Idle Forums Game Club 2 - Shadow of the Colossus edition

[Raethen]

I agree with the exception of the lock on for certain Colossi that get very close to The Wanderer. That camera can make some really crazy moves when you're locked on to something traveling by you really fast.

As far as the barren environment, I feel that it makes far more sense than having a good amount of wildlife around. This land houses behemoths that can be extremely destructive. The smaller creatures like the lizards are able to hide and keep away from the colossi, and the bird can easily just fly away. The rest would more than likely get as far away from these areas as possible. This is what I appreciate most about the game, so much of what is happening is inferred from the environment, each player interpreting things differently, as opposed to being told exactly what is going on.

[elmuerte]

No it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense at all. The first colossus was locked to a rediculous small area. Right outside the main temple is an enormous large area with absolutely nothing. There's hardly a tree or flower. Why would a bird fly around at places where there is no food or nesting abilities. If there's any excuse for the lack of a active world out there it would be technical but not due to game world logic. How many games released around the same time as SotC even had fauna?

Then again, Unreal from 1998 did have quite some fauna.

[Raethen]

I guess I never felt that the Colossi were stuck to their small territory, but were there strictly for the game. They've been in this valley for thousands of years it would seem, so they eventually found their own space away from one another. As for the birds, there is plenty of places nesting, and there are food sources in the trees that bare fruit, and the lizards could be prey as well. I know I'm justifying barren landscape that is because of hardware limitations, but it made the world so much deeper for me, and I felt there was enough in this landscape to have it make sense.

[twmac]

Planning to start on the first Colossus this weekend. It has been a while but I reckon it should be easy to do.

I am not going to play it on hard.

[Thrik]

My girlfriend finally finished Castlevania: Lords of Shadow this weekend. Holy shit, what a long-winded game. It did have a sweet ending to compensate the unbelievable frustration the game doles out, though. Also it has enough absolutely brilliant moments to leave a good impression overall.

Anyway, the relevant part: that game is basically a mish-mash of the best parts of lots of other games, and the end result is pretty sweet so long as you don't mind a game so hard you'll be driven towards throwing yourself out the nearest window. One blatant inspiration is Shadow of the Colossus: several times you have to face 'titans', which are suspiciously Colossus-esque right down to the numerous pressure points you have to repeatedly stab, the relatively freeform way of getting onto them and scaling them, and just the overall presentation. There's also the variety of ground-based and flying beasts, and the music is terrific. Oh, and what's the theme of the game? Bringing your fucking girlfriend back from the dead.

It's only a small part of the game really but it's an interesting glimpse of what a current-gen SotC might feel like. This game is incidentally one of the most lavishly-produced and graphically impressive of this whole generation, in the same way a new Studio ICO game might be. God I wish they'd put something new out.

[melmer]

I really loved that game in the end, but i wanted to throw it out the window during chapter two. and its like 15 hours long isn't it? Really looking forward to the sequel

i remember thinking the colossi were a bit naff, to easy

[Thrik]

More like 30 for us, and I know someone who took 50 to get through the fucker. In terms of value for money you can't complain, it has so much content and a lot of publishers would hold a lot of it back for DLC. It must have taken so long to produce all the assets for that game — every time you think there can't possibly be much more, you realise a seemingly small level is packed with complicated, long puzzles and shit. It's great yet simultaneously makes an argument for keeping games short and sweet.

Do you mean the Castlevania titans? I found them really bloody hard, apart from the flying one. I'm not exactly good at this kind of thing, though!

[Yasawas]

I did not enjoy Lords of Shadow but I do remember a boss fight early on in a frozen lake that was very Shadow of the Colossusesque and was the closest I came to having fun in the couple of hours I spent with it.

I got a little carried away with this game the other night and inadvertently slew three colossi, I really like it. I might start a separate save to keep up with the general pace as I'm finding it hard to stay away.

[Thrik]

Or you could just write down your feelings after killing each one for later use.

[melmer]

Do you mean the Castlevania titans? I found them really bloody hard, apart from the flying one. I'm not exactly good at this kind of thing, though!

