I have spoken of it from time to time on the site. Always briefly, always in hushed tones. Always fearful. It is the demon whose name can only be spoken by the bravest - or most foolish - of souls. Today, I am going to put myself at risk to tell you about it. I shall speak the unspeakable. I shall give an in-depth description of it. I may not survive, but perhaps my words will be a warning to others. Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you... THE WORST VIDEO GAME EVER CREATED: CASTELIAN! Understand this. People often joke about the worst video games in history. Daikatana, Hydlide, Gyromite, Spiritual Warfare... I myself thought for a long time that the NES X-Men game was the worst ever. Castelian is worse. It is a game so poorly made that it took me countless tries to get past the first screen, and countless more to get past the first level. And I still haven't finished even the second level. The only amusement it provides is in watching the ridiculous ways in which you fail, thinking to yourself, "Holy crap... someone thought this would be fun." That someone was a company called Triffix, which only released three games in its history. I hope they burned down. THE GAME Now, Castelian has an interesting concept, I'll give it that. The story is that some mysterious towers have appeared on planet Centrus, surrounding its major gem deposit and cutting it off. Since gems are Centrus's chief export, this is bad. So you, as a green alien named Julius, have to climb each tower and blow it up. I said the concept was interesting, not the story. Each level is a tower, and it uses a weird, cylindrical scrolling system. You know those old games where you can go off one side of the screen and reappear on the other, like Kid Icarus? It's like that, except that your character remains in the center of the screen, and the environment scrolls. Since it is a tower, half of the "screen" you're on will be hidden by the tower background at any given time. It takes some getting-used-to, but it actually becomes pretty easy to manage after a bit of practice. It's really very much like a tower of this sort would be handled in a current-generation 3D platform game, so one could say that Castelian was ahead of its time that way. So you can move left and right, go through doors, raise lifts, jump and/or shoot little balls a short distance (foreshadowing of the "THE BAD" section, hint hint). As I said, the object is to get to the top of each tower. In your way will be various moving or bouncing enemies, some of which can be destroyed while others are invincible. There are also platforms that disappear when you step on them, and flashing blocks which can be destroyed by your balls. I mean projectiles. Touching an enemy drops you down the tower a bit, and if you hit the ground, you die. Each level also has a time limit, and when that expires, you also die. Oh, and you score points by killing things and riding lifts, and you also get points at the end of the level for time remaining, "technique" and "extras." Whatever those are. The former is probably based on how few times you get hit. I think that a bonus level follows each normal level, but I've only finished one level, so it could have been a one-shot thing. It's a regular side-scrolling level in which you try to collect as many gems as you can while avoiding some enemies and trying not to fall into a hole. The bonus level ends when you touch an enemy or fall into a hole. The gems are worth bonus points, and I suspect that you earn extra lives at certain point plateaus. You get three lives to start, and two continues, for a total of nine tries. Good luck with that. Sounds interesting and harmless so far, right? Well, as promising as the concept may be, the execution kills it. Ha! Ha! I'm hilarious. THE GOOD Interesting concept. The animation is pretty good, and the graphics are okay. Hey, to give credit where it's due, they did a pretty good job pulling off a 3D effect on the NES. THE BAD Where to begin...? The controls are very sluggish. Triffix decided that it was important for Julius to be really well animated, which means that there is an unnatural pause while changing direction so Julius can look pretty doing it. And when you finally do start moving, it's like walking in tar. Along the "sluggish controls" line, jumping is really hit or miss. The game seems very picky about when you can and can't jump, which means that you can very easily just walk off the edge of a platform you're trying to jump off of. Here's what I was foreshadowing earlier: A normal NES game would have you press A to jump and B to shoot. Triffix apparently thought that the A button would work fine for both tasks. If you aren't moving, the A button shoots, and you can't jump. If you are moving, the A button makes you leap forward, and you can't shoot. Now, this gets sticky when you add in the sluggish controls. More than once, I tried to stop and shoot something, and ended up jumping into it instead. It's like it's trying to add an extra element of strategy or "puzzle" to the game, and it just