Lurid swear-em-up Shadows of the Damned—a 2011 action-adventure collaboration between Suda51 and Shinji Mikami—is getting a remaster. It was announced yesterday—amid a deluge of Summer Game Fest announcements—in the form of a trailer in which main character Garcia Hotspur arrives at the developer’s offices and shoots an unarmed man in the head. I think Nintendo announced that new Zelda the same way.
If you’re unaware, Shadows of the Damned is a splashy, weird third-person shooter that’s been trapped on the PS3 and Xbox 360 since it released 12 years ago. It’s loud and brash and zany—your signature gun is called “The Boner,” which should give you some idea of the plane we’re operating on here—and while it wasn’t a smash hit in its day, it’s occupied a sacred space in the hearts of fans as a cult classic for over a decade.
Thing is, of course, that the devs at Grasshopper Manufacture haven’t said anything about what platforms the remaster is going to be released for. We’ll learn that, hopefully, at the Grasshopper Direct on June 14. Then again, we still don’t know which platforms the studio’s Lollipop Chainsaw remake is going to release on, so maybe Grasshopper will keep it all a delightful secret until the last possible moment.
You’ve gotta think it’ll hit PC though, right? Pretty much everything does, these days, and the studio’s been pretty good about putting its games on god’s own platform over the course of its last several releases. Unless Sony has money-hatted the devs into an exclusive—which would probably still hit PC a year or two after release—I can’t see any reason why Grasshopper wouldn’t put the Shadows of the Damned remaster on PC.
We’ll find out soon, with any luck. In the meantime, can someone prod Suda about releasing Flower, Sun, and Rain on a platform besides the PS2 and Nintendo DS? All this gunplay and vivid violence is well and good, but some of us (me) just want to solve maths puzzles at a tropical resort threatened by terrorists and time loops, you know? You know.
