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Jan 31st, 2007 at 18:50:56 - Shadow of the Colossus (PS2) |
Wow. I have to say, music makes a huge difference in the way games are approached... I got sick and tired of the in-game music from Shadow of Colossus,so I decided to listen to the soundtrack of Tekken 5 instead... and to my amazement, I found that more action-suited music immediately got me 'into the zone' and defeat the last Colossus in less than 15 minutes, making me curse the game for the hours I spent yesterday being continually blown away and tearing up my headphones. I now realize how powerful the effect of different kinds of music can be if used well, and how horrible it can be if used badly. The music in Shadow of the Colossus was very poorly applied in the final boss fight; it sounded more like of a long haunted house trek, and I just couldn't get into it.
Also, the final cut scene, which ended up telling most of the story which previous cut scenes hinted to very abstractly, confirmed by suspicions about the player ‘protagonist’--the wanderer’s appearance does indeed get more sickly as you progress through the game. A minor detail, I guess, which leads me to fruits and lizards. What the hell are fruits and lizards? They’re a miniscule detail, and the only other thing that actually populate the map during the game. Apparently consuming them seems to increase your health and stamina--upgrades, so to speak--but seems to be merely a test of patience and an eye for obscure detail, much like the rest of the game. I’d say its probably a pathetic excuse for collectables and people with too much time on their hands--pathetically easy for the developers to add and insanely hard for players to find.
Finally, intriguingly, the most of the cut scenes actually allowed you to manually adjust the camera within the cut scenes, allowing you to zoom in/out and pan to view within a certain extent. Not entirely useful, but an intriguing feature. Additionally, in between the last cut scenes, there were a few segments where the player got the opportunity to ‘play out’ certain parts of the scene, although the finishing conditions of the cut scene were fixed and inevitably unchangeable, which was a drag, but an interesting feature never the less.
After beating the game, hard-mode is unlocked, and you can play in time-attack mode to unlock special weapons/abilities. Given the difficulty of defeating the Colossi with a total game play-time of over 17 hours, I think I can safely say that I’d find it much more enjoyable to play Tetris than endure the horrors of back camera angles again. From start to finish, Shadow of the Colossus was a big let down, both storyline-wise and game-play wise. While it does bring interesting innovations to game design, the game play--in my opinion--is abysmal, rendering it difficult and not very enjoyable to play.
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Jan 31st, 2007 at 17:31:19 - Shadow of the Colossus (PS2) |
I heard some good things about Shadow of the Colossus, so I decided to pick it up and give it a whirl. And I have to reserve the right to curse this game and its designers/developers because I found it to really be a colossal pile of trash organized in an innovative shape (pun intended). Immediately after turning the game on, the opening cut scene gave a very ‘epic journey’ both in music and the graphical portrayal of the landscape, giving me certain expectations as to how the game would play/feel. However, broken down, the highlights of this game come down to 4 things: traversing a vast, unpopulated land by mashing the X button, climbing and jumping walls and so-forth, and pulling your hair out or putting your foot through your TV/console etc. for the genuinely shitty camera and movement control system. This game, undeniably has one of the worst camera tracking I have ever played, which really doesn’t help at all in playing the game. One could argue that it’s purpose is to increase the difficulty of the game or add to the realism, but I seriously don’t see how being forced to stare at the wall/ground/sky or some obstacle behind you adds to the sense of realism or challenge… it’s a screw-over, plain and simple.
Within the game itself, the aspect of grandeur and epic -ness in the cut-scenes does in a sense reflect the struggles of the wanderer (hero/player) in defeating each of the 16 Colossi, but whole game simultaneously feels rather empty because of the lack of any sort of conflict when traversing the main map in search of the next Colossus. The story-line is very weakly told without any sense of actual story coming into play until very late in the game; the reason for the wanderer fighting the Colossi is briefly explained in a cut scene in the first 5 minutes but otherwise being very empty with short cut scenes of your character being disturbingly raped by black tentacles, hearing ghastly voices, and then being told “your next foe is…” by some godly being in between each ‘level.’ The lack of storyline via cut scenes is not replaced by story via the themselves either, as the entire map and weapons are open to the player after starting the game; the Colossi are only encounter able by playing through and defeating them in order, segmenting the game not spatially but temporally with a distinct sense of progression through the game.
