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kleinbl00  ·  3606 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why Kleinbl00 Is Wrong About Shadow of the Colossus - As Presented by Kleinbl00

Aright. Well said. Circle gets the square. Disclaimer for disclaimer, this is me talking shit about a game I played for about an hour, twice. It is absolutely no skin off my nose that everyone under the sun loves the fuck out of SotC so long as they don't require me to play it. - SO -

Let's challenge one assumption right quick:

    It means you suck at the game.

And I don't mean to challenge it in the way you think - because oh yeah - I suck at this game. I suck at it haaaaaard. But you know what I also suck at?

(Drop the needle, DJ)

Holy fuck do I suck at that game. I have been sucking at that game since it was a one track demo on PS1. I have been sucking at that game since Yugoslavia was a COUNTRY. I have been sucking at that game since before Sickboy was Sickboy and since Angelina Jolie had a muthafuckin' pixie cut.

And I'm not kidding around, either - I drive those sleds like they're Magic Erasers on a dirty stove. Like I'm scraping barnacles off a trawler. I leave paint around like I'm taggin' with my fenders. I. Suck. Hard.

But here's the difference - I still play. I play and I play and I play because even when you suck as hard as I do, that game is a fuckin' rush. Even without the first fucking idea how to get around Sebenco Climb for par, I play it sober, I play it drunk, I play it sick, I play it healthy and I know how to maximize or minimize my suck on any given track in any given play mode for one simple reason:

It's still fun.

Swear to god - the first PS1 video game I ever played was Twisted Metal. Eh. The second PS1 video game I ever played was Wipeout. And I was hooked. No idea what the buttons did - you figure it out. No idea how to win - don't care. Fuckin' 13" dorm TV at a friend's house and I just couldn't care less. It was, for all intents and purposes, full justification for that guy dropping half his tuition disbursement on a video game console.

So let's compare and contrast:

I'm no longer a ramen-eater fresh out of the dorms. I have a leather sectional that would make minimum_wage shit his britches. I project 1080P at 4000 lumens on 92 inches diagonal into 5.1 of Infinity Kappa. And here we are - atmosphere. So what do we do? Well, we ride the horse, then we climb the cliff, then the music changes and a damage bar comes up and swoop ouch swoop I'm dead.

Again.

Swoop ouch swoop I'm dead.

Again. Swoop ouch swoop I'm dead.

See, if I could, like, focus on the dude's foot or whatever the fuck you're supposed to do, that'd be neat. Except you can't lock shit in SotC so that's out. And even though I'm playing this fucking game at 92 inches the mechanics of the game give me about a 20 degree field of view so I might as well be playing it through a periscope. Oh, yeah - and this game is about:

    ...the concept of holding something.

Right. So in addition to running and jumping and getting squished, you're holding some goddamn button down the entire fucking game. Ctrl-Alt-fuck you. Certain things need to be autonomous. I can't see correctly, my haptic feedback is a buzz, I have no situational awareness what-so-fucking-ever and if you want me to stand a fighting chance of being even vaguely proficient at your game, I have to accept that my thumb is always going to be mashing the circle down because apparently, in SotC-land, fuckin' buttons will fly away if you don't keep them pinned.

Fuck THAT.

So right. Off the bat, we start off with the fact that I suck at something that is zero fun. This is why I don't play tennis: The journey from "terrible" to "embarrassing" passes through a sun-blasted hellscape of "there is absolutely nothing fun about this".

So what's my motivation, exactly?

Oh, right. A story and narrative that - if I may - I

    weren’t trying hard enough to find it.

Straight up, mofo. So I got this girl. She's dead. I suppose she's my one true love or whatever but mostly, she's dead. I haven't seen, met, or conversed with her in a not-dead state. Right. So now I'm in this giant mausoleum or some shit and I brought Artax.

(brief aside: I fucking hate horses. A motorcycle, you know where you stand. Motorcycles don't second guess you. Horses? I've been on a horse twice and both times they tried to kill me. The first time, by galloping under tree limbs designed to hit me in the face. The second time, by not knowing you can't turn around over free space while walking down a cliff trail. FUCK horses).

So okay. Artax and I are going to go ride across flat fucking nothing. Good thing I can hold up my sword and it'll tell me where to go. Where am I going? A cliff. So much for Artax. And, by the way, "climbing" isn't so much about executing the right moves, it's about executing the right moves with one finger keeping a button from flying away because, you know, "holding."

hey hey - what's that? A giant thing. And I appear to be armed with my singing sword and a bow and arrow. Against rocks. Oh, that's right -

    What you don’t seem to realize is that every boss in Shadow of the Colossus was a puzzle for you to solve.

Bitch, I've seen exactly zero game mechanics. The camera controls are whack. In order to climb onto the giant thing I need to time it precisely, because if I'm 20 fucking feet away I can apparently still get stepped on, unless I'm in the magic polygon approach blessed by the developers. It isn't consistent, by the way, and the controls are laggy. And I think I might have an idea but

- and then I'm dead.

So what did we learn? Well, we learned that I'm riding a fucking horse across Greenland to pick a fight with a glacier without so much as an ice pick. But apparently I didn't try hard enough.

See, this is where those walls'o'text and side quests and merchants and other bullshit comes in. You know why they call them "boss battles?" 'cuz they're the finals. They're the end of the level. They're the thing you've been building up to. They are the end-of-term exam to evaluate how well you've learned the lessons of the game. You know what you've learned in SotC by the time you get to the first colossus?

1) Jumping is a bitch

2) Horses are boring and stupid

3) Climbing also sucks.

Oh here, have a weapon or two. Go take on that mountain over there.

FUCK THAT.

We can agree about a couple things: Yes, Crime and Punishment is a bullshit book. Yes, the cutscenes in Okami are teeth-grindingly bad. That's why you keep a bottle of bourbon handy and keep your rocks unmelted. good video games? They give you a chance to drink your beer without having to pause.

Shadow of the Colossus? Doesn't even give you a chance to pick your nose. You're too busy "holding."

This is probably a cardinal sin to admit, but I'm going to hell anyway so what the fuck:

I play games for fun. I got this close to dying in the woods about ten years back. Twenty years back, I had some lame-ass mutherfucker drop the wrong rope when we were 100 feet up and 30 feet from the top and had to free-climb up before the sun set or we'd die. I've evaluated horses IRL and I'd rather ride an ostrich. And if I'm going to be faced with a puzzle, it's either going to be fun or it's going to be outsourced to the Internet. I have nothing to prove against a bunch of Japanese wankers I'll never meet. I want to chillax on my minimum_wage-enraging couch, drink my minimum_wage-enraging single malt, watch my boojie big screen and have fun.

And if I've given your game half an hour and utterly failed to find the fun, well...

...gotta say it's the game's fault.