kane_magus: (Default)
There is a new Bloodstained game coming out next year (or later, if it ends up getting delayed or something).

Given that there are two protagonists that the player controls and switches between at the same time, I just hope we don't have a "JONATHON! CHARLOTTE! JONATHON CHARLOTTE!" situation with this new game. (This was something that Vampire Survivors made fun of in the Castlevania DLC.)
kane_magus: (Default)
It has been over two years, but I finally got around to (re)watching the rest of Captain N: The Game Master.

Blah blah blah )
kane_magus: (Default)
Took me longer than I thought it would (but not really since I went several days at a stretch without even touching it at all), but I've finally unlocked everything in Ode to Castlevania. The last character to unlock cost over 17 million gold, and I only had like 3 million at the time, but one trip to Moongolow with Sammy and weapon slots set to 1, and I had 20 million gold in less than 15 minutes, or about seven minutes in real time (had it set to Endless, too, along with Hurry and Hyper, but didn't even need that, since I exited out before I even reached what would have been the 15 minute time limit).

So, now I'm going to get into spoiler territory beyond this point (behind a cut, if you're seeing this on my main page).

Silly, nitpicky, and also spoilery character stuff behind cut )
kane_magus: (Default)
No spoilers. I'm just going to say that everything about the final boss from lead-up to aftermath is by far the best thing in Vampire Survivors so far, and it will be incredibly tough to top it with anything else in the future, assuming there's more updates/DLC to come at some point down the line.

The Ode to Castlevania DLC, as far as I can tell, is around half or so of the game now, and that's if you include all of the base game and all the rest of the DLCs combined, probably. It was certainly worth that "1 less money than VS."

(EDIT) Oh, and fighting the "final" boss seems to be only the halfway point. So maybe there is something else later. (/EDIT)
kane_magus: (Default)
"The full-circle moment we've been waiting for."

Huh. How about that.

Watching the trailer, I saw some pretty deep pulls in this, like Saint Germain and Pumpkin. And, wow, they're even including Sonia Belmont in this, despite her being officially declared non-canon by Konami almost 20 years ago. I didn't notice any Lords of Shadow characters, though. I also didn't see Aeon, either. However, I did see several characters in the trailer that I didn't even recognize.

Be kind of funny if Dracula himself was left out of it so as not to break the trend of not having vampires in Vampire Survivors. There's no mention of him in the release announcement, and I didn't see him in the trailer... though it did play a bit of "Dance of Illusions"/"Illusionary Dance" at the end of the trailer. (Also, Alucard isn't a vampire, he's a dhampire, so him being there doesn't break the streak.)




Vampire Survivors join forces once more with KONAMI, this time featuring their notable Castlevania franchise, in a new DLC which many have been anticipating!

The Vampire Survivors have come a long way in their honorable hunt, and after joining forces with the Belmont Family, they are the closest they've ever been!

This all-out celebration has over 20 new characters, 40+ weapons including more whips than you can count on one hand, 30+ music tracks from Vampire Survivors historic composers Daniele Zandara and Filippo Vicarelli, but also from fan-favorites Evelyn Lark and Keygen Church! The BIGGEST stage we've made yet! Even though we're literally at Dracula's Castle, there's still zero vampires?

And the cherry on top: a man.
kane_magus: (Default)
Welp, they finally did it. Haven't bought it yet and will, of course, be waiting for at least a moderate sale, as usual, but it's still about 99.999% certain that I will be getting this eventually.

(And I have since bought and played the whole thing, except for the Haunted Castle stuff. It's pretty great. No complaints about anything, this time.)
kane_magus: (Default)
Between that post from earlier today and now, I have seen all of the first season of Castlevania: Nocturne. It was only 8 episodes, not quite half an hour long each, so it only took about 4 hours, not counting time spent doing not that.

