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Shadow of the Colossus.
paco_pepe
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
EDIT: Ok, sorry, i spoiler-tagged the ending.
SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS
My first reaction of this game was "zelda ripoff lol" or "bosses only bosses only lol", man i was so fucking wrong it hurts.
Some dude on a horse, holding a dead girl, arrives to some temple, and asks the gods to bring her back to life, the gods say "sure, but first you must kill this 16 badass monsters", the guy says "sure" and the adventure begins.
The overworld is a strange thing, its huge, its empty, its dead, and yet is beautifull. No music, the only sounds you hear are the wind, your horse, and the eventual river or bird.
You rise your sword to the sun, and it points you the way to the first colossus, a short horse ride later you find yourself in front of a huge stone wall, this is the tutorial, you climb the wall and by the time you reach the top you have pretty much learned the entire mechanics of the game: climbing, jumping and horse riding.
Then the first colossus, an impressive sight, overwhelming, considering the size of the foe, most games would have thrown you a rocket launcher or a tank, or a giant robot, but here you only have a short sword and a bow, shit.
I knew that the gameplay was to climb on top of the monster and stab him in the weak spot, for massive damage, yea easier said than done. The ground shakes under the colossus feet, our hero comically loses its balance and falls to the ground, almost getting crushed by a stone ape the size of a building.
I notice some parts of the creature are covered in fur, and inmediately climb onto his leg, wich does nothing since stone plates prevent me from climbing on the rest of his body, then, by mistake, i take the sword out, and a huge mark starts to glow, right there on his leg where i was holding still, "well, i guess this is the glowing weak spot" so i stabbed it, to my surprise it didnt caused massive damage, but hurt the beast and forced him to kneel down from the pain, and spitted huge ammounts of black blood, wich gave me a chance to jump onto his thigh, and onto the rest of his body.
I quickly made my way to the top of his head, where another huge mark started to glow, after some righteous stabbing action, geisers of blood and screams of pain from the colossus, he finally went down.
"Yes!", i exclaimed, then some dark energy emerged from the dead colossus, and our hero gets tentacle-raped (oh, Japan) and falls unconcious.
We are prresented with a trippy light tunnel(its full of stars!) and we are back on the main temple, a shadowy figure stares at us and a statue (representing the clossus) shatters, our hero gets back on its feet and the gods point us to the next foe and destination.
Then you repeat this process another 15 times, trough plains, mountains, caves, lakes, deserts, cities, etc. The colossus get progressively more awesome, agressive and harder to beat.
Overall, my favourite battle was against the eagle colossus, above a lake, it was just incredible in every way.
This game has the best animation ive ever seen, the colossus, the horse, the climbing, the falling, the only sucky animation was the hero's walking/running motions, they just looked stupid. The controls are tight for the most part, and the momentum based running/jumpig feels really good and realistic.
The only negative of the game is the well known shitty framerate, they just pushed the ol' PS2 waay beyond its limits, lots of self shadowing, bloom, endless draw distance, the detailed colossus, etc. I wonder how the game could look on PS3/360 hardware, hell it would have looked a lot better on GC hardware.
I wonder if i got the ending right:
Tl;dr: This game is really fucking awesome and i feel bad for not having played it untill now.
Question: is hard mode worth another trip around the game?.
SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS
My first reaction of this game was "zelda ripoff lol" or "bosses only bosses only lol", man i was so fucking wrong it hurts.
Some dude on a horse, holding a dead girl, arrives to some temple, and asks the gods to bring her back to life, the gods say "sure, but first you must kill this 16 badass monsters", the guy says "sure" and the adventure begins.
The overworld is a strange thing, its huge, its empty, its dead, and yet is beautifull. No music, the only sounds you hear are the wind, your horse, and the eventual river or bird.
You rise your sword to the sun, and it points you the way to the first colossus, a short horse ride later you find yourself in front of a huge stone wall, this is the tutorial, you climb the wall and by the time you reach the top you have pretty much learned the entire mechanics of the game: climbing, jumping and horse riding.
Then the first colossus, an impressive sight, overwhelming, considering the size of the foe, most games would have thrown you a rocket launcher or a tank, or a giant robot, but here you only have a short sword and a bow, shit.
