Annotated Appendix: The Long Library

Hey, really quick...

(takes you by the hand)

(leads you down a flight of stairs)

(opens the door to a dark, grimy alley)

(whispers in your ear)

...Super Castlevania IV isn't very good.

Yes, this is my opinion, but yes, it is counter to the cultural narrative that surrounds such a long-running and well-loved series of games. Am I saying this just to be adversarial to popular opinion? Mmmmno; the entire world seems to love it, but it's not like some classic piece of art that's stood the test of time to become a bonafide masterpiece like, I don't know, For Whom the Bell Tolls or something. If that were the case, me saying that I don't like it is just being contrarian for it's own sake. I'll admit that it has such a pervasive feeling of fond remembrance, though, that it's coming close, but when it comes down to brass tacks and you feel the need to play through every Castlevania game prior to 1997, I'm going to get you good and drunk so you have no choice but to tell the truth, and I'll put 100/1 odds that you'll find it about as mid-tier in this series as most of the handheld entries (at best). This whole paragraph isn't meant to hold a finger in front of your nose and repeat that I'm not touching you, but if I get through to even one of you that Castlevania IV is overrated, I feel as though this holy mission has been worthwhile. I also think that the second Bloc Party record is every bit as good as the first (though, for totally different reasons). Fight me.

WAIT. That isn't to say that it's godawful by any stretch, and there has been a frustratingly large minefield of lousy Castlevania games in the past (The Adventure, I'm looking right at you). As most know, it was a launch title for the Super Nintendo in 1991 and did its best to shoehorn in eveything that what was under the SNES' hood as far as Mode7 programming tricks were concerned, but to the game's detriment. I've always found the pace to be strange and haphazard, and aesthetically gross to look at with its sort of marionette-style sprites. The difficulty is also all over the goddamn map, making some of the later levels downright impenetrable compared to what Simon runs into even five minutes earlier. However, and this is where I'll give its proponents their druthers, it's just experimental enough as a piece of the series to be interesting with the multi-angled whipping and slightly altered jumping physics. If anything, I absolutely love that Konami had decided to do a remake of the first Castlevania from the NES, while also (at least from my perspective) tossing in some of the quirks from the lesser known entries of the series like Haunted Castle and Vampire Killer, and is still better than both of those by a country mile. I've heard people say that it's something of an evolutionary dead end of a franchise that continued to grow, and that's a fair assessment. I don't think it's an unequivocal piece of shit, but I do not think it's all that great. But I'm glad it exists, I suppose.

Alas, this was what I needed to put myself through for the second time in six months last weekend when I realized --because I'm stupid-- that I didn't get nearly enough footage from C4 as I originally thought, which is why Episode 5: The Long Library went up on Monday this week as opposed to last Friday. The whole thing was done, but after extensive checking and copious swearing, I found that I had zero footage of the enemies that originated in the Super Nintendo mediocrity. Lucky for me and my sense of good taste that I could easily look up where the Une, Ectoplasm, and Spellbooks where and just use codes to start at those levels (also so I could get footage of the guy and his dog, which will make sense later). Anyway, Episode 5 is now a thing that can be consumed like the insatiably filthy savages that you are, you beautiful internet goofs. Go watch it.

As far as actual stuff going on in the video, this one was hard to make because of the Librarian alone. Since I'm probably never going back to this guy in future videos, I had to recount all of what he sells as the game goes forward and give enough time to say something interesting about them, but close to none of the stuff I mention is on his list of goods at such an early point in the game. It was a pain, but that's how it goes. Luckily, this episode was super straightforward, though, because there really isn't a lot of ground to cover without the form of bat. There was some dead air on the mic as I backtracked a bit, but like I said in an earlier Appendix, sometimes, there just isn't a way around that, unfortunately. Hopefully, the Royal Chapel will be better in that regard.

PS-I'm finally getting shit for my mispronunciations of certain words. I guess only one linguistics class from my undergrad just wasn't enough. One more step to Making It!

Do You Know What Dissonance Means?

