MIDI Week Singles: "Revived Power" - Shadow of the Colossus (PS2)

"Revived Power" from Shadow of the Colossus on Playstation 2

Record Label: King records (Japan)

Composer: Ko Otani

Game Developer: Team Ico

The soundtrack for Shadow of the Colossus is, on a whole, fantastic.  Orchestral, exciting, at times dark and fearsome, it might be hard to pick an appropriate single.  However,  Shadow of the Colossus also uses event-triggered music, blending different tracks together.  Anyone who plays this game will agree that the music does a lot of work to augment the experience of the player.  

In this way, the track Revived Power stands out above the rest.  When I hear this track, I am clinging for dear life to the shoulders of a fifty foot tall behemoth, slowly climbing my way to my goal.  It's been a struggle to get here, but the tides are turning in my favor.  

I also hear flavors of John Williams in this track by Japanese composer Ko Otani.  This might be my imagination, or a product of my limited musical vocabulary.  However, if Otani is indeed standing on the shoulder of giants (or colossus), well then, that only seems appropriate.

-D

Second Impressions: Shadow of the Colossus (PS2)

http://rebloggy.com/post/gaming-design-poster-fan-art-shadow-of-the-colossus/74106064450

I am midway through Shadow of the Colossus, and I really think I should write something about this game.  The first time I encountered this second release from Team Ico, was when it was new, watching Zor the Red play, and sometimes taking turns.  It left a strong impression on me, and I knew this game would stand out over the test of time.

A few years later, I find myself with access to a PS3, and an earnest desire to play this game again.  Thank you ebay, I now own a copy of Ico/Shadow of the Colossus for PS3.  Though, I do not actually own the console I play it on.  This could be an issue in the future.

For the present, I definitely think Shadow of the Colossus holds up.  The art direction is just fantastic.  The graphics aren't terribly dated, and graphics aren't much of a problem for me as I am perpetually behind on the latest and greatest.  The gameplay is in some ways very simplistic, and this works to its advantage.  The few features in the game are fantastically well honed with very few exceptions.  

Much of the time in this game is spent simply going from point A to point B,  and it's beautiful and peaceful, a stark contrast to the actual Colossus fights.  For this, you employ your horse, Agro.  Agro takes a little getting used to.  My best equine advice I can give is not to try and control Agro too closely.  He's actually pretty smart, and will follow the curvature of the landscape.  He'll get on your nerves sometimes, and he can be a pain in the neck.  But it would take an extraordinarily long time to walk to your various destinations.  

One of the poorest features of the game is actually the difficulty in mounting your horse.  The mount button is also the jump button, and if you're not positioned just so, you'll end up jumping around like a goofball, which can quickly become annoying.  Apart from mounting, the camera can take some getting used to.  It has a mind of its own, and there are times when it simply won't cooperate when I want to get a look at something.  On the other hand, one of the best features of this game are the incredible majestic camera angles you are treated to.  Still, when the camera is a problem, and an 80 ton colossus is bearing down on  you, I'm less concerned about the directors vision and more concerned about not-dying.

The controls, and the gameplay in general requires patience.  This game is not a pick-up and play platforming adventure.  The controls are quirky.  However, with difficulty, there is always the exchange.  Every quirk contributes in some way to the overall artful payoff.  The heaviness of the hero's motions is really great to watch, even if he isn't as agile or quick as I'd like him to be.  If you have the patience and the will, you can become quite adepts at Shadow of the Colossus, and reap the rewards of beautiful, epic monster battles.  

One important thing to note is the third colossus battle.  This is the time in the game when the wheels come off, and everything seems to fall apart.  Typically, a colossus takes me about 30 minutes, start to finish, but the third battle took an hour and fifteen, and that doesn't include when I rage-quit and started again a later time.  And I remember having the same problem the first time through, when Zor and I felt we were slamming our heads into a brick wall.  Still, I made it through, even without consulting a strategy guide.  For anyone else:  consult a strategy guide.  Save yourself the heartache.  It's really amazing how an entire game can seem so terrible when you're having a bad time.  

Ultimately, Shadow of the Colossus is a sort of high-risk, high reward game, that I'm enjoying more and more as I get older.  If you can-- play it.  I'll buy you a copy.  (maybe)

-D

Foruming Exclusivity

First of all, sorry for not having this up yesterday and while I'm at it, sorry for not having something up last Friday.  Now, on with the show.

The Last of Us came out a short while ago (Well, almost a month ago) and from what I've heard about, it would be a game that I would love.  Something about a post-apocalyptic world (and the title suggests something akin to The Road) which if done correctly, will get me pretty much every time.  Once I started hearing good things about The Last of Us is when I tried looking the game up on Steam.  That's when I found out it was a PS3 exclusive.  That's also when I became annoyed.

Console exclusivity has been a thing since the beginning of video gaming so the concept/practice is anything but new.  Personally I find it to be annoying, especially if there exists a game I would like to play, like The Last of Us, but I do not own a PS3 and the two people I know who do own them probably wouldn't be too keen on having me sit in their living room for the 14-20 hours it would take to complete the game.  Which then makes me wonder how often people buy a gaming console because a particular game is not released on any other system.  I understand the draw/appeal when a console is launching, but for exclusivity this late in a console's life, I can't see as a selling point.

