Idle Forums Game Club 2 - Shadow of the Colossus edition

[tegan]

I'm still doing it! I need to do number fourteen today.

[syntheticgerbil]

I think I completely lost interest for now, since I keep playing other games inbetween and forget that I need to do another boss on Shadow. Sorry guys. I might just end up plowing through the rest of the game on a Sunday at this point and just post what I think, since I have no idea of the schedule and I'm like 3/4ths through I think.

[youmeyou]

I'm also still doing it but am a bit behind. Finished 11 last weekend. 10-11 were super aggravating so it's been hard to pick up the controller again. Then again, this is a perfect time to catch up as there's a bit of a lull is new game releases.

[darthbator]

I feel like we should just set an end date. The schedule is clearly not the ideal way to do this.

[miffy495]

Number 13 (baby):

 

This was probably the most visually arresting colossus I've fought. To the point where my girlfriend dropped what she was doing just to watch me fight this thing. She can't watch more than a few minutes of anything polyonal before starting to get really nauseous, so that's saying something. It was goddamned beautiful. I think I've gotten to a point now where the clumsy controls don't bother me. I'm just in it. It's so good. I'm glad I haven't been seeing too many spoilers though, as each time without fail my favourite moment is the "holy shit, THAT'S what I have to do" realization. Jumping from horseback to the wing was incredible, and also the moment where my complete non-gaming partner was sucked in.

 

So fucking good. Starting on number 14 now. I have a brand new Wii U sitting in front of me with Mario and Nintendo land, but the first order of business is to kill a giant. Then Mario.

[tegan]

Fourteenth Colossus (Cenobia) thoughts:

I take back all the bad things I said about Celosia; its stupid older brother is much, much worse. I really like the way that you use the environment in this one, but Cenobia is really fond of stunlocking you and being damned near impossible to get a good grip on. I actually had the exact opposite of my usual experience this time. Usually I jump onto the next pillar just as the one I'm on is falling, whereas this time I missed the jump every single time. When I got to the final pillar, Cenobia got stuck in a looping animation where it kept nudging into a wall, so I had to climb down and draw its attention somewhere else before climbing all the way back up and trying again. Then it did it again.

After I finally got its armour off, I was having trouble even getting onto it and it ended up running back out into the open area. I went for higher ground, climbing to the top of one of those platforms resting on top of two columns so that I could try to jump onto its back, and in the process learned that you can trick it into ramming the columns and stunning itself. I had no idea you could do that. I always just hung on for dear life and rode it around, stabbing it whenever I got a chance. This is a good thing to know.

Next time: most agressive colossus!

[miffy495]

Yeah, those bull-type ones are my least favourite by far. I really hope that 14 was the last one. It wasn't as bad as whatever number that torch one was, but it was still a pain. I didn't have quite as much trouble as you, Tegan, but after the majesty of the 13th colossus, this was a big let-down. I'm finding myself really excited now that I'm only two from the end. This has been one of the most guilt-inducing games on my guilt pile for about 7 years now, and to actually complete it but also see that it's held up for these 7 years is awesome. I've been very tempted to just plough ahead and finish this, but I'm also feeling enough loyalty to this thread that I'm not. Pumped for Tuesday and #15!

[youmeyou]

All caught up now.

 

12-14

12: Only colossus I've straight up had to go online and look-up how to beat. I felt justified in seeking out the answer after realizing the game was bugging out on me and wouldn't have produced the correct result anyway. Essentially, when you climb on to one of the islands in the lake the colossus is supposed to sit up and prop its forelegs on the land mass, allowing you to get to his tail. This did not happen once. I had to resort to what felt was a non-game-supported tactic of waiting for him to look away before jumping underwater and quickly swimming around to his tail before he was able to adjust. It was a frustrating, tedious, and obtuse puzzle of a fight, luckily capping off the string of shitty colossi starting with 10 - because 13 was SO GOOD!

 

13: Something about the flying colossi makes them the best fights in the game. The bird colossus on the lake felt very similar to this one. The process of going from "how am I going to get up there?" to "oh shit it's coming straight for me!" to "oh god, its wing... will it work?" succeeded by sudden dramatic skyward lift with fittingly triumphant music leaves a strong and indelible mark. It's when the game empowers you and rewards split second decision making that didn't necessarily feel guided that it truly shines. Such was the case with the 13th colosuss. Bringing it down was very straightforward, galloping up beside it and making that quick decision to attempt to leap on the wing, and then having it actually work, felt amazing. Then jumping from wing to body, holding up that sword to find its weak points and fearlessly trudging off to find them. If I had to pick a moment that every good characteristic of the game coalesced, it'd have to be this one so far.

 

14: I actually quite liked this fight, despite 11 being one of my most hated colossi experiences. I guess the main reason being that it was nearly impossible to do anything for all the stun-locking in 11 while in 14 I was able to just run atop the city ruins and avoid confrontation until the very end. It was kind of hilarious that the game does nothing to sleight-of-handedly explain why Wander is not constantly getting killed by falling under collapsing rubble. I guess he's just one tough dude. I have been eating quite a few fruits, so that might explain it.

