After plenty of time spent on youtube, GB-Databases and VBA I finally decided to join the castlevania community to ask for help here.
Fifteen years ago I played a game on my
Gameboy Pocket. Foolishly I sold my set when I got my N64. Last week I picked up a 3DS and started to make a list of gameboy games I played back then.
After fifteen years I only remember a few things of that game. I do not know the name because I was actually learning to read and write and did not speak one word of english. It was in a time when there were only 150 Pokémon and I think the Gameboy Color was pretty new.
I remember that you enter a castle pretty early in the game, probably on first stage. I remember
trapdoors and
bats. I am almost shure your weapon was a whip, but maybe that's a mistaken memory from
The Amazing Spiderman.
I also remember that it was pretty hard so I was sent back into the main menu pretty soon where I had to enter three letters for the
highscore record list. The lowercase a-letter was so called "
single-story" (every detail counts =P). I think I remember
bats in the main menu, too (not as cursor but an animated swarm of bats after pressing start if I remember correctly).
I found most accordances with
Castlevania: The Adventure. At first I was pretty shure it was it, mainly because I thought to recall the logo. But the castle is at stage 5 and I am pretty shure that I never ever did it so far, because I had no skill... Besides that, the map design did not remind me at all. And I do not remember these rolling eyeballs. Instead I remember more realistic enemies like birds and maybe snakes.
I have watched the walkthroughs of all three castlevania games I found for gameboy and neither of these games had a enter-your-name-highscore-list (let alone one with a "single-story-lowercase-a"). I am pretty shure that it was not possible to chose one of four levels. Legends is unlikely it, although the menu theme seems similar.
I have checked google for "gameboy platform games" and similar without success. Assumed there is no "secret unique castlevania for gameboy release" nobody on the web knows of, it may be not a castlevania game. Certainly it must be at least very very similar, so I was hoping for an expert coming up with an idea!
Thanks in advance!