Hasslevania

By: Derek Yu

On: November 20th, 2007

I’m a bit torn about Hasslevania, Del Duio’s Castlevania parody game. On the one hand, it’s a pretty sloppily-made platformer that suffers from bad controls, poor collision detection, and some really frustrating design decisions (e.g. not being able to heal at save points). It’s also a 140 meg download, 120 of those megs being cheesy voiceovers (I’m not kidding).

On the other hand, it’s pretty obvious that the creator had a lot of fun making the game, and it comes through when you’re playing. For all the flaws, the little touches he added do sparkle on this rough gem. And as dumb as the jokes are, I actually enjoy the sense of humor this game has. “Rovert Bellmunt” complaining to Dracula’s lawyer at the entrance to the castle? C’mon, that’s chuckle-worthy.

On the other other hand (yes, I have three hands (one of which is a penis)), I have the high jump boots but I’m totally stuck and why oh why does it cost 2 hearts just to do a high jump I can’t get past these spikes FUCK I have to wait another minute before the game over screen passes.

Screw this game.

(But thanks, Koholint!)

Posted in Freeware, Metroidvanias, Platformers, Windows

Gr.Viper

Hmmm… is the game actually playable and beatable, if one hadn’t played all those Zeldas and that sort of thing?
Del Duio

Gr. Viper:

Yes absolutely! I made sure to have at least 2 ways of getting to essential items or areas. The complicated way of getting to the LCD code room is the tougher of the two, it’s just that without an item that he lacks he can’t get to it the easier way just yet.

I’ve read a lot of e-mails so far and a lot of people have figured out they can go down the chimney so that’s encouraging! It’s the trick ceiling that everybody is getting stuck on still. I’m answering every e-mail I can because I’d hate when I had a question about a game and never heard back from anybody. I’m not going to be that guy!

Negative Zero:

You should at least try it for yourself. It’s really not that bad, especially now that you’ve read how to find a couple of things from these comments here. You can always delete it if you hate it!

Grabladon:

Okay the way the code room works is that upon starting a new game the computer assigns 3 random numbers from 1 to 9 for each book. These will never change for that game, even if you die or whatever beforehand. Now the trick is that you MUST have found all 3 books in order for the castle’s password to be accepted at the LCD tower. I specifically made it so that you had to have possession of the books so that nobody could rush the clock and start randomly guessing what the code might be. You have to get all three but the good news is that you’re only one away!

When you have all 3 codebooks, return to the LCD tower and hit the buttons with your weapon (doesn’t matter which one). The one on the far left is for the 1st digit, the middle the 2nd, and the right the 3rd one. Each time you hit a button the digit’s increment goes up by 1. If you screw up just keep hitting the button and it’ll flip back around to 0.

When you enter the correct password there’ll be no mistake that you’ve done it correctly as you’ll see. When you enter the right code (and save your game afterwards) you won’t have to enter the code again. You’ll know because all of the red LCD lights will be blue this time and the passageway will remain open.

The hardest parts of the game are beyond that code room though, so I hope you’re prepared for a good fight!