Reaving Souls in HD with Raina

Arrggh! A Video Game Podcast from The Waffling Taylors

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We were joined by Raina of The Ancient's Den this week. Raina has recently released an HD mod for the Dreamcast version of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, and it's bloody impressive. We talk zombie feeding simulators, the entire Legacy of Kain series, and about Raina's favourite controllers

Here's a sample of the full show notes - make sure to click through and check them out.

Content Warning

Because we're talking about some of the entries in the Legacy of Kain series - a series of games about vampires going around and doing what vampires do - we'd recommend that you skip this one if you have little ones listening, or are in a space where listening would be inappropriate.

Please listen responsibly.

Show Notes

This week's episode starts with Squidge in the Nosgoth underworld... or was it Brighton?

But before long, the boys where joined by Raina of The Ancient's Den, the person behind the Soul Reaver HD Mod, and all-round amazing person.

And Raina takes us back in time to the late '90s - gaming magazines, demo discs, and incorrectly spelt main characters - when bringing us up to speed about how they got involved with the Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. This was a time of internet cafes - remember them? - and floppy disks - remember THEM?! - and before widespread use of email.

Jay also shares a story of him playing around with the MP3 encoder on his home computer so that he could MAYBE load a single MP3 onto a single floppy disk.

I would go down to the library with a stack of floppy disks, which was my music library... I would swap disks after each song.
- Jay

And Squidge tells us that he first played Resident Evil 2 as a 9 year old.

I was so bad at playing it, I thought that it was a zombie feeding simulator.
-Squidge

Before we could talk about the HD mod, Jay asked Raina to...

Get Control of Yourself

This is a segment that we like to do every so often, which is based on a tweet from SinceSpacies - who is an absolutely amazing person, by the way. Seriously, go follow him on Twitter

Get a control of yourself!!!!!! What’s been your most fav controller of all time…
(and what controller bites the big one?)
- SinceSpacies

The idea here is that we want to know which is the best and which is the worst controller of all time.

Raina's Worst Controller

Raina chose the Xbox 360 controller.

The controller is really big and bulky, and it uses batteries... come on!
- Raina

Raina also dislikes the Dreamcast controller:

Not for anything other than the missing features. So with Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, they had to break the controls to make it work.
- Raina

Raina's Best Controller

The dual sense really surprised me... You can really feel the rope as your character climbs down, and you can feel tension when you pull an arrow.
- Raina

And both Raina and Squidge agree that the PlayStation controllers from DualShock on-wards are fantastic for FPS games:

I don't know whether it's because the analogue sticks are on the same level.
- Squidge

The HD Mod

Raina describes the origins of the mod by taking us back in time to the release of the original Legacy of Kain on Dreamcast:

They literally had three months to create the port, and that's not a lot of time
- Raina

Strangely enough, during the process of porting to Dreamcast, the graphical assets were reduced by quite a lot - meaning that the "inferior" release on the PlayStation TECHNICALLY has better graphics than the Dreamcast version.

They didn't have a lot of time, so I don't blame them.
- Raina

And Raina is calling this a "remaster" (or sorts) as the mod contains MUCH higher resolution textures which are swapped out, at runtime, by the Flycast emulator for Dreamcast.

You should certainly take a look at the comparison screenshots on the project's website here: https://www.sr1hdremaster.com/screenshots

Full Show Notes

Make sure to check out the full show notes for more discussion on the points we raise, some extra meta-analysis, and some links to related things.

Have you ever visited the land of Nosgoth? If so, which Legacy of Kain games have you played, and why is Soul Reaver the best one? Have you tried out Raina's HD mod for Soul Reaver? Let us know on our shiny new Discord server.

Let us know on Discord, Twitter, Facebook, or try our brand new contact page.

Links

Here are some links to some of the things we discussed in this episode:

• Join our Discord server and be part of future episodes
• Our Facebook page
• Us on Twitter
• Support us on Ko-Fi
• The Ancient's Den
• The Ancient's Den blog
• The Soul Reaver HD Mod
• Flycast

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