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Art book preview art book preview art book preview! Shipping August 15th! Pre-order today!

Hardcover.

Over 290 pages with many choices to make, just like the game!

The nightmare is there! >:]

@abby-howard PERSONALLY laid out ALL OF THESE PAGES

NEVER BEFORE SEEN CONCEPT ART OF ALL YOUR FAVORITE GIRLIES Couple notes: • EU friends: we're trying to finalize a distribution deal so you don't get murdered on shipping. • For folks who want to see all of this art but at a lower price point, we'll be releasing a digital version of the art book on Steam for the game's 2 year anniversary celebration (starting on October 20th)

Pick it up though!

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Castlevania: Dominus Collection (Switch)

The release of the Nintendo DS was swiftly followed by basically the perfect use of dual screens, a Castlevania with the map on one screen and the gameplay on the other. It was a couple of years out from the joyous Aria of Sorrow (at that age, it’s an eternity) so I was all over that. But it didn’t quite land the same way, and by the time of its two sequels I was preoccupied.

By the time I came to my senses the god damn collectors had got to them and driven up the price, and then the counterfeiters came after that and I wrote off the whole thing.

But lo! Konami and M2 blessed us with the Dominus Collection. As a purist I ordered the cart and so I finally got to binge this as a swan song for my Switch over the past few weeks.

Dawn of Sorrow still feels overcooked and undernourished to me. There are things you can do with all your surplus souls, but that means more grinding to have souls to use, for instance, cluttering a nicely balanced set of gameplay systems. And yet it’s still 80% reused sprites.

That said, there’s so much going on here, with the same playfulness and scope for experimentation that Aria has. Like Circle of the Moon, it’s the sort of thing that could be your only game for a system for months on end and you wouldn’t get sick of it, so I’ve no doubt it’s many people’s favourite.

Portrait of Ruin eases off on the grinding, throws in a whole lot of new art, installs a bold magic-versus-physical character-switching mechanic and is sublimely balanced. An absolute joy from a development team at the height of their powers. Breaking the game in to discrete stages in Portraits means the central Castle feels a little small but the reward in terms of location variety is worth it.

My personal favourite from this selection - and maybe a top 3 Castlevania overall - is Order of Ecclesia. The music slaps, the gothic style is both refreshing and carefully executed, and its combat and RPG elements are technical and demanding. Its world map for visiting discrete stages is a tasteful refinement of Portrait of Ruin’s idea, and villager quests add comic relief while encouraging zipping around previous locations. A game where preparing for combat can turn a boss fight from a tedious chore to a festival of destruction, and a routine enemy might become overwhelming once there are placed on screen at once.

Everybody in the opening movie has depression.

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Finally Poob has some competition.

Blippo+

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Today’s gamers will never understand how truly stupid we were in the 1990s. The least educated 9 year old Roblox fan was raised on Digital Foundry videos and press conferences. We were getting in knife fights about whether 64 bits was twice as powerful as 32 bits or Zelda is an RPG.

N64 Gamer #20, October ‘99 - The completely unbiased look at PlayStation Vs. N64.

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Beyond the bad decision of buying anything from Limited Run Games, I just don’t know if anyone will commit to the bit hard enough to… what the fuck does that say by the box art?

THEY GOT YOSHITAKA AMANO TO DRAW GEX???

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The boring bits of Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow look like this.

In the exciting bits Bigfoot is the creature I am repeatedly murdering in order to dominate its soul.

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Slightly obsessed with the ad for this hypercapitalist idle game themed on DC superheroes where there’s not enough money to hire Batman, Wonder Woman has medical bills, and the main benefit of defeating Doomsday is a giant stack of benjamins.

Yet it feels like the vision Zack Snyder truly had.

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Citizen Sleeper (PS5)

This one slipped by me at the time but talk of its sequel reminded me to check it out. It’s a branching story RPG about persisting and progressing, where the player character flees a sort of futuristic indentured servitude to a backwater in space. Each day you roll a number of dice determined by your precarious physical condition, and the numbers you get can be spent to attempt actions. The higher the number spent, the greater the chance of success.

It immediately captures the sense of living with physical or mental conditions that can constrain your capacity. On a good day, with five dice available, you can still be laid low by low rolls which encourage you to avoid risky activities. On a bad day, your two measly dice might still give you high enough scores to have a good crack at something you’d planned, but you still have to pack it in immediately afterwards. Events in the game world tick along with their own timers regardless of your physical ability to keep up with them, leading to opportunities slipping away or hazards catching up.