Admittedly however, I did buy a PSP because Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions was coming out and I bought a PS2 from Doc Torpotts after he won one from a Coke bottle cap back in 2005 because I wanted to play the upcoming Final Fantasy XII..  All the other systems I've bought (Nintend0) were because I liked the company and liked the games that were being released, exclusive or not.  And, while it's true that I do have a number of exclusive games (Eternal Darkness, The Legend of Zelda, Shadows of the Empire, Timesplitters, Bushido Blade, et cetera), I bought the games long after I owned the consoles.

Now onto message boards.  I get message boards.  I get why they exist and why there's one up for almost every company that says they care about how they interact with their fans/the public.  I've posted on a handful of message boards, each time thinking that the experience will somehow be different and I wouldn't be as much of a thread/post killer as I have been in the past.

Turns out this is still the case.

Back in June I joined the forums for the Shadow of the Eternals game that Precursor Games is in the process of developing.  I started posting pretty early on in the forums and all was going well.  Then I didn't visit for a couple of days and when I returned, it was that lost feeling I used to get when I went back to school after being sick for a couple of days.  Threads had taken off, new topics six to seven pages in had started, developed and been completed.  In other cases, I would add my thoughts to a thread and the thread would then die/not be replied to.  I'm not saying it was a bad/negative/insulting response, it just happened to be the end of the conversation.

This kind of thing has happened a number of times before, on the Reaper Miniature forums, the IMDb message boards, the Draconian forums and even the [Enforcer] forums.  And then there's Reddit. . . blarg.

Often times, I don't respond as I become very self conscious about what is being said and how my response will be over analysed.  There's a part of me that would like to be more active in forums, especially with companies that I really like and would like to promote, but often times I get distracted or forget to visit the forums and when I came back, I would feel disconnected from whatever the discussion has been about.

Maybe this is just me sounding sorry for myself, but it's been something that I've been thinking about recently, especially with the games that I've helped fund via kickstarter and Indiegogo, each having a forum/message board/discussion area.  I just don't have the time/energy/chutzpah to be as active as I want to be with all the things/people/places that I like.  As it turns out, time is a commodity.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Leave It All To Me Because I'm Feverish, Devilish and Irrelevant

Never Too Old For Video Games

I like to visit Cracked.com on about a weekly basis.  Conklederp knows which authors she likes while I usually don't remember who wrote what article.  I recently read two video gaming articles by John Cheese, whom I thought I didn't like after reading two of his articles, although I don't remember what those articles were about.  Anyway, one of his recent articles was titled "5 Ways to Tell You're Getting Too Old For Video Games."  It was a pretty good article, as far as Cracked articles go anyway, in that I was agreeing or disagreeing with what I thought were reasonable thoughts.

Here, I'll list his headlines along with my own thoughts on each topic.

5.  You Think Multiplayer is Bullshit.

While I don't think that multiplayer in its entirety is the collected fecal matter of our tasty bovine friends, I do not find it to be as much a selling point as other people.  Having grown up as a console gamer, multiplayer, let alone online multiplayer wasn't always an option.  The majority of the games I purchased and played were single player games (Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Eternal Darkness, Dragon Warrior, et cetera), and those that had a multiplayer element to them (Duck Hunt, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy III/VI, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Time Splitters), I didn't play to their fullest extent.  Sure I played a bit of multiplayer on Goldeneye whenever Dr. Potts was over, or a couple other friends, but it was never my main purpose for the game.  

With current generation consoles, each have some type of subscription/fee  component (Xbox Live, PSN and Wii Points), which I don't feel that I will ever need, partly because I don't have either system, but also because I don't want to interact with teenage douche bags yelling obscenities at me.  If I'm going to play multiplayer (most likely on the PC), I'd rather just play online with someone whom I know.

4.  You Think Games Are Suddenly Too Long

The three games that John Cheese references in this article (Skyrim, Fallout 3 and World of Warcraft) I have never played so I can't comment directly on any of these games.  I do know what he is talking about when he says that there seem to be a lot more side quests than actual story points.  I on the other hand tend to like side quests, but only to a certain extent.

I didn't do the Golden Chocobo side quest in Final Fantasy VII so that I could earn the "Knights of the Round" materia.  I liked the initial idea of breeding Chocobos, but the amount of time that it would have taken to find Chocobos from all over the world, to me seemed pointless; especially when there was a chuck of rock plummeting towards the planet.  In other games like Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2: Grimoire of the Rift, however, I did as many side quests as I could lay my hands on.  Maybe this is something with more recent video games trying to drag out the length of time it takes to "complete" a game, but then that just reinforces that I'm aging when it comes to video games, but whatever.

