Castlevania is an action platformer for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Known in Japan as Akumajou Dracula ("Demon Castle Dracula"), this game is about a clan of vampire hunters known as the Belmonts hunting down and killing Dracula himself.

You play as Simon Belmont, and fight your way through Dracula's castle (known in English as "Castlevania", a portmanteau of Castle and Transylvania, har har). You have many weapons at your disposal. Your main weapon, the Vampire Killer whip has somehow been passed down through the Belmont clan for generations. You can get power ups for that (essentially changing it from a leather whip, to a short chain, and longer chain whip). You also have many sub-weapons, which require hearts to use. These include a knife, throwing axe, holy water, cross boomerang and stopwatch (which freezes all enemies on screen). You can only throw one of these in a certain period of time, unless you get the "II" and "III" powerups.

This patch intends to offer the definitive version of Castlevania for the NES for its 30-year anniversary.

The 1.1 version completely changes all of the game's graphics, including backgrounds, font and item sprites.

==ATTENTION: It must be used exclusively with the standard american ROM:
Castlevania (U) (PRG0) [!].nes==

THE GRAPHICS: it aims to stay as close as possible to the original concepts, but with a better presentation. Lots of graphical upgrades and clean-ups were made, including enemy, item and boss sprites. All backgrounds were touched up to make the castle looks nice, dark and architecturally consistent. Fonts and items were redesigned too.

THE SKINS: The patches offer 3 possible skins for Simon Belmont for you to choose. Check out the Skins Guide file included in this folder to see the options.

THE GAMEPLAY: everything was a little rebalanced. Overall, the idea is to make the difficulty progression a little more gradual, and to make the gameplay even more strategic and thoughtful than it already was.

* You start with zero hearts, so you keep the short whip for a little longer, and you should really learn to survive with it.

* Big Hearts now are worth 3 units, and they're more rare, so you'll have to really use you Subweapons toughtfully.

* Candle placement was completely changed. There are much less of them (and their position is now more coherent, no more weird floating candelabras).

* Subweapons were replaced to really help you. With a few exceptions, you'll always find the perfect weapon for each situation... somewhere.

* All enemy attacks deal 1 less point of damage than normal. This makes the last 3 Blocks a little more forgiving. You'll notice that the bosses now put up some fun fights, instead of butchering you instantly.

CRAZY MODE: The same as above, but all enemy attacks deal 2 more points of damage than they did in the original game.

EXTRA STUFF: I've designed a digital new version of the original american instruction manual. It's included in this folder.

Huge thanks to Dan for his tool Stake.

YYCHR helped a lot too, thanks to whoever created it.

Hope you like it!

- KHEFZ

File: Castlevania (U) (PRG0) [!].nes
Size: 131,088
CRC32: 39C879BB
MD5: 00D93C9F 6B8AEFB8 B6C02B20 147DF4EC
SHA1: A31B8BD5 B370A910 3343C866 F3C2B299 8E889341