{"id":90,"date":"2006-03-10T22:10:43","date_gmt":"2006-03-11T03:10:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/?p=90"},"modified":"2006-03-10T22:48:33","modified_gmt":"2006-03-11T03:48:33","slug":"japanese-castlevania-iii-yes-its-worth-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/90\/japanese-castlevania-iii-yes-its-worth-it","title":{"rendered":"Japanese <em>Castlevania III<\/em>: The Music is Worth it"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"\/wp-content\/c3japan_1_large.jpg\" target=\"new\"><img src='\/wp-content\/c3japan_1_small.jpg' alt='C3 Japan' class=\"alignright\"\/><\/a>Welcome back to RedWolf&#8217;s New Adventures in Famicom Land.  Our latest trip takes us to an exciting island called &#8220;<em>Akumajou Densetsu<\/em>,&#8221; which promises to shower us with interesting music unlike any we&#8217;ve ever heard before on the Famicom or NES.  That&#8217;s because <a href=\"\/wp-content\/files\/c3_japan\/akumajou densetsu_j.nes\"><em>Akumajou Densetsu<\/em><\/a>, or the Japanese version of <em>Castlevania III: Dracula&#8217;s Curse<\/em>, uses the VRC6 chip, which provides for three extra sound channels (in addition to the Famicom&#8217;s original five).  And <em>Akumajou Densetsu<\/em> utilizes those three extra channels brilliantly.  Unfortunately, due to some hardware setup in the NES that I don&#8217;t understand, the US games could not utilize these extra sound channels.  As a result, the music for <em>Castlevania III<\/em> had to be rewritten and simplified for the US release.<\/p>\n<p><img src='\/wp-content\/c3japan_2_small.gif' alt='C3 Japan' class=\"alignleft\"\/>I had heard tales of how cool the music is, but I always wanted to hear for myself.  So I bought a copy of <em>Akumajou Densetsu<\/em> recently and plugged it into my new <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/73\" target=\"new\">AV Famicom<\/a>.  I was confronted with a flurry of new low bass notes and more complicated percussion.  Sure, the music is nowhere near up to SNES snuff, but it&#8217;s an incredible experience nonetheless &#8212; <em>Castlevania III&#8217;s<\/em> music is some of the best on the NES.  The rest of the game is the same as far as I can tell (except that, for some reason, the jumping &#8220;Igors&#8221; in the US version were changed from jumping demonic frog-like things in the Famicom one), so if you&#8217;re serious about <em>Castlevania III<\/em>, then it&#8217;s worth it to pick up this cart and a real Famicom to experience the music as originally intended.  FCEU seems to emulate the music pretty well, but I highly recommend getting the real thing.<\/p>\n<p>Jake, if you don&#8217;t have a copy of this, you should definitely get it. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome back to RedWolf&#8217;s New Adventures in Famicom Land. Our latest trip takes us to an exciting island called &#8220;Akumajou Densetsu,&#8221; which promises to shower us with interesting music unlike any we&#8217;ve ever heard before on the Famicom or NES. That&#8217;s because Akumajou Densetsu, or the Japanese version of Castlevania III: Dracula&#8217;s Curse, uses the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-video-game-collecting","category-nes-famicom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}