Fanboys.

[Codiekitty]

Originally Posted by Wyborn

what I don't respect is the unwillingness to defend that opinion,

Nevermind I've repeatedly gone over things like the fact you're practically playing as Wolverine with the wanderer's insane defense and healing powers negates all the legit challenge and reason for me to be even remotely scared of any of the colossi, and that they're some of the weakest bosses I've mucked through, and the only bosses with any chance of killing you do it cheaply like Record of Lodoss Warring* you, and that I find it insulting that the game makes up for this by making me repeat the same menial tasks like running in circles on a horse that controls like a nightmare to ground a flying dragon THREE TIMES while fighting to even see the damn thing, and the graphics are a bunch of brown and gray and bloom so out of control it turns the sides of cliffs and the sky and sometimes the whole freaking screen white and rocks with grid patterns on them and a fog effect that makes half the game look like it's being played through wax paper, among many other things. Yet you still insist that the only reason I hate the game is because it has fans.

* Knocking you over the second you get up from its last attack over and over until you die that there's no way to get out of it.


Where are these lemmings going? Not the Super Nintendo Super Shire! They know to go to Codiekitty.com now!

[Wyborn]

Originally Posted by Codiekitty

Nevermind I've repeatedly gone over things like the fact you're practically playing as Wolverine with the wanderer's insane defense and healing powers negates all the legit challenge and reason for me to be even remotely scared of any of the colossi,

Well, obviously, but if you think that the challenge of the colossi lies in the fact that they can kill you then you've completely missed the point of them - they weren't designed to kill you at all. Numbers 11, 14, and maybe 8 will kill you if you're not careful, but the only way for others to kill you is if you bash your head into them over and over for no particular reason whatsoever.

What I'm saying here is that you do a wonderful job of missing the point, and that the challenge of the battles with the colossi lies in the fact that you have to think about them. That's why battles with the colossi are measured in minutes for each initial playthrough rather than number of tries, as in an action game. If you want to die over and over, please go play an action game (I know you own Ninja Gaiden, if not Black, so you can at the very least try to beat Very Hard), this is not the adventure that you're looking for.

and the only bosses with any chance of killing you do it cheaply like Record of Lodoss Warring* you,

Actually not true either, though that's wonderfully beside the point...neverminding that carelessness is actually the chief cause of death in any battle, but there's no colossus that it's impossible to get away from if you have the instincts to get away from a giant behemoth with a club the size of a bus. Or, you know, a tiger.

and that I find it insulting that the game makes up for this by making me repeat the same menial tasks

me·ni·al /ˈminiəl, ˈminyəl/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[mee-nee-uhl, meen-yuhl] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–adjective
1. lowly and sometimes degrading: menial work.
2. servile; submissive: menial attitudes.
3. pertaining to or suitable for domestic servants; humble: menial furnishings.
–noun
4. a domestic servant.
5. a servile person.
[Origin: 1350–1400; ME meynyal < AF me(i)nial. See meiny, -al1]

You, uh...you hit the nail on the head with that one. Yep.

Harr-umph.

like running in circles

The arena referred to is big enough that running in circles doesn't actually happen, and is actualy impossible because of how quickly the colossus moves.

on a horse that I can't manage because it doesn't drive like a car

Fix'd.

to ground a flying dragon THREE TIMES while fighting to even see the damn thing,

He's the big flying dragon whose pretty plainly visible even behind the sunflare and sand - neither effect lasting ery long, of course, so it's even less noticeable than presented here, compounded on by the fact that he's easy to see in motion.

I'm having trouble getting that sound bite of Orson Welles saying "you exaggerate" out of my head.

and the graphics are a bunch of brown and gray

Not only is that not strictly true, in places to the point where I have to ask what you're going on about (you have to have been through the swamps and forests at least once a piece), but your dislike of the palette for whatever reason doesn't take away from the fact that it builds a wonderfully consistent world and establishes the sense that you're walking or riding in a place that hasn't seen humanity - or much life at all - in so long that it's largely passed out of human memory.

