Opprinnelig skrevet av 1up.com
At Comic-Con today, Konami revealed a new playable version of the upcoming Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, and though a few portions were similar to the demo shown back at E3, there was plenty new that we saw to keep us excited about where the game is heading.
Roughly 50 percent of the map in the Comic-Con build has changed since E3, and along with it, random item drops and a new boss of sorts have been introduced. The items lead to some fun discoveries, such as a martial arts knee attack and a group of spinning ice shards that looks particularly painful.
The first "boss" comes in halfway through the demo, though it's a boss in the classic sense where he chases you and you try to escape by knocking down pillars and making your way to the end of the room as quickly as possible so this screen-filling behemoth doesn't eat you. You actually can choose to fight back if you like, but it definitely seems easier to run.
Another key feature we got a chance to mess around with is the touch screen use, which has changed quite a bit from what you might remember from the last game in the series. The old draw-to-capture system is gone, replaced by the ability to press on the screen to tell your partner where to go. (If you haven't seen previous coverage, one of the big new features with Portrait of Ruin is that you can switch between two characters at any time or play with both of them on the screen at once, where you control one and the other follows you around helping out.) The idea here is if you want to send them out in front of you to keep yourself safe or if you want to surround a group of enemies, now you can! We're not quite sure how useful this system is just yet, since you seem to have to hold down on the touch screen to get your partner to go where you want -- which takes a bit longer than we'd like -- but we may be missing part of the overall approach here so we'll be sure to post an update if we find out more.
Though not available in the version at Comic-Con, Konami representatives tell us that the two characters will be able to work together physically as well, with one character boosting the other up in certain areas to reach high ledges -- think of it like the co-op in Splinter Cell, but with much shorter characters.
We're curious to see what other secrets Konami may be holding back at this point, because the touch screen use seems a bit limited and we're curious to see if there will be more to it in the final game. Not that it really needs it, considering how nice the rest of the game looks, but it'd be nice.