Last week, after taking stock of having four videos in the can and recording the voice for a fifth (which should be up sometime later this week), I decided to take a quick break from making Castlevania videos to... play another Castlevania game. Yes, this seems both redundant and a little dumb, and I think I actually heard your eyes rolling as you read this. That's ok! I also played a little bit of The Order 1886, but come on, you really don't to hear about that, right?

I think my reasoning is sound, though, because the game I played was Harmony of Dissonance for the GameBoy Advance. Now, if you're a longtime fan of the Castlevania franchise --and I assume you are since you're reading this and following the video series-- you'll recognize this game as one of the lesser siblings to some of the other handheld games in the series like Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow. That's an assessment that's not really unfair, which I suppose I'll get to in a second. What makes it worth talking about, though, is its placement in the timeline of the franchise's releases. I'll get to that, too.

My own history with HoD is pretty mundane. It was released on the GameBoy Advance in 2002. I was 22 at the time, and since I bought a GBA specifically for 2001's Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (a game I contend is unfairly maligned), the purchase of the next game in a franchise I really, really like was a foregone conclusion. Funny enough, though, that's really all I can remember. I can tell you with resolute clarity when I got Circle of the Moon because I was flat broke, waiting tables at a fucking Chili's, and had made a conscious decision to spend money on entertainment rather than food and rent for the next several weeks. I can also clearly recall being in a Target in Bowling Green, OH just as I was transitioning out of the bubbling stream of college life into the hell bog of post-undergrad with my then-girlfriend hunting all over for a copy of HoD's followup, Aria of Sorrow. She was heckling me the whole time. It was not very charming of her. So, now that I'm reflecting on it, I can't tell you why, for the life of me, I don't remember playing this game.

What I can tell you, though, is that it's the portable Castlevania I've played the most, and again, I'm really not sure why. I mean, sure, I've got 100% saves on both of my Circle of the Moon and Aria of Sorry carts and have picked at them again over the years here and there, but I have three, count 'em, three 100% saves on HoD, and I had to actually delete one to start a new game. I don't remember loving this, or any other handheld Castlevania game that much to completely run the table on it three (now four) times, so what gives? I think I just used this as my long flight video game for a long stretch, maybe because it felt easier than the other games at the time. I can conjure up some ephemeral knee-jerk feelings of disappointment with it over the years, but that's about as far is it goes. Judging by recent events, that seems accurate right now.

But even though the game made almost zero impression on me, it's been on my mind a lot lately. Since making the Annotated Symphony of the Night videos and digging into the minutia of both the series and its creators, I made sort of a point to basically cease all thought regarding the further Castlevania games post-Symphony like I was partitioning off a room in my house or something. However, unless your name is Tyler Durden, people don't really do that, and as I was going through some of the cut content from Symphony and re-reading interviews with Toru Hagihara and Koji Igarashi (the game's co-directors), I couldn't help but ponder what direction they (mostly Igarashi) took the series after what they had learned making Symphony.

I wonder about the development of Symphony often, and any other game that's such a resounding critical success, really. Do they know that they're making a masterpiece? Honestly, I don't think most developers do; judging by how often the team says that some things "barely made the game" and how others "barely worked until just before the end," it seems logical that, like all video game development, that it was spectacular that the whole thing got finished and was working in a fair state. The fact that it was good, if not great was basically a small miracle. After all, this was a point in game development before copious focus testing and extensive Q/A, so it was a race against time to get the thing out the door (and they even convinced Konami to delay it for them while they continued to work on it, which doesn't sound like common practice at the time --probably because the publisher didn't give a shit about it compared to the other Castlevania game also in development). Obviously, some things work in development while others don't, and it's ok to assume that one learns quite a bit about game design and production --even if you've already shipped games in the past-- while working on a project. Bearing all of this in mind, you would infer that Harmony of Dissonance would have been not only a superb video game, but superior to Symphony of the Night.

But it wasn't. Even if we were judging the game on it's own merits, it's certainly not something awful (for a video game, for a game on the GBA, or even a game in the Castlevania catalog), but the added weight of both it's immediate and deep past doubles down its status as a disappointment. Harmony is a mediocre game. Worse; there's no reason for that whatsoever.

