Halloween 2012: I’ve Been Waiting 11 Months For This.

As far as my bedroom is concerned, we are now in full on Halloween time. I’ve got cobwebs spread out, a skeleton hanging on the door, red light bulbs plugged in, these really great gummy-like ghosts and bats stuck on my window/mirrors as well as an awesome jack ‘o lantern lamp thing right here next to me on my desk (2 for $10.00 at CVS!). You may have noticed that I even changed the background of the site to a super cool Ghost house theme from Super Mario World (thank you, google image search). I truly can’t get enough of this season, so with that in mind it’s time to start playing some creepy games whenever my television isn’t occupied with Tales From the Dark Side reruns. Of course I plan on posting any current news that I find interesting as it pops up, but aside from that the month of October (and I guess this last week of September) belong to write ups involving primarily two things: Nintendo and horror.

Beginning with today’s quick look at one of the most memorable stages I can uh…remember playing in a video game:

Did you guess the Mad Monster Mansion level from Banjo-Kazooie for Nintendo 64? Not a bad call but sorry, I’ve covered that one already. No, instead we’re here to bask in the glory of stage 4-3 from Super Castlevania IV for the SNES (pronounce that as one word instead of letter by letter and you’re officially dead to me).

Yes, yes. Soak in those beautiful mode-7 graphics. Along with F-Zero, this level was one of the earliest examples of what the future had in store for video games: Wonderfully pixelated rotating backgrounds. Well, actually I guess that revolution never really made it past a generation, but it did provide us middle school kids with our earliest experiences of having to excuse ourselves from the room in order to adjust our pants. Super Castlevania IV has always been my favorite in the series. The graphics are as you can see, oustanding, the music appropriately spooky and the controls couldn’t be more precise. It’s available on the Wii Virtual Console at 800 points and I highly recommend the download especially as Halloween draws near.