 

So I guess next two colossi over the next two weeks, then?

[tegan]

Your tactic for 12 was the way that I originally fought it. I've never thought about

swimming around to its back while it's propped up, though. I always climb on top of the little platform in the middle of the island, then carefully time a jump directly onto its face and just clamour up to the top of its head.

[Erkki]

Ok, so I finished a while ago, but I guess I've fallen behind with posting.

 

11th and 14th

It was kind of a nice change to meet a small colossus. I think 11 was when I gave up when I originally played it. The stun-lock is incredibly stupid and they should have just implemented some hack to get around this, if they couldn't make a totally balanced solution. Other than the stun-lock, I liked the idea of these small and faster beasts, but the implementation was not the best, as suddenly you required more precision in your movements than before, and it seems the whole game is tuned towards navigating the larger ones.

 

However, jumping the pillars was kind of fun with the 14th, except when I died and had to do it again.

 

12th

this one seemed quite majestic, but I had to look up the solution on YouTube. I think I got on it by myself by swimming around, but didn't figure out that the teeth-like things were beatable. It left an impression, but wasn't the most interesting one for sure.

 

13th

This was quite amazing. Nothing specific to add.

[miffy495]

Yeah, I also used the same tactic for 12. I had no idea you could do what that walkthrough suggested. As for your comment on 14, with all the "falling through rubble" that Wander suggests, I'm finding that as he gets weaker and weaker I don't have the patience to wait for him to get his shit together and stand up again. What I did for that fight was

cling to the sides of the pillars as they fell, so that when they crashed down I ended up crouching on top of it.

Made me feel like a badass every time.

[youmeyou]

I managed to leap from pillar to pillar as they collapsed, which felt equally bad ass. It was a good fight as long as you kept off the ground.

[syntheticgerbil]

Part of why I keep putting this game off is because it really annoys the piss out of me every time I play. I finished giants 10 and 11 last night and hopefully I can do 12 and 13 tonight.

 

They were fine enough, nice to look at, fun to take down, but it's always the same where I'm fighting finicky controls and not always having a clear idea what to do even when I am trying to do it. The collision always seems glitchy and inconsistent no matter what boss fight. Also getting knocked down in the middle of battling a Colossus and the controls, if I ever get knocked down, I have to sit around with my face on the ground for way too long.

 

I'm not even sure if I completed Colossus 11 correctly. After luring him off the cliff, he was just kind of running around sporadically and didn't seem very intent on attacking me. I kept trying to jump on his back by running around him and just having my character hit some invisible box and fall back down. Sometimes he would briefly grip on to mid air and then fall or sometimes he would just slide along the back of the Colossus to the other side, not grabbing the hair. Was I doing this wrong or was this just poor design? It seemed pretty obvious I had to grip the hair on the back, but actually getting the game to acknowledge I was doing that was most of the battle.

[elmuerte]

I feel your pain. I still haven't made any progress since beardy colossus...

[syntheticgerbil]

12 and 13 down. I could have sworn I traveled to that lake already when I had to find 12. It was really throwing me off.

 

I loved fighting these guys, but I had to cheat to find out how to "steer" 12. Unfortunately they didn't come without their annoyances. Both involved long stints of me moving slowly around on the ground trying to catch up. If I made a mistake, even more frustrating as it meant I had to repeat a sequence to get back to the hit spot yet again. I really wish they had streamlined this kind of tedium, especially when mistakes that may happen where I'm through off seem to be a failure of R1 to connect every time. I have had this problem the whole game where Wander grabs something in mid air for a second, like he's found a ledge, but falls anyway even if there was an actual ledge he should have been gripping on when I held R1.

 

Erhg. Anyway, I guess the home stretch is coming soon. I might just finish it by the end of next week.

[youmeyou]

I sort of understand what the designers were going for in making falling off be like, the worst. Because if there was no penalty for falling off, staying on wouldn't feel so thrilling. It's still problematic though and poorly balanced as many times the punishment is too severe and does little more than artificially lengthen fights and take the player out of the game.

 

Speaking of insanely long fights: the 15th colossus.

This was the second fight I had to look up a solution to. Lots of mechanics that I found myself on the odd end of. Couldn't figure out how to get up on the ledges first. Knew that that's where I was supposed to go but the rareness in which he stomped the ground did not cast that as an obvious method. Once I got past that it seemed obvious to have him attack the columns of where I was hiding but many of his hits  produced no effect. I became unsure of wether there was one specific area of the 4 that I should be waiting in. Lead to a ton of fruitless running around before one of his hits finally brought down the roof allowing me to jump on his shoulders (though also got sidetracked with wondering what the relevance of his knocking the bridges down was. though now that i think about it it must have broken some unnoticed armor that was protecting his head). Man, I though I had plenty of stamina going into this fight. I was so wrong. He shook his head and stomped around 95% of the time, making the whole process take far, far too long.