For context, let's talk about the GameBoy Advance and Circle of the Moon. Plenty of smarter people than me have spoken about the GBA's history, so in sum, it was a console that Nintendo developed years before they actually released it because, well, they didn't have any competition for a GameBoy that was already stomping every other handheld on the market. The thing was inexpensive to manufacture and housed juggernaut franchises like Pokemon. By the time the GBA actually did get set free in 2001, the parts were practically off-the-shelf and it was running on a processor that most seasoned developers knew how to tease in their sleep. Castlevania: Circle of the Moon was a launch title. Wait, no; CotM was a hell of a launch title. While of course lacking a bit of the depth of its predecessor, it was, in practical terms, Symphony of the Night on the go. But its problems were emblematic of the GBA in one fell swoop: it was extremely dimly lit, so it was almost impossible to see without a proper light source, and the sound chip was just this side of terrible. It was also a Castlevania game made by guys that weren't stewarding the franchise. Apparently, this was a huge problem.

So the task for the followup was twofold: First, it would be controlled by Iga, and would bring the artistic know how of the man that already gave us one of the best video games ever. Second, it would attempt to solve some of the first game's technical failings while still operating within the confines of what the GBA could actually do. One of those things worked, and even then, it comes with an asterisk.

But what works was an easy fix. CotM had a dark, morose color palette of hunter greens and burnt browns alongside the dark gray corridors. Harmony went all the way to the other side of the color wheel for bright reds and blues to brighten the visuals and alleviate the strained eyes that fought with the GBA's lack of a back-lit screen. As an artistic choice, it's fine, but boring. Whole chunks of the castle are lifeless and empty. Backgrounds have very little quality outside of the spots with obvious graphical gimmicks to make everything easier to see, but it makes the game feel underpopulated and sparse. The redundancy of the colors actually gets old pretty quickly, too.

This just picks at the scab of the bigger problem --the overall design. Too much is borrowed from Symphony, and not enough of it was thought through. Wisely, Harmony drops the pretense of a "secret" second castle to explore and makes it a plot point early on, which is a no-bullshit attitude I appreciate (especially in a game meant to be mobile). The problem is that actually navigating through both castles is an absolute nightmare. Rooms that warp you from one castle to the next mostly take you to the opposite side of the map from wherever you started, and since you're covering the exact same area (just with different enemies and a changed color palette), you're constantly checking your map to see where you are and where you're going, which ruins any kind of intuitive flow that the game may have. I can see that the design philosophy was to basically have you cover one side of one castle, then warp to the other side of a second castle, and then to figure out how the two meet in the middle was a fine choice on paper, I really do. But there's an over-reliance on backtracking here that's a conceit of the second castle, which is a rut that Iga's team fell into too quickly after it worked the first time in Symphony.

Actual traversal works even worse. While I can give it credit for re-implementing the dashes and slides that were taken out of the admittedly stump-footed Circle of the Moon, the need to explore old areas again and again for clues to the next location to uncover or hidden item to collect to finish the game is really hurt by the lack of actual warping for speedy travel throughout the castle. Again, I'm calling this a problem because there's double the amount of ground to cover. Once you have enough abilities to move more freely about the castles, it's a total slog to go from one to the next to double check if you missed something or maybe map that one room you couldn't reach before. Yes, metroidvania games by and large have this problem, but at least Symphony had ways around it, and I can't fathom how an Iga-produced game in this series would drop those mechanics with so much area to explore.

What's weird is that the actual construction of the castle exacerbates the problem, because most of the rooms are redundantly sized, and the few more open areas are only that way insomuch as that platforms and corridors bottleneck you back to a more comfortable size. I know that sounds weird, but since they ditched the ability from the previous game to fly wherever you feel like, the vast majority of the castle is replete with platforms to jump on and ceilings that cramp the area. It always feels like you are confined and not set free in a living, breathing location. Many of the more "open" areas actually seem claustrophobic, and it robs some of the exploration of the joy of discovery. Boss encounters are just as bad as they all take place in rooms of exactly the same size as each other, and practically all of them are of similar physical makeup, making most easily routed and steamrolled with the appropriate weapon load out. Really, as long as you can read an attack coming, you can keep your distance in these tight locations and pound them from afar.