Games are allowed to have their own visual styles, after all, particularly when that style is leveled for the purpose of evoking a certain mood.

and bloom so out of control it turns the sides of cliffs and the sky and sometimes the whole freaking screen white

Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Hi-Dynamic Range Lighting, or HDR Lighting for short! In Shadow of the Colossus this is used largely to simulate the sensation of stepping out underneath a bright light after having spent too long in an ill-lit area, or vice versa. What this does, essentially, is create a facsimile of that sensation by having your screen "adjust" over a period of a certain number of seconds, darkening or lightening to make the area more clearly visible, as if your eyes had been adjusting to it.

The more you know...

and rocks with grid patterns on them

Hey look it's a letter from the PS2. Let's read it.

"I am an ancient thing, a corpse bereft of all but bones and hair."

Swear I've heard that somewhere before, but it makes an interesting point: you can't expect rocks to look completely natural on a game that renders this much terrain all at once, and much less so for rocks that imply that they were shattered at some point.

and a fog effect that makes half the game look like it's being played through wax paper,

Now that you're going to hae to illustrate for me, because I only remember instances of fogs over the lakes and mires - you know, places that might have fog.

among many other things.

So very few of them noteworthy.

Yet you still insist that the only reason I hate the game is because it has fans.

Oh no - like I said, I respect your opinion and your reasons are your own, far be it for me to just call you wrong-headed, but the presence of that fandom is the chief reason that you go on your endless, bountiful anti-fanboy tirades, and those are exactly what makes the anti-fanboy stereotype so irksome.

* Knocking you over the second you get up from its last attack over and over until you die that there's no way to get out of it.

R1 + Triangle.



I admit it makes me feel taller, but I fear the reality is less fulfilling.

[Codiekitty]

(I have to splice this post up because of the character and image counts)

Originally Posted by Wyborn

Well, obviously, but if you think that the challenge of the colossi lies in the fact that they can kill you then you've completely missed the point of them - they weren't designed to kill you at all.

So why should I be afraid of them? It's not like their designs (which I'll go into in a minute) have anything going for them.

What I'm saying here is that you do a wonderful job of missing the point, and that the challenge of the battles with the colossi lies in the fact that you have to think about them. That's why battles with the colossi are measured in minutes for each initial playthrough rather than number of tries, as in an action game.

Except I already went over how you're spoonfed most of the answers. Also, on most of the colossi I was actually spending more time trying to execute what I figured out than thinking because of the godawful camera and controls.

I also feel like mentioning that when I first beat the third colossus I was just running around and the colossus just happened to swing at me and hit the pedestal and break its bracelet - so, in essence, that boss can solve itself. Something similar applies for the sixth colossus, where I just ran behind the pillars and it bent over.

And let's look at what kind of complex puzzles the colossi are:

Spoiler Below

Colossus 1 (Minotaur):
1 - Jump on its left leg and give it two good stabs, it falls over.
2 - Climb up its leg and refill your grip meter on those platforms on its back.
3 - Climb up its shoulder to the forehead.
4 - Stab the forehead five times and it dies.

Colossus 2 (Ox):
1 - First off, don't mount the horse. But if you do you'll get knocked off in five seconds anyway, which should tell you something.
2 - Get the colossus to do its very slow smash attack.
3 - Shoot an arrow into the bottom of its foot. The sword will tell you something happens if you injure its feet, but also the bottom of its feet are glowing. The colossus falls over.
4 - Climb up it and run down to the rear. Stab out that rune.
5 - Run to the head. Stab out that rune and it dies.

Colossus 4 (Kirin):
1 - Lure the colossus to a plus-shaped underground tunnel-thing. The Dormin will tell you something about hiding yourself underground, so all you really have to do in this fight is recall that underpass you passed earlier.
2 - Run down one tunnel, and come out another. Of course, it goes pitch black in here, so you might get a little lost down here.
3 - If the Kirin isn't picking at the passage you just went in.
4 - Climb up the colossus using the staircases conveniently placed staircase.
5 - Run down its back, stab the glowing spot on the base of its neck to make it drop its neck.
6 - Run down to its forehead, stab it five times, it dies.

