Hmmm… well Shadow of the Colossus looks lovely until you start moving. Seems the developer didn’t realise that what made Ico so great was that the design and simple geometries worked together to make a truely tangible and seamless game world, the odd level of detail and frame rate glitches seem to indicate that in the case of Colossus the art director got free reign. I’d have been happy to wait another year to play this on a platform which could do justice to the game’s looks. Also the addition of energy bar and other on screen clutter, the slight fussiness fo the control detail, the overblown score and over long narative expositions… I know they’re just niggles but inevitably I’m comparing it to Ico and so far (4th colossus) it doesn’t match up.

Anyway it’s still beats more currently available games (shooting games, driving games, shooting and driving games etc.) but it’s sitting on the shelf at the moment because it’s literally impossible to stop playing the new Katamari Damacy for more than 45 minutes at a time. It’s like the team at Namco have dipped intio the past and found an entire new genre from the primordial arcade sludge before everything got nailed down, like scientists finding a whole new phylum in a cave on top of a mountain somehow untouched since the cambrian ‘explosion’. It’s simple pure joy, like asteroids or pac man except rolling a huge sticky ball of junk around. Buy it this lunchtime.

PS. Just one more thing about Shadow of the Colossus: It comes in a lovely cardboard slipcase so it matches my copy of Ico (L@@K first edition RARE!!!!) but unfortunately the people at Sony chose to stick a big ugly sticker on it that’s LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to get of without in someway despoiling the lovely eggshell-matt surface of the box. If you know me, you probably know how I hate labels with OCD like intensity so you can imagine that this put me in quite a bad mood. I mean seriously I allready bought the fucking game why do you need to advertise to me after the event. ARGH!