grow home offered a sense of mastery over its intentionally ‘clumsy’ controls that was definitely absent from sotc.
by the end of grow home, even disregarding the much improved capabilities of my robot, I felt confident that my manipulations would always succeed.
neither of these feel very prince of persia like because pop (both 2d and sands of time) were defined by the specificity and predictability of their platforming animations.
all this sotc talk made me poke my head into titan souls to see what it’s like
i’ve killed 4 of them so far, not sure how i feel about it yet? it’s definitely a lot twitchier and fast-paced
It would be interesting if there was proof somewhere that it was Ueda’s intention to have players white knuckle the controller to best simulate the experience of climbing.
I agree with you about the climbing in Uncharted, it’s perfunctory and often over in such a short amount of time that it doesn’t really register before you’re off to the next segment. Now that I’m playing Uncharted 3, you can tell Naughty Dog was struggling to keep this element interesting, but it’s creatively exhausted by this point. Should be interesting to see how they approach it for Uncharted 4.
It’s telling that the Vita Uncharted allows you to actually fingerpaint the path you want Drake to climb. I can’t remember if he automatically corrects for the inevitable broken board.
You know what linear action game has pretty engaging climbing? Modern Warfare 2! Titanfall single player is going to rule so hard.
I don’t think it’s possible to have worse pacing than Yakuza 5. The Haruka chapter completely derails the main plot.
I liked titan souls quite a bit, it’s perfectly good for 2D zelda atmospheric boss rush
Played through the first Momodora earlier on stream. The homing missiles were adorably ineffectual.
oh
@yarusenai the controls actually feel really loose, as I loose control of my sanity and fling the controller across the room.
I actually think it’s not a standard ‘loose’ vs ‘tight’ control thing. I’d sit there and mash triangle whilst gripping to get up a ledge. Sometimes it took, one, two, three clicks. Other times I’d just start mashing it until I gave up fell down and tried again. I would try waiting for sandal boy to ‘get his footing’ or something and that was a crapshoot too. It’s not that things didn’t respond crisply as much as it felt like a dice roll to if my button press would take or not. Among a few other mitigating factors like clipping.
Honestly after years of hearing how great this game was supposed to be I’m pretty MIFFED OFF.
@Felix oh, you sexy curmudgeon man. I see what you’re going for here. Getting exactly what you want when you want it sucks the zest out of things, leaves us wanting for not and takes the flavor out of life games. I’m not sure if Uncharted is the best game to point to for that. There’s definite scrambling MR.Drake will take micro pauses or breathers to steady himself in a way. Honestly I think it’s a better answer than sandal boy’s. There’s a physicality added, but it’s still a video game responsive and the onus is on you and not the game deciding that you can’t do what it’s asking you to do.
This transformers game is really great blue skies robot bashing. I miss games with incredible over the top set pieces. It is making me very, very excited for TMNT
I think most RgG games have the worst pacing and these horrible bloated dieased scripts that need an editor with THE MACHINE THAT EATS EVERYTHING.
Once you get three hours into any of them they become the last disc of FF7. Constant pressure from the plot but also do whatever you want man.
I’ll preface this by saying that I adored SotC in 2005, but a recent replay was illuminating and changed my mind.
I’ll echo @Tulpa and second that the predictability of the movement animations in PoP and successors like the core design Tomb Raider series are precisely what lends ‘weight’ or ‘heaviness’ to your avatar. SotC feels floaty in comparison with no real sense of gravity (for example, falling from a colossus feels strangely underwhelming). I think it’s fair to say that this issue is only exacerbated by the input lag though rather than lag being the major culprit.
More than this though, the game suffers from a myriad of poor design decisions that are largely overlooked in favor of it’s technical achievements with respect to the then aging hardware. The physics+puzzle hybrid issue raised by @Broco and @Godamn_Milkman is really present with every colossus encounter to varying degrees. If one fails to interpret the puzzle correctly, one is typically left clinging to the colossus with avatar animations being perpetually interrupted (be it movement or sword plunges).