Colossus 5 (Crow):
1 - Swim for about two minutes over to a platform by the colossus.
2 - Shoot it with an arrow. The Dormin will tell you to use your bow to get its attention, and since all you can do is shoot with it, right?
3 - Jump on when the colossus flies by.
4 - Run down the tail and stab out that rune.
5 - Pick a wing and stab out that rune.
6 - The colossus will stay on its side, so you really can't get back to the main body. Your only choice is to let go and repeat steps 1-3, then stab out the other wing to kill it.

Colossus 6 (Minotaur #2):
1 - Climb over the vases and walls to the pillars at the end, and run behind them.
2 - The colossus will kneel over looking for you. Jump into its beard and crawl to its forehead, and stab out that rune.
3 - Crawl down its back and stab out THAT rune and it dies.

Colossus 7 (Catfish):
1 - Plod around in this huge dumbass lake trying to get scooped up by the colossus' tail while trying to avoid those three electrified spines. The Dormin flatout tells you to grab the colossus' tail.
2 - Slowly make your way up the colossus, being stopped every second when you go underwater.
3 - When you have the sword equipped you'll see these glowing spots at the base of each spine. Stab them to deactivate the spines.
4 - After you stab the spine on the colossus' head, it goes underwater and your only option is to let go and do step 1 ALL OVER AGAIN, but at least this time you don't have to dodge the spines.
5 - NOW you can get to the head and stab it to death.

Colossus 10 (Sand Snake):
1 - Get on the horse and run in a straight line across the field.
2 - The colossus will swim up behind you.
3 - Hold R1 to face it, then shoot it in the eye. Easier said than done, because of an autocentering which keeps pulling the cursor to its nose.
4 - The colossus goes spinning into a wall. Ride up to it and dismount.
5 - Climb up it, and stab out a rune. After you do that the snake will recover and go back underground.
6 - Repeat from Step 1, and I don't remember if this boss has two or three runes.

Colossus 12 (Kappa):
1 - Jump in the water, dive, and swim between the colossus' legs and main body.
2 - Climb up its back, although in what's either more botched programming or somebody's idea of a sick joke, the Dormin will actually tell you to abandon this even though you're doing what you should be.
3 - Whack the molars (?) on the colossus' head to make it move in certain directions. It may not be entirely clear that these do something at first, but hey, the sword shines light at these, and they glow, right? That means something!they're glowing, right?
4 - Guide the colossus to a temple, jump off.
5 - Wait for the colossus to jump up on the temple.
6 - Jump on its chest and give it a stab or two. The colossus will jump back down and put you underwater, so you have to let go.
7 - Repeat from step 1, although the colossus will knock over the temple this time, meaning you have to guide it to another to attack it a third time.

Colossus 16 (Man):
1 - Navigate a REALLY long linear series of tunnels and barricades.
2 - After about ten minutes of this, you'll come out under the colossus. The bottom two thirds of it is platforming that might excite a ten year old.
3 - Stab that huge glowing spot on its back, jump to its hand.
4 - It carries you up, and when it has its arm up, run up to that on its bicep and stab it.
5 - Leap from its arm to its right hand. But because the controls are so awful, plus the colossus puts its hand RIGHT ON TOP OF YOU and the zooming makes it difficult to tell where the wanderer is facing, you'll probably try this only to somehow find yourself on the colossus' tricep, unable to crawl back to where you were, leaving you with no choice but to let go. If you're lucky you'll just land on the top of its dress, so you only have to do the backstabbing thing again. But you might fall all the way down to the colossus's feet! Happy climbing!
6 - Okay, NOW we get into the not-so-obvious stuff! Crawl over to the back of the hand and stab it. I'm sure the sword shines light at it, but I actually figured it out because I wanted to inflict pain on the SOB.
7 - Shoot an arrow into its shoulder. The sword will tell you something happens if you hit the shoulder, unless you forgot about holding the sword up in your frustration of trying to tame the camera and controls to accomplish in step 5 FIVE TIMES.
8 - Jump from the shoulder to the head, stab it to death. This will take upwards of five minutes, because after every stab you'll have to wait for the colossus to stop swinging around, recharge your grip meter.

