This year's Astro Bot is a huge love letter to the entire PlayStation brand, mainly because it featured many VIP bots dressed up as beloved characters from classic franchises, like God of War, Horizon, Crash Bandicoot, Parappa the Rapper, and more.

Fortunately for fans, Team A?SOBI ke?pt making and releasing free speedruning DLC levels to Astro Bot after launch, and they added new VIP bots from games like Stellar Blade, Helldivers 2, and Destiny. However, fans noticed that the studio also updated the game's credits very recently, and now they list a?? new character that wasn't ??there before.

Since its initial release, Astro Bot's credits feature the cop?yright of third-party franchises that don't appear in the base game, and this list keeps getting bigger and bigger with each new update. Specifically, all the cameo-less IPs so far are: Rayman, Assasin's Creed, Beyond Good & Evil, Worms, and Croc. And now, Tomba/Tombi appears on the credits as well.

While Team ASOBI released Astro Bot's final speedrunning level earlier this week, it also talked about its other DLC plans? in the past, which means that VIP bots dressed up as characters from all these fr?anchises listed in the credits will most likely appear in upcoming challenge levels. However, we currently don't know whether this DLC will also be free or not.

Astro Bot understands the importance of all these franchises

Even though Astro Bot featured cameos from several beloved franchises that are im?portant for the history of PlayStation, some obvious and expected choices were weirdly missing. So it's good to know that more of them will arrive in the near future, and these credits indicate that Team ASOBI definitel?y knows what it's doing.

It seems the studio is collaborating closely with Ubisoft to make more Astro Bot content, and for good reason. After all, gamers still remember the older Rayman games as some of the best PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 platformers, Beyond Good & Evil gave the PS2 a thrilling adventure game that could compete against The Legend of Zelda and the Assasin's Creed series was a huge deal during the PlayStation ??3 era.

The addition of Croc: Legend of the Gobbos and Tomba is also quite fascinating. While they are not as recognizable as other platforming icons, like (Crash Bandicoot or Spyro the Dragon) these still were solid PlayStation 1 games that many people appreciate to this day. Curiously enough, a remastered version of the first Tomba title recently launched on modern consoles, and Croc: Legend of the Gobbos Remastered is set to release in the near future. So it's possible that companies are planning the addition of their ??respective VIP bots as some sort of timed cross-promotion ??for each remaster.

The only oddity in the list is Worms, because this franchise of cartoony tactical games thrived more on PC rather than on home console. But some of them launched on PlayStation systems, so its inclusion wouldn't be completely out of the blue. Regardless of these minute details, you can expect more fun levels and adorable cameos to arrive to Astro Bot very soon.

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A few months ago, Argonaut Games announced a new remastered version of Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, one of the most beloved 3D platformers on the original PlayStation. Since then, the studio has been constantly posting updates on its official Twitter/X account.

But one of Argonaut Games' most recent posts revealed a fascinating new piece of information about the development process of Croc: Legend of the Gobbos: Croc was at one point going to be a drago??n instead of a crocodile. But that's not the full story.

Argonaut Games will include an Encyclopedia (or "Crocipedia") in the new remas?ter, which will feature never-before-seen concept art that the studio discovered after its recent rebirth. It already revealed drawings and test animations of Croc as a small, anthropomorphized dragon with wings from December 1996.

Considering that the animations look almost completed and that Croc: Legend of the Gobbos came out less than a year later, it's most likely that this old version of the character got pretty far into development. Curiously enough, Spyro the Dragon, another classic PS1 platforming game starring a small dragon, ca?me out in September 1998, which explains why Argonaut Games made a tongue-in-cheek reference to him in its original post.

And before that, Croc: Legend of the Gobbos was going to be a Yoshi game

Remarkably, this wasn't even the first prototype version of Croc that the studio scrapped before the release of the game. Back in the early 90s, Argonaut Games had a close relationship with Nintendo after it helped develop the original Star Fox for the SNES. At one point, the studio created ?a concept for a brand-new 3D platformer starri??ng Yoshi and pitched it. As impressive as it was, ??Nintendo didn't want to let another company use its IP (not to mention that it was already working on Super Mario 64 at this point), so it rejected the concep??t, even though the pitch had apparently impressed Shigeru Miyamoto himself.

This rejection and the cancellation of the almost completed Star Fox 2 marked the end of the partnership between Argonaut Games and Nintendo. Not wanting to let go of this brilliant concept, the studio repurposed its rejected Yoshi 3D platformer, transformed it into Croc: Legend of the Gobbos and released it on the PlayStation 1. So now we all know that Croc was originally going?? to be Yoshi, and he was later turned into a dragon before ??ending up as the adorable crocodile we all know and love.

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Argonaut Games has revealed that the studio has reformed, and is starting this new era by releasing a remaster of one of their beloved PS1/Saturn games, Croc: Legend of the Gobbos. It’s coming to current consoles and PC.

Argonaut Games started off as a studio that developed games alongside cutting-edge hardware. They were responsible for the SNES FX chip that enabled 3D graphics on the console, as well as Star Fox and Stunt Racer FX, along with the lesser-known Vortex. Released in 1997, Croc: Legend of the Gobbos was one of their better-received post-Nintendo titles. I personally like Buck Bumble better, but the last ???time I played it was, uh, 25 years ago.

After a series of setbacks, the studio closed down. Their last game was Catwoman, an adaptation of the 2004 movie featuring Halle Berry. It was hilariously bad. I played through it, and, at times, I found i?t bordering on torturous. However, it did have some pretty great looking puddles for some reason.

For the remaster, it largely l??ooks like everything was given the polishing brush. That is to say, it looks to be mostly the same, but all the polygonal edges have been sanded down. It’s kind of a weird effect. Everything is so smooth but still so basic. Some of the textures are a lot blurrier than others, which bothers me most of all, so I’m hoping we see a bit more consistency in the final ??release.

On top of that, there will be a “Crocipedia�that features “extensive and meticulously curated digital museum containing long-lost development assets such as game design documents, concept art, animation tests, team member interviews, and much more.�/p>

I own Croc: Legend of the Gobbos on PS1, and I can’t say I love it. I think it’s the simple environments that bring it down for me. I do have some fon??dness for Argonaut and their contributions, so I’d be down for giving it another try. However, I’m more interested in what comes next for the company.

Croc: Legend of the Gobbos is coming t?o “current consoles�and PC la?ter this year.

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