Than: If the atmosphere of SotC didn't grab you, I can understand that. I have to ask, though; did you BEAT it? The story, while admittedly vague and thin at times (by design), is also very powerful.
Than: If the atmosphere of SotC didn't grab you, I can understand that. I have to ask, though; did you BEAT it? The story, while admittedly vague and thin at times (by design), is also very powerful.
No. I got so sick and tired of trying to find the seventh or eighth colossus (I spent over an hour running around seeing fucking nothing) that I just said "fuck it" and gave up.
Wow, your guy's description of Bioshock is awesome, makes me excited to play it (got it for christmas, going to beat one of the two games I'm playing first).
jeddy lee on
Backlog Challenge: 0%
0/8
PS2
FF X replay
PS3
God of War 1&2 HD
Rachet and Clank Future
MGS 4
Prince of Persia
Bioshock was fucking beautiful. I'm not sure where you get the "uglier" art design from. It was less simplistic, certainly, but not uglier, by any means.
You don't think a claustrophobic dystopian flooded necropolis is "uglier" than SoTC's beautiful world? I mean ... it was neat looking. The art deco was cool. But it wasn't beautiful to behold or anything.
And who the fuck gives a shit about choices? You don't get to make any choices in SotC, meaningful or not, so I don't see how that's a point for Colossus.
I remember that this was one of the "selling points" of Bioshock, that you can "choose" whether or not to kill the little girls and this was supposed to be this momentous and morally significant thing, when it was really just more like choosing Dante's fighting style in Devil May Cry. But to be fair, you never mentioned this so nevermind.
And the gameplay on SotC really didn't seem like anything special to me, either. It seemed like a pretty standard Zelda-style adventure game, so I'm not really seeing how that makes it any better, either.
What I liked about SoTC's gameplay was how pared down it was. I talked about how I think it captured the "core" of the adventure game experience. There wasn't any peripheral bullshit (well, there was with the lizards but that is entirely optional). Whereas Bioshock, like almost every game, has all this peripheral bullshit; people you need to talk to in order to advance, items you need to get, boring normal enemy fights to slog through.
And I'm not typically a fan of FPSes, either; I'd much rather play God of War than most FPSes, but the fact is that in spite of my genre bias in favor of SotC, it was a shitty game in comparison to Bioshock.
God of War is a good example of a game that ... is not nearly as good as Devil May Cry 1 or 3.
Actually I think DMC vs. God of War is something that might be helpful to talk about. The "point" of both games, on an emotional level, is basically to make you the player feel like a total badass.
GoW does this by assisting the player in a lot of ways, automating the "badass" actions. So, in order to make Kratos do a bunch of awesome shit, you just need to press 3 buttons Simon-Says style, and he does it on screen.
DMC takes a very different approach. It's way harder. You can make Dante do awesome shit too, but you need to work for it, and you need to specify each particular badass thing he does with an input in a complicated chain.
Now, we could just compare the gameplay in DMC and GoW. DMC, especially DMC3, because of the level of input the player has, results in much richer, more complicated gameplay (in many ways DMC plays almost like a fighting game sometimes).
But I don't care about complex gameplay for its own sake. I liked the gameplay in DMC and DMC3 because it has a synergy with the "point" of the games—which is to make you feel like a badass. When you play these games and are forced to actually perform each step of all the complicated badass things Dante does, the result is a visceral sense of badassness. It enhances the "reality" of the experience, the sense of actually being there, being Dante. This synergy is much weaker in GoW, where a lot of Kratos' actions are basically on autopilot and you feel more like you're watching a movie.
SoTC is a completely different game than DMC or GoW but I think its gameplay and game design also have a strong synergy with the "point" of the experience ... whereas Bioshock's is much weaker. When you play Bioshock, it mostly feels like you're playing a standard FPS that takes place in an awesome environment, but that environment is peripheral to the experience. It doesn't meld with it. Compare Bioshock with Metroid, which really does, through its gameplay, force you to interact with the environment, to feel as though you really are Samus Aran and trapped in these claustropobic alien places.
I think all the elements of a videogames should work together to create a cogent experience. Bioshock, when I played it, didn't do this as well as SoTC, or RE4, or DMC3. It did to some extent, but it is easy to separate Bioshock's gameplay from the rest of the experience; one doesn't depend on the other. The same can be said for Final Fantasy games.
