Screwing with What Works

Note: The following post contains spoilers, albeit for a game from two console generations ago.

Last week, I was playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which I had downloaded from Xbox Live. As you can tell from my all-time favorites list, I have played the PlayStation original quite heavily. In fact, I think SotN is the one title I have played to completion most often (save the NES Contra, which is somewhat silly to count, since in my heyday, I could finish the game three times on one set of thirty lives). After Alucard dealt the deathblow to his father for the eleventy-first time, I set down my controller -- and heard the wrong song during the credits.

Apparently, a recent update to the game replaced "I Am the Wind," the original closing theme, with a remix of classic Castlevania tunes called "Admiration of Clan" or something like that. Now "I Am the Wind" is by no means a legendary musical composition, but I cannot figure out why the good folks at Konami would bother to change the ending music a full decade after the game's first release. My best guess is rights issues, but that just sounds too much like the Game Show Network dropping Card Sharks from its lineup because someone wants too much money for the rights to show thirty-year-old reruns. It just seems silly, in my opinion.

In other news, I actually learned something new about a game I have been playing for over ten years. In my pesky quest to fill in the whole map, I needed to hit some underwater areas in the inverted castle (which, by the way, are not present in the original castle's map). I did some searching on GameFAQs, and it turns out that you need to transform into Alucard's wolf form while in the water and swim through the areas in question. For years, I had always assumed that transforming was a no-go underwater, since the bat and mist forms -- you know, the useful ones -- are unusable when moist. Who knew? Well, a whole bunch of people not named Phil knew, but you know what I mean . . .