To be honest i can barely remember them. I think i was disappointed because where the SotC colossi felt more organic, moving around, the castlevania ones would just do the same cycle of attacks over and over

[Thrik]

Ah, right. No doubt, SotC does a far better job with the concept. It's still an interesting insight into how such gameplay can work with beefier hardware, but I think ICO would do a far better job. Somehow I think they're more into making something totally new each time, though. Or just nothing at all.

[melmer]

I was quite surprised that SotC started life as a co-op multiplayer game. Makes me even more confused what Last Guardian will actually end up being (hopefully nothing like that original trailer)

These are the perfect style of games to make the protagonist a little girl, instead of a boy for the third time

Give me a princess mononoke game!

[Erkki]

Give me a princess mononoke game!

I want a Nausicaa game!

[melmer]

That already made one...

[elmuerte]

Stay on topic ffs!!!1!one!eleven

[Yasawas]

Or you could just write down your feelings after killing each one for later use.

Ha, that would require a degree of organisation I do not have. Also it would eat into my colossus-killing time

I really didn't mean to but I've got a bit carried away and have done eight now. If anyone's doing this in the agreed-upon fashion and found the first one a little underwhelming I assure it gets significantly more whelming pretty quickly.

[youmeyou]

I didn't find the first one underwhelming at all.

I think where the fist colossus (the minotaur) succeeds is in looking impressive but being fundamentally very easy to finish off. The way he's introduced is awesome, you climb up a cliff (nice contextual tutorializing) only to get a face to face view of a giant pair of legs. You must then follow his mist-shrouded form deeper into the valley until finally the fog clears and you are able to take him in in his entirety. Because so much of my mental state was being occupied with "how the hell am I going to take this giant down?" it was vital that the actual mechanics of the fight were excessively simple. I also had trouble identifying his weak points with the sword light. The camera can get a bit wonky in those parts, and Wanderer stops moving whenever you raise his sword which makes it kind of an ineffectual technique, or at least the way I'm doing it. So it was good that the only way to die in the fight is if you put the controller down for 10 minutes.

On the subject of lizards. I tried going around and trying to find lizards and fruit for a bit but it felt tangential in that soul deadening way that video game collectible collecting tends to feel so I stopped. Think I'll forgo ghost world exploring and just stick to colossi murdering.

[Sno]

If you just keep an eye out for them as you traverse the world between the colossus lairs, you'll likely end up with enough. There are a ton of those things in the game, you can expand the health bar and stamina gauage to some pretty ridiculous extremes.

Additionally, what are the current feelings about the two week cycle?

How many of us have finished the first colossus? How many of us haven't?

That already made one...

In a world where there is a doujin fighter based on Les Miserables, it seems like a fair expectation that there would also be one based on the Ghibli canon, but my googling is turning up nothing for this. I am forced to conclude that you are a liar.

There are, also, actual Nausicaa games that are old and terrible.

[youmeyou]

I feel like we can narrow it down to one week, it really shouldn't take more than an hour for any colossus right? (Though I've only ever done 5 of them in this game so I don't know how long the later fights get)

[Sno]

There's a few fights later in the game that i particularly remember as being really motherfuckery, while exploration and travel will gradually eat up more and more time the deeper into the game you go, but i don't think it should ever really exceed two hours.

I believe the game is generally cited as being between 15-20 hours long.

Edit: About the Castlevania thing, there are a ton of 3D action games that have tried to do giant colossus-style bosses since SotC, but they usually end up feeling very much like gimmicks, very scripted and rigid event sequences that clumsily force the game's existing combat mechanics into an unsuitable context.

Then there's Dragon's Dogma, which has a very literal adaptation of the SotC mechanics, but applied as an ancillary tool to use against any larger enemy in the game. It's handled very well, allowing you to inflict specific injuries to hamper the enemy in useful ways and net you unique drops. Unfortunately, it also frequently ends up being something you can totally ignore, since it's a game that gives you so many options in battle. Still, Dragon's Dogma and its larger enemies are probably the best SotC-inspired thing i've seen.

[elmuerte]

We can always extend the timeframe when it's needed. But right now I think we should reduce it to 1 week.

[Sno]

I also feel that would be the right thing to do, but i think that we should stick to the two weeks for this first one so we're not taking anybody by surprise.

[syntheticgerbil]

So I beat the first Colossus and I am using a guide to pick up all the idiotic collectables. I've done the whole lower half of the game lizards and fruit bullshit completely.

