I should have been a pair of ragged claws

November. Second controller can play rhythm or bass guitar.

In Shadow of the Colossus, you assume the role of a young man trying to reverse the death of his lover. He travels to a temple at the end of the world and is tasked by a mystical voice to defeat 16 colossi to bring his beloved back to life. These colossi are awesome, giant beasts made of stone, hair, and metal. Some tower over you like living skyscrapers and the ground cracks as they walk about. Though they have an unfamiliar shape, they aren't exactly monsters. You don't find them attacking villages or setting fields ablaze; they are most often pacing about a remote cove. While their scale is jaw-dropping, their gaze can leave the deepest impression; while some throw looks with squint-eyed malice, many look with open, empty eyes like a bear at a zoo. Your quest to kill these creatures doesn't allow you the unassailable moral high ground as other games do. You are told to kill all 16 of these creatures to bring your lover back; exchanging sixteen (arguably) innocent lives f...

I've been rocking out to Guitar Hero for the last two weeks and wrote the following fan mail to the awesome folks at Harmonix: Wow; Guitar Hero is awesome! The music selection is sublime, the art direction is inspired, the difficulty progression is smooth (ok, maybe not with Bark at the Moon), and the whole feel of the game is great. The loading screen help text is hilarious (the first time I saw the "Freebird" one I almost cried), everything about the game is great. I hope you sell millions of copies of the game and I can't wait for an expansion! Good luck! Soon after I send my message, Mike Dornbrook, COO of Harmonix, replied: Hi Scott, Thanks for the kind words - reactions like yours are the reason we do this. If sales keep up like they have so far, there's no doubt we'll be doing sequels. We've got *lots* of ideas for improvements! Rock on, -Mike Digging around a bit on the company web site, I found out that Mike worked on the Infocom classics Zork, Le...

I am now a proud owner of the new PS2 thanks to a surprisingly good deal at EB . Quick thoughts on it so far: Size Wow. I thought the GameCube was a small system, but it towers over the PSTwo and looks to be three or four times the volume. The size and color make it difficult to find when you are looking for it in a messy pile of game systems. (Not that I would know of course. This is purely hypothetical!) Top loading Argh, I wish it was a side loader so I could pile other systems on top of it. The top panel feels a bit flimsy, but hopefully the top loading will allow boot disks to emerge allowing region-free play. Loading times The loading time for games seems to be sped up a slight amount. Winning Eleven 7, a game that has load times of over a minute, probably had 10% less load time compared to my previous system. The 10 second load times of Taiko Drum Master have virtually disappeared. From the few games I tried out, it seemed the shorter the original load time was, the greater t...

The rolling, sticking, never-stopping, ever-swelling clump of stuff that makes a star of out everyone and everything. Namco's Katamari Damacy is one of the most original and charming games that I've ever played. During the game, you roll around a sphere around various places. Smaller objects, like tacks and matches, stick to it, bigger things don't. Yet your katamari grows as things stick to it, and the once unassailable blockades become fodder for your ever-snowballing pile of junk. The initial enaging element is, haha, look what I just rolled over and squished onto my ball. The secondary element of the continuous increasing of scale is surprisingly and lastingly engaging. Often you'll start a level rolling over tacks, rolling around the heels of towering humans. After a minute or two, you're knee high to them, then soon enough you can knock little children over and consume them! Then cars! Then buildings! The epiphany that occurs when you realize that what once wa...

Update - Here's a movie of the game from the SCEJ web site. Looks awesome! The second game by the Ico team is Wanda and the Colossus . And the details from Quarter to Three's Japanese wunderkid, Kitsume : In the game there are only three characters the designers characterize as "living" (and one of them they do so vaguely). The rider of the horse, the horse and a girl found in a wasteland altar, who they say of, "Is she living? Is she asleep? It looks like a girl who has completely lost her soul..." So the main character wants to resusciate here somehow and determines to fight the "colossus." The horse will form an important support role and by pressing the R1 button, you'll be able to get a grip onto a colossus. Then you'll be able to try and climb it and find its sweet spot. The designers say they want to make the giant golem-like creatures seem less like monsters and more like mysterious entities, as well as they aim to create the fie...

Clover Studio , responsible for the superlative Viewtiful Joe , has released footage of their latest project, Okami. (28 meg mpeg) While the movie reveals nearly nothing gameplay-wise, the game's amazing art style is gleefully showcased. Clover Studios is trying to render the world of Okami in the form of a moving classical Japanese painting. The environment in the game seems hand painted and, in a clever use of bump-mapping, Okami presents the "background" of the world is as piece of parchment. Most games attempt to develop an immediately engrossing visual style through photo-realistic rendering. To my knowledge, Okami challenges the player visually more than any game to date. The entire artistic conceipt is an attempt to make the player believe that they are looking at a moving parchment painting on a video monitor.

Serendipity! Last weekend I was doing the dishes singing FreezePop's " Science Genius Girl " and Bessie said that she wanted to play Karaoke Revolution to sing it with music. I immediately tried to defuse the situation. I dearly love my wife, but I must either be out of the apartment or unconscious when she dons the KR headset. So I humbly recommended Harmonix's sublime Frequency as an alternative, because the "Science Genius Girl" appears in that game as well. Shockingly she agreed and I got her in front of the PS2 sans headset. Bessie had some difficulty completing the initial few songs in Frequency. Her opinion of the game was not improved when the game actually booed her if she failed a level. Frantically struggling to keep this dim light of gaming interest glowing, I hastily replaced Frequency with its successor, Amplitude . Harmonix mentioned in its post mortem that they did significant usability testing on Frequency in order to make Amplitude a m...