Your point on children's books is spot on, I think. Children's books follow trends and are as low-effort as any other garbage in any other medium, with rare exceptions - again, like any other medium. Harry Potter is the exception. The Wire is the exception. Shadow of the Colossus is the exception. First it was wizards. Then it was post-apocalyptic. My next guess is mermaids. Riding a trend is just as frequent in books as in anything else, and the quality is reflected in that.
That's the exact opposite of what most people find appealing about the game: cut out the creeps, cut out the grind, cut out the side quests, leave behind only the bosses with a bit of pacing in between. It's a game with only epic fights. With enemies so gargantuan that are composed of the landscape in which they reside: And it's one of the first games that turned "It's swinging a sword at you!" into "Quick, run up the sword and grab the wrist!"
Cut out the story, cut out the narrative, cut out the world, and leave that lovely "we're going to make you deal with our limited game mechanics by figuring out what contrived bullshit sequence of tedious keypresses will let you advance if you beat your fucking head against it for enough hours with a copy of gamefaqs open next to you on the sofa" aspect fully intact. Shadow of the Collosus is an utter and total bullshit game.
I'd heard so much about it that I bought it off PSN last year and played though it. There's a great feeling of accomplishment when you finish, but I think that's mostly relief that it's over. I finished it with no cheats or hints, but I found zero replay value in the game. It was really pretty, and unusual, and it was featured in some movie too, so it had that going for it...
[edit] I found playing through GTA San Andreas to be a much more literary experience - that's some good story there.
Okay I lied. I remember now that I did have to consult the internet for how to defeat the final colossus, I didn't know what to do after getting onto his hand [hangs head in shame]
I'm not a gamer and I loved the fuck out of that game. It was mysterious and cool and while the gameplay wasn't perfect at least it was interesting.
Right. It's Myst without the puzzles, interrupted by boss battles. The fact that a generation of nerdy gamers spent half their lives trying to find out if there really was something more does not alter that. I'll defer for a moment, though, and say this: My experience with Shadow was sitting through an intolerably long cutscene, riding across nothing, hopping and climbing and doing other things that were entirely too dependent on timing and entirely not dependent enough on game mechanics, and then attempting to fight some big golem thing that not only meant me absolutely no harm, but that could kill me in two blows. And the learning curve - the lack of reward - the incredibly BAD camera tracking Made it a terrible gaming experience. Hated that game.
That it was. Know what I dig? Know what you do in Journey? Stuff. Not a lot of stuff. Very little stuff, in fact. But for not doing a lot of stuff, you also don't have to learn a lot of commands, figure out a lot of arbitrary shit, or die over and over and over again because you pressed square-circle up up instead of circle-square up up.
To be fair, the camera tracking and frame rate were awful in SotC, but so were most games on the PS2. It ain't far to compare the graphics to Journey, which came out seven years after. PS2 games had to take a different approach when they wanted atmosphere; pixels weren't just handed to the devs on a shiny SDK platter back then!
It definitely used way too many polygon landscapes when it could have gotten away with with a simple matte background. But, hey, my experience is extra clouded by an extra-terrible emulator that put horse-riding around 10 fps. Look at what you can get away with when you make things 2D!Yeah, but to be fair, Myst looked pretty dope. Okami was dope. Metroid was dope. All of them use less horsepower than SotC.
Please tell me that wasn't the first time you saw Mean Girls? Because that movie is rich dense amazing chocolate mousse in our cultural landscape. I swear it was the only movie I watched in high school. Well, not only, Lord of the Rings was coming out while I was in high school, so it was like a 50/50 split. Delicious.