Hydra Castle Labyrinth port released for the Vita/PSTV – Yet another great side scroller to play on the go!
Thanks to Rinnegatamante, the maintainer of VitaDB and creator of lots of homebrew/ports, the PSVita got another port of a great open-source game. This time around, it’s Hydra Castle Labyrinth, an indie side-scrolling platformer which should be checked out by fans of Commander Keen, Knightmare II: The Maze of Galious (Metroidvania games) and other side scrollers!
What is Hydra Castle Labyrinth?
Playing Hydra Castle Labyrinth
As the title suggests, in this game you explore a large dungeon in which you must find tools and keys that let you progress in the game. Along the way, you’ll also have to fight some bosses but don’t worry, there are some equipment upgrades you can get that will make your character stronger! The game is a side scrolling platformer that controls very well with the Vita’s controls and excellent d-pad so you should get a highly enjoyable experience while playing this game.
The life bar conveniently changes its position to the bottom of the screen when the player is in the top-left corner!
The game was created by E. Hashimoto (Buster) and was originally released in 2011 entirely in Japanese but fortunately, some months later an English patch for it was released which meant that it could be enjoyed by Western audiences! Now, Rinnegatamante decided to port it to the PSVita with the help of EasyRPG Team (developed the audio decoder which was used for the audio code of the game) and some others. Trust me, the BGM (background music) is great in this one so it was worth the wait to have the audio code properly implemented (Rinnegatamante had the port finished without the audio code a few days ago)!
In addition to the normal release, this release gets 4 great screen borders that were created SwItChBlAdEfUrY and Brandonheat8! These screen borders make the game look nicer as you won’t get a black border around the 4:3 game area! The game also has an exceptionally nice LiveArea screen shown here.
The exceptionally nice LiveArea screen of this port!
How do I get it?
To get the game, all you need to do is open VHBB and get it from there since it’s on VitaDB. Alternatively, you can download the VPK from VitaDB on your computer/mobile device and install the game along with the data files. If you have any issues, report them to Rinnegatamante on GitHub or on the Wololo /talk page below!
Wololo /talk thread (more info + download links): https://wololo.net/talk/viewtopic.php?f=116&t=48707
GitHub page (source code + place to report issues): https://github.com/Rinnegatamante/HCL-Vita
Rinnegatamante’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Rinnegatamante
First
And only
So i was thinking about 3.61+ games and their potential future (fingers crossed) play ability on 3.60, and here is what i was wondering: if someone where to take a game released in japan, and dump that and then take that same game that released in eu/us in 3.61+ and dump that ( which is now possible with the new tools) would it be possible to analyse them side by side and break the encryption? Now i know that the games are slightly different, being from different languages etc, but i was wondering if they were similar enough to help. or what about taking a psn only release that got a print run on limited run games and maybe isolating the portion stopping the game from running on the cart? I doubt it will be possible to play 3.61+ games from the cart period, but the ability to dump my currently owned 3.61+ games and put them on a sd2vita would be a great improvement. Now this is coming from someone with very limited knowledge, so i am sure that neither of my proposed ideas would actually work on paper, but damn do they sound nice.
Where can I find more cool games like this?
Developer is E. Hashimoto. He tried selling some of these games but gave up on that, however he managed to sell their rights to a company… that’s likely Nicalis since they mistakenly had the Hydra Castle Labyrinth on one of their Nintendo Switch coverage.
The dev made these, plus smaller games (like King which is a puzzle platformer, or a Snake like game, or a basic shooter)
Buster (X68000)
Buster (PC, 2006) (platformer, hard as nails)
Akuji the Demon (platformer)
Guardian of Paradise (zelda inspired)
Hydra Castle Labyrinth (metroidvania inspired by msx stuff like maze of galious, similar to la-mulana)
All of them are on PC, though Hydra Castle Labyrinth had a port for the 3DS (with source code for it and unfinished Wii and PSP ports that I’m sure were useful for this Vita port) but it was anonymously on 4chan.
To install:
1. Install HCL.vpk
2. Extract HCL.zip file to ux0:data/
3. Enjoy 🙂
Configurable buttons please. Maybe that’s easy enough that I can write the patch myself.
Cool artwork!
The sound glitches and gets distorted from time to time, generally when switching or repeating tracks. Other than that, a pretty decent game; very reminiscent of Maze of Galious, but more fair and without the ugly MSX graphics.
so is there already ps3 webkit for henkaku or is the shareexploit still hot ?
some question for ps4 is there allready ps4 webkit henkaku vpk ?
waiting greatly
Nice, i’ll try this.
why is it only black screen on my ps vita? anyone has same problem?
have you find the fix for the black screen,, mine does the same thing
Maybe you installed the game on an unsupported folder.
v.1.1 got recently released, check if that fixes your problem.