Julian Gollop's Chaos Reborn Summons A Screenshot

It is, however, only a screenshot of placeholder art for the X-COM co-creator's remake of wizard wars classic Chaos, but it is nonetheless a fine thing to see this new vision of the landmark Speccy game taking shape.

You should take a look at the full res version over on Julian Gollop's site, not least because without my cropping it shows a little more of how the mechanics will work. Specifically, "The Spider is selected, and his possible actions are clearly highlighted by the interface. The orange circles indicate spaces that it can move to and still do combat. The green circles show spaces that can be moved to, but without combat. The red circles highlight possible enemy targets, with the percentage chance of killing that target displayed."

Gollop also claims that he now has a working build of the game. "In the last two months my expanded team of programmers have been busy making a playable prototype of the game, and I am proud to announce that Chaos Reborn is born! One thing we decided to do is not worry about graphics and animation, but focus on game play - so everything in this prototype is placeholder only (although I think Felix did rather too good a job on the placeholder graphics!). Testing is underway and a few bugs are being fixed."

Six-person multiplayer is even up and running apparently, featuring random spell selection and five different maps. He's also posted the full list of spells, but I think I'd be a bit of a turd to just paste the whole lot in here, so go have a read.

As for the placeholder art, I kinda like it. Obviously it needs a bit of tarting up, but it evokes the hyper-coloured weirdness of the original well, without disrupting things with too much focus on shallow whizzbang.