anaqer
3941
Must have been the sewers then.
Maybe it wasn’t edgy enough.
This week, Yahtzee reaches way, way back to Shadow of the Colossus. Apparently just to demonstrate that he does indeed enjoy playing games now and then.
Personally, while I found the review funny, I couldn’t really get into it because I tried Shadow the Colossus and hated it. Way, way too frustrating for me, and not very involving.
When trying to infiltrate a group of humans, it’s not the best idea to go screaming your head off with examples of your inhumanity.
So just out of curiosity BobJustBob, where do you come down on Shadow of the Colossus? If I recall correctly, you’re a guy who isn’t particularly fond of boss battles. So then are you a fan of SotC, which is almost nothing but a series of boss battles?
Christ, it’s not like I knocked Half Life. Besides, where did I claim to be human? Don’t aliens play games?
Pogue’s point is well taken. I hate boss battles. Shadow of the Colossus is all boss battles with a seasoning of platforming, another genre I usually can’t stand. It’s not that I have something against jumping puzzles; what I don’t like is puzzles that, once you figure out the trick, are hard to execute anyway.
I hate this, too. It’s a way that games cheat.
I haven’t played Shadow of the Colossus, but one thing I hate about boss fights, because this is another way of cheating, is the way that the rest of the game will feel really really easy, and the boss is omgwtf difficult. You need the boss fight to be difficult, certainly, lest there be no sense of climax, but you also need the boss fight to be the climax, not a sudden sheer cliff arising from a green pasture.
Same here, it’s a game composed exclusively of those obnoxiously difficult puzzle boss fights that I hate most in other games.
ZekeDMS
3950
SotC is so god even Bob likes it. That has to say something.
Besides, we’re not calling you an alien, we’re inferring that you’re a god damned emotionless android. The atmosphere, the quiet dread and the feeling of sorrow that ride through the game punctuated by the few moments of awe and wonder and even joy at the world around could carry it to me. How often do you feel joy to be flying, then remorse that the very flight you’re on has to end, because you have to kill the thing flying you around?
Combined with the subtleties of the slowly darkening hair (not even noticed by most until late game/newgame+) and horn growth, and the realization of how much you’ve been used to someone else’s ends…
God damn it, I can’t wait for the Ico/SotC remakes to come out. And then for The Last Guardian to make me cry too.
I do hate boss battles, but only because they don’t integrate well into most games. Everything you’ve learned in a game gets thrown out the window when you face a boss, in favor of that boss’s unique mechanics that you’ll never see again unless you face that boss again later in shadow/powered-up/ghost form. But that’s not the case in a game that’s all bosses. It’s the same reason why I love puzzle games but hate puzzles in other games, because they exist only as filler that keeps you away from the gameplay you actually want.
Shadow of the Colossus is great.
I never saw any of that. I remember a deadly dull introduction, followed by a fair bit of riding, and then an incredibly frustrating boss fight. Which I quit because I was having no fun at all, and sent the game back to Gamefly. SotC was one of those games that made me glad I had alternatives to purchasing games for consoles.
Maybe if I’d enjoyed the basic gameplay, I’d have seen some of this atmosphere you were talking about.
Drastic
3953
Has this rumor even been confirmed? It would be a beautiful thing if so, both for being able to see SotC in an even prettier form, but also to be able to play it without a framerate frequently brought to its massive moss-covered knees.
sinnick
3954
SOTC is probably the best “frustrating game” I’ve ever played.
I would kind of describe my experience of playing it in this way: it was like there were two of me playing it at the same time, both inside my head. The first Me was simply observing. Watching the game unfold in complete and utter awe and wonder, loving the environments, loving the tone and the music and the atmosphere, completely amazed by the scale of the colossi - the gray tones, the way their upper reaches disappear into the haze - and the way they moved and reacted to the little guy attacking them.
The second Me was the one actually using the controller and trying to do the playing, and that Me was not having fun at all. Having to constantly nudge the camera into the right position. Having to constantly whip the horse to keep him running. Trying to control the horse when he refused to jump over a certain cliff or suddenly bolts in a different direction because some invisible root is in his way. Having to get yourself into the exact right spot to be able to mount the horse again instead of just jumping retardedly in place. Trying to aim the goddamn bow and arrow. Trying to do one of those God forsaken wall-jumps from one ledge to another. Running out of grip strength because the colossus wouldn’t stop bucking, and falling all the way back down only to have to climb all the way back up again. Argh.
It was never obvious to me whether something I was trying was failing because of my lack of skill or because it was just not the right thing to do. I wound up using a walkthrough to complete it. Overall, it’s one of the more memorable games I’ve ever played, but I wouldn’t say I “enjoyed” actually playing it.
Yeah, I definitely had a love/hate thing going with SotC. I’m glad I played it, but I couldn’t ever get into a groove – think I played this over a several month period where I would beat one of the colossus, colossi, boss things and just be completely uninterested in moving forward for a while. The game was beautiful, especially for a PS2 game, and very interesting with its mood and the unclear motives of all the characters, but it didn’t really grab me. I’ll contrast that with Ico, which I think I blew through in a few hours over a couple of play sessions. In fact I played Ico twice and I just don’t see myself ever going back to SotC.
Wade42
3956
This. One could begin to accuse SotC of being guilty of the same thing, but since there’s no other combat in the game, it’s not breaking convention with other bits of the game. Sometimes the battles feel contrived (and they’re obviously scripted), but still, you’re scaling a mountain, and then you kill it. These boss fights felt like encounters with wonders of a bygone world. These are giant majestic snowflakes that you have to kill for your own (ultimately) selfish reasons.
Speaking of which, I appreciated the intimate scope of the story. You’re not setting off to save the kingdom/world/galaxy/universe, you just want your true love back. This is a man who has not come to terms with the mortality of the one he loves, and he’s going to desperate lengths to avoid facing this. I think that’s a very human motivation, and it made the story work for me.
I loved the exploration, I loved the boss encounters, and I loved the tone/story.
SotC: Damn Good.
Charles
3957
I never finished SotC. Kept getting lost in the massive overworld, eventually gave up after 8 or so bosses. Plus the framerate sucks. I’m waiting to play the inevitable ps3 port slash moneygrab.
Yep. That was my experience with both those games too. Exactly that. Like I discussed with MattKeil in another thread, the most disappointing part about the SotC experience for me is that it never really grabbed me emotionally like Ico did. I can appreciate other people’s experience of SotC and how it was good for them, but perhaps because of the frustration factor of the actual controls of the game, I was never really able to get into the game deeper than on an artificial level.
Drastic
3959
The protagonist is actually a Final Fantasy villain. He’s got his angsty sympathy-hook backstory to his goal, which he’s going to pursue no matter the damage it does to the entire world. In the end, a group of utter weirdoes in goofy costumes comes out of nowhere to drop some completely unbalanced superattacks on him right at the cusp of the villain’s triumph. (It took them so long to get there because they were probably farting around breeding chocobos and grinding to defeat optional boss monsters and the like.)
ZekeDMS
3960
Well said, and I love the way it contrasts against the game itself. The things you’re doing are world-shattering. Ancient beasts, mystic sealed away evils. The whole damn world is being reshaped by the player, yet the entire reason is so small as to bring one person back to life.
