Archive for November, 2005

Wow.

Four, five and six down.

Four and five were superb. Not too hard, but great fun and, yes, very intense.

(The only time I’ve died so far is on the first colossus when I didn’t know what I was doing.)

Number six, however, has just taken me about an hour. Why? Because I am an idiot. I was thinking the camera was unhelpful and the difficulty had spiked alarmingly and the control system wasn’t up to the job… but I was also thinking that I might have missed something obvious. And I had. I’d missed something completely, utterly, blindingly obvious. Something so obvious that I’d actually noticed it at the beginning of the fight and then, er, forgotten about it when it mattered. As soon I’d worked that out, he went down easily.

Great, great game. If you can play North American Playstation 2 games you have to play this.

My God.

This is brilliant.

I’ve just beaten the first three colossi and I’ve only turned off because I’m exhausated.

I’ll just get the annoyances out of the way first.

ANNOYANCE ONE – Right, I got very pissed off with it earlier when I couldn’t make a jump. There was a jump I knew I had to make because it was the only way to go. I just couldn’t do it, though, and every time I failed it took a couple of minutes to get back to try again. (The character you play is a very slow swimmer.) Turned out in the end that I’d been pushing the joystick in slightly the wrong direction and that there’s actually a nice visual clue to show you when you’re pointing in the right direction. So that was my fault, really.

ANNOYANCE TWO – Um, I suppose the horse controls can be a bit clumsy at times.

ANNOYANCE THREE – Er, nope, I’m stuck now. I’ve not even noticed any of the framerate issues people have been going on about.

So that’s what’s wrong with it. What’s right with it?

GOOD THING ONE – It looks gorgeous. You can see the compromises made to fit it into the PS2 hardware – which is poncy videogame twat talk for ‘it looks like a Playstation 2 game because it is’ – but the design and the lighting and everything are astounding. The colossi themselves look wonderful. The hair looks great, they’re huge and they’ve got real personality. (The personality is basically: “Huh? What’s going on? I’ve just woken up and some little bastard’s firing arrows at me. Bugger off, kid! Get away with you!”)

GOOD THING TWO – The controls work properly and you can invert them both horizontally and veritically as you see fit.

GOOD THING THREE – The battles are going to make every boss battle in every other game ever seem lame. I’ve never played anything like it. They’re puzzles, as much as anything, where you have to work out how to get to the colossis’ weak spots. Each one takes ages. There’s the initial part when you’re feeling it out and running away to recover health, which has a rhythm all of its own. And then there’s the part where you jump on to the colossus and things get…

GOOD THING FOUR – Intense. That’s the word that most leaps out while playing. (Shortly followed by ‘fun’ and ‘awesome’.) Clambering over these huge beings is breath-taking. And when one shakes you loose and you slam your finger on to L1 and just manage to grab a a piece of rock sticking out of the beast’s head and get shaken around a hundred feet above the ground, well, there just aren’t any words for it. It’s something new entirely.

There’s always a chance the difficulty curve will be all out of whack and I’ll have to give up on this before the end, but first impressions are that this is another absolute classic. A real one. A touchstone game that we’ll look back on and which will seem to define this generation.

The Playstation is as much about ICO and Shadow of the Colossus as it is FIFA and Need For Speed. Let’s not forget that.