I mean, you pretty much didn't give a single area where SotC was actually better than Bioshock, just a couple of things in which Bioshock was slightly lacking, and your own personal bias against FPSes.
In short, I thought SoTC had a much greater emotional resonance than Bioshock, and that it was a "purer" game in the sense of just delivering this emotional resonance and forgetting about the rest of the shit in a traditional videogame.
IMO, Bioshock was awesome up to a point, then nose-dived rather quickly. At least in terms of story.
*edit* Also, after all their talk about water effects, and hiring people just to work on them, the fact that I could walk through a stream of water and get no splashing effect, just see the clipping from the backsides of the polygons, was really disappointing.
TV: Dave Chappelle, Killin' Em Softly (Arrested Development if limited to series only)
Movie: City of God
Album: Amy Winehouse, Back to Black
Book: Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Game: Beyond Good & Evil
Meme: Lolcats or Chuck Norris
BubbaT on
0
Options
amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
I actually found Viva La Vida much better, it just has much more variety while remaining good. To each their own I suppose, it's your list, not mine.
I'm going on pure pop culture impact, and Viva was after their whole "we're currently the most popular band in the world, so we're going to take 15 years off and raise our kids, but psych, we're coming back a year later to put out a glorified single" bit. It didn't register as hard imo
edit: on a more frightening note...
I was gonna say the biggest meme of the decade was goatse, so I went to wikipedia to safely look up info on it and get a date.
First, It was 1999, so I couldn't use it.
Second, fucking wikipedia has a picture of a mans gaping asshole for the article. The article got goatse'd
Rickrolling is obviously the best meme of the decade.
Oh, you changed my mind. It was glorious.
I feel ashamed that I didn't think of that.
Hmmm, people are talking about impact rather than favorites, so I'll take my hand at impact.
Movie: Lord of the Rings trilogy defined what a sci fi/fantasy epic should be like, and extended the overall length of a blockbuster from 1:45 to averaging 2:30 in length.
Music: This is a hard one. I would say the most impact would probably be a pop or rap album. Perhaps "The Black Album" by Jay-Z, or "The Grey Album" by Danger Mouse / Jay-Z / The Beatles. The Black Album for showing how intense and socially aware mainstream rap could be made, adding inflection and emotion accenting the bass and beats. The Grey Album for showing the power of user generated media, and a new focus on producers rather than artists.
TV Show: Colbert Report I'm not sure anything has really captured frustrated youth's opinion of politics like Stephen Colbert's show. That thing was and still is a monster, and it astounds me the things Colbert is able to do with it.
Book: Avengers: Dissasembled I know it's a comic book, but everything current in the marvel universe stems out of the events of that title, not to mention it's what allowed BMBendis to really take a crack at impacting 616, which led to him pretty much holding the reigns for story direction at Marvel.
Meme: Rickroll was the new Goatse, trapping people with something awful.
Video Game: Wii Sports. I don't know that I really need to explain it further than that.
jeddy lee on
Backlog Challenge: 0%
0/8
PS2
FF X replay
PS3
God of War 1&2 HD
Rachet and Clank Future
MGS 4
Prince of Persia
Decade's Best Meme: Rickrolling
Biggest Disappointment of the Decade: Election '04
Product of the Decade: The smart phone/pimped out cellphones
Actor of the Decade: Robert Downey, Jr
Trend of the Decade: Free public wi-fi
Biggest Surprise of the Decade: A black president? Really?
Was a jRPG on the Dreamcast that successfully managed to avoid being overbearing with jRPG tropes.
Except for the random battles. Oh fucking God, the random battles. I've heard the Gamecube port tones down the "fuck you for daring to move an inch in any direction, have a random battle!" slightly, though.
Music: This is a hard one. I would say the most impact would probably be a pop or rap album. Perhaps "The Black Album" by Jay-Z, or "The Grey Album" by Danger Mouse / Jay-Z / The Beatles. The Black Album for showing how intense and socially aware mainstream rap could be made, adding inflection and emotion accenting the bass and beats. The Grey Album for showing the power of user generated media, and a new focus on producers rather than artists.
Was a jRPG on the Dreamcast that successfully managed to avoid being overbearing with jRPG tropes.
