I genuinely have mixed feelings when it comes to this machine. I feel that the idea and concept were very strong, but I didn’t have the ability to accurately portray it with the pinbox 3000. Building the external ramp and table proved more difficult than I though which pushed back the time I could use to work on the other aspects, on top of frequent printer issues that caused the art to have to be manually edited and then colored by hand. These issues forced me to scale back my original design, while keeping the core mechanics in place. For the visual pinball assignments, I intend to build the machine as I originally intended.
Feedback was mixed, a lot of people liked the theme and the boss mechanic a lot, but the ramp leading to the subweapons was way too difficult to hit, so they barely got to play the rest of the machine since they had to spend their time hitting that one shot. They also found the rest of the playfield to be a bit barren or pointless which I agree with.
As I was building this machine, I came up with several cool ideas which unfortunately I could not implement since it would have required me to start from scratch, but if I could, I would have implemented them. One such idea was to have the plunger launch directly into the subweapon ramp so that players always start with at least something. I’d also modify the steepness of the ramps so that players can go up them much more easily. Thankfully, with visual pinball I’ll be able to implement these features and much more, so I’m greatly looking forward to that.
Citations:
https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/NES/Castlevania-II-Simon-s-Quest-276610.html
https://www.spriters-resource.com/nes/cv/sheet/8468/
https://kotaku.com/in-defense-of-castlevania-2-simon-s-quest-1835599200