Topic: If Castlevania Legacy of Darkness/Castlevania 64 was released today

[xscientist5000]

Improve the camera, add a save-anywhere-not-in-combat feature (or reconfigure the infamous Nitro puzzle) and give it a few shiny graphical touches, and I bet it would sell a fair few units.

How far away is a save anywhere except in battle feature from playing a rom where you can save state, or using a game genie/ game shark? These games today with their infinite health/save constantly features take away more than they give, IMO. What they take away is strategy, skill, and most importantly the feeling of accomplishment. Goes perfectly with today's instant results generation.

A save crystal here and there is good enough and players should be thankful they even get that.

[RichterB]

How far away is a save anywhere except in battle feature from playing a rom where you can save state, or using a game genie/ game shark? These games today with their infinite health/save constantly features take away more than they give, IMO. What they take away is strategy, skill, and most importantly the feeling of accomplishment. Goes perfectly with today's instant results generation.

A save crystal here and there is good enough and players should be thankful they even get that.

Yeah, saving is not a problem. I've been playing the game on and off in recent times as if it were an old-school Castlevania, and I've gotten from Stage 1 to Stage 5 without any saving, and then from Stage 5 to the Room of Clocks without any saving (I could have gone further with both, but I had already proved the point to myself).

I realized that, once you know the route and the dangers, the Nitro puzzle is actually very easy with saves. It's only without saves that it becomes a bit nerve-racking; but even then, it's challenge level is middling with practice. The hardest part (and the only part that can be unfair at times) is the transition between those two gears, honestly. So, I always do that nitro run first, then set the second nitro to get into the library, then mandragora for the library, break observatory room seal, and finally mandragora for the now unsealed spot where I dropped the first nitro for safe keeping.

Anyway, having played without saving for a while now, I think that the save spots they put in were well placed and make the game a lot less frustrating than it can be without saves.

The thing that bugs me is you can't save more than four quests at a time. I'd like to save some areas to play over and over for fun, like a stage select. So, a stage select in a redux would be great. A redux called...wait for it...Castlevania: Dracula 3D

[DoctaMario]

Walking through the nitro puzzle is easier than running. It takes a little longer but it means you'll probably only have to walk through it once if you do it right.

And I'm glad I'm not the only one who spent stupid amounts of time using the first person camera to look at the levels in detail. xD

[Lelygax]

How far away is a save anywhere except in battle feature from playing a rom where you can save state, or using a game genie/ game shark? These games today with their infinite health/save constantly features take away more than they give, IMO. What they take away is strategy, skill, and most importantly the feeling of accomplishment. Goes perfectly with today's instant results generation.

A save crystal here and there is good enough and players should be thankful they even get that.

Have played Tomb Raider for PSX? It work very well, but costs a item to save. This shows how to do it right.

The problem is that even right it can backfire on the player, since you can save with low health and no items, meaning that sometimes you will need to restart the game from 0 (its rare, but happened at least 1 or 2 times with us here).

[Intersection]

Have played Tomb Raider for PSX? It work very well, but costs a item to save. This shows how to do it right.

Are you sure? This kind of a system would be far too arbitrary to work well with a game like LoD.
It actually ties in with your next concern:

The problem is that even right it can backfire on the player, since you can save with low health and no items, meaning that sometimes you will need to restart the game from 0 (its rare, but happened at least 1 or 2 times with us here).

Exactly. And it'll probably happen more often than you might think. If you're low on health, or find yourself in a difficult situation, it might be a critical mistake to save your game -- you'll often be forced to start over entirely. And yet, when we're given that option, that's precisely what many of us do; it's compulsive, a survival reflex. So implementing this "free" save system isn't the best of ideas.

Now, of course, there are ways to circumvent that; think of what HoD did: you could make a "quick save" in any room, but only save rooms allowed you to regain health and magic. And when returning from the title screen, you could choose to return either to your quick-save point or to the last save room you'd encountered -- so that you won't be forced to bend to that hasty bit of checkpointing after all...
But this, of course, could really come to the detriment of a decent level of difficulty. For LoD in particular, I don't think it would be a good solution.

So here's a last possibility: along with the traditional save feature, a "sleep" mode that will essentially save your game at any point during gameplay, but that will forget your progress until you choose to put the game to sleep again. This wouldn't allow cheating, since you can't quick-save, continue your game, then revert back to the save if you aren't satisfied -- the save would simply no longer exist. I think AoS had something similar; it's simply a way to avoid losing progress if you have to leave without having yet reached a save point -- essentially a mechanism to facilitate coming back, and nothing more. And I think an auto-save feature would work well with this too.

[Lelygax]

Yes, that would be good, they did it in DS titles too.