Happy Ghost Day! Oh, and I've finally started playing Castlevania: Symphony of The Night

True Blood and Twilight may have sullied their good name by turning them into androgynous, emo pretty boys, but once upon a time -specifically back in 1997 when Castlevania series magnum opus, Symphony of The Night was released, vampires used to be cool.  I've long considered giving the game a go, since it's been available on Xbox Live Arcade for years, and what better day to finally take the plunge into this horror classic of yesteryear than the thirty-first day of the tenth month?

Symphony of The Night on XBLA, somewhat ironically, feels like an ancient beast roused from deep hibernation against its will. The game is a hark back to the 16-bit days of a Japan-centric gaming industry, when the now kitsch hallmarks of the era such as poor translation jobs, silly high pitched item pickup sounds and a liberal application of cliched terminology such as '1UP' and 'Game Over' were all considered  facts of gaming life. Technically, Symphony of the Night is from the 32-bit era having debuted on the original PlayStation, but it is clearly indebted to the generation that preceded it in terms of gameplay, and is probably best summerised as being a heavily stylised, gothic 2D slash 'em up/RPG hybrid from a time early in the PlayStation's life when many developers, having cut their teeth churning out side scrollers for the Mega Drive, SNES et al, were still shying away from fully realised 3D environments.

Modern games will typically have built in tutorial sections, rendering the instruction manuals that used to be considered par for the course obsolete. Indeed, back when Symphony of The Night was released, you'd be expected to consult a glossy, multi-lingual (over here in Europe, anyway) tome to familiarise yourself with the finer points of gameplay before even booting your console. Given the impracticality of providing a physical manual for a digital release, you'd think that Digital Eclipse, the studio responsible for porting duties, would have at least imparted the basics in the 'How To Play' section of the menus - but no, they didn't. The game only really begins to make sense, and by extension become in any way entertaining, after you've skim read through a few walkthroughs online to figure out where you're supposed to be going and how the gameplay mechanics work.

After figuring out what the hell was going on, I started to see what all the fuss was about.

I'll update when I've finished the game. Stay tuned.