About this Strip

So the heroes land even further in the past which, for this comic, is represented by Game Boy style graphics. In my head this makes sense as the Game Boy allows for even less colors than the NES (it wasn't until the Game Boy Color that a Nintendo handheld could even emulate NES-style graphics). Of course, if you know the Castlevania timeline then you know that the first two Game Boy games, the two Castlevania Adventure titles, technically happen 100 years AFTER Castlevania III (where the NES graphics came from). So, technically by traveling into a Game Boy game they would be traveling forward, not backward, right? Yes, maybe, but from a design standpoint the layout we have here makes more sense. Although...

Technically, since the Game Boy version isn't chronologically correct for the series, I made an alternate version (for anyone that's feeling particularly pedantic). This version is designed to emulate Atari graphics which are, indisputably, older than NES graphics. If worse graphics means older game then this logic works perfectly. (Let's just not discuss Lament of Innocence and it's place in the timeline, okay?)

Obviously this is all custom work since a CV game hasn't (at least officially) shown up on the Atari 2600. I goofed this up by hand, trying to make all the colors, pixels, and sprite limits console-appropriate. That's why the background is so simple, why all the sprites only have two colors (the color of the sprite and "transparent"), and why all the characters are the same color. The Atari could only have a limited selection of sprites on screen at a time so, often, the moving sprites were all styled similarly. I made all three villains white to represent that. Having both the tree and the shuttle on screen at the same time might be a bit of a cheat (not sure the Atari could have actually handled that) but I took it as as a stylistic convenience to properly set the stage -- sometimes you have to let the realism of the scene slide a little to make it "feel" more authentic.