The damsel in distress plot was handled more effectively in Ico, in that it at least toyed with your expectations of the trope. Ico is portrayed as a young boy attempting to assert his masculinity (and often getting rebuffed for it) with Yorda at least displaying limited agency. SotC is really a pale imitation of this same story but refocused to emphasise the traditional male saviour discourse with a silent (dead) trophy-bride. It’s also told so much more heavy-handedly with constant interruption and dialogue (particularly in the latter half). The less said about the Rampage style endgame blunder of SotC the better.
Ico arguably achieves a comparable and more unified graphical aesthetic than SotC by omitting the extraneous HUD elements as well as the jarring musical transitions between approaching/mounting/falling from a colossus, which is why Ueda seems to be revisiting this territory with the Last Guardian.
I don’t mean to underplay the significance of this game as part of some sort of canon, but a deeper, more critical reflection on the game’s failings would certainly benefit the design of future titles rather than the blind adoration that seems so prevalent.
but like Ico, there is nothing sexual in the relationship between the two characters in SotC. even the ‘bride’ part is assumed, and certainly she is not won. the game’s contention is that what Wanda is doing is morally ambiguous, and part of that is because of how non complicit the girl is. we don’t know what happened to her or why, what her thoughts on his quest might be, or, indeed, even the nature of her relationship to him. all we know is that she is dead and that his quest is in some way forbidden. the fairy tale/mythological trope is that the woman needs to be either saved or preserved in order to bring about some kind of rebirth, which is usually interpreted in a wider cultural sense. this is the case in Ico, though it is a bit muddled, but the narrative in SotC is almost reversed for the same end. the girl’s restoration is unnatural and enervating. wanda’s journey is desperate and ugly as opposed to heroic. in Ico there is a price to be paid, in the form of a dual sacrifice of Ico and Yorda, for cultural preservation. the result is a cleansing and a rebirth. in SotC the cultural norms are betrayed for personal gain, but the result is still a cultural rebirth. it is tempting to see the two in the popular light: with Ico as SotC’s narrative sequel. Wanda’s desperation births its own cultural heritage, with at least some link to the traditions of his people, but there is a level of corruption present that is eventually atoned for by Ico’s naive resilience and Yorda’s self-sacrifice. in both games the persistence of the individual is culturally disruptive. its a heavily mythological narrative construct. I think it could be argued that the girl’s passivity in SotC is The Problem, it’s what produces the tension in the game, and that the tension is relieved in Ico when Yorda is allowed to have her say.
I don’t think that the damsel in distress trope really implies anything sexual so I’m not sure what brought that up. The bride part is, admittedly, my projection but she is most certainly a prize as she is literally placed on a pedestal (or an altar as I would suggest, hence the marital undertones).
In both Ico and SotC the expected cultural norms are betrayed, both by men, both in order to save women. The plots are not mirror images of one another. Ico escapes his culturally induced captivity and flees with Yorda. Wander likewise flees and breaks societal convention alongside the woman by entering the forbidden lands. At most, the discrepancy here is between breaking out and breaking in.
The heroic music that plays when you mount a colossus drastically undermines the moral ambiguity of slaying them, even if the visible deterioration of Wander makes the player uncomfortable. In any event, the result of the player’s actions in SotC are forecast well in advance, and rather explicitly, to Wander himself. I took this to imply that his sacrifice was intended regardless of any greater cost to his or anyone else’s well being. In this sense I think it’s difficult to characterise his quest as being for personal gain as he will (knowingly) never exist to see her again.
Regardless, my gripes are not merely with the plot which is really a very simple vessel for the mechanics and art-style. The overall mechanics are pretty dated and need a more nuanced critique.
I would say that is not entirely true. Ico is sacrificed. That part of the bargain, so to speak, is fulfilled. The similarity with SotC is that Ico’s will breaks the contract, but it is not an intentional disruption like it is in SotC. The intentional cultural disruption in Ico belongs to Yorda. The boy is still dead without her, and she makes all the choices and sacrifices in the game. He is a naive actor, and his naivety forces Yorda into the contemplative role. So they are inverted in a sense.
I used to agree with you here, but I think I believe that this is meant to be a contrast, and that the totality of the contrast is what makes for the ambiguity. Wanda’s deterioration is purely negative. The giant’s death is purely saddening. The heroic music and the natural triumph of the player completing his task is positive. It is the nature of video games to code the player’s success as positive. Sometimes this is undermined as in, say, Killer 7 or maybe Silent Hill 2, but that still depends on the assumed positive norm. SotC does not undermine your success, it just complicates it. Or at least tries to.
As I said above, I think his willingness to sacrifice himself is well forecast so it can only be negative for the player and is thus a projection. As an extension of this, the ‘natural triumph’ of the player is something that is easily avoided in SH2 as you mention, so the music just comes across as tonally dissonant. The plot of the game is perhaps it’s least interesting contribution to the video game canon.
I don’t think that’s true. You can have a noble sacrifice where the guy jumps in front of the bullet and gives a nice speech on his way out. That’s not what SotC does. The long deterioration, the knowledge that the sacrifice represents a transgression, the passive nature of the early Colossi, etc. seem to me to indicate a pretty intentional injection of miasma into things. The contrasting triumph is that of the Will of the individual, and the question is one of how the opposition of the individual and the culture ought to be negotiated when they are at odds with one another. I do think SotC reads better when Ico is added to the picture, specifically because the miasma is never dealt with in the course of SotC. Wanda simply wins. We can argue that his victory is maybe a little phyrric in that his sacrifice was so ugly and that its consequences are maybe unclear, but like Ico the ending wants things to end on a positive note, which rings a little false without the kind of cleansing that would be necessary to make that narrative work. Ico is where the girl gets her say. Does that leave the girl’s muteness as a problem in SotC? It might, in the end. I wouldn’t refute that entirely. At any rate, I’ve always preferred Ico.
Wander’s sacrifice is certainly drawn out, I’m not questioning that. Rather, because it is drawn out and because the overall tone (of the music in this case) is heroic and Wander’s demise is so explicitly foreshadowed, any miasma is largely a projection of the player onto the loss of their avatar. If Wander (as a fictitious character) in a fit of heroism wants to sacrifice himself for another, (and the OST largely supports this notion I would suggest) then there exists a disjuncture between the narrative and aesthetic components of the work which compromise it in my eyes. Ico feels more complete and coherent.
I’m not sure who this individual is (Wander, the player?) or to which culture you are referring. I’ll takes some guesses here but correct me if I misunderstood. If the tension is one of the player’s successes being in conflict with the demise of their avatar, then we are projecting onto the medium which would mean the heroic OST then exist’s solely for players rather than as a soundtrack to accompany the narrative (which is fairly dreary a you’ve suggested) or the actions of their avatar. This creates an uncomfortable juxtaposition for me as, tonally, the medium then inexplicably shifts between passive and active modes of interaction. It just doesn’t work for me.
I think attempting to narratively justify a female characters muteness is inherently problematic (see also MGSV’s Quiet).
Ico is certainly the better game, I’m pleased Ueda seems to be moving more in that direction seeing as he had some misgivings about SotC himself.
edit: spelling
Oh so that’s what happened to stottbott
I’ve always liked the way the heroic music would be sharply undercut by the slow, sad collapse of the colossus once you dealt the final blow. And i think there is meant to be that uncomfortable distance between the player’s feelings and Wander’s actions. Not to say that it should work for you if it doesn’t, but i believe it’s deliberate.
I remember being frustrated with how Shadow played at times, and i’m not surprised to know it doesn’t hold up as well today. Some of the colossi require you to bait them into doing things in an annoyingly specific way (the 3rd one on the enormous dais and the one you need to smash apart the colosseum). Others just broke the established “rules” and were bothersome for that reason, like the sand snake you need to shoot in the eyes. As much as i liked that game, those kinds of annoyances kept me from replaying it for a long time.
It was such a thoughtful and beautiful game though, and at the time there was really nothing quite like it. A nostalgic favorite, but one of the better ones.
I too prefer ICO. It’s the only game i’ve ever played through twice in one sitting.