Nostalgia Is a Hell of a Drug!

Have you ever seen a 40-year-old man more gitty than a kid about to attend their first Taylor Swift concert? Well instead of getting raked over the coals by Ticketbastards all it took for me was a $13 investment in Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest. Castlevania 2 was one of the first video games I purchased all by myself, from a flea market in the 90s. I remember being allowed to freely roam the flea market when I happened upon a booth that had games for $5 each, to the best of my recollection. At this point I had never hear of, let alone played any of the Castlevania games, so I knew absolutely nothing about them, but the label of Castlevania 2 looked cool so I bought it.

I remember rushing to find my parents after I made my purchase and urging them to go home, as I wanted to play my game immediately. Youth, am I right!? That's not how my parents played it, so I had to continue walking around the flea market, now without any money, until they were ready to go home. When I did get home, however, I did all the cartridge blowing and whatnot to get the game going and was dropped into a world of my own making. I was confused. Without a manual I had no clue what I was supposed to do. This was well before Yahoo, Google, or even youtube tutorial videos. So to make the best of my purchase I just walked around killing the monsters, and that became the game's objective to me. I counted how many monsters I could kill before they killed me. That was Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest to my youth addled mind.

Along the way I've lost a lot of my old NES collection, mostly due to youth stupidity, and as an aging man I find myself wanting to collect them, just to have them again. Sure, I could play Simon's Quest on the NES Classic, or even better, an upgraded ROM hack on my modded Wii, but there's something very deeply connected to my memories about having the actual cartridge and holding a real NES controller in my hand while actually playing the game. You know as it was intended and not just as my ignorant childhood mind made it up to be. I'm really glad to finally have Simon's Quest back in my collection. And yes, I am playing it just like I did as a child; on a CRT through RF, and it's really not that bad. This completes my Castlevania Trilogy on the NES, but I have a few more cartridges I plan to track down. Maybe this will become a series. We'll see.