Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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Dark Horse rides Hell Boy into Cryo

Cryo Interactive have today announced a license with Dark Horse to produce a 3D action PC title based on the comic firm's critically acclaimed paranormal investigator "Hellboy". This doesn't really come as too much of a surprise to us as we actually saw Hellboy in action at ECTS and were quite impressed by the early build, in which the Hellboy character already exhibited much charisma and style. Hellboy is a rather perculiar character. An orphan, he is the unfortunate product of an illegal scientific government experiment which went somewhat wrong, rendering him a Hellish demon with horns and glaring red appearance. After sawing off his horns to improve his appearance (I'm not making this up) he decided to set off on a lifelong quest to discover his identity, his past and what his purpose in life should be. Along his travels he was recruited by another secret government operation (being as there are quite a few of them these days), the BPRD, which is made up of paranormal beasts that investigate the paranormal. The press release suggests that you liken it to the X-Files, but personally I think it sounds more akin to the "Spookhouse" organisation found in fantastic PC adventure title Nocturne. While the build we saw was very early on in development (and buggy enough not be shown to the general public at ECTS, which takes some effort as far as we could see), the game is expected to be released as early as November of this year. A console version is also in production.