Castle Magus

"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!"

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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)

"Cinemassacre, this channel, is ultimately about nostalgia. Movies, games, retro topics, sometimes music. Everything I've loved in my early years, to the point of building little museums of nostalgia such as the Nerd room and the fake VHS 'rental store'. But today I wanted to dive into different memories. VHS ones. Filming things off TV, my favorite VHS tapes, all that sort of stuff. It's something I've been wanting to do for a while now."

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I somehow managed to miss this one when getting caught up on recent Cinemassacre videos that I hadn't watched until now, despite this being one of the ones explicitly mentioned in that top 10 thing that was what kicked all of this off.

Just as well it turned out that way, because I think this one deserves its own post.

James and his Universal monster movie purchases... He talks about getting an allowance and saving money to buy them. For me, the equivalent to his Universal movies was my old Game Boy collection. The difference is that whereas James still owns all of his old movies, I sold those Game Boy games to a mom-and-pop used games store, for pennies on the dollar, at some nebulous point between two and three decades ago. Probably closer to three. I don't even remember why, exactly. Probably to buy more SNES games instead. Either that or Playstation games. Several of which I later sold in order to buy a Dreamcast and games. Not that any of that really matters now, because even if I hadn't sold all that stuff way back then, they all would have been sold more recently, when I got rid of basically everything. (I say "more recently," but even that was already almost a decade ago, now, which is rather weird and a wee bit harrowing to actually think about. And, yeah, this is pretty much the first time since writing that post that I've even touched that old Backloggery page, too. [I was tempted to log in again and fix the error that, for some reason, Clock Tower 3 ended up in the PS1 section, rather than the PS2 section where it belongs, which I only just now noticed, but... nah, it's been that way for over 8 years at this point, so fuck it, I don't actually care.])

As of today, I no longer own any video game consoles or associated games. I sold all of that stuff to Lost Ark Video Games in Greensboro, NC. Well, actually, I do still own a Xbox 360, because Lost Ark wouldn't buy the old fat model, a Playstation 2, which I didn't even take out there to bother to try to sell because it was already on its last legs, and an old, modded Playstation 1 that I didn't even take with me to Washington when I moved out there in 2004, let alone to Lost Ark to try to sell. (EDIT) Oh, and I still have a Wii Fit board, even though I no longer have a Wii to connect it to, because I forgot to bring the stupid thing with me when I sold all the other crap. (/EDIT) Everything else is gone, though, including the handheld stuff. And, weirdly, I don't feel too awfully bad about it. I thought it would probably feel like the rough equivalent of selling one's children to do it or some such, but no... nothing all dramatic like that. (EDIT 2) I have to say that going into my Backloggery and tagging all those games with the little "Formerly Owned" ghost was somewhat sad, though. Some of them I had to actually (stealth) add as new games, since they weren't previously even in the list given that I hadn't bothered to update my Backloggery page in forever, only to then mark them as "Formerly Owned." >_> (EDIT 3) And... that was probably very close to the last time I ever even bothered to keep up with my Backloggery page, so... yeah. (/EDIT 3) (/EDIT 2)

Now, though, I still have a ton of old PC games, which Lost Ark also wouldn't buy, that I need to do something with. I'll probably end up selling those individually on eBay or Amazon Marketplace or something. I actually could have done the same for the consoles and console games as well, and probably would have gotten more money out of them in the long run if I'd done so, but I just wanted to unload them somewhere relatively convenient, so that's what I did.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the Castlevania series. Here is 1up's retrospective of the series as a whole. They were quite a bit more negative in the middle part than I would have been, and the best/worst bit on the third page was kind of silly and very subjective, as such things usually are (and, worse, they blatantly spoil several key plot points of some of the later games, so be forewarned), but on the whole I think it was a pretty fair look at the series.

The premise is simple: spooky/creepy music from video games. No categories this time or anything like that (aside from spooky/creepy), and in no particular order (but grouped by game, and with one exception to the "no order" thing), and no commentary (until the end). Just the music. There's a whole lot of it, this time, just whatever came to mind as I was writing this post. Without any further ado, let's jump right into it.

( A bunch of Youtube videos behind cut )

A few months ago, I ordered Shadow Hearts: Covenant and Shadow Hearts: From the New World. I already had the first Shadow Hearts, from a few years ago. A few days ago, I decided I finally wanted to get around to playing through the whole series, except... that isn't the whole series. So, after an initial failure with one seller on Amazon Marketplace (it never arrived, they claimed the post office damaged it, and gave me a refund), I have received today, from a different seller, a copy of Koudelka. It was just the four discs, jammed into a single paper sleeve thing, no case, no instructions, but this was mostly as advertised and the shipping time for this try at getting it was really speedy, so I'm not complaining much.

I've only just started, and have just beaten the first boss and gotten the third character in my party. So far, what little I've played of it has been pretty cool. It seems to be a bit on the easy side so far, but then most initial enemies in games like this tend to be. It's got kind of a Parasite Eve feel to it, what with it being a RPG/survival horror-ish hybrid thing.

I just hope I don't get really far into it and then find out I have a bad disc 3 or 4 or something. >_>

EBGames.com sent me a replacement for Um Jammer Lammy.

It doesn't work either.

This one was slightly more annoying in that it actually let me play about half-way through the Chop Chop Master Onion level at the beginning of the game before it started skipping and dragging, whereas the other one started doing it at the very beginning of the song before I could actually start playing.

Do they just not test the used games they get in to make sure that they work before re-selling them or something?

I guess I'll have to send them both back now. They'll probably just refund my money this time and not send yet another replacement copy, though I'd rather get an actual working copy of the game than get my money back. *sigh* Dammit.

(Taken from alessar. I meant to post this earlier but forgot about it.)

For those who have played the awesome PS1 Persona games, here is a torrent link to a trailer for Persona 3.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, this is really exciting because the Persona games are amazing (though, admittedly, I've only begun to scratch the surface of the parent series, Megami Tensei, or the various other spin-off games). On the other hand, this is really disheartening because there is probably almost zero chance of this game getting an official US release. I really hope I'm wrong about that, but I'm not going to get my hopes up too high here, at least not until more solid news is made known.