecting coins. This boss fight is a breeze once you get the rhythm down.


Eventually the big bird goes to the great deep-fryer in the sky.


You’re left with an egg that bounces around for a while, then hatches into one last pair of mini-chickens. Just continue firing the HOM. This is less a second stage of the boss and more a stinger.


Nintendo Power’s tips for this level.


The kid remembers another spell at the end of this stage. As you can probably guess, being able to walk upside down becomes very useful from here. Note that like the BAT transformation, you get a 5-second countdown until this runs out.


The kid really knows how to hang out! (Laugh track)

Next time: What’s that big boat?

Marvelous.

I wonder if there was any dev team crossover between this game and Adventures of Batman and Robin, since the rollercoaster stages of both are quite similar.

Oh my god that's awesome.

My apologies for not commenting earlier, but I've been enjoying the LP so far, Beowulf. I think I might give this game a quick run-through soon.

Considering how long it has been since I ate fried chicken that spirit has been haunting people for a while.

Personally the game is a little too adorable for me to want to play through, but I am enjoying the LP quite a bit. I particularly like the Famicom comparisons.

I'm glad people are enjoying this so far! (And after Kishi's great lead-in, I may have to hunt down the Famicom game and do more comparisons myself.)




Before starting this stage, I played three rounds of Jump & Pop and loaded myself up on extra lives. I’ve been taking a lot of hits trying to get all of these screenshots.


Whether this is a proper “airship” or just a haunted normal ship is a matter of some debate.


But it’s definitely up among the clouds.


These witches move in the same swooping patterns as the bats from the first stage, swinging their scythes the whole way. Unlike the bats, however, it takes two charged-up NOR shots to take them down.


And the manual thinks they aren’t specifically witches, just wenches who happen to be witchy.


The big issue, though, is that the ship also moves up and down, like the airships in Mario 3, while cannons fire at you. (It’s kinda derivative, really.)


There are several of these sets of four platforms that rotate around a center point, but only one in this first area. The key is being patient and not jumping too soon.


The last challenge in the first segment is this guy, who can block your shots with his shield. If you just wait a minute, you can let him charge over you and duck past him to the…


Swoosh!


The second segment takes place inside the ship.


This fellow comes up to greet you.


He’ll roll out the red carpet skull in your honor.


Both the head and the body are destructible, but neither is really worth the time when you can just jump over them and keep going. Most critters from here on have too much health to try to grind coins from.


Crushers move up and down, blocking the hallway. Jump on just as it moves down and don’t stop moving—you have a very small window to get across.


Making it this far nets you a flashing heart, though I never found it useful.

Because next up are reverse-crushers, which require you to use UPD to walk across the ceiling and hop across them. The timing is just as tricky as the rightside-up crushers, and a slight miss when it retracts means instant death. (Which is why that heart doesn’t matter to me—you have few opportunities to get hurt before you have to dodge a lot of instant death, and restarting after a death gives you full health again.)

Protip: You can still press Select to change weapons while the game is paused. This becomes significantly more useful from here on.


Once you’re past there, there’s a small segment where you need to dodge these barrels that fall from above. It’s just a couple of hops (slightly complicated by another of those head-flinging skeletons), nothing special.


And that’s segment two.


These platforms are neat—if you walk on them, nothing special happens. If you jump on them, they flip and you fall through. You can do this from both directions, using UPD.


So you need to dodge these cannoneers (and spikes) and navigate through the flippers.


It’s a fun mix of walking rightside-up and upside-down while avoiding attacks and not jumping on spikes.


The shield guys reappear, too. They’re harder to deal with here, because you have much less maneuvering room to dodge them.


And here’s the dumbest thing I do through this entire play-through: If you go the wrong way, you miss this heart container. I zipped right past it and only noticed it in my screenshots afterwards. Five hearts would have been nice for a bunch of later segments. Kids, don’t do what I did.


Past one more shield-dude, and you’re home free.

The final area is a boss arena.


This boss is a larger version of the Witchy Wenches from before.


She’ll fling scythes at you, in a simplified version of most Castlevania battles against Death. The pattern is pretty easy to handle.


Just keep hopping and firing the HOM, and you’ll take her down in no time.


And you’d think with a death animation like that, she’d be the only boss, right?


Nope! This game loves two-stage bosses. The screen shakes, and this giant robot clomps in.


He attacks with his robot stretchy arms.


His only vulnerable point is his face, so you need to use UPD to hit the ceiling and fire straight ahead.


You’ll have to dodge that arm a lot and keep bouncing back up to the ceiling, but eventually he’ll explode in sparks and POWs.


