Hey Folks,
I’m going through some kind of Castlevania renaissance at the moment, I finally finished Lords of Shadow last night (which is an amazing game by the way) and I’m playing Dracula X remake on PSP which isn’t bad at all!!! That made me think about my favourite Castlevania of all, Akumajou Dracula X: Chi no Rondo on PC Engine. The PC Engine CD platform hold a special place in my heart, compared to SEGA’s MegaCD, developers really pushed that platform to its full potential and Akumajou Dracula X: Chi no Rondo is a prime example of that.
Now, I’m not going to review that game, as there are far too many reviews out there and my advice is to experience the game, preferably on a PC Engine but an emulator would be fine and/or the PSP remake contains the original Akumajou Dracula X: Chi no Rondo emulated as well.
I collected a lot of game related images and web pages over the years that I thought were interesting. While cleaning up my hard drive, I stumbled across some images of an auction for an Akumajou Dracula X: Chi no Rondo sample/demo sold on Yahoo Japan for the whooping price of 316,155 Yen back in 2008!!! That’s about $3,200 at current exchange rate…
As far as I can tell, the demo contains only the first level and then goes onto a to be continued screen. Here are the images that I have gathered at the time. The first 2 images are from the Yahoo auction and the next 5 are from a now extinct Japanese website, this last set of images look like they come from a VHS tape due to the distortion I can see on the images, so there might be more material about this demo/trial out there…
There doesn’t seem to be a mass of differences between this and the release, if anybody got more information on this disc, I’d be curious to find out more!!!
EDIT 12/11/2015: One of these nice discs is now on sale on eBay for the whooping sum of £1,500, here is a clearer picture of the disc:
EDIT 12/08/2018: Turns out the Demo Clear message is hidden somewhere in the retail version of Rondo of Blood, as discovered by The Cutting Room Floor. Here is a nice quality picture:
sabre
Super CD·ROM² 