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Castlevania: Spectral Interlude [2015, ZX Spectrum] Review - It's a Pixel THING - Ep.#39




Just take a good look at this awesome piece of pixel art!
Isn’t that gorgeous?

This particular loading screen was inspired by the North American NES box art of the very first game released in 1986.

Back in the day, Konami should have released a ZX Spectrum version of the amazing and tímeles Castlevania. 

They’ve completely missed the chance.

So, the homebrew Russian developer Rewind has just made available Castlevania Spectral Interlude.

Stories like these are what made the ZX Spectrum so popular in early 80s, back then all youngsters were creating their own games in their own bedrooms!

Castlevania Spectral Interlude was intended to be a port of the second installment of the game, subtitled Simon’s Quest and released for the NES in 1987, but it turned out being a totally new game and exclusive for the Zed X Spectrum.

If you’re a fan of the franchise and never had the opportunity to play around with a ZX Spectrum, here’s your chance. The story of this totally new and exclusive game is centered on the disappearance of Belmont from later Castlevania games.

This is kind of a slap in the face to Konami that always underestimated the European market and, mainly, the 8 and 16 bit home computers.

So, what’s the main features on this new Castlevania independent title? Once loaded, the very first thing to point out is the extreme high quality music that simply blown my mind away! The 12 song soundtrack, composed by Vladimir Tugay, is also available in Soundcloud and is simply brilliant. The graphics, by Aleksey Golubtsov, are also high quality stuff with more than 150 colorful game screens including hidden rooms, and, let’s not forget the coder behind this project, Aleksander Udotov. Without him, all these great pieces probably wouldn’t fit in this awesome puzzle.

This is definitely a “MetroidVania” type of game: 2D action-platformer with exploration, backtracking and RPG elements, and I invite you all to try it out and beat this monster!

The game was released for free and can be played either on a 128k ZX Spectrum or with the help of a ZX Spectrum emulator.
I’ll post all the direct links below for you to check out.

Homebrews are becoming very popular and an awesome way to dust off our old hardware. Who would have ever imagine that the ZX Spectrum would ever have a Castlevania game in its library! Finally, in 2015, that dream became reality!


 Follow the links below to grab this awesome exclusive gem!

Visit the "official" web page to download the game and, you liked it, please support de developer: http://spectralinterlude.com

Soundcloud direct link to the awesome 12 song Soundtrack: https://soundcloud.com/michellekg/sets/castlevania-spectral-interlude



If you're into retro - or not so retro - stuff, please subscribe at http://www.youtube.com/user/ThePixelTHING and visit http://www.facebook.com/PixelThing & http://twitter.com/Pixel_THING

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