At the recent Eurogamer Expo, amid the gloomy gun-metal grey environ­ments (in-game and out) and the shoot-em-ups in space, a little square of light on the floor – where several large plasma screens stood – revealed itself, illuminated by a gorgeous green forest, shot through with golden shafts of sunlight as Gabriel Belmont, foll­ower of the Brotherhood of Light, dispatched one goblin after another with a whiplash strike of his pyro­kinetic Combat Cross, the ugly varmints splattering against the inside of the screen in tasty gloops of raspberry-jam blood. Sold.

Stretching right back to the heady days of 1986 and those wondrous new worlds of pixel-thick platformers, Konami’s vampire-hunting Castlevania (in its many incarnations) is a title remembered with much affection by older gamers.