VinnyVania: Dracula's Curse - Part 06

Fuck this game.

This game is a real penis.

Also, DAT MUSIC! D:

Fuck this game so much

I would have guessed that Austin would roll a Tremere, actually.

Men in Tights is a movie that remains kick ass every time I watch it. Every two or three years I'm pleasantly surprised.

@commodoregroovy: WOW that is a really good version of that level 9 song. I believe the original is called "Climax", which I thought was a really fitting title for that level.

Spiders are forever.

@kevinski: Well if they're going to play that, they should play the real deal version "Rondo of Blood" on the PC Engine CD, which happens to be available on the Wii virtual console. The SNES port was basically a watered-down version of that.

Playing this game seems like torture.

Not like this...

Man, I fucking love Vinnyvania.

Someone tell Vinny you can fresh install windows 10 for free, there's an option to reformat your HD.

@artmaddox said:

I'd be really surprised if Vinny skips Rondo. The reason that I mentioned Dracula X is because I more or less expect Vinny to pass on it as a result of someone being under the impression that it's little more than a bad version of Rondo (which isn't the case). I actually prefer Dracula X to Rondo for various reason, and I think it'd be really entertaining watching Vinny fight Dracula in Dracula X. If you don't know what you're doing, then the Dracula fight in Dracula X is arguably one of the most challenging segments in the entire series.

That said, I'm actually more so looking forward to Vinny playing Bloodlines. That's my favorite of the Castlevania games that aren't in the style of SotN.

@austin_walker in regards to mo-cap data and support for it in Unity. Unity bought a Montreal-based company called Mecanim that specializes in creating tools for animation blending, mo-cap processing and animation re-targeting (take the animation from a small guy with chubby arms and apply it to a tall guy with long arms). The Mecanim animation system was included in Unity 4 back in 2012 and allows for adjustment and setup of mo-cap animations right in the editor. For example if you have an animation of a guy running you want to use but he is veering slightly to the right you can correct for this when the animation is imported and modify the animation to loop better, it works pretty well.

It was a bit hard to build really large elaborate animation trees in Unity 4 due to some restrictions and quirks with their first attempt but Unity 5 has some really powerful tools that are very flexible so I expect to see some jumps in animation complexity with games that were built from the ground up with Unity 5. There are a bunch of mocap animations available on the asset store and there are some big animation companies that are providing their catalogue of animations. But sometimes you just need to capture your own animations for contextual situations and it is hard for an small studio to get access to a mocap stage. There are some low-cost smarter mo-cap solutions out there but nothing that is commonly used yet.

Having worked a lot in Unity and to a lesser extent Unreal 4 I find it interesting that while Unity is pushing for the higher end stuff like high-end animation blending and physically based shaders you have Unreal pushing the other direction towards ease of use and a more easily modifiable architecture. At some point they are basically going to be the same engine.

DRINKING GAME: Take a drink every time Austin repeat someone. I am getting wasted right nooow!

@commodoregroovy:Originally I went that route, but I became so impossibly stuck I just restarted the game and went a different way. Goodbye Alucard.

@kevinski: That battle is such bull****, it's like the only actual hard part to that game, and since the whole thing is just a remixed version of the much better Rondo of Blood, I really think he should just skip X and just play Rondo.

Maybe it was the 20-second loop of "music" making me tense, but I was getting really frustrated for the first time in the series watching this episode.

Why not use Sypha? Why? He could've been one-shotting the dragon heads the whole time instead of making the whole ordeal that much more difficult by trying to whip them to death before the floor collapsed.

Oh no, Alan Rickman. :(