And now, a little bit of lighthearted levity before the spooky day is upon us. Sometimes we need a little break, and replaying this thing was a good little break for me. I'll gladly talk about the game itself, but the circumstances around me getting it are memorable to me. It was not a Halloween purchase, but a Christmas gift. I don't recall the exact year offhand. Sometime in the mid to late 90's. Christmas break was coming and I made a little lending trade with a friend at school over the break. I lent them my Gameboy and some games, they lent me some Super Nintendo games. I remember Starfox was among them and I really liked playing that. My family dropped some hints that maybe I shouldn't have lent out my old Gameboy over the Christmas break, but I dismissed that. Come Christmas Day, here I am with fresh copies of this game as well as Operation C, the Game Boy Contra game. Don't I look like a fresh dumbass now, with two brand new games I can't play? I either waited for the New Year or got my Game Boy back with haste, but either way I played this game. I really loved it. Years later I lent it to another friend, and when I was leaving for college he asked if he could keep it because his little sister loved it. Sure, I said. What the hell. I got what I wanted out of it. In the end the joke was on me again, because it turns out that game was rare as shit and worth hundreds of dollars. I guess when it comes to Kid Dracula, I got varying degrees of trick and treat.
The tricks I've detailed, but the treat is the actual game. Maybe it's just childhood nostalgia and the old memories of how to play it popping back when I fired it up again, but it's a cute and breezy little action platformer experience. Funny enough the Famicom version this is a sequel/remake of is now easier to get one's hands on, having been included as a bonus in the Castlevania Anniversary Collection last year. Yes, this is technically a Castlevania game. A cute tongue-in-cheek parody of it, in which the titular Kid Dracula is supposed to be Alucard, I guess. The entire game is goofy and irreverent, with lots of stock horror monsters drawn in a goofy style. You got your zombies, your bats, your Frankenstein monsters, et cetera. As a child I just took it as a funny spooky game. Maybe it helped interest me in horror, who knows? Later you go to space and deal with aliens and obvious Xenomorph parodies. The one that always got me was the stage 2 boss, who is a burly masked man who attacks you with a hatchet and then a shotgun. I always just thought it was making fun of Jason, but now I'm fairly certain it's a dig at Splatterhouse, because that game has prominent shotgun use too. Splatterhouse also got a cutesy parody game in this style, but I've never played it. Next year, maybe.
As far as how it plays? I kind of love it. Knowing what I know, it was easy enough to rack up enough lives that I didn't have to worry. The bonus games you can play at the end of the levels help you in this regard, and I could easily get 10 lives on the balloon popping one. That's the best one, but after a certain point I didn't need the lives. A newcomer might, but if you do they're there. There's a lovely sense of progression as well with the powers you unlock after beating the stages, from a bat transformation to homing bullets to walking upside down. The stage hazards themselves are good and varied; everything from collapsing bridges to Gradius-style flame arcs to a tube in space level which is an autoscroller. It really is just a fun little game with just the right amount of challenge, and one I certainly loved at the time. Pity I gave it away, but what can you do? Ah well. That'll do for my little nostalgia trip with Kid Dracula. I highly suggest you give it a whirl before the spooky season ends. Speaking of, the night approaches. Ghosts. Goblins. Kids in masks knocking on the door asking for candy... and I hope they're wearing the safe kind of masks under the spooky kind of masks this year. Poor kids have been through a lot, like we all have. They deserve the fun sized potato chips we bought to give out to them. The kids will come a-knocking, as they have every year... but in between those knocks, for me? The final spooky movie of the season. The new beginning has reached its end. Oooooo. See you on All Hallow's Eve, y'all.
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