Its place in the scope of Castlevania history also seems odd and wrongheaded on further recent reflection. Now, I'm not a timeline or cannon psycho. I (mostly) don't give a crap about how this fits into that and who birthed who and what time-traveling head of cabbage repaired which dude's fridge or whatever. But since Symphony was a game that was originally supposed to put a period on the previous games of the franchise, the fact that it was a success put the other games in the series in a peculiar state. I mean, sure, we're dealing with fiction here, and campy fiction at that, so it's not like Iga couldn't shoehorn something new into the loosely defined state of Castlevania up to that point, but part of the design of Symphony was a protagonist that was different than in previous games to help redefine what those games could be. Rolling back to a whip-cracking Belmont was both reductive and ill-fitting.

Let me clarify: I'm paraphrasing here, but the older, level-by-level linearity of classic Castlevania games was defined by the Belmont family's movement ability; specifically, their lack thereof. Symphony, then, gave us a protagonist that was outside of that mold, and holy shit, was this guy agile! He could alter the trajectory of his jump and could equip various weapons with different attack lengths and speeds. Minor though it sounds, this stuff was a drastic tonal shift for these games. In circling back to a Belmont main character, Iga's team decided to try the best of both worlds, and there's something lost in the translation: Juste Belmont attacks in a methodical fashion like his predecessors, but has the otherworldly ability to float along in mid air like Alucard. This means that there's no commitment to any movement outside of a jumping attack, so other than just tanking enemies with attack after attack, there's no threat to zipping around foes and doing your worst to them. He feels almost too mobile, even though the whipping can feel at times slow, and the exploration-heavy design of these kinds of games works against combining what worked in previous games to how it shakes out here. It seems that this was something that Iga and his team figured out quickly, because most other franchise games spun back to the more Alucard side of things, or was rejiggered just enough to fit correctly for 2006's Portrait of Ruin for the DS.

Callbacks to previous games for Harmony also feel like dipping back in the well a bit too much here, too, but that might just be a matter of taste. After all, Iga and Hagihara crammed basically everything from previous franchise games into Symphony as a way to say farewell, but it feels particularly redundant here to revisit plot points of the first two Castlevanias when they were dealt with almost 20 years prior to this.

Harmony of Dissonance was not directed by Koji Igarashi, so there's a natural feeling that it's the fault of lesser creators (like Takeshi Takedo, whom actually did direct it). This is misplaced, I feel. Really, this is the Dark Souls II problem in reverse. In that game, series director Hidetaka Miyazaki took a back seat while other From Software employees guided the game to completion. When it was release, Dark Souls II was given the misguided resentment of fans because it wasn't helmed by the original creator. I'm not the first person to say this, but there's a fallacy here that one guy carries the weight of everybody on a game's development team, kind of like the extreme, zealous end of auteurism philosophy. Tons of people make video games. Yes, it might be the guidance of a singular vision to get them there, but that's a fluid thing, especially during active development. The point of Harmony of Dissonance, though, was to wipe the slate clean of Circle of the Moon; a non-canonical side project not blessed by the Castlevania team's newfound creative direction after Symphony of the Night. In fact, Konami did their best to get the old band back together from Symphony to right a ship that wasn't even that far adrift. The fact that this game was so sub par from this kind of talent, led by Iga, is downright strange.

As a footnote to a series so beloved, it's an odd artifact. As a video game, though, really, it's fine. I didn't even get to other failings like the ponderously terrible music (it sounds like an ICOM RPG at some points, which is weird and kind of cute but really just badbadbadbad), but heaping more blame on it takes away from the fact that it's a perfectly fair game. There are redundancies and bad design choices just dripping from this game, but you could do a lot worse in portable Dracula-killing than Harmony of Dissonance in the grand scheme of things (though, if you're going to pick one, you should probably just skip the baloney and play Aria of Sorrow). Maybe in another ten years or so I'll come back around to it to see if my views have changed. Since that's exactly what I did for a game I evidently barely remember, though, probably not.