It was pretty good. Unlike the first season of the previous series, though, this one absolutely was not a mostly stand-alone, self-contained story, and there will have to be more to come. I'll just say that much.
kane_magus: (Default)

"The Nerd celebrates 20 years of Angry Video Game Nerd in AVGN episode 215, with the series that started it all and this time he's going to decide what the greatest Castlevania game of all time is for good!"



It's an interesting video, but just to be clear, he's talking about what he thinks is "the greatest Castlevania game of all time" ...while not even mentioning any game post-Symphony of the Night at all, aside from Castlevania Chronicles (which was a remake of a much older game), and no game beyond the original Playstation era. So, take it with a grain of salt.

However, even with that said, even taking all the newer games into account, I personally find it difficult to argue with his pick of Castlevania 4 (aka Super Castlevania) for the SNES as being the best of all time. I love allmost of the later Metroid-inspired games, but still... CV4 is up there, too. (And, no, not just because it lets you swing the whip in eight directions.)

(EDIT) Oh, and I was reminded by some of the comments under the video that the Castlevania: Nocturne series came out last year. I'd completely forgotten about that. Guess I need to get on that. (/EDIT)
kane_magus: (Default)
"Vampire Survivors managed to bag itself a Konami collab, but not the one everyone was expecting."

Huh.

You know, when I first heard about the upcoming new Vampire Survivors DLC a day or two ago, my initial reaction was simply something along the lines of "well, a Contra DLC is weird, but at least it isn't as bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping as that Among Us DLC was," before I simply tossed it on my Steam wishlist and then completely forgot about it. It didn't even occur to me until now how (apparently intentionally) weird it is Poncle collaborated with Konami for... Contra... instead of, you know... Castlevania.

But then, most of the sprites in VS are already just shy of wholesale plagiarizing Castlevania (and Bayonetta, among others) to begin with... close as they can possibly be while remaining "legally distinct," and all that... so what would a Vampire Survivors/Castlevania crossover even look like? *eye roll*

Oh, and here's the obligatory anime trailer for the DLC:

kane_magus: (Default)
Right, so talking about Bloodstained in the previous post reminded me that I hadn't written a post about the Castlevania Advance Collection, which I bought back in September, but only started playing through a couple weeks ago. I've since completed Circle of the Moon, Harmony of Dissonance, and Aria of Sorrow. (All of these are games that I previously played through, many years ago, on original hardware that I no longer own.) I have not yet completed Dracula X in this collection, mostly since it is just the subpar SNES version of Rondo of Blood, and for whatever reason it just doesn't appeal to me as much as the previous three did (mainly because it's a more traditional platformer and not a Metroidvania; also because Maria isn't a playable character in DX like she is in RoB).

Of the three I played, AoS is hands down the best of the bunch, of course. CotM is a close second, in my opinion, even though it came out before HoD.

Seriously, I'm just going to rant for a bit about Harmony of Dissonance now, partitioned off into it's own littlelarge area.



HoD rant behind cut for good measure, along with a big music nerd-out for the other games )



Okay. Now that all of that is over and done with. Yeah, Harmony of Dissonance was mostly dog's ass, but Circle of the Moon and Aria of Sorrow more than make up for it, and make the Advance Collection plenty worthwhile.

There are also some added features in the Steam version that aren't in the original games. Most notably is the rewind feature. Basically, you can hold shift and then press the left arrow key, and it will literally "rewind" the game (if you're playing on keyboard anyway, as I was, as I'm not sure how/if it works with a controller). Very useful for when you fuck up and don't want to have to reload from a previous save. I'll freely admit that I abused the hell out of that shit. CotM in particular is pretty damn hard, and even with that rewind thing, it could be frustrating at times. It was useful for the metal ball race in HoD, too, as that could have sucked a lot worse otherwise. Also, I had already beaten all three of these games "legit" on the GBA, back in ye olden dayes, so I didn't care much if I "cheated" in these recent playthroughs.

And there are also just straight up save states, like any emulator worth its salt has these days, so you can save at any point without having to find a save point. Also allows for exploits if one wanted to use it in such a way (but with the rewind feature already right there, there's no real need to bother with save states for such).