After the initial cut scene, you are thrown into the game without any tutorial or instruction as to how to play, leaving you to start learning the movement controls intuitively or by reading the manual. There were tool tips for the game controls, but in my experience, they continually showed up really late, long after I’d figured out what to do, giving the game a rather steep initial learning curve. This was very apparent in fighting the first Colossus. Faced with a giant Colossus to defeat without any direction, its left up to the player to figure out how to defeat it until roughly 20 minutes pass and the godly being gives you indirect hints as to what you need to do, but not how to do it, leaving the player to figure out how to defeat the Colossi as a adventure/puzzle as opposed to an enemy to defeat via hack and slash. Essentially, the colossus act not only as a sort of boss-monster, but as a ‘level’ in and of itself, with the player trying to reach and stab the critical points of each colossus in order to defeat it. In this regard, I applaud Shadow of Colossus for introducing the innovative concept of combining both the environment, a live/moving creature and utilization of the AI script and environment to create a much more complicated, challenging levels. Due to this structure of the game, I found the learning curve to be rather steep for the first four Colossi, anywhere from 40 minutes to over 2 hours on each Colossi, primarily in figuring out how to use the weapons/abilities of the wanderer and understanding the game mechanics for defeating the Colossi.
The middle 8 Colossi were varying in difficulty, some being considerably easier to figure out and defeat than others, but a few stood out. The first was ‘Groundshaker,’ a sand worm, which required you to shoot the Colossus in the eye which riding away from it on your horse. This proved to be rather difficult as the controls for aiming the bow were very jolty--not so much the movement due to riding the horse but the stickiness of the thumb-stick could not be adjusted, causing the cursor to continually jump back and forth over the eye, making my attempts at aiming essentially futile; I was able to defeat it merely by getting lucky. Another was the ‘Flame Guardian,’ and also the ‘Destruction Luster’ which basically just continually tried to ram you. While not entirely too difficult to dodge, I found the frequency of its attacks opposed to the speed of recovery of the wanderer to be horribly unbalanced. Once knocked down, the Colossus would simply charge at me and knock the wanderer back down again before he could recover and be able to move; this kind of pathetic, unavoidable cheap-shot tactic made it both extremely aggravating to play and necessary to avoid getting hit at all costs. Lastly, the final Colossus, which I have been unable to defeat so far thanks to the worst case of camera angle screwing-over in this game yet.
While the concept of the game is innovative and relatively intriguing, the execution of the camera control is so poor, it literally made me tear my headphones apart when trying to defeat the final Colossus, which I will reattempt after finishing writing this. Part of the problem is the sheer size of Colossi, which range from 5 to 100+ the size of the player character, creating scale/perspective problems. This can be overcome somewhat by manually controlling the camera view, but given this is typical in 3D 3rd person games, I will can acknowledge the difficulties with this. However, I found the camera problems lied predominantly in two other cases which the manual camera control could not fix. The first was automatic camera rotation, especially when clinging onto the Colossus when its swinging it’s body around, trying to shake the player off. The camera often spins on its own when moving from one part of the Colossus to another, totally throwing off the axis of the movement controls. This is most apparent when hanging onto a ledge and trying to jump across/over to another ledge; the directional controls are so picky that it becomes too easy to jump off into open space and fall back to the ground or into a canyon. This can get extremely irritating, especially on the last boss, where if you fall, you have to make your way all the way back up…. Again. For like the 50th time. Secondly, is object obstruction--ending up with something in your field of view so you can’t see where the hell you are. This is simply the most annoying camera problem ever, which I found to be largely apparent after the Colossus shakes you around when you are on its limbs. Often times you end up some other body part obstructing your view and the view will revert to the craptastic obstructed view if you let go of the manual view controls, which you can’t use simultaneously as the action buttons (jump/attack/crouch/etc.) leaving you to try and maneuver with either little to no visibility or utterly confusing perspectives with messed up movement axis. Consequently, with half--if not more--of the bosses, you end up fighting the game engine itself more than you do playing the game to beat the Colossus.
So maybe I just suck with analog sticks, but words cannot express enough my sheer frustration and at playing Shadow of the Colossus. On one hand I want to beat the game so it no longer rests on my conscience, but on the other hand the aggravation doesn’t really feel worth it, especially considering how weak the storyline and lame the cut scenes are. This is definitely a game worth studying for its aspects via a few demo levels, but not playing all the way through… It’s just not worth it.
And now… I’m going to try and beat that @#$% final boss…. For the sake of finding out the ending so I can see the ending and finish/close this bloody log.
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Jan 19th, 2007 at 19:26:49 - Mario Party (N64) |
My final thoughts on Mario Party are that although it lacks a strong story or narrative, the gameplay is fairly well tuned and easy to pick up and learn while remaining difficult/challenging to master the mini-games that you play throughout the game. In this regard, the gameplay is well balanced (with the exception of the thumb-stick rotation mini-games which are outright). However, I dislike how time-consuming the game is; the main board game can only be played with 4 players (people or the computer) and requires a minimum of 20 turns, which can easily exceed an hour if not two or more for a single game of Mario Party; I would have hoped that Nintendo would try and streamline the game a bit more so it goes by a bit faster by cutting redundant/unnecessary dialog or cutscenes/animation. Also, the reward system of obtaining stars and coins for unlocking extra features is too much in favor of playing multi-player, making it all the more tedious and massively time-consuming to rack up a decent amount of coins if you don't have the people or controllers for 4 people to play at once.