3. You Miss Game Storylines That Were Actually Compelling

I'm about 50/50 with Mr. Cheese's views on this point.  While I do agree that some of the Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior  (I'm also going to throw in Chrono Trigger) games had very in depth story lines that would rival that of some of the books that I was reading at the time, I don't feel that I was putting myself into the role of the characters that I was playing, which would be why I felt they were more "in depth" when I was a kid than now that I'm an "adult."

Part of my problem might be that as I don't have any of the "next-gen systems," I haven't played many of the newer games that seem to lack story lines.  However, how many people who played Super Mario Bros. felt that the story line was lacking and how did an Italian plumber, presumably from New York got to the Mushroom Kingdom.  That's never explained in-game.  In The Legend of Zelda, all the back story is told in the instruction booklet and just after the opening titles, which don't even play when you start a game.

But yes, I feel that story, for me at least, is very important if I want to have any emotional feelings towards the game I'm playing.  Sometimes I don't want there to be a story, for example, in the first Doom.  You start the game without any introduction, but you know that you need to shoot anything on the screen, and sometimes, that's all I want to do.

2.  You Think Originality is Dead

Sometimes I'll think "Huh.  I've played this game before, why do I want to play it again?"  Being the person that I am, I will usually look into games before I buy them (although with the Humble Bundles, I don't really care too much, and just think that this type of business model is very awesome).  That being said, I sometimes don't mind playing a familiar type of game over and over again.  

Yes, I do appreciate originality in video games, but sometimes I like to play something that I know, even if it's a "brand new" game that came out the previous year that's based on a platformer from 1990.  Mr. Cheese acknowledges this too when he says "The industry looked just as cookie cutter then as it does now." It's very similar to the movie industry. There'll be a period when westerns are all the rage, or where we're at right now, where anything to do with zombies or vampires will sell millions, just because of the subject matter.

1. You Miss When Games Used To Be "All About Fun."

To be honest, it seemed like Mr. Cheese began to ramble here, as if he didn't actually have "5 Reasons...." but only had four and desparately tried to come up with the fifth.  He starts off about the "look" of games versus the amount of "fun" and then trails off  about how the repetitiveness of games meant they were fun for younger players.

Maybe it's because I've been constantly playing video games for, roughly, the last 24 - 25 years, that I'm able to go back and play Castlevania or Donkey Kong Country and still have fun.  Granted some of that fun may turn into frustration, but I'd rather have that feeling than the feeling that I'm kicking ass at a game because it's too easy.  I actually remember not being able to beat a lot of games, which probably bothered me on some level, but yeah, I had fun.

Conclusion:  No, I don't believe that I'm too old for video games.  Like anybody in any genre in any form of media, I'm not going to like everything out there, but I tend to know what I like.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

The Road Goes Ever On And On....

But First, Introductions

My first thought was to jump right into games.  Specifically video games.

But first, introductions.

My name's Jack, JWfW, JDub or Jaconian.  All depending where I am on the internet.

I've been playing video games since the ripe young age of I don't remember when.  My first memory of playing video games of any kind was either on Dr. Potts' Atari 2600 or on the Intellivision down in Lake Arrowhead at a house my grandparent's rented for the first half of my life.  The first time I played on a Nintendo Entertainment System was probably sometime around 1986 or 1987 at a neighbors house up the street.  The following Christmas, my sisters and I received the "deluxe" packaging NES that came with the Power Pad (because when my Mom sent my Dad out to buy it, he naturally bought the biggest available version; a bit ironic since my Dad doesn't play video games on any level).

So my childhood and teenage years was during the height of the Console Wars of which I was on the side of Nintendo.  NES, SNES, Gameboy (original and Play It Loud series), Gameboy Advance, N64, Gamecube, DS lite.  All Nintendo.  I did buy a PS2 from Dr. Potts after he won it in one of those Coke bottle cap contests and I did buy a PSP from my friend Chreekat (since we're using aliases here) before he moved out to go adventuring.  These I bought so I could play Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, on their respective systems.  I have played some PC games, but until recently as 2003, I never owned what one might call a "gaming computer," and even then, the computer I had still wasn't very powerful (80 gig hard drive, Pentium III processor, 256 Mb or RAM).

I tend to play mostly role-playing games although I do also love and play other types as well.  The one big exception is rhythm and music games.  Sure I've played Guitar Hero and Rock Band and I've even gotten on a DDR pad a couple of times, but they're just not my pint of beer.  There's a wall that I definitely hit right after the "Easy" stage that I can't get past without hours of practicing, which doesn't happen since I don't own any of the games.  Figures.

Now to close with a short story.  In elementary school, our school decided to have a dance.  It was the first dance the school had ever had (that's what we were told, maybe they lied) and it was going to be on Valentines Day.  A lot of kids went either because they wanted to go to a dance before going to Jr. High, or because of the novelty of our school having a dance.  I on the other had was very not enthused about the prospect of a dance.  Plus I had recently rented Captain Skyhawk for the NES and was most likely trying to get passed the second stage.  A number of my friends had asked if I was going to go and felt bad/guilty that I didn't want to go because I'd rather sit at home and play a video game.  Whatever, I'm all the better because of it.  And I never beat the game either.

~Jack/JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Copying People More Famous Than I.