Konami Keeps A Promise

So if you're some of the more anxious fellows who have been awaiting for Konami to upgrade their Anniversary Collections to include foreign versions, your patience has been rewarded with a free update. So now Castlevania fans who have never diverged into importation or the evil art of emulation can now officially play the Japanese Dracula's Curse that everyone says it better.

For the most part, all games included in the Castlevania collection - with the sole exception of Simon's Quest - have Japanese versions that you can play. The Akumajo Dracula game (Castlevania JP) included here is the Famicom cartridge version, which doesn't have the save functionality of the FDS version, but does include an Easy mode which reduces damage and eliminates knockback entirely. Castlevania 3 JP has many differences while Belmont's Revenge JP swaps the axe for the cross boomerang, which makes me happy. The other versions have minor differences aside from language change and things of that nature.

As for Contra, I haven't played through all of them. From what I can tell, differences are seemingly superficial... though Contra III and Hard Corps' JP versions have cheat codes which grants you multiple lives that were removed from the local versions, so that feels nice for those who care. Those who have played these Contra games from top to bottom will probably be better equipped to tell you the differences in greater detail.

In addition to the Japanese versions, the update also includes built-in BUTTON CUSTOMIZATION! So now you don't have to fiddle with Steam controller settings to get the mapping that works best for you and thank fuck for that. Dealing with that shit is a headache and a half.

So who knows? Another House show might loom in the corner.