The slow reward system and sheer time-consumption has discouraged me from wanting to pick up board-game type games for a while because of the lack of enthusiasm and time for getting people together to play such a game makes it a tough game to pick up and actually play through and enjoy it to its fullest potential. Thus, while an innovative idea, I think it takes 'too much effort' to actually enjoy it, giving it more shelf-space value than game-play value.
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Jan 19th, 2007 at 15:11:59 - Mario Party (N64) |
I remember first playing Mario Party back in elementary school with my friends, but for this replay, was unable to obtain multiple controls for the N64 that I borrowed, so was unable to play multi-player games, so this log is based entirely off of single-player gameplay experience.
The defining game structure of Mario Party is that of a board game presented in video game environment, taking advantage of not only the 3D graphical capabilities of the N64 system to a large extent, but the video game media to implement the astoundingly large collection of mini-games. Along this line, it reminds me of some of the other early N64 games like Super Mario 64 and Star Fox, which took games previously designed in 2D and turned them into ground-breaking 3D games (of their time). The game controls were extremely simple, making the game easy to learn how to play, but hard to master, particularly with the mini-games.
The main feature of the game was the virtual board-game, in which players moved around the board trying to collect stars and coins until the last turn (pre-specified) was reached, which a random mini-game taking place between each turn, giving an additional opportunity to get more coins and adding to the mix in the gameplay. The sheer variety of mini-games made it all the more interesting; there were single-player, 1 vs. 3, 2 vs. 2, 4-player free-for-all and cooperative mini-game types that evoked a much wider range of approach to playing the mini-games in attempt to be the supreme victor. I was surprised not only at the number of mini-games, but that they were mostly very different, and well designed, displaying/testing the capabilities of the N64 system. The mini-game where you get to tweek the features on Bowser's face to try and get it to match the example picture--actual polygon modification in-game--was very intriguing. While I was able to get a god glimpse and the technical innovations of the game with a single-player play-through, I was unable to experience the multiplayer aspect, which Mario Party was really geared for; if my knowledge serves me correctly, all coins and stars earned by all (human) players are counted towards. This leads to the next major component of the game:
By playing through the game, players unlock, or gain access to more maps (game boards) to play on, which follows a rough story line of 'trying to become the biggest superstar by collecting stars.' Additionally, players can unlock or purchase new mini-games or random game-events from the item and mini-game shops to add new dimensions of difficulty to the game. As a part of this there is the Mini-game Island, where players have to try and play through and meet certain winning conditions on all of the mini-games to unlock access to most of the mini-games for play in the main board-game and also individual mini-game practice or the mini-game-only board.
While the overall game concept by Nintendo (of a video-board game) was novel and unique, it failed to compel me to keep playing to unlock the majority of the remaining mini-games for practice-mode due to the rate of star/coin collection when playing with only one controller/player. By picking up the game, its instantly obvious that it was intended as a multi-player game, and performs as such. I found myself constantly struggling with/against NPC opponents even when they were set to easy difficulty because they already know and understand the rules of the game, giving them an unfair advantage against me.
While the AI was challenging, it was still defeatable once I started to master the mini-games. However, while the more strategy and skill-oriented mini-games were more interesting, there were a few 'button-mashing' games such as the balloon burst. The worst of all, however, were the 'palm-grinding' mini-games that required you to rapidly rotate the thumb-stick several times per second--constantly. Not only did I feel very stupid playing those mini-games, but it started killing my wrist after a while because of repetitive strain. It probably isn't all that great for the controller either, although it may have been a conspiracy by Nintendo to get you to destroy your controllers to get you to keep buying new ones...
There was one thing from Mario Party that remains even more heavily on my mind about Mario Party, however. Despite the game having an 'E for Everyone' rating, I found the mini-game Grab Bag (a game in which you try and steal money from other players by running up behind them and looting from their money sack) to be rather... disturbing. Call me sick/twisted, but the characters looked like they were actually humping each other. Perhaps its just poor animation or my lewd imagination, but I found it both irritating and disturbing to keep getting 'raped' due to my difficulty maneuvering around the npcs.
Overall, I'd say I found the game challenging to play and interesting to study as an example of innovative game design, but not really very fun to play single-player because it is really a game that's only oriented towards social multi-player play.
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EX has been with GameLog for 17 years, 10 months, and 12 days |
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