Weekly Game Review: Shadow of the Colossus

[MockBot]

Automatically generated comment thread for Weekly Game Review: Shadow of the Colossus (http://www.i-mockery.com/weeklies/weekly.php?type=games&id=18).

[Nick]

I kind of sputtered out after the fifth colossus and never bothered to finish the game. I suppose I just found the journey to the temple and back to the colossi to be tedious after a while. :(

[OxBlood]

The Sotc-Land has this warm-emptiness to it, this feeling that it´s kind of "dead, but it´s okay", kind of a gentle sadness. (Haven´t played through it yet, so I don´t know what really happened there). The only downfall is the occasional framerate slowdown imho.

[thecatillaccat]

I beat this one once, and that was enough. The boss fights were incredible, the landscape beautiful, and the controls felt stiff and slow. I'm stiff and slow. I don't want my vidjagames reminding me of that!

[Hangie]

This game kicked alot of ass, although my cousins didnt know how to find the colossi and never even saw the first one : /

[Pentegarn]

I never got to play this one. I did see it featured prominently in "Reign Over Me" though. I thought it looked really fun. I like epic boss fights, maybe if it is or becomes one of the greatest hits titles I might check it out though.

[Zbu Manowar]

Hasn't it been a Greatest Hit for a while now?

[BakaGaijin]

I agree with Nick. I enjoyed the beauty of the game, but the pace was too slow and there wasn't anything else but temple, boss fight, temple, boss fight, temple, boss fight. Yawn. I got stuck on one of the four legged bosses (where you had to shoot the bottom of it's feet with arrows or something) and just thought "why even bother?".

[Codiekitty]

I hate this game.

I don't think it's a stretch to say the camera is the worst I've yet dealt with.

The colossi fights are easy, drawn out, and tedious. The catfish where you plod around in this giant lake, trying to align yourself to get scooped up by its tail while avoiding those electrified barbs but the wanderer swims so slow and the camera and depth perception throw you off so much it takes forever to actually do this, and when you DO get on it, stab out the spines, and get to the head it submerges and you have to let go and do it aaaaaaall over again. The salamander I had to flip over ten times to kill the first time, though in a replay to get screenshots I discovered a way to cut it down to five, which takes it from "ridiculous" to "really unnecessary". The kappa where a glitch or oversight has the Dormin telling you to abandon what you're doing when you climb up its back, which gets you where you need to be. The dragon I figured out how to ground in two seconds, then took me another half hour of fluff to actually kill it. The final which I had to climb no less than five times because whenever I tried to jump from its left bicep to its right hand, the sloppy camera and controls would somehow put me on its tricep with my only option being to let go and climb up it again, climbing which amounts to "hold R1 and tap Triangle". Also, you're given the answers to fifteen of the sixteen colossi, either by the Dormin or the sword.

I guess I can see how the world could have been beautiful had more attention been put into the world and making it look less like a computer generated it and getting the grid patterns off everything, instead of seeing how high they could crank the fog and bloom.

It's riddled with cliches. The only reason the first lion is afraid of fire is because some law book out there says "beasts are afraid of fire". It's inflammable, which throws out "it can get hurt by fire" and it lives in a small temple with four giant candelabras, which throws out "it doesn't understand fire". The "big reveal" at the end can be seen coming a mile away because it's been used in just about every cartoon ever made. Hell, the game's bloody name is a cliche.

Also, I've determined that the only explanation for the plot and world is that the wanderer is Dracula incarnate. Or more likely, somebody was too caught up in trying to rip off Vagrant Story that they overlooked WHY what happened in Vagrant Story happened.

[Grislygus]

"I TOTALLY HATED EVERY PART OF THIS GODDAM GAME BUT I Played It All the way through anyway"

[Styled Executioner]

Is there only a handful of people who can appreciate artistic merit nowadays?

I loved the game anyway and thought it frustrated just enough to challenge me without either being piss easy or sweetcorn-in-your-shit hard. The roaming around the epic landscape almost made me gasp in adulation more than once. Sure the game had some issues with the camera and such but the overall feel of the game overcomes the problems.

[EndersGame]

I loved the game, i loved the visuals, i loved the gameplay, i loved it all!

[hobbsend]

I've only played bits and pieces of the game, as I don't own it myself, but this is a fairly spot on review. The only part that I can add (and some may disagree with me here) is the sense of feeling bad for the Colossi. It's almost as if your the bad guy in all this, yet due to the story telling, your only getting a glimpse of what's actually going on. Great review proto!

[Entreri21]

I adored this game after absolutely loathing Ico. I couldn't stand Ico and found it bland. I thought that SotC added a sense of epicness to the game world and I love the whole thought of an entire region (big enough for SIXTEEN COLOSSI to roam around) being completely cut off from everything and forgotten....