Except for the random battles. Oh fucking God, the random battles. I've heard the Gamecube port tones down the "fuck you for daring to move an inch in any direction, have a random battle!" slightly, though.
I honestly don't remember it being significantly worse than FFVII in that regard, but it was bitched about quite a bit.
Was a jRPG on the Dreamcast that successfully managed to avoid being overbearing with jRPG tropes.
Except for the random battles. Oh fucking God, the random battles. I've heard the Gamecube port tones down the "fuck you for daring to move an inch in any direction, have a random battle!" slightly, though.
Music: This is a hard one. I would say the most impact would probably be a pop or rap album. Perhaps "The Black Album" by Jay-Z, or "The Grey Album" by Danger Mouse / Jay-Z / The Beatles. The Black Album for showing how intense and socially aware mainstream rap could be made, adding inflection and emotion accenting the bass and beats. The Grey Album for showing the power of user generated media, and a new focus on producers rather than artists.
Public Enemy and Giorgio Moroder say hello. :P
I'd probably go with something from a more esoteric genre that still managed to gain notoriety, as that is the signal that the industry has been looking for. Similarly, District 9, Paranormal Activity, and Avatar seem to indicate that you can't go inoffensive to get cash anymore, but instead need to sither go niche or find a way to get out of the pack early.
John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk at Carnegie Hall: I imagine different posters will have wildly different albums they list based on what music they like. I'll list this one even though it was recorded in 1957. It's here because it was found - in an unmarked box by some random guy looking through the library of congress archives - in 2005. Monk and Coltrane are both legends and prior to this album there were only three tracks of them playing together, now there's a whole live performance and best of all they both play well. It's like someone just stumbled across another Beethoven symphony like "oh, we must have missed this one."
This happens all the time. People are constantly stumbling across long-last Bach pieces, especially (mostly because he was so prolific).
I chose Beethoven because it's well known he wrote nine symphonies and finding another one would be a big deal.
I don't see how you can say SoTC failed, as though it was trying to be another game and couldn't pull it off. You may not have liked it, but the stuff you didn't like (walking around) was part of what made it cool for those of us who did like it.
John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk at Carnegie Hall: I imagine different posters will have wildly different albums they list based on what music they like. I'll list this one even though it was recorded in 1957. It's here because it was found - in an unmarked box by some random guy looking through the library of congress archives - in 2005. Monk and Coltrane are both legends and prior to this album there were only three tracks of them playing together, now there's a whole live performance and best of all they both play well. It's like someone just stumbled across another Beethoven symphony like "oh, we must have missed this one."
This happens all the time. People are constantly stumbling across long-last Bach pieces, especially (mostly because he was so prolific).
I chose Beethoven because it's well known he wrote nine symphonies and finding another one would be a big deal.
I don't see how you can say SoTC failed, as though it was trying to be another game and couldn't pull it off. You may not have liked it, but the stuff you didn't like (walking around) was part of what made it cool for those of us who did like it.
I never played Shadow of the Colossus, but I really enjoyed the banality of seafaring in Windwaker.
Music: This is a hard one. I would say the most impact would probably be a pop or rap album. Perhaps "The Black Album" by Jay-Z, or "The Grey Album" by Danger Mouse / Jay-Z / The Beatles. The Black Album for showing how intense and socially aware mainstream rap could be made, adding inflection and emotion accenting the bass and beats. The Grey Album for showing the power of user generated media, and a new focus on producers rather than artists.
Public Enemy and Giorgio Moroder say hello. :P
Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the 90's, and I would say Public Enemy was a huge influence on Jay Z, but they no where near reached the mainstream appeal that Jay Z did. It's that Jayz retained his "Hardcore thug" cred with the mainstream media, but interjected some of the most intelligent lyrics to hit the top 10 in the US.
Anyway, I change my mind on most important album. The radio head album that they gave away for free on their website, that is the most important album of the decade. It represents the movement in the digital revolution, it also gave more power to the artists who create the music.
jeddy lee on
Backlog Challenge: 0%
0/8
PS2
FF X replay
PS3
God of War 1&2 HD
Rachet and Clank Future
MGS 4
Prince of Persia
Posts
PS2
FF X replay
PS3
God of War 1&2 HD
Rachet and Clank Future
MGS 4
Prince of Persia
360
Bayonetta
Fable 3
DS
FF: 4 heroes of light
I remember that this was one of the "selling points" of Bioshock, that you can "choose" whether or not to kill the little girls and this was supposed to be this momentous and morally significant thing, when it was really just more like choosing Dante's fighting style in Devil May Cry. But to be fair, you never mentioned this so nevermind.
