Thanks for the memories.
Atweetfrom last week asked developers: “What’s in your game graveyard?
Games that were cancelled or no one can play anymore?”
But also beloved XNA games and YA interactive fictions.
I hope it’s not wrong that those two responses coexist.
And that idea - the game graveyard - is just perfect.
We need a game graveyard, I think.
And we have game graveyards of a sort, of course.
On Youtube I can see clips ofTabula Rasa- I can see the moment the servers were turned off.
I read that piece and wanted that game so much.
But there’s also a wonder.
It is an interesting experience to be granted a vision of something you are ultimately denied.
There’s another graveyard, though.
A very human - and as I’ve just discovered - distinctly imperfect graveyard.
I heard last week that Hyper Scape is being shut down.
Ubisoft’s Battle Royale contender.
But I loved the world.
That map, a grey-box European city delivered in the kind of detail that only Ubisoft would go for.
Was this model of Notre Dame originally intended forWatch Dogs?
But that only added to the delight: a cut-and-paste city, a swipe file metropolis.
Decked out in grey, yes, but also Thorntons selection box foils and flashes of neon colour.
I spent hours here, never playing the game really, but just exploring.
Working my way to landmarks or away from landmarks.
Marveling at the way a game never gave you the full map, just a chunk of it.
I didn’t love Hyper Scape, really.
It was so much better than that.
I loved the world of Hyper Scape.
And that’s not surprising perhaps.
Battle Royales, more than any other genre, are their world.
They ask you to fall in love with their landscape.
And then you might often pretty much make up the way you play.
And so I went onto the Xbox this morning to download Hyper Scape for one final blast.
But it’s already delisted - for new downloads at least.
It bares only the vaguest resemblance to the game in my head.
And of course that’s the case.
