Reaving Souls in HD with Raina

Players

Squidge

Jay

Raina

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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.

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.

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

Due to the recent changes at Twitter, we are unable to embed tweets at this time. We apologise for the inconvenience.

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 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’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.

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.

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

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.

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

Recent Games

The Recent Games segment will not be new to listeners, but in case you’re new to the show here’s how it goes: we go round the table and discuss one or more game that we’ve been playing recently, and whether we think it’s worth the listeners checking it out. We continue to do this until we’ve run out of games to discuss.

And this episode was no different as we asked Raina what they have been playing in between HD-ifyinf sessions:

Raina’s Recent Games

• Elden Ring
• Horizon Forbidden West
• Heaven’s Vault

Jay’s Recent Games

• Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (with Raina’s HD mod)
• Vampire Survivors

Squidge’s Recent Games

• Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (with Raina’s HD mod)
• The Outer Worlds
• Vampire Survivors

External Links of Interest

• 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

Music

Links to the music used in the podcast can be found below. Definitely check them out, because they're amazing tracks by awesome musicians.

• Intro music is Among The Stars, from the Cosmos Music Pack by Muz Station Productions
• Spoiler Break music is Spectrum (Subdiffusion Mix) by Foniqz (BandCamp)
• Pallet Cleanser music is Breath Deep Breath Clear (Wu Chi) by Siobhan Dakay
• Crickets - Crickets Chirping Sound Effect
• cheering-FREE SOUND EFFECT - APPLAUSE, CHEERING CROWD
• Soul Reaver 2 - Sometimes, a coin lands on it’s edge
• Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver - All Story Cutscenes
• Soul Reaver Soundtrack ; Underworld - spectral
• F*** this shit im out
• 8 bit friends- Friends 8-Bit Show Opening
• Outro Music is I N e e d Y o u 私の側て by G.H (removed from BandCamp)