I skipped some because I didn't care to mention all of them, and I think nine of the sixteen (or eleven, I've gone over the Salamander and Dragon before) gives a good idea of what these things are like.

Most of these consist of doing one thing to get on them, then running around and stabbing out the weak points. Two things at the most. They're not riddle after riddle, and I don't buy that the colossi require signicantly more thinking than any boss or obstacle in any other serious game especially when the colossi don't even require that much thought.

Beating any boss is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. Except with colossus, the Dormin and the light from the sword give you the pieces you need and you just have to figure out how they go together. Other bosses make you search for those puzzle pieces, then figure out what pieces go together and how they go together (the boss's attacks, how to dodge and counter them).

I admit to having gone to GameFAQs for four bosses. I'm not the type of person who can think at all when I'm irritated, and Colossus tested my patience MUCH more than it did my brainpower. That kind of design is when I give the designers the finger and go to GameFAQs.

This sums up what fighting the colossi is like:

- A camera that's everywhere except where you want it.

- Do one thing to get on the colossus, then run around and repeat things over and over with no increasing difficulty, and thus no reason to do these things over and over other than to test your patience.

- Yes, He-Man is fighting something four times his size. It's a cat that's not only adorable, but doesn't fight back.

Designwise, the colossi are not menacing and in fact they're even kind of cute (granted, I find the strangest things cute, but whatever). The only one that's any kind of scary is the final one, and that's because of the lighting making it unclear what you're even looking at - if you actually see his face in the flashes of lightning you'll probably want to squeeze his cheeks and give him milk and cookies, which I guess explains why he's hiding in the darkness. The first thing most people notice about the colossi is that they're covered in fur, and people interperet "fuzzy" as "lovable". And since fourteen colossi are based on an animal, real or mythological (or fifteen if we want to get scientific and group Humans in here), the "fuzzy critter" thing is just amplified. The third one isn't really an animal but it still looks like a teddy bear (and in fact, someone I know says it even reminds him of one he used to own, and somebody else compared it to Wicket the Ewok) and even appears to be cheerfully smiling or laughing. None of them have any intimidating facial features and most even sport vacant stares (the fifteenth looks a little mad, and the final looks like it's shrieking), except for the prerelease version of the second boss because of its toothy, menacing grin. Then they replaced that grin with a snowplow for the final cut.

And speaking of changes at the 11th hour, many prerelease shots I've seen (like the ones covering the packaging) show the colossi with eyes that are a stone dome with a beam of light shining out the middle. The final cut of the game has colossi with large, colored, and lifelike eyes complete with veins. So, instead of having the alien eyes from the originals, they put big puppydog eyes on them.

It's really hard for me to look at most of these bosses and have a better chance of going "EGADS!" than "BIG FUZZY!" like the kid on the episode of Rescue Rangers with the bear. The only colossus I've seen that was remotely creepy was a concept sketch of a mummy-like boss that had been torn in half and was dragging itself around with its spine and organs trailing behind (like the Zombie enemy from Sweet Home except for the mummy bandaging). While the Kirin and the Kappa both have open chest cavities, the rest of the Kirin is so pettable that's quickly forgotten, and the Kappa keeps its underwater most of the time, and it's not even clear that it's sporting this design at first.

Bears and lions and tigers are fuzzy, and we even make plush toys of them, yet we know in the back of our heads to fear them in person. This isn't because they're forty feet tall, but because they have teeth and claws and the potential to do us much bodily harm and even kill us if we cross them. We don't run screaming from skyscrapers for a reason. Most of the colossi don't even try to fight you, or do much of anything for that matter, and the best response any of them can come up with to deal with you climbing on them is to occasionally try to shake you off (and some of them don't even try that, and just let you climb on them!). In the event you do get hurt there's a way to evade each boss while you heal up (although with the Colossus of Lodoss War, you often can't get there because the colossus has you pinned against a wall). Many of these even allow you to put the controller down and go get a sandwich.

For starters, many of the colossi aren't even that big. The colossi that are big are very big - that's it. In fact, maybe the reason they're so big is because somebody knew the actual designs weren't going to scare anybody.

