Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse – Best Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Video Games of All Time

The third Castlevania game, Dracula’s Curse, is a prequel to the first two games. This is a good thing, since the second game, Simon’s Quest, was basically a large steel pole that you would shove into your butt. They wrote “Castlevania II” on the side of the pole. Konami knew they had screwed up with the second game in the series, and returned to the original’s games fast paced, sidescrolling mayhem.

The third game is pretty hard just like the original, which is great since the only thing hard about the second game was deciding which lube to use. I remember getting the third game and playing with my best friend Adam the month that it came out. We were really excited to play through the thing. It was awesome that you could choose which path to follow in the levels, which made the game somewhat non-linear (though only slightly so). We were blown away when we found Grant and discovered that you could get new, playable characters as the game progressed.

Yeah, you could get "Grant DeNasty," a Sorceress chick with badass magic, and Alucard – the son of Dracula himself. Alucard was probably the coolest, since he could turn into a bat and fly around hard obstacles. The sorceress was very interesting, though. Her magic proved very useful to all the enemies, especially against Dracula himself. The music in Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse kicks total and complete ass. It’s some of the best music ever written for 8-bit sound.

The whole "additional characters" thing was new to me and my friend at the time. That was a very interesting concept that we hadn't seen before. We were hooked on this game fast.

Now, it isn’t all awesomeness. The controls in the game are legendarily stiff and clunky, which leads to a lot of untimely and tragic deaths. There’s an underground level where you have to stand around waiting for bricks for a long, long time in order to climb up. Some of the bosses are used more than once, such as the Cyclops. Oh well, to be fair, cartridges on the NES had very little disk space to work with, and we have a very epic game here.

They have this game on the Wii virtual console, and if you love old school platformers then this is a truly awesome game. Castlevania III and the original game are two of the very best old Nintendo games ever made, no doubt. Don't bother with the second unless you want to torture yourself. You can read my thoughts on that game with the link below.