overdrive's Castlevania II: Simon's Quest review

This game and the likes of Phantasy Star III would had served better as a side story/companion than an actual sequel in my opinion.

Yeah, I'd agree with that. With Simon's Quest, it was just another case of a series on the NES making a dramatic change from the first to the second game and going back to the style of the first for the third. Kind of like Zelda, where the second had RPG elements with XP and gaining levels and had side-scrolling dungeons and caves AND how SMB 2 was a tougher SMB in Japan and something very different in America.

One of those weird aspects of the creative process for that time as compared to most times in gaming where if something was successful, it seemed like a lot of things had to be changed for the sequel, as they didn't really want them to be too similar to the original.

Perhaps this is also the reason that Mario Bros. 2 was completely out of place in the series. It was actually a reskin of another project called "Doki Doki Panic," as I recall, with Mario characters inserted into it instead. Mario Bros 2 in Japan was an entirely different game; it was later released in North America as "The Lost Levels." Some cursory research suggests that there was a video game crash in the mid-80s that accounts for this; companies like Nintendo were trying new things to try to boost sales.

Your reminiscing about the relationship between video games and publications is right on the money, too. I remember how games like Mega Man 2 and Metroid were basically impossible to navigate without help. It makes me wonder if the developers and Nintendo Power were in cahoots to sell more copies of the magazines. The PC market was similar, and perhaps even more overt about it; Sierra adventure games like Police Quest and King's Quest were basically impossible to beat without help. You needed the hint books you'd see on the shelves at your local gaming shop (the ones that came packed with invisible ink-revealing markers), or the help of those shady 1-900 numbers who gouged you at incredibly high per-minute calling rates. And unlike today, you were completely at the mercy of these publications and hint lines to get the answers you needed, because the internet really wasn't a thing yet. Sources like Gamefaqs simply didn't exist. C'est la vie.

Great review, by the way. :)

Oh yeah, I had a couple Infocom text adventures back in the day. That I beat SOLELY because they had built-in hints that would give the solution to every puzzle if you typed in the "hint" or "help" command.