Annotated Appendix 3

Finally, Episode 4. Be thrilled and amazed (please).



This one was actually pretty easy to make, all things considered, because there wasn't as many strange and outlandish things to reference like last episode's Bela Lugosi clip. I say that with a caveat, though; it turns out that I have copious footage from PC Engine's Rondo of Blood, but only the normal route through the game. It turns out that I'm an idiot, and didn't record the alternate levels, which certain enemies are exclusive to. I guess this one would have been up a lot sooner than it is because I had to grab some more video last night, but hey, if that's what it takes to show you what a vintage Armor Lord looks like, so be it.



I went digging around the vast internets to see if there were any shreds of evidence to the Alucard Bedroom that would have been at the top of the castle, but no dice. There's some nice stuff on The Cutting Room Floor, though, which will definitely show up in future videos about our next stop, the Long Library. It's a great site for that and piles of other fun stuff, but the problem is a lot of those things don't really fit into this video series that well, like their whole separate page for unused audio recordings. I mean, I have to bring some of that stuff up, but things like alternate Richter grunts and such are really minor in comparison. Check it out anyway because whomever runs that site is a goddamn internet hero.



I guess the only other beef I might have with this one is the choreography problems. I'm really trying to get that stuff locked down. I really am.



Thanks again for watching, cats and kittens.

Annotated Appendix 2

Mmmmmk, so here we have Episode 3...

It doesn't look like it, but this one kind of took forever to make, even though it's not quite like the information dump that the first episode wound up being.

For one, the info here was a little challenging to parse out when it came to Maria and the Clock Room. It's kind of a lot of info to get through, so I tried to write a script that was as succinct as possible while also covering a lot of ground. Now that it's out in the wild, I hate it, really. This is one of those instances where I recall all of the times I dreamed about doing something like this and what I would say about any given topic. I'm absolutely sure that in my head I had way more interesting things to say (or at least more fun ways of saying them). It's done and it's out, though, so fine. Let's all move on with our lives.

This video was also chock full of little tidbits that weren't in the original script that had to be added with some re-recording later. I'm pretty sure the differences in the dialog levels make that abundantly clear. Truth is, I had to do those extra audio recordings at something like 11:30 at night when everybody's asleep in the house (including my year-old baby), so I couldn't have these saucy tones booming into my little Snowball mic.

More on that end, and really the point I'm slowly getting to, is that this has been a very complicated couple of weeks for me professionally. My work life is changing pretty drastically --and not really for the better-- and this is by far the busiest time of the year for me, so other things like video editing and script writing didn't get the attention they probably could have used. I'm glad I caught some of the glaring flaws before completing the video rendering and putting on the internet, but even though this is much lower on the priority list for me than how I feed my family and pay my mortgage*, I need to be a more careful of the script writing to make sure all of the facts are in there. This is going to be especially true for a few of the upcoming videos like the Outer Wall and the Long Library where there's lot to talk about.

Whew. Ok. Another difficult part of this video is plugging in the background filler to the backtracking moments, like when I opened up the section previously blocked in the Entrance and went back through the Cthulu/Devil fight and back up the chimney with the Marionettes. Not a super long section, but definitely a lot of silence to fill, so it was a matter of finding the best piece of trivia to inject there that's both appropriate in length and situationally useful. I tried a few different chunks of dialog to use, and they were either too long, or it made more sense to use them in a future video when there's an example that's found in the same place (like, say, explaining elemental damage).

Alright. On to the Outer Wall.

*Really, not that much lower.

Annotated Appendix 1

Well, hi there.

That thing at the top? Yeah, that's Episode 2 of the series, which was just posted early this morning. I haven't had a chance to dig into the episodes here since posting them, but the response to the first was very promising, and the comments were more than supportive. If you're reading this and you've commented, then thanks again for the views and the kind words.

