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Idle Forums Game Club 2 - Shadow of the Colossus edition

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One thing i'd urge you guys to remember is to allow time for a bit of exploration. If you're not hunting for those stamina and health upgrades, some of the later colossi can be pretty painful.

As for the schedule, i think the important thing is that if you don't feel like you can keep up, don't try, but do keep playing.

Story discussion should be spoilered at all times to allow people to continue participating even if they've fallen a bit behind.

Two weeks though, are we happy about two week intervals?

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As the one who introduced the colossus-a-month timeline, I do admit it would drag on. Let's do 2 weeks and keep story spoilered.

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As far as spoilers go, maybe we should just throw in a little hint before each spoiler as to what the post spoils. Nothing to wordy, just a "Colossus 1/2 (spoiler): [ spoiler tagged thing ]"

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That sounds like a plan.

Also, apparently i don't have component cables for my PS2, so i will be playing in classy old 480i. Nnngh. (The PS2 version does support progressive scan, i just don't have the cables for it.)

I do have my old save though, and i have the hard difficulty unlocked unlocked, so i'm going to do that.

Edit: Gaah, i loaded up an old game to test things out, and I can't even make out any detail on Wander's face, it's just a smear of colors.

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I've read on a the ps3trophies.org forums the HD version is a bit harder to control in some areas, but that could all be changing perceptions. No clue if something got messed with. Either way that's how I'll be playing.

This is actually an important point to talk about, since it might just be the issue of HD lag.

HDTV's have not been a good thing for games, and when you go back to games designed to be played on CRT's, they were not built with that lag in mind and generally have tighter input windows. It can result in a noticeably harder time with the game when playing it on an HDTV.

Even on a lot of modern games though, if you play things like shoot em` ups or fighters, HD lag is the bane of your existence. (In a fighting game, say you have an input window of five frames or less, if the TV is creating a delay of nearly two frames, you're kind of being fucked.)

Things can get even weirder when you go into the minutia. A good HDTV with the proper settings might have only the smallest split second of lag on the 1080i settings it's been optimized for. Now flip it back to 480i, it hasn't been optimized for that at all, and you can end up with actual noticeable lag in the worst case scenarios.

With that consideration, you guys on the HD version are probably still going to have an easier time than i will.

In general though, if you guys have never set up your TVs for their fast response modes, you'd do well to look into that. (It's usually a "game" mode or something, it will disable a lot of the processing the image goes through to reduce the lag.)

Also, that whole thing about TV's being sold with "4ms" response times is BS, it has virtually nothing to do with HD lag. The actual lag is usually way worse than they would be willing to advertise, you have to do a lot of digging to get real numbers and figure out the best way to optimize your TV. (Best case scenario is that you find you're magically way better at games than you thought you were.)

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Hint: put your TV in "Game" or "Computer" mode. That mode usually has the least input lag.

Anyway, I don't know how much I will like the game, so there is a risk I cannot slow down to 1 chapter per 2 weeks. But let's start with 1 for the first two weeks, we could always change the pacing, right?

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We certainly could, let's see how everybody feels about it once things start up and adjust it from there.

As far as spoilers go, maybe we should just throw in a little hint before each spoiler as to what the post spoils. Nothing to wordy, just a "Colossus 1/2 (spoiler): [ spoiler tagged thing ]"

Again on spoilers, I am in agreement on this. We should spoiler-tag colossus strategies, seeing as figuring out the best way to fight them is pretty much what the game is entirely about.

So story discussion and colossus strategies should be spoiler-tagged and labeled with descriptive prefixes, i guess. That should work.

Probably also a rule for not discussing things ahead of what the schedule is, so if you jump ahead, don't talk about it.

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I will be playing the back half of the game for the first time. I got up to Colossus 8 on PS2, and then fell off with (surprise!) the start of a semester. Will give it my all to keep to a one every two weeks schedule this time around.

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Bi-weekly sounds great.

First time I played through this game, I didn't even know there were stamina and health upgrades.

This has in common with Metroid Prime, that I gave the controller to a friend for the last parts of the game and let my friend finish them. I didn't want to play them anymore, but I wanted to see how it ended.

Actually, reading up on this game while writing up the game club pitch, i came across an interview where Ueda talked about Team Ico struggling to make Agro feel like a real horse, which doesn't always immediately obey, but without going so far in that direction that it would affect playability. So yeah, it was totally intentional.

In my first hours of the game, I saw Agro as purely a vehicle to get from place to place and got very frustrated with the controls. Learning that dropped the frustration for me. Viewing Agro as a character instead of just transportation made me a lot more understanding when she did things that I might have viewed as undesirable before.

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So is this like a book club, but for video games? I would be interested in that.

Also, people don't like the horse controls? There was an adjustment period for me, but I eventually wised up and realized that Agro is a character with autonomy and that I should trust her to be able to navigate. Sometime after my second playthrough of SOTC I tried playing Twilight Princess again for the first time since that game was released and realized how spoiled I had become the moment I got on Epona.

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I won't be playing through the game again but I hope it's ok for me to throw in my two cents.

The horse is the best thing in Shadow of the Colussus (once you figure out how to mount him). He is a horse, not a car. If you constantly give him instructions he will do stupid things. If you gently push him in a direction he will do everything on his own. I remember riding down a narrow path with cliff walls on either side. As the path winded left and right I didn't need to steer him, I just told him to go forward and he steered himself. He has eyes, after all. He knows not to run straight into a wall.

Here's a little story about the first time I popped this game in with a group if friends:

One of my friends had read up about the game prior to playing and would go on and on about how the game was about traveling vast distances through beautiful lands to reach the enemies. He got it in his head that entire play sessions would consist of just riding through wilderness.

