A Shadow of Colossal greatness.

Recently it was announced that a new version of Shadow of the Colossus will be coming to the PS4 as a remake.

What interests me however is that this is the first we have heard from Team Ico (or what's left of it) since The Last Guardian. Considering the delays and dramas that went into The Last Guardian's development and the lukewarm reception it received, one would think that relations would become frosty with Sony and Team Ico. And that appears to be the case with the newest release from Team Ico would be in the form of a revamp of it's greatest success.

It's a worrying sign and a legitimate concern that the genius and vision of Team Ico has now hit a wall. Granted no one can keep such talent going for so long (the prolonged development of The Last Guardian being one such example) but it is unfortunate that the generate perception of Team Ico's output is a truly great game, an experiment and a flop (so to speak).

Needless to say, it will be interesting see what comes next out of Fumito Ueda's imagination - provided that particular well hasn't run dry.

More Xbox than Atari

In one of the most head-scratching, baffling decisions announced recently, Atari has declared it's intention to re-enter the console market with a new console under it's name.

A strange decision to say the least seeing that a) Atari have been out of the console race for over twenty years, b) they have been rebuilding as a mobile game developer and c) they pretty much started the whole console crash in the mid-eighties.

This may be easily dismissed as a case of 'Your mouth is writing a check that the rest of your body can't cash' but a fourth horse in the console race? Why not? We haven't seen that since the sixth generation so why not release a cat among the pigeons to shake things up a bit? The Steam box has more or less been a failure so why not?

I mean it may lead to another Great Gaming Crash but hey, gotta ditch the dead wood....

Boxed up

So the Xbox Scorpio now has an official name: Behold the Xbox Box One X!

Just when you thought Microsoft couldn't come up with a dumber name than Xbox One. Or lazier name.

Okay sure the first letters of the words making up this new name all spell out Xbox but that is even more lazy. Are those in Microsoft marketing department are feeling resentful? Or have too much money?

And to think that I once thought the title of 'Scorpio' had some degree of allure...

Go fish

Out of all the hours I have invested in ESO, this line of dialogue has to rank as the funniest I have ever seen:

The Right Combination

This came up as an ad for Steam sales.

 Could be a wild guess but i think this placement may have been intentional. 

Where are my dragons?

Here's a blast from the past: Dragonstone. It was an Amiga game that came out in 1994.

Original video located here. Accessed 7th June 2017

I didn't have the full game but I did play a demo of the first level (Woodlands) a lot back in the day - hey, when your system is being phased out and you find yourself short on actual games what else are you going to do?

Looking at the gameplay of this game, it's quite clear the makers of Dragonstone were going for something along the lines of a Zelda clone. of course, this was meaningless to me as a teenager as Zelda would come much later on. But, I want to call attention to two things in the playthrough.

Firstly, the pixel art is simply stunning. I will forever maintain that the 16-bit area produced some beautiful graphics that have aged surprisingly well and this game certainly makes a case for it.

Secondly, this game always struck me as being set on a remarkably small scale. You see, prior to this the RPGs I played usually required me, the player, to defeat some huge Big Bad and involved traveling through to a wide variety of diverse locales with a whole bunch of NPCs to encounter along the way. Not so with this one: based on the Woodlands level alone one gets the feeling the this game is a very isolated experience. You start in a forest as opposed to some village, there are are only two NPCs in the entire area (with the first being both in the middle of nowhere and not immediately apparent) and there is no music, only basic sound effects. All of these make for a very atmospheric experience and proof of the adage that Less is More.

Watching the play through itself, the idea that this is a smaller scale RPG is enforced with the locales themselves: They seem rather limited. We see Woodlands, a Village, a Mountain, a Port Town and finally the Dragon Isle. The small number of locales is fascinating to me: If this is representation of the game's world it's a small one. Does that mean that something bigger is happening out of the view of the player?

It may sound odd but I like this formula of 'small scale adventure with isolationist mood and something bigger may be happening elsewhere'. Wish more people would use it in this modern age.

Legging it

Where did the other half of this guy go?