Let's get into the process a bit regarding this first two videos. These both wound up being kind of awkward with the way it seems that I'm forced to do these for one reason: choreography. See, there's just too much to say about a given topic that by playing a normal game and not stopping to smell the roses once in a while that it's certain that my commentary won't be able to cover everything. A good example of this is in the first episode where I hit three big facts about the Death encounter. Without stopping there for a certain length of time, I wouldn't have enough room to talk about the Bone Scimitar enemies (both of which are unique, it turns out) and the Red Rust sword that the red one drops. It turns into real logistical problem when actually playing the game.

The solution, then, is to write tight scripts, record them in Audacity, annotate them so I know what's coming and when, and then listen to them through headphones as I'm playing the game. As you can imagine, it's kind of a painstaking process, but I'm trying to cut down on the amount of time that Alucard is either bum rushing through commentary or just standing around in silence, so I'm trying to get it down to more of an exact science.

The other problem with this (which is something I re-learned the hard way the other night) is that SotN isn't a game with multiple save files. If I complete a section and think, you know what, I should re-record that, I have to do it with a separate run of the game, which is something I'm trying to actively avoid. I think people would eventually catch on, and my schadenfreude would be lost. We don't want that, do we? Honestly, I want some semblance of consistency with the videos, and to me, that means one unified playthrough. I'm not saying that this won't happen down the line, though, so please keep your pitchforks and torches in the shed now that you know the reasoning.

The good news is that the actual recording and editing is getting a lot easier now. I've decided to put the kibosh on the PS3's smoothing option when playing PSX games. This doesn't completely translate into crystal clear pixels on a YouTube video, but it makes me feel better, I guess. I'm still using the copy of Symphony that my parents gave me for Christmas when I was 17, though, so I'm at least getting a sense of authenticity with it, even though it's not on original hardware.

The second episode was much more dry of interesting things to say, though, sadly. One thing I probably should have mentioned is that most of the enemies in Alchemy Laboratory are all old timey monsters from the very first game, other than the Spittle Bone, Bloody Zombie, Bone Scimitars and the bosses. In fact, they all come from the second to last level where you fight Death, which may have something to do with the Grim Reaper's appearance at the entrance and Slogra/ Gaibon being the first boss, but that's a bit of a stretch. Anyway, the Marble Gallery is a larger area, and I should still have more fun things to talk about more often.

Part of those fun things is something I'm going to playfully call "backtrack filler." Mapping the entirety of the game (not counting outside of the castle, which I'll only briefly mention) can take a fair amount of time, and there's definitely going to be some episodes that are a little on the quiet side as I blast through old areas to find previously inaccessible chambers and locations. I'll be using these moments to talk about as much of the background development history of the game as I've dug up. I worry that I don't have enough to fill the entirety of the game, but I suppose I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

So yeah. Part 2. It's a scene, man. Lucky for me, I have a week off of work soon, so I'll try to blast through another video within that time, because life is about to get pretty nutty for me over the next month or so.

Thanks again for watching.

Annotated Update: I Swear This is Going to Happen

Aaaaaaand hello.

Just a few updates while things are moving along. Last week, I posted the intro video on YouTube. It's still a little rough and could probably use some polishing, but I needed the thing to see see some daylight for my own sake. It's been a few months since I started this whole thing in earnest, and it's discouraging not to have much to show for it after a long stretch. I mean, I'm certainly fine playing Castlevania games whenever I get a free moment, but after a while, it was starting to feel like I made this whole thing up as an excuse to sit around and play a bunch of Castlevania games (again, not the worst thing).

Now, I get that having this crudely edited video on the internet without context seems kind of dumb, so I've been working as quickly as I can to get an actual first video up by (hopefully) this weekend.