There’s a cast of characters here who are all in more or less the same boat as you, struggling to get by in a tangled late-capitalist nightmare that is constantly working against them. I was only able to pull a couple of these threads before an unexpected change in my luck threw me headlong in to one of the game’s endings (narrative honesty: the world doesn’t wait for things to wrap up) but they are compelling in and of themselves and reflect off each other with unexpected synchronicity.

I’ll be going back to try to do things differently.

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Total PlayStation #38, January 1999 - Review of ‘Apocalypse’ on the Playstation.

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she doesn't know about space!!!!

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Castlevania 4koma in English

In case you missed any of the Castlevania comics I translated into English, here’s some links for you.

Order of Ecclesia (Some of them were also officially translated, which you can see here or here.)

Lords of Shadow: Mirror of Fate

Judgment

Lament of Innocence

Dawn of Sorrow, Part 1 and Part 2

Portrait of Ruin, Part 1 and Part 2

Harmony of Despair, Part 1 and Part 2

Curse of Darkness, Part 1 and Part 2

Pachislot Akumajo Dracula

Pachislot Akumajo Dracula III

Finally: not mine but all the Dracula X Chronicles 4koma were officially translated into English, which you can read here or here.

Thanks to Shizumon and the other mangaka, Konami, Castlevania Realm, Castlevania Wiki, and my friends who supported this endeavour. Please share this post around to any fans you know!

Read them all at Flickr!

Read them all at MangaDex!

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(x)

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1000xResist (Nintendo Switch)

1000xResist is a high concept but emotionally grounded drama about the Janus power of memory and storytelling to hurt and to heal. A generation from now, an alien invasion and accompanying pandemic wipe out the human race, save for one young woman who is rendered immortal. One thousand years later, the Allmother and her clone children toil beneath the surface to cure the disease and retake the world. Our point of view character is Watcher, who has the sacred duty of viewing and interpreting the Allmother’s memories through a psychic Communion. The first scene is Watcher killing the Allmother in a righteous fury; the story then jumps back to her first Communion, and the beginning of the journey to that matricide.

1000xResist’s greatest strength is that it establishes and maintains the emotional stakes through well written characters and their conflicting relationships. Created during the pandemic, the game’s story is underscored by the melancholy of physical and emotional separation. When we first meet the Allmother in her mortal guise as Iris, she is a troubled teenager whose difficult relationships with her classmates and parents provide the first hints that something is wrong at the heart of her new society. Understanding where this hurt comes from, its consequences for a millennium of human life, and how it will curdle Watcher’s piety in to hatred, provides a gripping narrative drive for the first few chapters.

Memories are not truths, however, and the game smartly constructs dramatic reversals and reveals out of the non-linear and inconsistent way Iris recalls her past. As an audience, and as Watcher, we have the opportunity to judge Iris’ actions charitably or harshly, but the way these events are remembered implies a clear moral judgement. What are the consequences if we forget and forgive this wayward child? What is the cost to the human race if we don’t? Has she even forgiven herself?

The loss of proportion that comes from passing the human race through a bottleneck one person wide is an opportunity Sunset Visitor have taken with both hands. 1000xResist deeply entangles its themes, characters and plot, their links through Iris causing them to pop up out of time and out of context, and with outsized influence on one another. Threads of cause and effect link cycles of hurt, and sometimes do and sometimes don’t align with the stories characters tell each other. This error-prone interconnectedness gifts the character relationships a page-turning precariousness in the later chapters and sets up fascinating juxtapositions that I shan’t spoil here.

This combination of emotional rawness and thematic cleverness also makes it hard for an amateur like me to do 1000xResist justice. It’s been living in my head since I finished it a few days ago and I’ve pages of fragmentary paragraphs. Playing it after Slay the Princess and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, two very different games about memory, story and relationships, doesn’t help matters. Suffice it to say that 1000xResist is food for the mind and the soul and an outstanding addition to the narrative gaming canon.

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Gradius Advance - Featured in our book - The Unofficial GBA Pixel Book

The Game Boy Advance landed on shelves in 2001, dazzling fans as it put 2D worlds front and centre of its offering.

Check it out: https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/all-books/products/the-gba-pixel-book

#bitmapbooks #book #retrogaming #nintendo #gameboyadvance #gba #gradiusadvance

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There’s a charmingly janky Java mobile version of the first DS Castlevania game.