Another thing the Steam collection has is full lists of equipment, items, powers, and enemies, all right there, available at the start, with all entries fully unlocked. This is via the Advance Collection's overlay, which is an addition to the original games themselves. Also, some of the games originally didn't have a bestiary or anything like that at all, and for the ones that did, most of the entries were locked until you actually, for instance, killed at least one enemy, or got at least one of their drops, before you could view those entries in the in-game versions. I mean, it's not world-changing or anything like that, but it's still neat to have.

One of the simultaneously useful and annoying new features are the new pop-ups on the side that appear whenever you attack an enemy in CotM or AoS, which show you specifically which enemies have card drops (in CotM) or souls (in AoS) and whether you have or haven't acquired them yet. Especially useful in CotM, since otherwise it was kind of a Guide Dang It situation on trying to find all of the DSS cards. Fortunately, though, you can turn the feature off entirely, if you don't want to use it (and it can and does take up a fair bit of screen real estate, especially when you're using a quick, multi-hit attack on a single beefy enemy, which doesn't look all that great). In HoD, it was used to show you which Dracula artifact or random piece of furniture you had or had not yet collected in each section of the castle(s), which was nice.

One complaint I have about the Steam version is that the keys apparently cannot be reconfigured. For keyboard, the arrows are the GBA D-pad, Z/X are A/B, A/S are Select/Start, and Q/W are L/R, and if you don't like that, then fuck you, I guess. Also, F1 brings up the overlay menu. And Esc brings up the "Do you want to quit?" menu, and you better be damn careful on that shit, because if you forget whether Z or X is A or B and you press the wrong one, you'll get dumped out to the desktop and lose all your progress. It happened to me a few times. (Oh, and this is also a reason why I'm less than enthused to keep trying to play Dracula X. For CotM, HoD, and AoS, jump was Z and whip was X. In DX, jump is X and whip is Z. It sucks.)

So, yeah, in conclusion (for real this time), even though Harmony of Dissonance certainly isn't the best thing since sliced bread, and Dracula X is sort of the odd man out of the bunch (i.e. it's not a Metroidvania like the other three and it also wasn't a Game Boy Advance game like the other three [it was a SNES game]), I would still definitely recommend this collection for Circle of the Moon and Aria of Sorrow, at the very least.

Despite how shitty Konami has been lately, for a huge variety of reasons, I'd probably still buy a Castlevania DS Collection (or whatever they ended up calling it) on Steam, if they ever made such a thing, and it had the same quality as this did (Harmony of Dissonance sucking not withstanding, as that's not the fault of this particular bundle). Konami not ever making such a thing would just be indicative of yet another way in which it is shitty in this modern era.

(Post started at 2:40pm. Post actually posted at 9:00pm, mostly due to being interrupted and distracted, by things both related and unrelated to the making of this post.)
kane_magus: (Default)

Yeah, sure, Konami might have remembered that it once made games, but I'm not sure that I can bring myself to bother to remember that I once liked Konami games, especially since they're apparently only announcing remakes so far.
kane_magus: (Default)

"Konami recently held a contest asking devs to revive old game IPs. We discuss what new games from their catalog we want to see return!"



"I can picture them always making Castlevania games."

Can you, Pat? Can you really?
kane_magus: (Default)

"Castlevania: Nocturne, a new Netflix animated series, is officially in production.

"The series is led by showrunner Kevin Kolde and Creator/Writer Clive Bradley and produced by Project 51 Productions with production services provided by Powerhouse Animation. Castlevania: Nocturne follows Richter, a descendant of the Belmont family, popularized in the iconic Symphony of Night and Blood of Rondo Castlevania games."




Huh...

Well, given that I only just happened to finish watching the original four seasons of the Netflix Castlevania series yesterday (I'd already watched the first two seasons a few years ago, but I watched them all over the past week or so), finding out about this now (even though this trailer is over a month old at this point) is pretty cool, I have to say.

