Konami Collector's Series: Castlevania & Contra

There are better versions of these games out there if you must own them. They don't support D-pad and are running on a sub par emulator. This is a lazy bare bones port from a company that doesn't care anymore. Konami is pretty much just a Yakuza front company that mostly makes gambling machines in Japan and has been for years. They only care about squeezing as much cash as they can from the franchises they own with as little effort as they can get away with. Don't support this garbage.

Not a great title in the Konami line up of games. I love all 5 games in this collection, but for $6 I was expecting a different experience. Controller support is Pre-2006 so if you want D-Pad support at least with an Xbox Controller you're gonna have to do some work arounds. Save States exist, but there is no Rewind Feature or Turbo Button support like in other versions. Also when it comes to Castlevania 3 and Contra these are only the North American NES versions so there's no option to switch to the Japanese versions if you wanted to play them (like some other versions that are out there). These are all fine games and I'm glad there's a DRM free PC version of these games on here now, but I just wish this was the other collection that came out fairly recently and not the old 2002 version. It just feels there's too much stuff left out and is a relic of an older time in PC gaming rather then a celebration of Konami's classic game lineup. Good Games, but a poor collection. Only get it if you want DRM Free versions of these games.

tl;dr -- You can't use the dpad for directional input, only the analog stick. Which is terrible. I've played all of these games many times in various forms over the years, and the one thing that makes the most sense for directional input is to use the DPAD. These are NES games, and requiring the use of an anlog joystick for playing NES games is really awful. On top of that, there are no resolution options -- maybe that doesn't matter, but I use multiple monitors and having Windows rearrange all my applications whenever I launch and exit the game is stupid. You also can't play in windowed-mode as far as I've found. If you want to access options (to save, load, or adjust inputs) there's no menu option for it -- you have to press F1, which isn't ever communicated. Mashing buttons on a controller gets there eventually, and knowing programmer UI, it's not too hard to start trying F-keys, but it's a terrible user experience. This was a port done by programmers with no input from a graphic designer or game designer. This port is literally the worst way I can imagine to play through any of these games.

This is a really great collection of classic Konami titles, but they made a few minor mistakes and one major mistake. First and foremost, the collection doesn't support the D-Pad on modern controllers. This really is a massive oversight on the developers part, because these games were made to play on a D-Pad. The games might play on a D-pad if you're playing on an NES or SNES style controller, but if your controller has an analogue stick, it will default to the analogue stick. Secondly, the interface is terrible looking. I don't know why they didn't take a little more time to give users a decent title screen, because it's extremely ugly. Other than that I'm very happy to see classic Konami games coming to the platform!