GamingCult - Our Gaming Culture

I wasn’t expecting to write about a demo today, and I don’t expect to write about demos too often, but I couldn’t ignore the return of Castlevania to modern consoles in any shape or form. Seeing as we won’t be getting the full Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse for another 15 days or so, I thought I would play through the demo and share my thoughts on the return of one of my favourite franchises of all time. Belmont’s Curse takes place in 1499, 23 years after the events of Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse . It also takes place 20 years after  Castlevania: Curse of Darkness , making it the latest chapter in this particular era of the Castlevania timeline. This time around, you play as Rose Belmont, daughter of Trevor and Sypha Belnades. Rose starts off equipped with a longsword and, unfortunately, does not have her father’s Vampire Killer whip, at least not in the demo. She also has magic in the form of the Cursed Flame, which allows her to launch a fireball. On top of that, she is prov...

The Sega 32X add-on always fascinated me. It originally came out in November 1994. It had a lot of hype leading up to the release, but that hype quickly fizzled out after Sega was unable to deliver on the initial demand. It also came out a month ahead of the Japanese launch of Sony’s PlayStation and Sega’s own Saturn. At the time, even though I was interested, I didn’t bother getting a 32X as I was still enjoying playing on the Sega Genesis, which still had solid and stellar releases. As cool as the launch lineup was, Star Wars Arcade, Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, etc., it wasn’t enough for me to justify using the limited disposable income I had. I ended up getting the add-on later in my adult life and have been a massive fan ever since. Looking back, the unit failed for so many reasons, with Sega clearly to blame for its failure. Sega didn’t have the proper development tools for third-party developers, making the 32X difficult to develop for and ultimately resulting in mediocre rele...