When I purchased the game, I let him play it before me, just because he seemed more psyched than I was. So another friend and I watched as the adventurer wandered the landscape for over an hour. Eventually he found the monster - about a hundred metres away from the starting point. If you were to draw his path from a birdseye view. it would be a line going straight in one direction for about four kilometers, and then a massive spiral. Later the other friend asked me how long it took me to find the boss on my play through: thirty seconds.

Just some general comments:

I love this game but it has two flaws that nearly ruined it for me. The more serious one is the frame rate. Speaking of the original release, it was incredibly irrating to let go of a Colussus, hit the jump button, and realize that the game was chugging so badly that the input lag was a full two seconds behind the action. The last boss was not fun in the least because of this.

My other problem with the game is the conceit that the bosses are stupid enough to do the thing that lets you hurt them over and over again without learning. One of the early fights is against a guy who who swings his sword at you, which you run up to reach his vital points. The first time it was one of the most incredible things in any game ever. The second time, it was one of the greatest disaappointments, not just because the Colussus was revealed to be incredibly stupid, but because I had already solved the puzzle, and performing the action multiple times was anticlimactic.

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In my first hours of the game, I saw Agro as purely a vehicle to get from place to place and got very frustrated with the controls. Learning that dropped the frustration for me. Viewing Agro as a character instead of just transportation made me a lot more understanding when she did things that I might have viewed as undesirable before.

When i loaded up the game for a few minutes to mess around, it struck me how much autonomy Agro has. The two most immediate things were that Agro won't run across stone and will steer you away from ledges, i had totally forgotten about those behaviors. You really kind of have to fight with the horse a bit to traverse some locations in the environment.

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I think they did an amazing job making Argo an npc and not just a vehicle. I am totally down to replay this one! I still have my old ps2 copy but this seems to be a great excuse to buy the reissue. Have we decided on the 1st as a start date? I think a game club sounds like an awesome idea! I think we should be knocking off at least 2 to 3 collosi a month. That way we can make it through more then just one game a year!

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I played this within the last couple years, and as an animation nut, Shadow of the Collossus was YEARS AHEAD!

This game holds up.

I wrote a fat dissertation on Ni No Kuni recently and why anime games don't look like anime. In a purely aesthetic way I actually like that Shadow and Collossus has such a low framerate, and I'm sure if I was a really studied motion-scientist I might be able to articulate why.

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I wrote a fat dissertation on Ni No Kuni recently and why anime games don't look like anime. In a purely aesthetic way I actually like that Shadow and Collossus has such a low framerate, and I'm sure if I was a really studied motion-scientist I might be able to articulate why.

Slowdown has a weird place in the Video game vocabulary.

You know? Like how Shmups often emulate it on purpose for its gameplay and stylistic effects. Sometimes it feels right that the game is struggling with whatever totally insane thing it is showing you.

Alternatively, maybe the shitty framerate also gives it a bit of a stop-motion vibe, which is totally fitting for SotC and its subject matter. (When Brad Muir was showing off the prototype for Brazen on that GiantBomb live stream, he talked about them going to great lengths to produce animation that was stuttery and shitty in just the right way to emulate that Ray Harryhausen kind of look.)

But yeah, i look at the HD version of SotC and see the game running at a stable, smooth framerate and i feel like it almost loses something.

Edit: I just looked at your link, apparently we have similar thoughts on this.

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Interesting read, I_smell. The close ups and the polygons are a great point, and having an art style be supported by its medium is totally vital. I played the Ni No Kuni demo and can totally see the video gameyness of it. It doesn't feel like you're playing a Studio Ghibli movie, it feels like you playing a jRPG wrapped in the colorful fabrics of a Ghibli film. Which on its own is still pretty great. The animation of the characters is still nicely executed, there's lots of character in the way your little buddies move around the battlefield, but it's a separate thing from the film world (which is once again, not necessarily terrible)

On framerate I'm not really in agreement. Film and animation works well in the 24fps (or 12fps) world because it's a passive medium. I prefer video games to have the most frames possible. Because when I hit frame spikes/lags my suspension of disbelief that I am controlling an avatar in a digital world is lost. Not to mention, inability to perform fine actions. For example, if Ni No Kuni was running at 12fps I would constantly be struggling in the combat scenes as I'm trying to reposition my characters and queue up spells and being frustrated by lack of response from my actions.

Can't really speak on SotC as I've only ever played the HD version.

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I haven't played Ni No Kuni, but it's interesting to compare the PS3 game to the DS game, the latter of which features a blend of 2D and 3D art. I think the DS game is absolutely beautiful, while the PS3 game looks... Yeah. (I don't think we got the DS game in the west though, did we?)

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Yeah that's right, the DS game is still a Japanese-only release. Bit of a missed opportunity, from a fan's perspective at least. Presumably Sony PlayStation is happy enough to see it materialize as a PS3 release internationally, whatever the reasons are.

I'd like to join the Shadowathon if time allows, which I think it will.

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I never finished SotC. Not sure I want to take part of this if it lasts a whole year or more, but I may be house-sitting in mid-January with a PS3 on hand so I might just play through it then. I doubt I'll be able to put down the controller. Or maybe I might, could try stopping and resuming next month.

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I don't think it always makes a game harder to play.

Actually a lot of times it makes games easier to play. A lot of times it depends on how the game itself decides to handle input at the engine level. Lots of engines will run their Input loop seperate of their render loop meaning you're going to be getting reasonably accurate feeling control despite a crazy framey mess.

I can actually remember quite a few NES era games (contra) that became MUCH easier once the frame rate started to tank.

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