Can You Beat NES Castlevania 1 with Only the Handgun?

If for some reason you want to see Simon shoot his way through all 18 stages, I also uploaded the full unedited recording, but it's not really a meme.    • Castlevania 1 Gun Run   There are a couple graphical issues you might notice. For one, the subweapon icon changes to the stopwatch from level 2 until Dracula. I changed the graphic in two places, but didn't feel like searching for wherever else it appears. In the first place, this game had some really interesting (but still fairly basic, it is NES) graphical compression IMHO which made finding and editing tiles a bit tougher than expected. I chose the Stopwatch specifically because it has 4 unique tiles (no flipping) and can't get the Multishot item. For two, you can see Dracula's healthbar start depleting when he hits Simon, rather than when Simon hits him. That's just because I couldn't find info on a single "this is how much damage the whip does" byte, and it seemed like too much effort to change his hit routines since each Dracula phase has multiple hitboxes and I didn't wanna play through the full game twice just to check. So instead I used a super-simple ingame cheat. This short video just edits the healthbar in post, which is why it's kinda blurry. Incidentally, I know there's an actual mod that gives Simon a gun. But I had fun doing this myself, and even with slight tool assistance for savestates to make a clean-looking "full run" (and make sure I didn't lose the Stopwatch) it was kind of a neat challenge to do "whip-only except you can't even see your whip and need to intuit its range." Anyway, that's all. Dumb video idea complete.