 

Then it was time to go after his hand. Unfortunately the sword pointing mechanic to highlight weak points didn't reveal his funny bone weak spot. This was extremely unfortunate as I spent far too long dropping down to his hand and stabbing at the tiny space between the blade handle and clenched fist before looking up that I had to hit his elbow first to make the whole process 100x easier. Though it's kind of a testament to the possibility space of the game that its even possible to damage his palm while its closed around the sword. Unfortunately that particular possibility space led to much frustration so its a mixed blessing.

[miffy495]

So I beat this game. I'm house-sitting until Saturday, and they have a really nice TV that my PS3 is hooked into at the house I'm staying at, so I wanted to finish out the game on this screen. Thoughts:

 

15:

I also had to look up a thing to figure out how to get on top of this guy. I knew I had to get to the walkway, and the stomp seemed significant, but the sheer size of the arena and poor signalling of the stomp hotspot (unlike 3, where there was ONE stone plate in the middle of a round arena, this had one plate at one of six possible entry points to the walkway that you had to figure out was slightly different from the other 5) meant that I never put two and two together on my own. A bummer, because to this point the thrill of the discoveries was the best part for me. Also, his thrashing made it really frustrating to actually get a hit in once I was up there. It took a good four or five approaches to wear out his head weak point, and like youmeyou I thought I had a tonne of stamina going in. I'd rank this as my most disappointing "giant" fight, but still ahead of the two bull colossi.

 

16/Endgame:

First off, fuck everyone involved in this game for making Agro fall. I almost quit the game right there.That said, the fight: This was a fantastic fight in concept, but a little frustrating as it went on. My hitch was that it took me forever to work out that I had to shoot him in the shoulder. Getting to his left arm was proper epic, then a bit frustrating to work my way to the right arm. Took a while there to work out that I needed to stab him in the hand to stabilize it, and then I'd just stand on his hand trying to hit him in the eye with arrows until I fell off and had to start over. The giant glowing eyes reminded me so much of 11 (10? The sand worm guy, whichever number he was) that I just thought that hitting him in the eye was the thing to do. Once I worked out to shoot his shoulder, the rest fell into place. I felt that the battlefield leading up to the colossus did a really good job of organically leading you up to him. I just kept running the way that I instinctively felt I should run, and in no time found myself at his skirt thing. Given how signalling and arena design has been kind of a weak point for this game (see two sentences previous), I was impressed with the arena design for this one. As for the final cutscene/endgame stuff, I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. It was a bit trite and obvious that you were really the bad all along, but in stories like this sometimes being obvious is fine. It's in the telling. I definitely felt like it was a bit cheap to have Agro limp up to the girl at the end, as it put a damper on what was, to me, the emotional high point of the game. It made me feel like I'd been cheated for being so sad as I watched him fall, retroactively taking away from the power of his sacrifice. The horned baby thing at the end was kind of cool, even though I'm still not entirely sure why the powers at work would send Wander back to baby basics rather than just let him die. Chance at redemption, if not for him then for his line I guess?

 

All this definitely made me want to fire up Ico immediately after finishing, as that's another game that I got about halfway through but never finished back in high school when it came out. In fact, yesterday I did just that. Played for about an hour and a half, and I may just find the motivation to go through it all the way this time. I'm glad I participated in this thing. Game club is a neat idea, and I'd like to try it again with something else, as I'm currently one for two on commitments to these things (Killer 7 happened right when school started to kick my ass, so it died for me fast). Any suggestions?

[syntheticgerbil]

Ico is super short (one of the trophies is a less than 2 hour speed run) so I recommend you give it a shot sooner than later. I certainly enjoyed it more than I'm currently enjoying Colossus even though Ico has a lot of similar problems with lack of polish in the control and gameplay department ("YORDA FUCKING STAY ON THE SWITCH!").

[syntheticgerbil]

Erm.. beat this Sunday, but I'll wait for everyone to catch up because as this point I'd rather just talk about the ending.

[Erkki]

Someone linked this in Twitter -- Eurogamer has an article about Shadow of the Colossus secret hunters. An interesting read, but maybe wait until you've finished (and then it still spoils the secrets, of course [which I personally never would find])

[tegan]

Argh, I meant to do the last two on Tuesday all in one go, but I just can't muster the effort for some reason. Also I keep forgetting about it. Maybe on the weekend.

[youmeyou]

Whoah:

 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/170524064/The-Making-of-Shadow-of-the-Colossus

[Erkki]

Wow, I didn't realize this HD remastered version had 3D support. I just got my 3D glasses and tried it, it was occasionally quite nice, especially when riding Argo and climbing colossi.

[Bjorn]

Wow, I didn't realize this HD remastered version had 3D support. I just got my 3D glasses and tried it, it was occasionally quite nice, especially when riding Argo and climbing colossi.

 

Crap, that makes me really want to replace my dead PS3.  SotC in 3D sounds like an epic experience.

[Erkki]

Crap, that makes me really want to replace my dead PS3.  SotC in 3D sounds like an epic experience.

It wasn't completely awesome all the time, though (but I was projecting on a brown wall, so maybe it's better with a proper screen) -- I didn't notice much of the 3D effect on the colossi, except on rare occasions when climbing them and their movement caused a sudden change of perspective.