#Vampire on rails shooter series#

In the game you'll progress along rails - this is an auto-movie, on-rails shooter after all - exploring the castle while wave after wave of enemies come at you. For the Vampire Hunter the sub-weapons are absolutely essential as that's their only means of ranged attack.

Along with the the main weapon - a whip for the Belmont, or a more traditional (in this context) gun used by the 'Lady Gunner' (I was sadly not able to test out the hidden character, the 'Little Witch') - you also have sub-weapons you can collect and switch between. It's so goofy but, oddly, rather engaging in its own weird way. The game's mechanic, at least as the Belmont-like 'Vampire Killer', is essentially 'waggle' - you grab your 'light gun' and aim it at the screen, flicking the beam of light back and forth to 'swing your whip'. If you can track down a machine you'll be greeted by some of the weirdest video game mechanics you'll find outside of a the Nintendo Wii bargain bin. Maybe 2009 just wasn't the right time to Konami to release an experimental light-whip 'shooter' into the dying arcade scene. This is a rarity, to be sure, a curiosity that lost all support from Konami almost as soon as it was put out (it's planned European release was quickly canceled).

I was lucky enough to experience the game properly, once, which is why I can write this review, but I doubt most will be able to get that same level of luck. Trying to play it now is even harder and most fans would have to resort to some kind of emulation which just wouldn't have the same feel (if they're even lucky enough to stumble on the game and can get it to work).

It was originally a Japan-exclusive title (although a small chain of arcades did import four or so machines into the U.S., reportedly) produced in small numbers (only five of these machines still seem to even be in existence at this point) such that tracking down a machine when the game first came out could have been difficult, even if you lived in Japan. Of course, that special Castlevania magic could have been lost in the process (just look at the Lords of Shadow games, which I detest) but experimentation on its own wasn't bad.įinding a way to play this game, of course, is the big issue. A change of pace could certainly have been warranted, even if it were into a genre the games hadn't tackled before.

#Vampire on rails shooter series#

Certainly as the series had gone on it has started to repeat itself and its core concepts enough that the series no longer felt fresh, just that it was making copies of itself over and over again (something I like to think of as Mega Man Syndrome). Konami was certainly willing to experiment with their brands ( Castlevania: Judgment, which came out a year earlier, showed that), but the kind of game play shown off in Castlevania: The Arcade was so different from the main series that it would have legitimately felt like an unrelated game where it not for the 'Castlevania' (okay, the 'Akumajo Dracula') emblazoned on the sides of the machine.īut maybe that wasn't a bad thing. I think it's fair to say that very few Castlevania fans expected Konami to make a light-gun based, Arcade-exclusive shooter for the series.