Run Ningaf Terthe Deevul

Even though I was a child of the Playstation era due to coming to the console world about five years later than most people my age, I had had a notable gap in the games that I'd played for a long time. It wasn't exactly difficult to get hold of, being one of the four or five Playstation classics that were actually released in Europe, but somehow it had completely passed me by and I'd never even seen it at all, let alone played it. When looking through the Playstation Store one night, we saw Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was available, and decided that it was time to give it a try.

Hideo Kojima's invasion of the Castlevania series was going to happen much later on, but you're treated to a dose of exactly his kind of madness right from the beginning as it starts you confidently off in the wrong game. You're presented with the title "Final Stage Bloodlines", and are then led through what I was later to find out was an enhanced remake of the finale of one of the previous titles in the series. It confused me hugely when it came up, and even after going back to it after finishing the game, this time understanding what was going on, it still felt uncomfortably like something out of a dream where you turn on the television and things aren't acting as they're supposed to, and the ten o'clock news is being presented by the Clangers and they've asked them to make sure to tie every story in with the name of a kind of cheese because they've got a new sponsor but they refuse to do it because they can only speak in that slide-whistle voice and... but still, getting back to the topic at hand, you're introduced to the backstory through this positively ham-tastic demonstration of how to create an instant classic of a cutscene, then invited to take a few whacks at Dracula, being awarded invincibility if you can't do it, before you get to start the actual game.

Here, you're instead put in control of Alucard, a complete ponce with hair to rival a power metal drummer and a collar with its own postcode, who has decided that the best way to distance himself from the name of his cursed bloodline is just to spell it backwards rather than changing it to Rodge and going to live in the country. Your task is to venture into a castle full of creatures of the night who can't act, chopping them up with a selection of gradually more effective equipment while they respond by making a set of unearthly squealing noises unmatched by anything but most episodes of Sex and the City, and gather up the cash that they keep in their bat/crow/skeleton pockets. But the introduction to the main game is quite wonderful - after stalking through a darkened corridor, the lights suddenly come up, the Dracula's Castle theme starts playing, and you just know from that point on that you're in for something very special.

My first thought on getting into the proper game was much like my first thought towards many classics that I didn't grow up with - namely, "Cripes, this is bloody hard". And you're not granted any forgiveness with continue points like in today's games - if you die, it's right back to the last save point for you. So it took me a while to get reaccustomed to taking every opportunity to save, even if I didn't think that I'd really done an awful lot since starting the game. The difficulty was made clear to me when after finding the first real "level", the Alchemy Laboratory, I was completely flattened against the first boss, a deadly combination of a flying fire-spitting blue gargoyle and a sort of flamingo with a spear. I actually retraced my steps at that point, wondering if I'd wandered into a place where I wasn't meant to be yet, but the backtracking let me level up a couple of times, and once I mastered Alucard's sort of Michael Jackson sliding backwards dodge, I got past them after a mighty struggle. This pattern was to be repeated many times throughout the game.

It gets easier as you go on, though, because there are so many different paths to take and upgrades to find at any one point - eventually you even break free of your confinement to the ground, with the abilities to transform into a bat, a nondescript cloud of mist, or the world's most effeminate-looking canine*. What most impressed me about the game was just how much of it there was - it's all rendered in beautiful sprite work, and the castle is so large that it's very easy to get completely lost. This problem was alleviated somewhat when I realized that there was a map (after only about five hours), which helped a rather extraordinary amount, but it still takes a while for locations to become familiar. One other thing hampering navigation is that a couple of areas also seem to be fond of repeating rooms and enemy patterns more often than you'd think was necessary - for example, there's a bit where you have to run along a flat area with some pillars in the background and hit a scorpion-lady-for-a-tail a bit until it catches fire, then you run past it and exactly the same thing happens again, twice. Then you encounter Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, uproot it, and then exactly the same thing happens again a screen further along. Obviously, Dracula owns one of those castles from Scooby Doo where every single corridor has a grandfather clock, bookcase and doorway that just whizz past in endless rotation as you run along them.

The only way in which I felt the game showed its age was in the interface, which has a rather messy mid-90s look to it (not helped by being able to see all of its naked pixels on a modern television) and was extremely clumsy at times. I finished the game with an absolute banquet stuffed into Alucard's overcoat because the food healing items and potions are so awkward to use - you have to go into the menu, unequip your weapons, equip what you want to use, go back to the game, use the items (making him toss them disgustedly a bit in front of him), pick them up to actually get the health benefit, then go back into the menu and find the weapons that you had equipped again. It really doesn't feel worth it when you lose the amount of health you gained back so quickly anyway. And of course, there's always the atrocious acting, common to so many games of the time - but this one does it so badly that it somehow becomes part of its charm. There's a beardy man in the castle's library who you can buy things from, but "Vocal coaching" is not among them, sadly for both him and you.

It took much longer than I ever expected at the outset, but after going around gathering up abilities for ages, we finally flew over to the tower at the top of the map, battered the final boss in the same place as we had begun in the fake introduction, ( and finished the game. )

* Apart from kjorteo