Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night’s recent announcement and the buzz surrounding it has set the Internet ablaze with nostalgia and love for the Castlevania series. It’s easy to see why. From the beginning, Castlevania has been a very beloved series. The very Japanese take on the tale of Dracula, pitting a single warrior wielding a …
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Currently in development by Inti Creates and Koji Igarashi TBA for Mac, PC, PS4, and Xbox One When Castlevania godfather Koji Igarashi approached Konami with the idea of bringing the classic gameplay of franchise favorites like Symphony of the Night into the latest generation of PS4 and XboxOne, he was shot down …
In his not-quite seminal but still very good 1998 essay “F/X Porn,” David Foster Wallace dissects the lasting legacy of James Cameron’s mega-blockbuster Terminator 2: Judgment Day. (Well, more accurately, he examines the enduring stain left by Cameron’s film on the modern action movie, but whatever.) The essay doesn’t offer much in the way of …
Over the many years since the SNES and PSX had their day in the sun, their legacy and influence have still been felt with regular validity. Legend of Zelda games are still compared to SNES classic, A Link to the Past, Final Fantasy games are still measured by the stick of Final Fantasy VII, and exploratory action-platformers are leveled into a prestigious subgenre known as “metroidvania”.
As a teenager, I felt I would never age. Yet I also knew I would, and more than that, I could anticipate that when I did, everything would change. So I stood then, with confused ideas about time. The future would never arrive, yet it was also imminent. Now, my teenage years were horribly boring and sexless, so I was certainly looking forward to some sort of revolution. It was only a matter of emerging out the far side of high school, into the end of the world as I knew it. Life is a succession of points of no return, and if we find apocalyptic stories about crashing asteroids and alien invasions so absorbing, it might be because they exaggerate this fact. Popular fiction brims with characters who undergo processes of self-discovery while everything around them burns, from The Lord of the Rings to Akira. Watershed moments can be as monumental as they can be personal and private, and though graduating high school or parting with your family are not exactly comparable to a tidal wave, such commonplace events can inspire fear and trembling regardless.