I knew that the gameplay was to climb on top of the monster and stab him in the weak spot, for massive damage, yea easier said than done. The ground shakes under the colossus feet, our hero comically loses its balance and falls to the ground, almost getting crushed by a stone ape the size of a building.
I notice some parts of the creature are covered in fur, and inmediately climb onto his leg, wich does nothing since stone plates prevent me from climbing on the rest of his body, then, by mistake, i take the sword out, and a huge mark starts to glow, right there on his leg where i was holding still, "well, i guess this is the glowing weak spot" so i stabbed it, to my surprise it didnt caused massive damage, but hurt the beast and forced him to kneel down from the pain, and spitted huge ammounts of black blood, wich gave me a chance to jump onto his thigh, and onto the rest of his body.
I quickly made my way to the top of his head, where another huge mark started to glow, after some righteous stabbing action, geisers of blood and screams of pain from the colossus, he finally went down.
"Yes!", i exclaimed, then some dark energy emerged from the dead colossus, and our hero gets tentacle-raped (oh, Japan) and falls unconcious.
We are prresented with a trippy light tunnel(its full of stars!) and we are back on the main temple, a shadowy figure stares at us and a statue (representing the clossus) shatters, our hero gets back on its feet and the gods point us to the next foe and destination.
Then you repeat this process another 15 times, trough plains, mountains, caves, lakes, deserts, cities, etc. The colossus get progressively more awesome, agressive and harder to beat.
Overall, my favourite battle was against the eagle colossus, above a lake, it was just incredible in every way.
This game has the best animation ive ever seen, the colossus, the horse, the climbing, the falling, the only sucky animation was the hero's walking/running motions, they just looked stupid. The controls are tight for the most part, and the momentum based running/jumpig feels really good and realistic.
The only negative of the game is the well known shitty framerate, they just pushed the ol' PS2 waay beyond its limits, lots of self shadowing, bloom, endless draw distance, the detailed colossus, etc. I wonder how the game could look on PS3/360 hardware, hell it would have looked a lot better on GC hardware.
I wonder if i got the ending right:
so this temple is actually a prison were some demon is being held, its soul got shattered and dispersed across the land , this soul pieces were secured inside the colossus, some millenia ago. Then our hero steals the master sword, wich is the only weapon capable of killing the colossi, wipes them out and releases the demon, who takes over him, only to get imprisoned again by the guardians of this place.
But the demon kept his word and revived the girl, who is now isolated in this place, and then a demon baby WTF?, also, Aggro lives! YES!.
But the demon kept his word and revived the girl, who is now isolated in this place, and then a demon baby WTF?, also, Aggro lives! YES!.
Tl;dr: This game is really fucking awesome and i feel bad for not having played it untill now.
Question: is hard mode worth another trip around the game?.
paco_pepe on
0
Posts
so fantastic, i've never tried hard mode or anything though, so i'll probably give it a shot once i beat it again.
COLOSSUS!!!!
Anyway, SOTC is probably my second favorite game of last gen. It was a close battle between that and MGS3.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
The music when you grab onto him is so excellent
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
same question for ICO
PSN: Robo_Wizard1
Well SotC is a Greatest Hits title now so you can get it for $20 on the reprints. I'm not sure about ICO though.
Oh, and favorite Colossus? The guy with the sword that you have to run up. Wow, that's just an amazing fight with the best song from the soundtrack.
________________
The lake collosus took me a while to figure out.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Everybody seemed to be happy when he
but I certainly wasn't.
The worm one in the cave took me about half an hour to figure out what to do because I was too afraid to walk on the sand.
IIT: I demand you to convince me to buy Shadow of the Colossus
How can anyone be happy about that?
i mean
Because this is one of the rare games that lets you think about what's going on as opposed to telling you. As far as video games go it's as quiet and contemplative as they come which is a fresh breeze compared to the Zelda games which go as far as to bold and highlight one word out of less than a dozen to pay attention to just in case you don't want to read that much.
Now, before I get flamed, I think the Zelda games and how Nintendo really allows anyone to get into them are excellent examples of game design but SotC is such a different experience and executes it perfectly. Sometimes you want to experience the atmosphere at your own pace and SotC lets you do that.
