But it was ATMOSPHERIC KLEINBL00
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.
