Castelian (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
244A playthrough of Triffix' 1991 puzzle-platformer for the NES, Castelian.
Played through on the novice difficulty level.
Castelian for the NES was a port of a popular late 80s PC game that appeared under several names including Nebulus and Tower Toppler.
It's a simple, arcade style platformer with a few light puzzle elements. You play as Pogo, a deformed green frog/puppy-looking thing with bug-eyes, and it is your goal - for whatever reason - to get to the top of seven towers.
The game's main gimmick is that the towers are circular. The stages rotate as you run around them using a pseudo-3D rotation effect somewhat similar to the one used in Battletoads' final stage.
But, while the effect is neat, it doesn't do much for the gameplay but to obscure half the playing field at any given time. This wasn't too bad of a compromise on the Commodore 64 version thanks to the smooth animation and control, but the mechanics in the NES version are far clunkier, slower, and more frustrating.
The time limits are infuriatingly tight, the hit detection is a mess, and the controls have a nasty bit of lag to them. Pogo often doesn't move fast to get out of the way of hazards unless you have already memorized their locations and patterns and can anticipate them. Additionally, the control scheme originally intended for 1-button joysticks hasn't been adapted at all to the NES controller: you use a single button to both jump and shoot, and as you might imagine, this makes things far harder than they need to be. I can only assume that sheer laziness in the porting process was the reason. The NES controller easily accommodates dedicated buttons for each action.
The graphics and sound reflect this same sense of laziness - the animation is slower, the scrolling is choppier, and the playing field is padded with a huge black bar that fills the bottom of the screen. The sound is just as poorly handled in this conversion: you get your choice of sound effects or music in-game. Not both. This was typical on 80s PCs due to the limited number of simultaneous voices they could play, but there's really no excuse for it to be that way on the NES.
Overall, Castelian is a piss poor port of a game that wasn't really ever up to the standards of good NES platformers to begin with. Even the addition of a few original bonus levels can't make this one an appealing prospect.
It reminds me of the Ubisoft's NES port of the Indiana Jones Game Boy game, or Virgin's NES ports of The Lion King and Aladdin. It might have made a good game if it had built for the NES from the ground up, but such was not the case.
The game is absolutely vile and has no business existing. I suggest playing the PC version or just not bothering at all.
At least the bonus stage music is pretty catchy.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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