Honestly, I'm not enjoying this game anywhere near what I thought I would. In many ways it just sucks. It feels like constant tedium so far. I forgave Ico's atrocious controls and physics because it was released 2001, but Shadow came out the end of 2005 and it's still carrying over the shit jump physics and crappy ineffectual sword swinging. They tried to add some Prince of Persia type wall climbing but it just tends to be broken or buggy half of the time.

When I was trying to find some lizards, sometimes I would be required to scale rock faces that were not noticeably climbable. Turns out to climb shit you either hold jump right and about a foot below the edge you are going to be on, the character pops into place. So sloppy. Other times I could just spam the jump button and my character would jitter up a rock.

Also getting fruit and lizards is an exercise in frustration every time, let alone the idiotic hassle it takes to find them in the first place. So many times my fruit that was shot down just goes 3/4ths into the ground, arrow side down, so I can't find the fucking things. So I'm just pressing R1 over and over again in a general area. Could they not fix their collision detection for these trees? The lizards themselves don't seem to care half the time if I slash them with my sword and if they are on a wall, I can hit them dead on but the sword just clangs and the lizard runs away.

I'm sorry, Team Ico had 4 years development time and so many games in between came out smoother controls and more polish, but this game is so sloppy within an environment with almost nothing inside. It had Sony money backing it and it appears no time was put into a refined gameplay experience. Where did that time go?

On the subject of lizards. I tried going around and trying to find lizards and fruit for a bit but it felt tangential in that soul deadening way that video game collectible collecting tends to feel so I stopped. Think I'll forgo ghost world exploring and just stick to colossi murdering.

This is my main peeve so far because it's an exercise in tedium. I have a thing in my brain that makes me compulsively go for the collectables and it's been done well and intuitive with many games, but with Shadow it's almost as if the designers don't want you to gather any of this shit. There's no way to find all these lizards on your own without a guide. The world is filled with a bunch of nothing and you are supposed to find these tiny lizards with no indicators? Come on. On top of all of that, they don't stay still much and can be frustrating to kill.

Some trees have fruit and some don't. The ones that do have multiples that you have to spend like 5 minutes running around holding your bow to see them all because this game has no FPV (another major mistake). I'm not wasting my time on bad design so I'm just using a guide and just slogging through this part.

The colossus so far was fun enough but really not that awesome. I had to again look up what to do after the back leg part because I kept thinking the game wanted me to climb up the hammer since that goes down for an extended period of time, then I'd climb up to his elbow and stab a lot, doing nothing until I fell off because I ran out of stamina.

To me, climbing up the back of his leg made less sense, because the parts where you shimmy on the ridges from the back of his thigh to his side made no sense as you had to shimmy with the bad controls to a different angle of ridge. Getting my character to do this seemed to be very buggy and there was a lot of jitter until I was on his side and I could get up to the lower platform on his back. Then shimmying again to the upper platforms was another exercise in frustration as I shimmied on the ledge to the left platform and somehow I shimmied under the platform and was holding on to nothing for a second before I just fell back down. I just tried again with the right upper platform and it went fine.

Sheesh, is the whole game going to control this bad?

[Thrik]

They probably shouldn't have bothered with the collectible shit. It's badly implemented and was probably literally just done so there was more to the game than the bosses, to please testers or publishers or some shit.

For guys like you who are compelled to collect it's pretty much a death sentence for your enjoyment of the game. If you stick to the colossi all that crap isn't quite so blatant and the game's strengths somewhat balance out. Not that I finished it, I got bored.

In fact, collectible shit is often one of the laziest and shittiest parts of any game. You should break that habit unless you really, really like a game.

[youmeyou]

It's funny because when I first tried the game half a year ago I didn't even know there were collectibles in this game. I got five collosi in and never bothered to shoot a fruit let alone slice a lizard. It's only because of comments here that I've even attempted to engage with that side of the game.

So it does truly feel like an afterthought thrown in to please the replayability gods. It's very possible to play this game without even realizing there are things to be collected.

As to the difficulty of the first colossus

I am in agreement that it does start out feeling very awkward. I also first thought you could run up the hammer, but it's on the ground for too short a period for that to be feasible so I quickly gave that thought up. But once I figured out how to climb up his leg the rest progressed pretty naturally.