In the comments Matt Sephton linked to this great look at the technology behind Shadow of the Colossus. It really does sound like they used every trick in the book - rendering off distant terrain as 2D (very subtly if you ask me), rendering fur without shaders, faking HDR and many other such impressive techniques.

I’ve mentioned the demo scene before and I’m sure some of you were already familiar with it. The problem has always been finding the truly impressive pieces and then viewing them - it can be a time consuming process. Well, not anymore. I just stumbled across this site that offers video previews of each demo along with the download link. Super easy to browse, I’ve already lost about an hour to the coding wizardry on show there. Login required but it’s well worth it.

A couple of demos I’d recommend in particular are Silkcut, an Amiga 3D demo, and 195/95, a very polished 3D PC demo with incredible lighting by plastic.pl.

Not enough superlatives or hyperbole can be applied to Shadow of the Colossus. It is so lovingly, meticulously designed, so unfailingly unique, so unspeakably beautiful, so frequently wondrous and moving in ways other games practically never are. Every victory’s sense of glory is swiftly replaced by sorrow at the death of these immense creatures. And the ending sequence stands as one of the most satisfying I have ever seen in a game, far too rare a thing.

For once, the reviews that gave it 10/10 are not far wrong - it’s so very hard to criticise the game that rounding up from the few decimals it’s short seems fair. Not since the original Unreal have I felt such a sense of wonder at a game; one Colossus literally made my jaw drop while my mind scrambled to figure out precisely how a mere PS2 was rendering such astonishing visuals. Truly an incredible game.

Maybe this is just post-completion euphoria speaking here. We’ll see.

20 years of computer animation that kids, geeks and grown ups alike can enjoy, and now us Londonders get to see how it’s done.

Bonus points for the Star Wars theme, minus points for going with Alienware and a Clone Trooper. (No idea who did this, found it on ImageShack)

This one’s been getting great reviews. What’s cooler is that it’s done some crazy first week numbers (50k) with next to zero marketing and no copy protection whatsoever.

Thanks to the Internet and the ease of communication, it is looking very possible that the balance of power in PC entertainment software has shifted decidedly to the players and away from the traditional avenues.

Well, it’s still early days yet. It’s certainly great to see digital distribution take off and support smaller studios. It turns out Savage made most of its money from the 20% of sales that were online - a mere fifth, sure, but they kept such a huge cut of that so the developers are distributing Savage 2 online only.

I’m just going to quote this from an email one of my workmates wrote and sent round, it really speaks for itself:

Here are Play’s coming soon titles

The Sims 2 : Open for Business (3^rd expansion to a sequel)
Lord of the Rings : The Battle For Middle Earth 2 (sequel)
The Elder Scrolls 4 : Oblivion Collector’s Edition (3^rd sequel, special edition)
Galactic Civilisations 2 (sequel)
Commandos : Strike Force (3^rd sequel)
C-130 Hercules (15^th expansion to 4^th sequel)
Tomb Raider Legend (6^th sequel)
CSI : Crime Scene Investigation 3 (2^nd sequel)
SWAT 4 : The Stechkov Syndicate (expansion pack to 3^rd sequel)

Anyone else wonder why the PC market is stagnant?