3961

I loved the sense of loss every time a colossus was killed.

I’m sure the controls weren’t perfect, and I vaguely remember some frustration when I fell of a colossus and had to start over, but I think I was so wrapped up in a feeling of awe as I played that those things didn’t touch me. It integrated a simple, moving story into gameplay in a way that’s incredibly rare.

3962

SotC is just too good in my reckoning. The way they manage to describe an entire world through a single, voiceless character… the way they harnessed the technical capabilities of the PS2 in order to depict that world in the first place…

My God.

Even now, years upon years after playing it, the… I’ll just leave that to the professionals.

From my perspective as a story-reader and consumer, that game did more for me and my imagination than all of Halo and WoW. That game is a Hayao Miyazaki masterpiece where YOU get to play the protagonist. And it is glorious. Utterly, utterly glorious.

3963

There’s other stuff that’s great about SotC as well. Like when you first meet the first colossus you have to kill. Only he’s not some ancient evil, he’s just a 30 foot tall dude hanging out on a mountain top. Wandering around minding his own business. And then you start firing arrows at him and he runs over to you to swat you away like you’re nothing more than an annoying fly. You will note, that he doesn’t try to actively kill you until you start climbing on him, before that he’ll just swat you away. When you finally do kill him, after an epic feeling battle, he slowly falls listlessly to the ground, while somber music starts playing in the background. This gets more intense with each boss you kill until you realise that you’re not actually killing ancient evil demon things, you’re killing creatures that are just roaming around. At which point, the player becomes the monster (figuratively, for the moment), and that if you want to keep playing the game you’ll need to continue your path of murder and destruction. There’s only two or three bosses that I recall that would actively attack you, one of them being the last boss. The rest are just wandering, flying, or swimming around the land minding their own business.

3964

I liked SoTC. It had some problems, and I had to peek at some hints for one or two of the guys. But on balance it was very very good good. Very. Good.

3965

@Drastic: YES!

3966

That would be more acceptable than knocking Shadow of the Colossus. Best game of the last 10 years, possibly my favorite game of all time (it battles with Panzer Dragoon Saga for the position, which is aesthetically rather similar). There is not enough praise in the world to heap upon Team Ico for SotC, and should the rumors of a PS3 HD revamp a la God of War Collection prove true I may swoon from excitement and joy.

I’ve played through SotC in its entirety (yes, that includes time trials and both difficulties) four times. As Yahtzee says, it is not perfect, but it is as close as any game has ever gotten for me.

3967

Hahhahahahahahahaha

3968

They’re making remakes of these? For the PS3? This review made me wanna snag a PS2 just to check 'em out, since I never owned one.

3969

Fucking SoTC.

I gave up when I missed a jump, fell into a lake, had to backtrack three minutes, failed the jump again. And again. And again. Mounting frustration probably didn’t help.

3970

They have not announced anything officially, but the way Ueda talks about it in multiple interviews it would be surprising if it didn’t happen. Hopefully there will be word on it at TGS.

3971

This is exactly what I hate about most platformers. I don’t really see how the people putting it up on a pedestal can’t understand why this is a problem for many players. Not them, maybe, but you’d think they’d get that not everyone can tolerate this kind of thing.

One reason I’ll never replay God of War was the godawful rafter jumping room. The rest of the game was great, and I’m not even a fan of action games, but jumping from narrow beam to narrow beam with rotating blades set to kill you if you didn’t get the timing right tainted the experience for me.

  • Gus
3972

This is a good description of why I never played the game. The very first things I read lead me to deduce that it would be a “path of murder and destruction”; I decided it wasn’t an experience I was interested in.

3973

In Shadow of the Colossus, a lot of the tension came from the fear of screwing up, missing a jump, and having to start over. It was definitely frustrating, but it was part of the core of the game; bitter defeats made you eventual victory more elating. I understand that it’s not what everyone is looking for in a game, and that they would rather have less frustration or different kind of obstacles, but it’s unfair to compare this aspect of SotC to tacked on platform sequences in other games. I stopped playing some double dragon games because of terribly frustrating platform sequences near the end, but that’s because those games aren’t supposed to be about platforming and they don’t do it very well. SotC is supposed to be about tenuously clinging to giant constructs far above the ground, and I think it’s pretty good at it.

3974

Unfortunately, you missed out on an exceptional game because of a completely incorrect assumption.

3975

I still have a working Dreamcast and a copy of Dragoon Saga.
It’s like I visited a foreign world years ago, and now, even if I tried to go back, I’ve changed too much.

3976

I should put my original XBox and Game Cube away. I’m never going to play Eternal Darkness again. I kept the XBox despite owning a 360 because the supposed “backward compatibility” for Mercenaries doesn’t work, but if I ever wanted to do that again, wouldn’t I just fire up Crackdown instead?

  • Gus
3977

I’ve got my xbox purely for Steel Battalion purposes. Beyond that, anything I want to play I’ve got on PC, or it actually IS compatible. Excepting for KotOR 2, which I can’t ever make work on my PC, but lack a copy of anyway. Still, that seems to be the exception.

3978

You might also be frustrated if you tried to get it to work, since PDS is a Saturn game.

3979

The upside is I’ve heard Saturn emulation has come a long way, and my copies of Nights and Bug are still here, waiting to be loved again.

3980

I loved the idea of SotC, but was nowhere near skilled enough to get anything out of it. Most bosses took me hours to get past. Plus, there was a jump mentioned earlier in the thread where if you miss it and fall into a lake you have literally three minutes of backtracking. There are at least two hours of my life I’ll never get back due to that jump. I made it to the horse boss, which I think is only like the fifth or sixth, but gave up after dozens of tries.