Immediately afterwards, you learn a spell.


And here we have Nintendo Power, being moderately helpful.

Remember how I said there were more cutscenes? Here we go!

Viewscreen turn on.




















Garamoth hacks the Cross-Eyed Creep’s signal to taunt us.


At the end of stage 4, you’ve collected all of the special abilities. (Though I have to wonder why they didn’t wait and give you something after stage 5—it’s not like you really need the Bomb or the Umbrella in stage 5.) But as such, it seems appropriate to post Nintendo Power’s breakdown of abilities.

Next time: Garamoth…already?

This stage is probably the shortest, having only two sections, but it’s also one of the most annoying.


We open in front of a platform. Jump on the platform. It takes you up.


The platforms all slowly move down the screen, and you need to climb up by jumping on them. Falling off means instant death. (The way this segment works means that both BAT and UPD are effectively useless here.)


You learn to memorize where these robots are, and they only take a single hit to kill, so you really need to kill them right before you land on the platform they’re on.


The spacemen, on the other hand, take a ton of shots to kill. You need to wait for the brief gap when they’re out of the way but you can still make all of the jumps.

This area is where my single-run attempts on an actual cart usually fizzled out. I saw much, much more of the stages before this than the stages after it.


As it stood, I burned a lot of lives remembering the patterns and trying to get screenshots that didn’t look like ass.


When you reach the top, there’s a brief gauntlet of aliens and UFOs. Just charge up the HOM and stay out of their way.


Those fellows in the last shot look like aliens, but there’s some theory that they’re hypnotized humans—the manual calls them “Trance Fusions.”

Then Garamoth attacks. He has two real parts to his pattern.


He’ll fire a beam from his wand-thing that occupies an entire band of the screen. Ducking is the only feasible way to dodge.


And he’ll jump in the air and try to land on you. HOM shots aren’t particularly effective, but the ATT can be useful because it passes through him and hits weak points.


Bam! Blew your head off.


Wait, what? It wasn’t Garamoth at all! It was an alien in a brand-new Garamoth suit! In this form, he’ll keep jumping at you, but also pause to fling bombs your way. You can only hurt him when he sticks his head up.


Which means a lot of dodging an patience is required. The ATT is the best way to make use of his vulnerability window. There’s nothing special after beating him, just the usual chance for lives or coins.


The boss is the easiest part of this stage to give tips for, so the Nintendo Power advice focuses on that.

Next time: Yeah, you knew that wasn’t the end.

Is that an Ebisumaru Coin in that final screenshot on the NP scan? What was that about?

Apparently, if you manage to shoot the alien piloting the Garamoth suit when the suit explodes and he flies into the air (a feat that I have never managed; you only have a couple of seconds to react), he drops the big coin which is worth 20 normal coins.

I have no idea what NP is talking about with the "two smaller versions" thing.

At the top of the space ladder, the world map changes. I actually saw very little of these areas until a few years ago, when I returned to a bunch of classic games and discovered that my platformer reflexes had improved, not atrophied, with time.


So let’s talk about these fire pits, which are exactly what they sound like: Pits full of fire that will instantly kill you. Many of them have fireballs that periodically pop out; either in a straight up and down pattern, or as killable enemies that behave like Trout That Wouldn’t Die.


Trying to jump over them all is an exercise in futility: Many are either too wide, or there isn’t enough clearance to make a proper jump. UPD is your friend, though BAT works in a pinch, as well.


If you use UPD, you need to watch out for similar long pits in the ceilings. The fireballs will sometimes drop from those, too.


By the latter part of the first segment, you’re also dealing with the periodical giant curves of flame that stretch out of one pool and into another, leaving a safe spot in the middle. This is similar to what you’ve seen in plenty of other games, and is mostly a matter of timing. (Though if you’re walking on the ceiling at the time, you need to watch the 5-second countdown carefully.)


The checkpoint is rather welcome.


The next section is actually a bit of a breather, because there’s only one real obstacle: The volcanos that periodically spit rocks on you. Just charge up the UMB and duck when the rocks are about to hit and you’ll be fine.


The only enemies in this segment are these tiny flaming horses, which unfortunately didn’t get a name in the manual. I’m going to claim their Latin name is Ignus Equus Lunus. This should give you a good idea of how much Latin I know.

That leads into the boss arena, which the fire-horses were a precursor to.


The boss is a bigger version of them, which—because of the mark on its rump and the flowing flame/hair—reminds me of a My Little Pony more than anything else.


