After my second hour, I was totally hooked. This game is absolutely amazing, And the collosi are ridiculously gorgeous for something rendered with the PS2's dusty old hardware. There seems to be a very wide gap between the skill required to beat the first two collosi and what it takes to beat the third. Finding and beating the Third collosus probably took longer then my combined time on the first two. Also, I think its interesting how the collosi don't even fight back till the third; it makes you really question what you're doing. Also, everytime I kill a collosus, dark black tentacles flow from the collosus into the player character. The story, while presented competantly, is also very vague, which i think adds to the mystery and allure and uncertainty that so far pervade this game.
Its nice the developers made this game feels action-oriented without any real sort of combat system: all you can do with your sword is swing when standing or pull back and stab while clinging to something, and your bow functions just like a bow in any of a multitude of other games; the longer you hold it down and the harder you press the button, the farther the arrow goes. Despite this extremely simple combat system, the game is incredibly engrossing and fun.
I immensely enjoyed killing the third collosus, even though it got extremely frusterating. This one is located on top of a tower, and i fell of when i was still trying to figure out how to kill it, and for some reason it took me three trys to get back up, and given that its takes 2-3 minutes to climb to the place where I was falling, that got somewhat unpleasant. However, all in all, I think this is an extremely good game, and i plan to play it all the way through.
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Shadow of the collosus is so far a very unique experience. From a design perspective, it's something that hasn't really been done before. Its sort of as if the designers decided to take the boss battles of an RPG or Adventure game, expand on them, and then turn the whole business into a game.
That thought, in addition to some independant games i've been playing lately, got me thinking about game design, and about how those of us who grew up playing games, when we're thinking of a game, always have to make it conform to some archetype we know and recognize; be it a shmup, a first person shooter, or an RPG, or even some combination of multiple genre's, we always categorize. I think alot of the most interesting games that have been released lately are the ones that are hard to classify. E.G. Shadow of the Collosus, GTA 3, or Flow( an Independant game).
Anyway, to return to the topic at hand, I'm greatly enjoying Shadow so far. i've killed the first two Collosi, and I had trouble making myself stop to write this. So far, the one part of this game that has really lept out at me is the moral uncertainty of your actions; When you defeat a collosus, you feel triumph at having overcome a difficult obstacle, but you also get the impression that you just destroyed something grand, perhaps even benign.
I find it very interesting to play a game where morals aren't black and white, and from the little i've seen so far, I feel like shadow of the collosus was a very ambitious and successful work.
The only problem i've had with the game so far, ironically enough, was when I couldn't figure out how to get to the first collosus in the very beginning because i couldn't figure out what to climb. My roommate eventually suggested a wall that appeared to be covered in vines, which i realized i should have tried pretty much the instant i saw it, as climbing walls covered in vines is an extremely common gaming convention, but for some reason the idea just didn't strike me. I don't if this was a failing on my part or the games, but I think that it was at least partially because a wall with green spots just doesn't visually appear to be something a person could climb.
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