Friday, November 16, 2007

Let's Play Spot the Difference!

Completed Map:


My Map:


If you wanna know how crazy I am, take a look at the above pictures. See those two diagrams of the Castlevania Symphony of the Night map? If you look very closely, you can see them begin to mock you as you try to spot the differences. I was only missing 4 rooms (if you're feeling up to it, try to find them yourself). 4 little squares away from gaining 100% and satisfying the completionist part of my gaming brain. But as miniutes turned into hours, I quickly found that might not be so easy. I started questioning myself. I started questioning God, Allah, Santa Claus, as to why they'd put me through such pain and agony?

Then I thought maybe I should stop attacking this problem like a caveman and learn to use some 21st century tools. So I whipped out Thao's digital camera, loaded up my copy of Photoshop Elements, and like a CTU agent working on terrorist intel, I got to work! It was actually a nice little exercise, because until now, I had never used a Photoshop application before. I've used other, smaller apps like SnagIt to do simple modifications, but never anything that involved multiple layers. I think the hardest part was adjusting both images to match well enough for the whole thing to be useful. Once that got taken care of, it was fairly easy to modify the completed map's opacity (37% worked pretty well) to a point where the overlay of my map bleed through quite nicely.

The best part of the whole ordeal was that, almost instantly, a light went on and the all the secrets of the Universe were revealed to me. It was like finally fitting in that last piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Well.. now that I'm halfway done with the game, I might as well get moving. This castle map isn't gonna reveal itself.





Btw, if you're interested in the solution to the above challenge, look below.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

HOw the hell did you get into that room at the beginning of the game. i mea the secret room at the beginning where the fismen are?