About the Game:
Castlevania: Vengeance is an unfinished Castlevania fangame created by the user uze6666 for the Uzebox. There are no enemies and only one level, which is split into 3 sections. It includes an underground section.
About the TAS:
We can press start on frame 1.
The level is very simple. Most of it involves just walking right, so I'll only highlight the frames where we do something other than that.
- 1246, 2226 - Pressing up to climb a staircase.
- 2065 to 2225 - Backtracking to reach a staircase that goes underground.
- 2704 to 2890, 2987 to 3123 - Climbing staircases to the left.
- 3140, 4174, 4222, 4254 - Jumping to higher places, apart from 4254, which is mandatory to end input quickly as we can't go through the 3rd door.
Fast Movement
By holding X, it's possible to move at incredibly fast speeds. However, I have determined that this is a debug feature and shouldn't be allowed in this TAS.
In Conclusion
I'm not sure if this'll be accepted because the game itself is incomplete, but figured I would try anyway.
Thanks for reading.
Samsara: Simon's never looked better. Judging!
Samsara: Okay, this was a bit of a tough one, but it makes sense to me.
I found a thread on the Uzebox forums where the game is discussed. In it, it's described as a "demo/proof-of-concept", and it definitely shows in its content (rather, it's lack of such). It is the first level of the original NES Castlevania, just completely devoid of any obstacles. Enemies? None. The pits downstairs? Float right over 'em. Candles? Not even an obstacle, but not there either.
Looking further in the thread, you can see that there was a lot of early excitement about the engine, particularly in how faithful it is to the original game (the physics are 1:1 as far as I've tested). There was early discussion on potentially porting the whole game over and even a bit of work done, however that quickly stalled out by this post, saying the technical capabilities of the Uzebox (at least at the time) weren't enough. At least for this demo, that's remained the case for the last decade. There was a much more recent post from the dev that implies there could be more work done on the concept, but I doubt it would be concerning this demo in particular, and it's unclear whether or not that work will even be done at all.
The way I see this, then, is an unlicensed port, which we do allow on the condition that there's transformative or unique gameplay, such as demakes. I suppose you could count the complete lack of obstacles "transformative", but given how faithful everything else is to the original version, it's hard to classify this little proof of concept as something other than just that - a proof of concept port that, while incredibly impressive, fails to set itself apart from the original by succeeding at what it set out to do.
All that being said, though, given that this little thing was last discussed just a few months ago despite originally being made in 2012, I do have some hope for some kickass Uzebox Castlevania fangame coming out in the future. Maybe we can revisit this submission then.