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EX's Shadow of the Colossus (PS2)
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| [January 31, 2007 06:50:56 PM]
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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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| [January 31, 2007 05:31:19 PM]
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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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EX's Shadow of the Colossus (PS2)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Tuesday 30 January, 2007
GameLog closed on: Saturday 24 February, 2007 |
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EX's opinion and rating for this game |
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Study this game ONLY. Do not play it as a game to beat unless you have spare TVs/consoles to put your feet through/throw out the window. Seriously.
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