What I liked about SoTC's gameplay was how pared down it was. I talked about how I think it captured the "core" of the adventure game experience. There wasn't any peripheral bullshit (well, there was with the lizards but that is entirely optional). Whereas Bioshock, like almost every game, has all this peripheral bullshit; people you need to talk to in order to advance, items you need to get, boring normal enemy fights to slog through.
God of War is a good example of a game that ... is not nearly as good as Devil May Cry 1 or 3.
Actually I think DMC vs. God of War is something that might be helpful to talk about. The "point" of both games, on an emotional level, is basically to make you the player feel like a total badass.
GoW does this by assisting the player in a lot of ways, automating the "badass" actions. So, in order to make Kratos do a bunch of awesome shit, you just need to press 3 buttons Simon-Says style, and he does it on screen.
DMC takes a very different approach. It's way harder. You can make Dante do awesome shit too, but you need to work for it, and you need to specify each particular badass thing he does with an input in a complicated chain.
Now, we could just compare the gameplay in DMC and GoW. DMC, especially DMC3, because of the level of input the player has, results in much richer, more complicated gameplay (in many ways DMC plays almost like a fighting game sometimes).
But I don't care about complex gameplay for its own sake. I liked the gameplay in DMC and DMC3 because it has a synergy with the "point" of the games—which is to make you feel like a badass. When you play these games and are forced to actually perform each step of all the complicated badass things Dante does, the result is a visceral sense of badassness. It enhances the "reality" of the experience, the sense of actually being there, being Dante. This synergy is much weaker in GoW, where a lot of Kratos' actions are basically on autopilot and you feel more like you're watching a movie.
SoTC is a completely different game than DMC or GoW but I think its gameplay and game design also have a strong synergy with the "point" of the experience ... whereas Bioshock's is much weaker. When you play Bioshock, it mostly feels like you're playing a standard FPS that takes place in an awesome environment, but that environment is peripheral to the experience. It doesn't meld with it. Compare Bioshock with Metroid, which really does, through its gameplay, force you to interact with the environment, to feel as though you really are Samus Aran and trapped in these claustropobic alien places.
I think all the elements of a videogames should work together to create a cogent experience. Bioshock, when I played it, didn't do this as well as SoTC, or RE4, or DMC3. It did to some extent, but it is easy to separate Bioshock's gameplay from the rest of the experience; one doesn't depend on the other. The same can be said for Final Fantasy games.
In short, I thought SoTC had a much greater emotional resonance than Bioshock, and that it was a "purer" game in the sense of just delivering this emotional resonance and forgetting about the rest of the shit in a traditional videogame.
*edit* Also, after all their talk about water effects, and hiring people just to work on them, the fact that I could walk through a stream of water and get no splashing effect, just see the clipping from the backsides of the polygons, was really disappointing.
Movie: City of God
Album: Amy Winehouse, Back to Black
Book: Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Game: Beyond Good & Evil
Meme: Lolcats or Chuck Norris
I'm going on pure pop culture impact, and Viva was after their whole "we're currently the most popular band in the world, so we're going to take 15 years off and raise our kids, but psych, we're coming back a year later to put out a glorified single" bit. It didn't register as hard imo
edit: on a more frightening note...
I was gonna say the biggest meme of the decade was goatse, so I went to wikipedia to safely look up info on it and get a date.
First, It was 1999, so I couldn't use it.
Second, fucking wikipedia has a picture of a mans gaping asshole for the article. The article got goatse'd
Oh, you changed my mind. It was glorious.
I feel ashamed that I didn't think of that.
Hmmm, people are talking about impact rather than favorites, so I'll take my hand at impact.
Movie: Lord of the Rings trilogy defined what a sci fi/fantasy epic should be like, and extended the overall length of a blockbuster from 1:45 to averaging 2:30 in length.