ends up nonsensical. There is an enemy that appears at one side of the screen, level with you, and moves across to the other side. Even though it appears away from the tower, it is apparently moving around it, because its speed relates to how the screen is scrolling. You see it coming, you decide to move toward it and jump over it, and then you discover that making the screen scroll has caused the enemy to slow down, so you're actually jumping right into it. However, that doesn't mean that the thing's position on the tower is fixed. Sometimes I would come out of a door, see it coming, and decide that the best course of action would be to go back into the door and wait for it to pass. So I go into the door, the tower scrolls around to the other door, the enemy stays in place, and I come out of the door right on top of it, even though it's supposed to be on the other side of the tower. This enemy follows no logic (or rather, it follows both the "moving around the tower" and "moving across the screen independant of the tower" logics simultaneously), and there is no guaranteed way of dealing with it. On the credits screen that follows the title screen, buried at the bottom beneath all the programming information, is a message inviting you to press the select button for options. From here, you can go into two player mode, increase the difficulty(!) or - and this is the really bizarre part which I am counting as a "bad" point - change the sound from "effects" to "music." By default, the game has sound effects, but no background music. But with this option, you can turn on the background music... which turns off the sound effects. You can't have both. Also, the background music is the same music that plays on the title screen. But wait! There's another layer of madness here. Remember the between-level bonus stages? They have music and sound effects, regardless of which option you select. And it's different music! Make sense of that. The blocks that disappear when you touch them have nothing to distinguish them from regular blocks. You'll just be walking along, and suddenly fall down. Also, both levels I have played have disappearing blocks on the platform you start on, which means that if you touch them, you die. In the second level, for example, you start with the choice to go either left or right. The first block on the right disappears, so unless you know about it, you have an automatic 50% chance of dying. Not fair! Since touching enemies sets you back as opposed to killing you, and you're on a timer, that makes time your main adversary. You can sort of look at it as a "life meter," and each hit you take from an enemy depletes it. Well, fine. Except that it not only "depletes your life meter," it forces you to perhaps deal with enemies you've already been past, which really just gives them another opportunity to "deplete your life meter." Each hit you take increases your likelihood of being hit again, which increases it again, and so forth. And in the one-and-a-quarter levels I've seen so far, I didn't see any "time-refilling" items available to collect. Some enemies can be killed by your shots. Some can't. Some are just stunned. And the enemy's type does not always dictate its vulnerability. See, in most games, if you encounter an enemy that can be dealt with in a certain way, you can be confident that the same tactic will work on that same enemy in future. Buzzy Beetle is always going to be immune to fireballs, no matter what level it's in. In the first level of Castelian, there are some bouncing balls that can be destroyed by your shots. But there is at least one of these balls that can't be destroyed, but is simply stunned instead. And there is nothing marking that ball as different from the others. You'd think they would have changed the color or something. TIPS & TRICKS Most emulators allow you to play ROMs other than Castelian, and if yours doesn't, I suggest that you download a new one. I use FCE Ultra, and it has a "File" menu from which you can select "Open," and then choose any other ROM you have. You can even browse through the directories on your drives to find ROMs you may have saved elsewhere. Most emulators probably have similar functions. Outside the emulator program, if the Castelian ROM is saved on one of your computer's hard disks or a zip disk, you can easily delete it. If it's on a CD-RW, you can overwrite it. If it's on a CD-R, you're kinda stuck, but remember that they are pretty cheap should you decide to just snap the offending disc in half. If you're playing the cartridge version, it can easily be removed and replaced with another game. Just make sure you turn the power off before removing the cartridge. FINAL ANALYSIS Worst game ever. Thumbs down for Castelian. SCREENSHOTS This screen appears each time you're about to try the first level, including after death. Get used to seeing it. The beginning of the first level. Get used to seeing this, too. Progress. You probably won't see this without a lot of practice. The beginning of the second level. You'll probably never see this.