![]() First up, we got whip-wielding Texan, John Morris, who is related to Quincy Morris, a character from the Bram Stoker novel Fangs! (or something or other). In this game, you have the option to play as two different protagonists right from the get-go. THE DEVOLUTION OF A BLOODLINE It totally looks like a stealth kill is about to go down. You only get those two continues, and unless you like plugging in grid-based codes to restart a level, you’ll need extra points to earn extra lives in order to make it to the end of this quick jaunt around Europe. This game requires you to not squander your lives. It’s an obsolete goal to get the high score in games of this nature, but there’s a good reason for an emphasis on points here. We live in an era where action platformers like Bloodlines have eliminated the points system. I still haven’t recovered from a last-second kill shot from Shredder all these years later. It was always some game that didn’t need to do it, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the NES. I never cared for games with limited continues. Yes, this is one of those games that gives you limited continues. I can feel your palpable excitement over the tallying of points. You just know I’m dying somewhere in Stage 2 and then there goes one of my two precious Continues. I only had three cherry Pez left, and there are no more Rest of me. That means you’ll have to start at the beginning of the level even if you die in the boss fight, and they dock you a Continue. The health upgrades are sparse, meaning you’ll actually die often in this game, and when a stage is 11 sections long you’ll potentially lose all your lives. You’d often have your hearts maxed out at 99. While in Super Castlevania IV (which I’m gonna go ahead and abbreviate as SCIV from now on) you had a pork chop in every wall practically. The stages are about as long as your usual Castlevania stages, but they’re split up into more subsections. CASTLEVANIA: A SHORT STORYĬastlevania: Bloodlines is like the console version of an arcade game that never existed. In the first level alone you are treated to enemies being graphically disemboweled, while chained victims missing their lower torsos writhe above rotating mechanical torture devices. Was it the influence of Mortal Kombat (released two years prior in 1992) that made Konami go so gore-heavy for this installment or was it simply to do what Ninten-didn’t back in the 90s? Either way, every level of this game is dipped by it’s heels in the red stuff. I mean, that is the obvious pun you would go to for a game this drenched in plasma. I wonder how many reviews of this game referred to it as “a bloody good time”. This week the Castlevania series goes where it’s never gone before, the Sega Genesis, as we look at Castlevania: Bloodlines. Mainlining is our new featured series where we run through all the mainline games in a series one article per game, in often different and original ways.
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