MLP has a very predictable pattern that’s easy to deal with once you see it: One of the platforms sinks as he appears on ground level. You can either step into that platform and duck (and he’ll go over you) or you can jump over him. He’s also vulnerable during this period, though hitting him with anything other than HOM or ATT is tricky. I prefer HOM.


He’ll then do a horsey-hop up to the “sky” section, where he’ll kick a tiny horse out of his rear. (…Actually, I just thought about that, and this boss is probably a “her”, eh?) If you’re using the HOM, it’s easy to kill that horse before it’s anything resembling a problem, and a get a free coin for your troubles. The big gal then becomes invincible as she sinks behind the scenery, and restarts the pattern.


It’s a long battle, but not a terribly difficult one once you get the hang of it. When you kill MLP, she’ll explode into four of the tiny horses, and when they die or leave the screen, you’ve won!

Next time: Mining?

Apparently not enough to know that the Latin word for moon is Luna. Also, that name should be italicized.

Depends on the grammatical case. Luna is the nominative case, which I don't think is correct here.

NOTE: I did not study Latin.

Probably the genitive Lunae (loon-eye), of the moon. Maybe Equa Ignis Lunae for fire-moon-female horse?

Umby, get in here to render a verdict.

I should probably clarify that my entire knowledge of Latin comes from dog-Latin phrases in Terry Pratchett novels. I figured there would be folks here who would correct me before Great Caesar's Ghost appeared to stab me for butchering his language.

(Does anybody else remember the episode of the George Reeves Superman tv show when Caeser's Ghost appeared to Perry White because he'd invoked him so constantly? Those were the days.)

The map doesn’t really distinguish these areas besides “Hey, we’re getting closer to Garamoth’s castle!”


Caves? Or the edge of a forest? You decide!


The first things you run into are these guys, which look like normal zombies much move faster and take four normal shots to kill. (Or a single direct hit with BOM.)


You can find them sleeping, which is the best time to charge up a BOM attack to take them down quickly.


Here’s the manual’s take, because we haven’t had enough monster name puns recently.


You then get an introduction to this area’s gimmick, and the primary use for the BOM attack: You can destroy those blocks with it.


Though despite the BOM’s large blast radius, each shot only destroys one block. This is irritating in a segment we’ll see shortly.


Then the ceiling falls on you. It’s an instant-kill if you get touched by this. It pisses me off to no end. There are two of these, and you basically just need to know they’re there.


The other new enemy in this first area are Edward Drill-hands, here. He takes a whopping eight normal shots to kill.


These hearts exist to remind you that you can fire the BOM straight up.

I think one of the best things about this game is the way it doesn’t need tutorial segments, because “learning moments” like these are so seamlessly integrated with the gameplay.


Swoosh!

The gimmick in the next segment is breakable blocks, but this set move. The dark block in this set is the only unbreakable one, but the whole set constant shift upwards, forcing you to destroy them quickly and precisely so you can slip through.


There are two single rows (one going up, one going down), then two sets of double rows with one moving set and one still set.


If you get caught between a moving set and a wall or another set, and there isn’t room for your sprite, instant death!




But the last one is the really nasty one: A sequence of three, with the middle one being still and the outer ones moving. You really need to clear out a four-block high space in the middle one to give yourself enough clearance to open a space in the third column; I spent a lot of time jumping up and down and failing to escape here because I only cleared out three spaces.


These guys are nothing special: They walk back and forth and die to a single BOM.


The game’s biggest dick move is here, where it doesn’t give you a checkpoint before going into the next segment, where the ceiling comes down to crush you.


As is standard for these sequences, you need to move when it moves up, and find safe spaces to not get crushed.


Remember how the game taught you to fire the BOM upwards? You need to do that here to not die.


Mostly, you need to remember that, even ducking, the Kid needs two spaces of height to survive. You (thankfully) get a checkpoint before the boss battle. There are also a few hearts you can snag right before the checkpoint, but practically everything in this segment is instant death, so you probably haven’t taken damage.

The boss is METAL.


The wall in the middle will constantly shift, and Metal will use his hammer to knock the blocks at you.


You can use BOM to knock blocks at him, instead.


Once you hit him eight times, ladders will come down and give you more access to the full arena, but the tactics remain the same. Eight more hits are required to bring him down.


Mamma said knock you out!

It occurs to me to wonder if, in an preliminary design for the game, this stage came earlier: It’s really a one-trick pony, as the BOM is the only power you need and you need the BOM a lot. Compare that against Stage 5 (where you don’t need any powers, really, and can’t effective use some of them at all) or Stage 6 (where most powers are useful and you can choose which ones fit your playstyle).