Certainly one of my fave PS2 games of all time.

[Copper]

Unforutnately, I never got past the demo of this from one of the Jampacks. I'd heard the rave reviews, though it was a great concept for a game, and did find it visually stunning. Unfortunately, I have to agree with folks about the clunky controls. Now, I'm no savant, but I've been gaming for odd-on 20+ years and when I can't grasp the controls in a 15-minute demo, it totally turns me off from playing the game. I don't want to have to think about what my fingers are doing on what buttons. I want to be able to react to what I'm seeing on the screen without having to think "Okay, do I hit X and L1 or do I hit X and O? O twice?" And yeah, hated the camera, too. Some of the jumps, even in the demo, were impossible because I wasn't at the proper angle.

I think it's wonderful that this game is such a hit and I have no argument with the people that love it and think it's beautiful, but personally, I fall more into the camp of "Let's watch someone play" rather than doing it myself.

[macrodeath]

I loved this game, but it isn't "the best game ever" for me. I hated the end boss, not because he/she was too hard or anything, but because you have this fucking tower just standing still, throwing beams at you. (Thank god that fucking horse died before the battle...)
Anyway, i liked ICO better...
Top 5 games:
#1: We love Katamari damacy
#2: Dragon Quest 8
#3: System Shock 2
#4: Tomb Raider's :)
#5: Horror games (Silent Hill, Fatal Frame etc...)

[Fluke]

This is one of those memorable games indeedy.

[Dr. Boogie]

I thought it was a great game, and I never had any problems with the controls.

However, I will say that some of the battles were artificially long, like the catfish one, but the worst for me was the one where you fight the giant turtle-like colossus in the barren geyser field. You had to get that bastard to stand a certain way over a geyser right as it's erupting, and meanwhile, he's blasting the shit out of you with his mouth laser.

[Codiekitty]

I was going to mention that one because it pissed the holy fuck out of me the first time and is the exact moment I started hating this game, but in the replay, I beat it in ten minutes including the time it took to get there. Maybe it would have been less infuriating the first time had I remembered the horse which actually CAN outrun the shots, but there's still the catfish, the salamander, the kappa, the dragon, both lions ESPECIALLY the second, and the man.

And hell, it probably takes five minutes to stab the swordsman to death because you have to climb up the back of his head, down his forehead, press whatever button is Attack I don't remember, wait a second, stab, wait for him to stop bucking, notice your grip meter's low, climb back up his forehead and down back onto his shoulders, let go, let the grip meter recharge, grab him when he moves funny to signal the start of his shaking, and repeat about six times.

[DuFresne]

I love games like this and Portal: games that are fairly short but challenging without being insanely difficult. Both games had an excellent sense of mood, as well.

[MarioRPG]

I just remember not having much difficulty with this one, and that's where it lose some points for me.

[SlyBattery]

All the riding back and forth from the temple to the colossi was to much for me. To boring and repetitive. This isn't a game for people that can't stand doing things over and over again. But it definitely had a good concept. And the visuals were fantastic.

[JJ the Jetplane]

I never played this game, i played a demo one time, but it didn't seem like the kind of game i'd be into.

[Protoclown]

I'm surprised to hear so many people had a problem with the controls. Yeah, the camera sometimes did stupid things (but what game with a moving camera doesn't have that problem?), but after the first hour or so of playing I had the controls mastered.

[BurntToShreds]

I've never played it, and I don't think I will. The "Obvious Weak Point" part of it seems stupid.

[Emu]

Spending hours hunting for the weak point would be gay, and it's not like you can just leap straight up to it and shove your sword in. It moves around on some of the bosses after you damage them to a certain extent, and the goal of the game is even getting there in the first place.

[Oska_Go_Wilde]

The final colossus is epic. I sure hope none of you dimwits consider that "spoilage", because well, we could all see it coming: epic.

[Goronian]

I liked this game... For an hour or so. It's just too repetitive and bland for my taste... Yeah, yeah, visuals are pretty, but, well... Grey. Really-really grey. The sort of grey you see in black and white movies. Really... Ico kicked this game's ass.

[Fathom Zero]

By the way, that one horse colossus screwed me over and over and over.

[Codiekitty]

The final colossus is like that episode of Doug where he goes to see a monster movie, hides just before the monster is unveiled twice, then the third time he sees the monster and breaks out laughing because you can see the zipper in the back of the costume.

[Emu]

Except this monster is a thousand feet tall and hurling fireballs at you.

[Codiekitty]

It's a 200 foot tall shrieking man in a dress and its fireballs are stopped by thin walls and it's not even throwing them for half the fight.