The original series was like a weird mishmash of Dracula's Curse, Curse of Darkness, bits of Symphony of the Night (backstory and Alucard's design), and even faint shades of Lords of Shadow (in some of the other character designs, if nothing else). It was pretty cool. That said, I think I preferred the first two seasons to the second two, even though the latter ones weren't bad.

Hmm...

Apr. 17th, 2022 12:50 am
kane_magus: (Default)
(EDIT) Welp, guess I won't be doing that. Game graphics in Lords of Shadow are glitched all to shit, and I got tired of fucking with it after spending like twenty minutes trying to look online for solutions and monkeying with graphics card settings and other such bullshit, with nothing working. *weary goddamned sigh* (/EDIT)

I think I may give the Lords of Shadow series a try again, now that I'm pretty much done with Bloodstained.

I'd played through the first game many years ago, when I still lived in WA, on the PS3 that I no longer own. I tried to play it on PC not too long ago, but I made the mistake of thinking I could handle the harder difficulty, even though I hadn't played it in years and was also trying to play it with keyboard/mouse instead of a game controller, so I gave up on it after only a few levels. If I play it again, I'll do it on the standard difficulty. I also bought the other two games a while back, but I haven't touched either of them yet.

None of that will be tonight, though.
kane_magus: (Default)

"What are the most difficult games we have played and beaten? We discuss some that come to mind!"



For me, the hardest games I've beaten were probably ones I used to have for the old school, gray brick, Game Boy. As a kid, I used to own a bunch of them and beat all of them. What I was most proud of was my eventual ability, now almost assuredly atrophied to the point of nonexistence, to beat Castlevania: The Adventure and Castlevania: Belmont's Revenge clean, without taking a hit. I don't recall if I ever did it without taking a hit, but Bram Stoker's Dracula was a pretty hard one, too. Oh, and of course, Battletoads in Ragnarok's World, which I think was a (slightly easier?) port of the original NES game (whereas just Battletoads on Game Boy, which I've never played, was its own thing, from what I can tell).

But then, there were the actually broken/poorly designed/not-really-worth-beating-in-the-end games that I still somehow managed to beat, such as Pit Fighter (yes, Pit Fighter was on Game Boy) or Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly or The Simpsons: Bart vs. The Juggernauts or Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone (the other two Double Dragon games on Game Boy weren't all that bad). For that matter, Castlevania: The Adventure could also possibly fall into this category (aside from the "not really worth it" bit).

Oh, and beating Tetris on B-Type Level 9 High 5. That was some shit, let me tell you. Or, at least, it could be, if the RNG decided to fuck you, which it very often did, more often than not.
kane_magus: (Default)



They did a full playthrough of both Reinhardt and Carrie in this. I'm glad they actually liked the game, for the most part. Castlevania on the N64 really wasn't as bad as too many people make it out to be. Not sure if they'll do a Legacy of Darkness playthrough, but I'll probably watch that as well, if they do.

I really kinda missed those guys.
kane_magus: (Default)
Hmmm... *strokes chin thoughtfully*
kane_magus: (Default)
Youtube embeds behind cut )



I could go on, but I'll stop there.

(I say liked in the past tense, of course, because Konami sucks and this is all pretty much in the past now, where it will remain, most likely, until and unless something changes, such as the slim chance of Konami miraculously ceasing to suck at some point.)
kane_magus: (kanethumb1)


This? Right here? This is all I ask for in a CastlevaniaMetroidvania game. More like this, please. Konami's loss, I guess.
kane_magus: (kanethumb1)
Stupid Youtube embeds behind cut )

You are taking two of your best series and turning them into goddamn pachinko machines. Seriously, Konami. What in the fuck.

Once again:

Requiescat in pace, Konami. You are dead to me now.

It's always sad to see a once awesome game developer/publisher fall and fail so hard like this.

Profile

kane_magus: (Default)
kane_magus

June 2025

S M T W T F S
12 34 5 67
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Page generated Jun. 6th, 2025 06:44 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios