Ico / Shadow of the Colossus

Chinese Democracy exceeded my expectations by ever appearing - I would question the sanity of anyone who expected it to be good.

As cozen says, this sounds like more of the same good good stuff.

Fiddly controls are what we grew up on dammit AND WE LOVED IT

this looks pretty damned good in 4k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GV-OmR1Vo8

Yesssss!!!

ugh I still have yet to play this game :-/

*this games

yeah this is one of the greatest 3D games ever. everything about the game is incredible. every boss fight (and every journey to the boss fights) feels epic and grand. the gameplay is seamless, smooth, non-intrusive. no need for maps, markers, quests, NPCs, etc. you have a sword that you can hold up and the light it reflects shows you where to go. just follow the light. it is that easy. brilliant.

jeez the remake is astonishingly good-looking huh

have you got it? I'm going to give Rime, which seems to be in a similar vein, a play-through before taking the plunge. I never played SotC on the PS2 so am looking forward to it.

yeah, started playing it this morning and took down the first three colossi as my wife looked on in horror at my savagery

it’s pretty remarkable tbh - it’s a total remake rather than a remaster but it plays just like the original, only at a silky 60fps* rather than the notoriously juddering ps2 version

(* on PS4 pro)

and it’s less than £25!

By 'plays like the original' do you mean 'has a camera like a lazy eye which seems much more interested in a random patch of grass than the giant you're supposed to be focusing on'?

well, yeah

The most Terrence Malick of video games

I am psyched to play this, loved the original. Will probably wait until I’m bored with Monster Hunter, the other, way different game of killing giant monsters.

sounds great BG, looking forward to it

The Last Guardian (long intended for the PS3, thanks for the bait and switch Team Ico) is still pretty much the strongest argument for me to eventually buy a PS4, so this just the cherry on top.

hate to tell you but last guardian was all but unplayable imo. i lasted three hours.

psvr last guardian is great tho

you just get to hang out with trico for a bit and feed him snacks while craning your neck to look into his big beautiful eyes

it’s all i ever wanted from the base game tbh

yeah Last Guardian looks great but is unplayably janky I think. Trico is cool though!

adding one more voice to say that the last guardian was bad - there are some interesting concepts in there but it's mostly boring and unattractive and a pain in the ass to control. but i didn't really like ico or shadow of the colossus that much either.

i should point out that i think shadow of the colossus was one of my all time favorite games! and i bought a _PS3_ for last guardian. the gameplay is just SO bad.

finished last guardian recently, enjoyed it. controls weren't too bad just annoying that the kid stumbles around like a drunk

Ico is all-time for me, I definitely enjoyed Shadow Of The Colossus as much as I could considering that it's a game where you're frantically and randomly grasping at patches of fur

Ico tho wow

An entire game devoted to the pleasure of architecture and space

Ico’s one of the few games I ever played co-operatively - a friend heard about it and liked it and came over to play my copy, handing off the controller to me for the hitting shadows with sticks bits.

SOTC was good to play and complete once, and I’d consider the remaster assuming it’s got the hidden secret fruit thing from the original, which I heard about after I finished it. But it’s a very different game.

Hidden secret fruit??

it's a game where you're frantically and randomly grasping at patches of fur

FINALLY

(i mean finally someone gets it, not finally a game where you're frantically and randomly etc etc)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps2/924364-shadow-of-the-colossus/faqs/58447

Right?

Good game! but I think I played it around the same time as Grand Theft Auto and the gameplay is reallllllly repetitious

Ico is perfect tho, perfect game, want a remaster, want a sequel that’s the exact same game but in an enormous tower built into a wintry mountaintop.

I’ve never felt an unique a pleasure as being somewhere in Ico and seeing a parapet or a windmill that I’d struggled with hours earlier, way off in the distance

Oh the soundtrack to Shadow Of The Colossus is hilariously bad imo, this dramatic James Newton Howard in top gear bullshit that completely doesn’t suit the slow motion climbing up a snuffleupagus

Hidden secret fruit??

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Thursday, February 15, 2018 2:43 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, I have the PS3 upgrade and I was baffled when I looked through the list of trophies you could acquire for a number of things I had no idea you could do in the game.

Huh... interact with fish and turtle...

I tried to interact with the birds a number of times on the PS2 but the camera made it kind of a nightmare and I gave up.

One nice thing about the PS3 version (that I THINK was absent from the PS2 although I might have just never utilized it) is the ability to remap your buttons and tweak the camera movements in several ways. I assume that carried over to the new remaster?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQNeYbBiCKw

!

That was pretty great. I made it 16 minutes in before I suspected there could be significant spoilers (which the video impressively avoided before that, for the most part), but when I finish the game I'll definitely finish the video. I love the idea of game designers hiding things that are bigger than mere jokey easter eggs (almost as much as I love posters being citing by their dumb screen names). One of the best aspects of Breath of the Wild was all the substantial stuff you could do or get lost in that was completely irrelevant to the completion of the game. I suspect people are still figuring that one out, too.

That was amazing, thanks so much ulysses!

really, really good video

Tremendous

I've taken down ... six or so Colossi, and it's all kind of the same? I start at the ruins, the sword points the way, I take as long as I want getting there, thing eventually makes its grand entrance and I climb up it somehow, hold on and stab it where I need until it's dead. Fortunately, the scale and spectacle itself is pretty thrilling, so that makes up for the actual battles (so far). I wish the Divine Beasts in Zelda were this impressive.

well yeah the game is from the ps2 era when full production console games had a smaller scope and focus

josh

The actual battles do a good job of twisting the formula iirc

The game looks absolutely gorgeous.

So I've killed three colossi, each one more tedious and annoying than the last. Is this going to get any better?
― ledge (ledge), Wednesday, 15 March 2006 09:34 (thirteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

(that video was good though, and i've gotta have some respect for a game which can make people disappear into insane yet seemingly plausible conspiracy theory rabbit holes for years on end)

I'm on the ... 8th monster? And this is the first one (maybe the second?) I had to look up online, since I had no idea what to do or how to do it, and the cryptic hints were no help. In fact, knowing the solution now, there is literally no way, even with those hints, I would have figured out what to do. (I'm sure I'm not the first one to joke that the camera is the toughest colossus to beat of them all.)

Fingers cramping up from holding down the grip trigger button all the time the ultimate boss iirc

Another monster or two down. I'm going to chalk this up to a great experience but probably a bad game. Equally repetitive and novel, thrilling and boring, which is weird but it's a mix that makes it worth playing even if playing it is not particularly interesting or challenging, imo. ("Challenging," that is, after you spend forever figuring out the thing you need to do to make the monster do the thing, which doesn't feel like solving a puzzle so much as a PIA you just have to do.)