Castlevania

Who's Your Daddy?

HIGH The battle with the Daemon Lord in Chapter 3.

LOW The godawful laser puzzle in Chapter 2.

WTF Who or what was the Lost Soul supposed to represent?

In a nutshell, I Am Alive's a post-apocalyptic story about a father who was trapped far from home when disaster struck, and is only just now returning to find his wife and daughter. There are a number of things that make this title unique, such as the extremely stark visuals, the dark, mature subject matter and the interesting combination of environmental traversal and highly non-standard combat which is more like lethal puzzle-solving than it is about punching dudes out.

The Half-Hearted Dracula

HIGH The combat system once all the moves are unlocked.

LOW The first several hours.

WTF Gabriel Belmont's neck is bigger than his head.

In the days before you plugged an ethernet cable in the back of your console, letting a glitch of this nature slip through QA would have been a public relations disaster on an epic scale, and would have incurred the wrath of the entire gaming community. At Konami, someone's head would have had to roll. Apologies would have been publicly made. Free stuff would have been sent out as a way of saying sorry. These days, it's barely a blip on anyone's radar—and of those that do notice, half of them don't seem to care.

After rolling credits for both the main campaign and the Overtime mode that comes after, my thoughts about the game are basically the same—it's a note-for-note reproduction of the original with a much gentler difficulty curve and a create-a-weapon mechanic that doesn't feel like a good fit for the schedule-oriented structure of play.

With great passion comes great verbosity. We're splitting this week's jumbo show in half, which means our long awaited Too Human / Dynasty Warriors showdown won't occur until next week. This week, though, we step WAY outside our comfort zone and delve into some multiplayer-only experiences, like Monday Night Combat, Castlevania: Destiny of Harmonicas, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, and more. We think we have a pretty good grasp on where multiplayer needs to go from here. Plus! Our Quote of the Week! Tim Sings! Richard Calculates! Oh. the party doesn't stop! Featuring Chi Kong Lui, Brad Gallaway, Mike Bracken, Richard Naik, and Tim "Yes, I Said He Sings" Spaeth.

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Topics discussed:

• Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
• Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance
• Monday Night Combat
• Lineage II

Please send feedback and mailbag questions to podcast (at) gamecritics (dot) com.

Castlevania Puzzle: Encore of the Night rocks.

No, seriously, it does.

It looked like the big screen adaptation of Castlevania was basically dead in the water not too long ago. Director Sylvain White was gone and all signs pointed to the film spending a lot of time languishing in development Hell. Turns out that's not the case at all, actually, as Bloody-Disgusting has got the exclusive scoop that director James Wan (one of the co-creators of the Saw franchise) has come on board the project as a director and co-writer.

Oh Konami, when will you learn? How many times have you guys tried to take Castlevania from its classic 2D origins and bring it into the 3D realm now? I've seriously lost count. It never works. That doesn't stop them from trying, though.

Yesterday, at the company's press conference, they unveiled the latest attempt: Castlevania: Lords of Shadows. I get the feeling this is probably Konami's most serious attempt to finally branch out beyond the successful Nintendo DS "Metroid-Vania" styled games. They've lined up an impressive voice cast (Patrick Stewart, Robert Carlyle, Natasha McElhone) and the real kicker is that the project is being overseen by Konami's golden boy Hideo Kojima (and it should be noted that he's overseeing—Kojima Productions is not producing the actual game).

I was going to start off this story by saying that it was bad news for the fans of the whip-wielding, vampire-slaying Belmont clan, but I'm not entirely convinced that news stating the planned live action adaptation of Konami's wildly popular Castlevania series is dead is a particularly bad thing.