Plans fall apart, interests change over time, but an annual playthrough of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has been a fixture of my October festivities since 1997.

The Japanese version of the game — along with Bushido Blade — was the reason I sprung for a region-free modded Playstation back in the day. The tantalizing screenshots on import gaming fansites and rumors that the game might not get a North American release made short work of my fiscal restraint.

I didn’t feel any buyer’s remorse after a localized version made to these shores. It merely offered another reason to play through the game, this time with a dodgy English translation and some voice acting for the ages.

I even bought the import Saturn version of the game, whose punishing load times and visual downgrades were offset by additional characters and some new regions of Dracula’s castle to explore. With the possible exception of Dig Dug, I have purchased and played SOTN more times and across more platforms than any other videogame…and I still come back to it every October, without fail.

The funny thing is that I wasn’t wasn’t much of a Castlevania fan before SOTN. I enjoyed watching my high school pal Damian screaming at his TV while playing the original NES game, but its punishing combo of high difficulty and fiddly platforming elements put it beyond the limits of my thumbskill and patience. SOTN changed things up with a side-scrolling hybrid of Metroid and Diablo — where grinding for experience levels and gear drops mattered more than precision timing. There were still oodles of monsters to slay and bosses to overcome, but the emphasis was on exploration and discovery.

The ability to grind past any combat challenge in SOTN is seen as a point against it in some quarters, but I think that assessment misses the point. Yes, it is possible to become so powerful that the final third of the game becomes a joke, but the process of getting that powerful requires a fair amount of time, effort, and lucky item drops. This isn’t Dark Souls, but rather “flaunt what you got.”

The real joy to be had comes from discovering some new secret or rare drop or equipment combo, knowing that the trip through Dracula’s domain isn’t going to hit an impassable difficulty curve. Later iterations of the formula have attempted to cap the power creep by stricter controls on inventory and level-gating, which is probably why none have captured and retained by attention the way SOTN has.

A quarter century on, and I’m still finding new-to-me facets to the game each time I play it. That’s a more remarkable design feat than some “challenging” boss fight will ever be.

Recommended listening:

One of the bigger events that happened during the hiatus was the passing of Ollie Dog last spring. He is much missed, but he had a grand life, was much loved, and left this world peacefully.

My opinion that we should maybe wait a bit before getting another canine companion was vetoed by the wife and child, which in turn led to this energetic furball joining the household:

He’s a Pomeranian/Yorkshire Terrier mix whose official name is Apito (chosen by the Kid, after a Caribbean goddess) but he has already racked up a slew of alternative and nick names…one of which is Larry.

Why?

Well, the little dude’s extreme fuzziness has led to him being called a “miniature Wookie,” “Ewok,” and — when he’s being extra rambunctious — “baby werewolf.”

This triggered memories of the time when Maura and I were watching The Wolf Man a few years back and she blurted out “Wait, the werewolf’s name is Larry?!?” So whenever Apito is acting up, we say “he’s gone full Larry.”

Personally, I think Baby Fang/Fangpuss would’ve been a better fit.

Recommended listening:

Surprised to see my unheralded return? You shouldn’t be! This the spooky season, when dead things crawl from their graves and torment the living.

What tricks and treats do I have planned for the next thirty days? You’ll just have to wait and see. Or not. The affairs of the living are of no concern to the dead.

Recommended listening:

Eh, I’ve seen groovier ghoulies.

And so we reach the end of an other Halloween Countdown that Sorta Wasn’t. Behind the scenes, I managed to cram my October with all sorts of ghoulish delights, from 1970s made-for-TV devil movies to the original PS1 Silent Hill game to a long-overdue reread of Stephen King’s Night Shift.

It was great fun, but I didn’t feel the need to rush back here and pontificate about any of it — and I suspect the former has a great deal to do with the latter. Shaking off the sense of obligation that overtook this site is still a work in progress.

Recommended listening:

Recommended listening:

I was hoping to get a bit more substantive during this countdown but, as they say, the devil is in the details.

Recommended listening:

Recommended listening:

Recommended listening:

Might as well, I suppose.

Recommended listening:

The nice thing about clearing the archives is being able to double-dip musical selections with zero shame.

All those PSAs and parental lecture were right — peer pressure can make a person do the darndest thing.

I can hear my mom’s voice now: “If Mike Sterling bought some original comics art, would you buy some, too?”

Well, yeah, mom. Mike is the coolest cat in the funnybook blogging scene, and that would still be true even if there weren’t only a half-dozen of us left standing in 2021.

Besides, it wasn’t as if Mike was trying to tempt me with a pack of purloined Parliament Lights. At most, he reminded me of a dormant goal which somehow failed to make it on my current wishlist. Scoring a favored page of comics art was a dream deferred by concerns about storage and display space, expense, and what page might possibly justify the above.

In an ideal world, it would be the Perez/Ordway group shot of the “Forgotten Heroes” which kicks of Crisis on Infinite Earths #12, but that’s never going to happen. So I settled for my second choice — a page of Henry Scarpelli art from A Date With Debbi.

As luck would have it, I managed to find a reasonably price page from issue #8 of the series, which also happened to have one of my favorite Debbi panels ever. It’s the third one in the above photo, in which Debbi exhibits the qualities which set her apart from her teen comedy genre peers (and may also mirror those occasionally displayed by a certain Queen of Animals).

Now it is in my possession, and I can proudly say that I own original artwork by a legendary teen humor illustrator and the father of one of the supporting cast members from Jennifer Slept Here.