29 years later, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night gets its second PC…

Weeks after a version based on the Xbox 360 port was released, a PC recompilation of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on PS1 has been released.

Konami has been pretty good to PC users over the years, with official ports of Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill games reaching the platform in the '90s and 2000s. And in the time since, Konami has been very good at bringing back classic games, with Castlevania, Metal Gear, and Contra getting massive collections over the last decade or so. mieszalniakolorado.pl

And yet, Castlevania's crown jewel has been kept away, with Symphony of the Night's only modern port being as a part of the PS4-exclusive Castlevania Requiem collection, while pretty much every non-3D entry of the series was made available on other platforms, including PC.

Thankfully, a few weeks back PC players finally got an unofficial port of the all-time classic (ignoring that PS1 games are fairly easy to emulate), with NocturneRecomp, which brought the 2007 Xbox 360 port of the game over to PC. However, weeks later, SymphonyRecomp has been released by BlackLabelHQ. The 360 port is a solid way to play, but it is missing features like the FMV cutscenes and credits song by singer Cynthia Harrell – best known for the title track of Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater.

So what does this mean? First off, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night's PS1 version can be played natively on PC. Which alone is a great thing, but as we've seen with recompilation efforts over the years, this also opens the game up to mods and updates. As of right now it features widescreen resolutions and a built-in randomizer.

However, the potential for this to become the definitive version of Symphony of the Night is the real exciting part. Symphony of the Night's Japan-only Sega Saturn release featured an updated version of the game which included new areas, which had remixes of classic Castlevania music, and a playable version of Maria Renard. And yes, Maria is playable in the PS4 release (which itself is based on the PSP release), but that version was more akin to her Rondo of Blood playable appearance than the Saturn edition.

While there's no mention of whether Maria or the Saturn content is in the works for this port, the potential is exciting at the very least. And it's nice to have a PC version that doesn't remove the extremely '90s credits theme.

Castlevania: Belmont's Curse was made to enlighten players who "love Metroidvanias" but have "never played a Castlevania game," Konami lead says.

It seems nearly every conversation about PC gaming hardware comes back to the memory crisis, and that's because it's such an all-encompassing problem for the industry. Though we don't appear to have a way out for the next year (at least), we've seen memory competition coming out of China, with Chinese company CXMT appearing to be getting a foothold in the market.

As noted by Counterpoint, CXMT seems to currently have a 7% revenue market share, with industry leader Samsung mopping up 39%, SK hynix taking 26%, and Micron getting 25%. If you haven't been taking in those numbers, that means just four companies have a whopping 97% of the memory revenue market share.

There are a few reasons for CXMT's seemingly meteoric rise. Early last month, component makers began validating their products for Chinese memory, in order to work with CXMT memory. Then, just last week, the company made its public offering to the tune of $8.6 billion, with shares surging by 466%. That means its market capitalisation was valued at just under half a trillion dollars, making it one of the most valuable companies in China.

To top this all off, CXMT memory has reportedly been landing in HP, Asus, and Acer notebooks, though not in the US. With the big three not having the memory capacity to meet the huge demand, CXMT seems to be making it big off the memory crisis. There's a significant hole in the market, with AI sucking up all that memory, and Chinese memory is rushing to plug it up.

Naturally, more competition is better for the market, in both pricing and production. Just two months ago, Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron were all accused of anticompetitive behaviour in a class action lawsuit, and more competitors would certainly quell any such allegations.

Still, even though CXMT might help ease the memory crisis eventually, it seems unlikely it is ending soon. Just last week, Samsung said there would be a "severe" memory supply crisis next year, and didn't comment on whether or not it will follow into 2029. And even SK hynix believes "Customer demand will remain higher than our supply capacity even beyond 2030."

For now, CXMT is reportedly making plans on making even more chip plants, with a second in Beijing, as well as one in Shanghai and Hefei. The plan is to double capacity up to 600,000 wafers each month, and if the memory crisis stays as it is, CXMT will likely have no problems selling those orders. There are clear winners and losers in the memory crisis so far, and with the cost of RAM for your rig, we PC gamers are currently losing.