Next time: The final confrontation.

And we’re finally here. Space Castle Garamoth.


In this first segment, the entire area scrolls up and left, and you need to jump from platform to platform while avoid bot the turtle-things and the spikes.

\
If you get stuck at the top or fall off the bottom, it means death. (In grand platformer tradition, this includes if there’s a platform just below you offscreen, that just hasn’t scrolled into view yet.)


There’s a brief gauntlet of unremarkable stone warriors when you get through.


Then a swoosh.


The second area has an amusing gimmick: These column cause you to hover upwards as long as you’re standing in them.


You retain side-to-side movement, and you can cause the Kid to fall by moving out of the column. This is sometimes (often) necessary to avoid being swept up into spikes.


There are a fair number of hearts scattered around, which is a mercy, particularly for a final stage obstacle. But on the other hand, this segment is really long. Trying to memorize it is tricky, so it’s nice they gave you some extra health wiggle room.

They get pretty creative with the patterns of the columns and where they put the spikes.


BAT still gets pulled upwards, but if you time the activation right, you can sneak through some of the trickier areas without having to time falls perfectly.


Oh, and if you don’t have five hearts already (which I didn’t, because I was dumb a ways back), there’s a heart container here.

Upon reflection, if I were a more enterprising soul, I should try to clear the first four stages without picking up either heart container, and see if there are other “conditional” ones. Or maybe someone from the peanut gallery wants to try that in their play-through, eh?


Similar to the first area, the swoosh checkpoint is welcomed.


Area three: Meet Phyllis.


Phyllis is less of an enemy and more of a stage hazard, but you take what you can get.


Phyllis will try to fall on you and crush you when you walk under her. It’s fairly easy to tell when you need to keep walking versus when you need to back up and let her fall. And you can stand on her after she falls.


I think we saw these crabs before in one of the spell tutorials, but this is the first time we’ve seen them in-game. They move up and down on their tracks and fire at you.


The other hazards in this area are blocks of ceiling that will fall on you, or floor that will drop out. Move cautiously, and use the HOM to take out crabs.


Then we have another quick gauntlet of Phyllis Drillers, and a flashing heart if you need it.


Hey, look at that cute thing!


I’m honestly impressed that they managed to get what is obviously a cute Xenomorph into the game without getting sued.

The aliens will spit fire at you, but are vulnerable to most weapons, including ATT and BOM.


The bigger problem is that they’re doing this while the ceiling is collapsing behind you and forcing you forward. (Getting crushed by the ceiling is, as usual, instant death).


The secret is to use the umbrella.


The aliens’ shots will be deflected by the umbrella, they’ll bounce of it when you run into them, and then they’ll jump into the ceiling and die. It’s shockingly easy.


Getting through here leads to Garamoth’s lair.




And our final boss, the man (Demon? Alien? Time traveler?) himself.


In his first stage, Garamoth flies around the top of the screen, and he has three attacks.


The first is the two-handed lightning blast. You can survive this from between the two bolts, but it’s much easier to be outside them.


The second is the one-handed lightning blast. This is only tricky because it comes at a diagonal, and will hit you if you’re trying to be between his hands for the first attack.


The third attack is his fireball-spit. This is also the only time he’s vulnerable—you need to hit his face when his mouth is open.


I’ve found that ATT is the best way to do that, because it passes through the invulnerable areas that will deflect things like HOM or badly-aimed shots from other weapons.

When you do enough damage, you’ll knock his wings off.


Now, he’ll start jumping all over the place. He’ll do two short jumps and then a big one when he opens his mouth. Again, ATT is your friend here. This part of the sequence is harder to avoid, but generally more straightforward that the many attacks of his first form.


Sufficient damage will cause him to explode, shimmer and spilt apart, ending his reign of terror until the next game he appears in.

Victory!


You’ll note I hadn’t posted any Nintendo Power excerpts in a while: That’s because they condensed the last three stages into a single block.




So, let’s check out our ending sequence.


















Kid Dracula and his bats head home as the credits roll.

“Hey bats, check out my awesome umbrella…whoops!”






And the Cross-Eyed Creep promises another sequel which never came. Alas.



Next time: Not quite the end. As I mentioned earlier, I've done a full run of the NES game so I can run through the comparisons. So there's one more super-long entry to come!

Given the device's limited real estate, there was only so much it could do with a platformer, but that didn't stop anyone from trying. I never played Kid Dracula, but this brought back lots of memories of the GB titles I did play.

Thanks for the LP!