I have a weird relationship to SotC because it was the first console game I played straight through, period. I was not allowed to own consoles or handheld devices as a child because my parents thought videogames would rot my brain; PC games were mysteriously exempt, probably because a lot of the ones I played were educational. I played a lot of fantastic PC games and some weird artistic webgames in high school, and I had a taste for the less arcadey stuff. To me SotC was this unobtainable thing, too expensive for me to access but apparently mindblowing and gorgeous and cool, and I needed to have it.
So the very first thing I bought with money from my first summer job was a PS3, and I bought SotC and played it and at the time it was everything anyone had hyped it to be for me. A real kinesthetic experience like Torque said above; totally unlike the Star Wars IP games and the RTSes and the various Maxis sim games Iâd been playing for years. I think when I bought SotC I was back again on a fucking Sim Ant kick. I was going from Sim Ant to crawling all over giant hairy robots. Incredible.
Like others here I agree that the tone is cool but the actual challenge of defeating the colossi was the thing for me. Each one of those fights is genuinely very, very carefully designed and affecting. The game also taught me a lot about explorable spaces in videogames and what they can do and what they are for. It was my first âopen worldâ game and it set the bar super high.
It was such a wild experience for me that I am kind of afraid of playing it again, haha. A lot of my childhood experience with games was about not being allowed to do things, or being restricted from them somehow, and figuring out how to get them for myself and finally play the thing my parents wouldnât let me. SotC is probably the only game where I finally got the game and it was as fun and weird as everyone said it was.
The biggest disappointment was when I finally got an emulator on my laptop my freshman year of college and downloaded Pokemon Blue and played it all the way through and found that it was actually a little more boring than I had expected and hoped, haha. At the time, though, SotC delivered. Kind of afraid to play it again now if Iâve grown to hate it or be bored with it.
The singular game he actually liked was Cosmology of Kyoto which is like, literally as much the opposite of blockbuster boob adventure movie as you can get in a game though.
this made me think of that film critic/writer Will Sloan has this whole bit where he predicts what scores Roger Ebert would give to things post his death. and the fake review snippets he wrote basically feels indistinguishable to me from a real Ebert review
itâs interesting to me cuz Roger Ebert has always been this aggressively middlebrow figure in film. iâm not even really hating it either, cuz heâs a good introduction to a lot of things. but his proclamation about videogames was one of the stupider things heâs ever said, and something iâm sure he regretted later⌠esp from all the awful discourse that stemmed out of it. lol. him being a kinda clueless boomery type with various weird fetishes and middlebrow tastes doesnât really have anything to do with videogames at all.
also now the environment of a lot of film discourse is stanning âvulgar auteursâ like Paul WS Anderson (director of several videogame movies) and distributors like Vinegar Syndrome releasing deluxe blu ray versions of obscure Lucio Fulci and Jess Franco films. the kind of stuff Ebert hates basically (grotesquely violent b-movies). almost as if the film world has come closer to videogames, if anything.
SimAnt is great. I was just talking to my sister about that game last night. I still appreciate that it was a game you could âsolveâ and beat in a single sitting in a reasonable amount of time.
I have a hard time thinking of anything that surpasses the experience of the fifth colossus when SotC was new. At the time I remember thinking that it was like being in The Neverending Story.
yeah when i read a few ebert reviews i couldnât understand why anyone presumed this guy to be an authority on what âartâ is, enough to feel that his endorsement was a life-or-death proposition for your medium
Itâs more that Ebert was the one person who came out and said it instead of merely implying it. âLike a video gameâ had been a pejorative phrase used by movie critics for decades prior. So he made himself the official representative of an ambient vibe
It is worth noting that within a week Ebert put up on article on his site titled âalright, go play on my lawnâ where he basically half-apologized for the dust up his comment caused and told people to go enjoy what they enjoyed.
I think my favorite bit from this brief period was when some I guess tweeted at him (was twitter a thing then?) about how he could claim that some great game wasnât art but Pirates of the Caribbean was and he basically blurted out âwhy the hell would anyone think that movie is art?â.
i guess ebert was middlebrowish but he would still very often put one right between the eyes and he was often very funny and his politics didnât suck total shit. i wish he had been around for a few particular discourses over the last few years. and i still think the videogames arenât art thing owned, the waves of chuds solemnly commenting like âyou probably wonât, but if you ever did try one, make it shadow of the colossus. i think then you will agree that games has more storytelling potential than the godfather. i respect youâ were great
I also liked that unlike most critics, Ebert would periodically be like âthese are the ones that I got wrongâ and say actually, this movie is really good I just didnât like it at the time for these reasons, and/or wow actually this movie sucks ass, hereâs what was going on for me at the time. A small thing; given how much people just double- and triple-down on never ever being wrong, it was refreshing and hopeful to see it from somebody relatively prominent.
I wonder when I stopped caring about video games being art, because I definitely have. Iâm perfectly fine with them just being whatever it is they are.
Can video games make me cry? Yes, but so can commercials for the ASPCA, thatâs not a good metric.
I always enjoy games that have big lines of division between their parts and you so rarely get that since most games have a consistent level of stuff going on at every moment. Using a quiet world to punctuate boss fights is good in the same way a safe room vs zombie filled hallways in Resident Evil is good. Motion between different kinds of spaces.
I also played Shadow of the Colossus at a time when I was exhausted with third person combat in games and felt like it was always filler. SotC cutting it out is always going to leave an impact with me.
Playing Dark Souls 1 recently I had a boss fight against the Moonlight Butterfly and it was one of the few times in a game where a boss or monster felt like it was part of its world, inhabiting its environment. SotC is one of the only other games Iâve ever played that achieved that feeling.