Music: This is a hard one. I would say the most impact would probably be a pop or rap album. Perhaps "The Black Album" by Jay-Z, or "The Grey Album" by Danger Mouse / Jay-Z / The Beatles. The Black Album for showing how intense and socially aware mainstream rap could be made, adding inflection and emotion accenting the bass and beats. The Grey Album for showing the power of user generated media, and a new focus on producers rather than artists.
TV Show: Colbert Report I'm not sure anything has really captured frustrated youth's opinion of politics like Stephen Colbert's show. That thing was and still is a monster, and it astounds me the things Colbert is able to do with it.
Book: Avengers: Dissasembled I know it's a comic book, but everything current in the marvel universe stems out of the events of that title, not to mention it's what allowed BMBendis to really take a crack at impacting 616, which led to him pretty much holding the reigns for story direction at Marvel.
Meme: Rickroll was the new Goatse, trapping people with something awful.
Video Game: Wii Sports. I don't know that I really need to explain it further than that.
PS2
FF X replay
PS3
God of War 1&2 HD
Rachet and Clank Future
MGS 4
Prince of Persia
360
Bayonetta
Fable 3
DS
FF: 4 heroes of light
TV: BSG. It certainly had dry spells, but it's the best science fiction that's been on TV since probably B5.
Music: The Fragile. This was released at the very tail end of 1999, and half of its singles were released in 2000, so I'm including it.
If The Fragile isn't allowed I'll go with In Rainbows.
Book: No idea.
Meme: 2girls1cup
Game: Also really hard. The short list is Skies of Arcadia, Halo 2, KotOR, and Half-Life 2.
Though, I have no idea what Skies of Arcadia is.
Biggest Disappointment of the Decade: Election '04
Product of the Decade: The smart phone/pimped out cellphones
Actor of the Decade: Robert Downey, Jr
Trend of the Decade: Free public wi-fi
Biggest Surprise of the Decade: A black president? Really?
9/11? Probably shouldn't have been surprising in retrospect, but the method was pretty damn surprising.
It's really which element of a Bruckheimer movie is more surprising to you, I suppose.
Was a jRPG on the Dreamcast that successfully managed to avoid being overbearing with jRPG tropes.
Edit: Braid should probably also be in that list.
Television Show: Arrested Development
TV performer: Stephen Colbert
Movie: Eternal Sunshine
Director: Christopher Nolan
Band: Radiohead
Album: Electric Version - New Pornographers
Author: Terry Pratchett
Book: The Road - Cormac McCarthy
Comics - creative team: Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely
Comics - writer/artist: Bryan Lee O'Malley (Scott Pilgrim)
Comics - series: Daredevil
Meme: lolcats!
Video Game: Super Mario Galaxy
Except for the random battles. Oh fucking God, the random battles. I've heard the Gamecube port tones down the "fuck you for daring to move an inch in any direction, have a random battle!" slightly, though.
Public Enemy and Giorgio Moroder say hello. :P
I'd probably go with something from a more esoteric genre that still managed to gain notoriety, as that is the signal that the industry has been looking for. Similarly, District 9, Paranormal Activity, and Avatar seem to indicate that you can't go inoffensive to get cash anymore, but instead need to sither go niche or find a way to get out of the pack early.
I chose Beethoven because it's well known he wrote nine symphonies and finding another one would be a big deal.
I don't see how you can say SoTC failed, as though it was trying to be another game and couldn't pull it off. You may not have liked it, but the stuff you didn't like (walking around) was part of what made it cool for those of us who did like it.
I never played Shadow of the Colossus, but I really enjoyed the banality of seafaring in Windwaker.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the 90's, and I would say Public Enemy was a huge influence on Jay Z, but they no where near reached the mainstream appeal that Jay Z did. It's that Jayz retained his "Hardcore thug" cred with the mainstream media, but interjected some of the most intelligent lyrics to hit the top 10 in the US.
Anyway, I change my mind on most important album. The radio head album that they gave away for free on their website, that is the most important album of the decade. It represents the movement in the digital revolution, it also gave more power to the artists who create the music.
PS2
FF X replay
PS3
God of War 1&2 HD
Rachet and Clank Future
MGS 4
Prince of Persia
360
Bayonetta
Fable 3
DS
FF: 4 heroes of light