I crossed a line today with my Castlevania collection by purchasing a game from another region.
This is the Japanese version of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for Sega Saturn. It was a Japan-only port of the PlayStation game, and it featured new areas and playable characters that weren’t in the original version. I’m going to be looking into emulation solutions so I can play the game, but from what I hear the port was inferior to the PlayStation version despite the additional content:
In 1998, Symphony of the Night was ported to the Sega Saturn for a Japan-only release. It includes various new features: Maria Renard becomes a fully playable character, and along with Richter, is available to play as for the start of the game. When playing as Alucard, a “third hand” is available to store food or medicine. Alucard can also use exclusive items in the port, such as the “Alucard Boots”. An exclusive new boss, the Skeleton King, was added to the castle, as well as two new areas: the Cursed Prison and the Underground Garden. The game also contains remixes of previous Castlevania songs.
Unfortunately, due to poor coding, there are more and longer load times in the Saturn version. However, in most cases, slowdowns were noticed after the player has occupied more than three save slots, so these issues can be avoided by careful walk through and save progress planning. Since the Saturn has limited hardware transparency support, transparency effects, such as the mists and the waterfall, were replaced with dithering effects. Also, rather than take advantage of the Saturn’s increased resolution, the graphics are stretched to fill the screen, which causes some sprites to be distorted. The overall quality is said to be lower than the PlayStation version due to it being a simple port handled by another team, and not being recoded to take advantage of the Saturn’s technically superior 2D capabilities. Igarashi has expressed his disdain for the Sega Saturn version.
Thanks, Wikipedia.
Happy birthday, me! I’ll write about it once it arrives and I have a chance to play it.
I also picked up two other games recently. One is a factory sealed copy of Curse of Darkness for Xbox (I’ll trade my opened copy) and the other will get its own post when it arrives (it’s kind of a big deal.) I also got a great deal on a piece of Castlevania E3 swag, I’ll post about that too.
Computers and Video Games (CVG) has a feature up called, “24 games that will define gaming in 2012.” Among these is the unnamed sequel to Lords of Shadow, along with the blurb, “Bigger and bolder… with a shock twist” and then “Originally outed by the first game’s composer, CLOS2 will dwarf the original in terms of scale and ambition. CLOS’s shock conclusion (spoilers) hinted at a present day setting, as Gabriel’s story takes a cruel twist…”
A store at Etsy called 8 bit memory will make any video game image into a mouse pad. Sure, there are other video games out there, but this $12 US beauty is the only one that will rise from the grave every hundred years or so and demand attention from a legendary mouse pad slaying clan who will uh… yeah it’s a mouse pad with Castlevania on it.
This very cool Castlevania rock medley features mixes of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Stalker, Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall Part 2, Vampire Killer, Bloody Tears, Demon Seed, Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it touch of Need You Tonight by INXS, Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust, and the death fanfare from Castlevania.
Topping this all off is the animation, featuring one of the faces of Dracula, a pork chop, and a trail of flaming blood in a Nyan Cat-style animation.
Let’s just stop and look at that last sentence there for a little while.
A quick peek at Amazon shows used copies of the Lords of Shadow strategy guide going for several times the cover price. Why is this? Make sure you shop around.
The guide is still apparently available for $13.99 US on the official BradyGames website.
Kayness Digital Illustrator