YMMV / Haunted Castle

• Awesome Music: The tracks in this game were worth your quarters. More info can be found here.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: During the third stage, you're suddenly warped to an alternate dimension where you must kill three Harpies. This never happens again, nor is it ever explained.
• Breather Boss: Frankenstein('s monster), the boss of the penultimate stage, is perhaps the easiest boss in the whole game.
• Fan Nickname: For Simon's walk in Haunted Castle, "Wedgie Walk" or "Gotta Pee Now Step" apply.
• Game-Breaker: The Pocket Watch, which is all but useless in later stages of the console games, is able to stop bosses (including the last form of Dracula) at only two hearts per use.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The Pocket Watch, which unlike in other games uses only two hearts instead of five and can stop most enemies.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Who at Konami got the bright idea to impose a strict three-continue limit on an arcade game, when the whole point of coin-op machines is to encourage players to feed lots of coins in to keep their game going?! In a way, it's less insidious compared to the more common strategy of cutting players off at the final stage, but it's worse for revenue generation since a novice player learns much sooner not to spend any more quarters on it. Note that this isn't actually unique, as some of Konami's other games from this period — Contra in particular — also have a three-continue limit, but in addition to the operator being able to disable continues altogether if they're really sadistic (something that wasn't the case with Contra), here it's compounded by another issue...
  • The game only gives you one life per credit. That's it. You can't earn any extra lives at any point in the game, and falling into a Bottomless Pit will still give you an instant game over. You can quite easily add in extra money to get a longer life bar, which counts as using up part of your extra continues, but falling into a pit still wipes the entire lifebar, whereas if you don't buy any lifebar extensions you can at least fall into pits up to three times. For perspective, Contra, itself notoriously difficult, gives you three lives per credit, and lets you earn more via the point system, meaning that the absolute minimum number of lives you can get is twelve. With Haunted Castle, you're looking at between one and four lives (depending on whether or not you buy extra health) throughout the entire game.
  • Compared to the aforementioned examples it's a case of adding insult to injury, but the game doesn't replenish your life bar between levels, something that every other Castlevania game from this period does.
• Sequelitis: Ugly spritework, poor controls, and brutally unfair difficulty (even by its standards) means this is generally considered to be among the very worst games in the Castlevania series.

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