Of course, there have been snags:

First, I decided I was going to hook up that magically little Elgato to my PlayStation 2 to get Symphony footage from that. Nope. I'm running the PS2 off of component cables, which isn't normally a bad thing if we're trying to grab footage from, say Vice City, Stella Deus, or any other rando PS2 game. The problem is that the console downsizes the resolution automatically when you plug in a PSOne disk, which the component cables can't (or won't) properly send through the Elgato. Normal composite cables would do the trick, but A: I don't have them anymore, B: I want my PS2 games look as saucy as they can on the beautiful mountain of a TV it's hooked into, and C: there isn't a chance in hell that I would go looking for some at this point, especially if money is involved.

No problem! I have a PlayStation 3, which is spectacular in that all PS3s natively play PSOne games, and they naturally upscales them to wondrous effect. But this Elgato, though, was given to me second hand (read: bestowed upon me not unlike from on high. I can't complain) and without the appropriate PS3 cable. I tried just hooking in the PS2's component cables, but couldn't get them to properly work. I didn't want to do it, but I wound up nagging the guy that gave it to me to dig around his parents' house for the PS3 chord, because it would have cost close to another $20 with shipping to get a new one. Nuts to that.

This minor setback has been solved, thank goodness. The dude found the cable and dropped it off the other night, and the PS2 components would have worked fine if I would have just been smart enough to properly configure them, so the only real "problem" here was my own idiocy.

But let's keep that trend going for snag #2 --the voice recording. Over the weekend, I decided to record the VO for the first script, which covers the moment you turn the game on through the entrance to the Alchemy Laboratory (which is still pushing 15 minutes!). Now, I solved all of my dialog recording problems about two weeks ago, so I sat down, freewheeled an intro speech that will run like a teaser before each episode, and the pulled up the first script. There were a few stumbles, sure, but that could be easily edited out. But no, this whole thing needs to get recorded again after some extensive audio surgery last night. I suppose you could blame the vodka for this, but again the real problem here was me. (Lesson: only record your voice drunk for podcasts).

Snag #3 has to do with making a better title card and an appropriate background for the videos so you're not staring into the fringes of a black abyss while they're playing. I'll get to that later today on my way through snag #4...B roll...

...Which is the worst.

I knew it was going to be tedious, but that's part of what will hopefully make the whole thing special. I want to source video from other people as little as possible for this project, which means that I need to do a lot of side stuff in Symphony (and a few other games). And, by a lot, I mean a lot. Busting out of the castle. Showing off all of the weapons with special moves. Glitching into the grate right underneath the castle entrance (ok, that one might get pulled from someone else's YouTube). It's a big job.

But that's the point.

I swear to whatever god you may or may not believe in, I'm going to get a fucking video up this weekend.

Annotated Update

So, I made this big statement about this big plan and it's turned into a big, big job. But I saw that coming, so it's ok. Really, though, it's turned into just a little more work than I anticipated, but for the amount of work I thought it would be in the first place, a "little more" really just pushes this from a massive undertaking to a super massive undertaking.

You know what the problem is? Castlevania games, that's what. I thought I'd replay the ones that I know just to get a refresher and capture good footage from them. Then I figured that I'd play some of the ones I skipped to make sure I didn't miss anything that may have been referenced in Symphony. Then I realized that if that's going to be the case, I need to play everything from every platform that came out before 1997 just in case. The point of this whole exercise is to be thorough, so I, you know, need to be thorough.

On the plus side, a very generous friend of mine set me up with legit a copy of Sony Vegas, which is a very easy editing program to use, though it's a fairly old version of the software. After a little tinkering, I'm a lot more confident in my original vision for the videos with as little compromising as possible. But there have still been some hurdles. I'm struggling to use my rudimentary pixel art skill to make a title card for the whole thing based on the actual Symphony title screen (meaning GIMPed into the actual Symphony title screen). I took a good swing at it a week ago and it needs a whole lot more work than I've been able to put in so far, so if anything holds the whole endeavor back, it could be that.

Second, I'm doing all of this --all of the video capture, all of the editing, all of the sound recording, etc.-- on my laptop. It's only about a year old and has a nice amount of muscle to it, but this thing was not built for the task I'm asking it to perform. Do me a quick favor and silently pray for it's endurance over the next few months.

Update's over. Time to finally play Kid Dracula.