Castlevania: Harmony of Despair coming to PS3 this week

Konami will be bringing Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, its experiment in multiplayer vampire-killing, to PlayStation 3 on Sep 27, the company revealed via Twitter. For being such patient customers, sitting quietly without a word of complaint while XBLA players tried the game out for them a year ago, PSN players will get free access to two characters and one map which cost perfectly good money when they debuted on the Xbox version of the game.

Above: Get three friends round and see if you can all make sense of this sort of thing

Whereas XBLA gamers have been appraising HoD as overwhelmingly adequate (we gave it 7/10) since the game's August 2010 launch, PS3 gamers have had to console themselves with Lords of Shadow, last year's latest attempt at bringing the series into 3D. That, or they could've dug out pretty much any other console for one of the other installments of the series, which debuted in September of 1986 and has been averaging about one game every year since. But you can't mark your series' 25th anniversary without some sort of party favors – so PSN players will get the first round of XBLA DLC, comprising playable characters Julius Belmont and Yoko Belnades as well as the Pyramid of Ruin stage, bundled in with the game. The conversion also allows local 4-player, an improvement on the 360 version.