Here's another example of how the tone in SotC is slightly different yet extremely effective. I think one of the other really cinematic experiences in gaming is the Metal Gear Solid Series. But here's the main difference. In MGS you're in the cinematic experience as it happens around you. In SotC you're making the cinematic experience with the harrowing boss battles and serene moments leading to the fights.
________________
Deleted the unimportant part. SotC will make you care about the characters involved with almost no dialogue and will create more emotional investment than any 70 hour RPG through the subtlest of gestures.
Also it has quite possibly the best and most touching ending of any game ever.
https://medium.com/@alascii
Also, I never once noticed the framerate drop in this game.
But I'm conflicted over my feelings for it. I wish the colossus battles had been more seamlessly integrated into the rest of the game. I wish there was some incentive to exploring the over world besides finding nice looking places. (They had extra weapons in time attack mode, why not scatter them around hard-to-reach places?) What's there is incredible, but the game feels like a lot of good parts that didn't have enough time to develop into an organic whole.
Still, worth playing. No other video game has come close to evoking the feelings that it evokes. It's a game that's years ahead of it's time, or maybe it's completely timeless. I can't wait to see what the team does next. If they're given the time and money they need to develop one of their ideas to it's full potential, I would expect them to give us nothing less than the greatest game of all time.
True. The decision to make the world almost totally non-interactive is a weird one.
https://medium.com/@alascii
Did you collect all the fruit and the white lizard tails?
Thinking about it, this is so true it's amazing.
Sad thing is I may never beat it. My PS2 is at a friend's house, I basically gave it to him because PS2 games look like ass on my HD. Even with component cables.
EDIT: And while it is a fun and great game, I felt absolutely no connection with the story or characters. This whole "less is more" thing that seems to apply to this and Half-Life is, IMHO, bullshit.
I liked the first of the small ones too because I messed up somehow and got into this major game of cat-and-mouse (I wasn't the cat) that required me to use the entire area. I did very poorly but it was a gritty encounter.
I don't know if I have a favourite among the bigger ones. They were all pretty memorable but I didn't like the ones that shot crap at you. That's not how I wanted to be engaged by a colossus. I had a big "holy shit" moment when I first saw that turtle thing because of its sheer size but then it fired a laser at me and I thought that was pretty lame.
Also, some of them seemed gimmicky to point that they didnt feel very alive but overall it was a pretty great game. Also, the ending was pretty dumb.
https://medium.com/@alascii
I didn't get it the first time. I just held on until he got near a platform.
That was a long battle.
That was beautiful, from both a thematic and a game design standpoint
I teared up a little
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
Holy shit.
The level of world building in this game is intense, and the colossi are amazing. Favorite colossus still has to be the first or third one. I also liked the dog one that runs into the pillars, and you have to jump from pillar to pillar. Freaking epic.
Holy shit, that's the only time a video game has made me seriously almost cry.
aggro's death was the worst part for me. I think i actually went "AGGRO!" with Wander. After that I just sort of had this grim determination like "They've gone too far, lets end this." And then you see the final colossus and you start to understand.
https://medium.com/@alascii
but I think BlueDestiny's is a little bit of a more reasoned analysis.
https://medium.com/@alascii
I hear this game has awesome boss fights, but truth be told, I don't really enjoy fighting bosses in videogames. Zelda games (minus the Ganondorf fights, which are awesome), God of War 1, Metroid Prime games.. I just don't enjoy them. Would this ruin the game for me?
I think it spawns from the fact that I had so much trouble beating the bosses in Megaman X in my youth. :P
Still, a decent game that everyone should at least try.
Well you can't really compare these boss fights to other boss fights though because yeah, i kind of see boss fights as weak story telling points or just contrived. This, though, is just a natural extension of the rest of the gameplay. They aren't really as much boss fights as just part of the game. It's hard for me to explain. I know what you mean though about boss fights being annoying and this game is still one of my favs.
________________
Y
Very Y
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
Don't think of them as "boss battles."
Think of them as platforming levels that are moving and thrashing around trying to crush you.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games