[Codiekitty]

If you want to die over and over, please go play an action game (I know you own Ninja Gaiden, if not Black, so you can at the very least try to beat Very Hard), this is not the adventure that you're looking for.

I don't have an Xbox (I've been trying to obtain one), and I have it on good authority that most of Ninja Gaiden's difficulty comes from having a broken camera.... hey wait...

Actually not true either, though that's wonderfully beside the point...neverminding that carelessness is actually the chief cause of death in any battle, but there's no colossus that it's impossible to get away from if you have the instincts to get away from a giant behemoth with a club the size of a bus. Or, you know, a tiger.

Uh no, the fourteenth one likes to pin you into a corner and bash you until you're dead.

You, uh...you hit the nail on the head with that one. Yep.

lowly and sometimes degrading

And didn't I say I felt insulted by these tasks?

And even if that wasn't quite the right word, at least it makes more sense than "literally fear inducing"

The arena referred to is big enough that running in circles doesn't actually happen, and is actualy impossible because of how quickly the colossus moves.

So you make tighter circles than the colossus instead of following its exact track.

He's the big flying dragon whose pretty plainly visible even behind the sunflare and sand - neither effect lasting ery long, of course, so it's even less noticeable than presented here, compounded on by the fact that he's easy to see in motion.

Not when you're squinting and have a headache from the graphics.

I'm having trouble getting that sound bite of Orson Welles saying "you exaggerate" out of my head.

Am I exaggerating or are you trivializing?

Not only is that not strictly true, in places to the point where I have to ask what you're going on about (you have to have been through the swamps and forests at least once a piece), but your dislike of the palette for whatever reason doesn't take away from the fact that it builds a wonderfully consistent world and establishes the sense that you're walking or riding in a place that hasn't seen humanity - or much life at all - in so long that it's largely passed out of human memory.

Games are allowed to have their own visual styles, after all, particularly when that style is leveled for the purpose of evoking a certain mood.

Maybe I've just been spoiled by games, movies, and even cartoons that had depressing moods yet remained visually pleasing, but also chose more interesting settings for the themes of lonliness and despair to begin with.

I also might have been more appreciative of Colossus' world if I could actually see it through all the fog and bloom.

Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Hi-Dynamic Range Lighting, or HDR Lighting for short! In Shadow of the Colossus this is used largely to simulate the sensation of stepping out underneath a bright light after having spent too long in an ill-lit area, or vice versa. What this does, essentially, is create a facsimile of that sensation by having your screen "adjust" over a period of a certain number of seconds, darkening or lightening to make the area more clearly visible, as if your eyes had been adjusting to it.

The more you know...

There's using something, and there's abusing it. Colossus speeds over that line line going 80 MPH.

Also, what Colossus does with it is backwards. In the real world, when you're standing inside a building and looking out there's a glare. It's not totally white, but there's a glare. Then you step outside and your eyes adjust and you can see clearly. In Colossus, when you're in a building or other dark area and you can clearly see outside. Then you step outside that dark place and the sun goes supernova.

Hey look it's a letter from the PS2. Let's read it.

"I am an ancient thing, a corpse bereft of all but bones and hair."

First, just because a system isn't the current one doesn't mean it's somehow incapable of doing anything impressive.

Second, Colossus has graphical glitches and oversights to the point it's distracting and even hilarious:









I'd mention the wanderer's ridiculous running animation, but that problem wasn't the programming, just somebody didn't bother to actually observe how humans run.

And finally, let me tell you about a game called Zanac. It's a bullet hell shmup for the NES with no slowdown, no flicker, an AI that changes depending on how much you fire and what powerups you pick up, and the entire game was made by three or four people. You can do marvelous things with technology and other resources when you put your heart into it.

Swear I've heard that somewhere before, but it makes an interesting point: you can't expect rocks to look completely natural on a game that renders this much terrain all at once

Colossus isn't even rendering that much terrain at once. It's not like the entire world is booted up at once. You can even see when the game loads mountains that suddenly appear in front of you and corrects improperly loaded polygons. And was changing the rock and building skins THAT much of a problem?

Not that I had any doubts that Colossus was poorly programmed before.

and much less so for rocks that imply that they were shattered at some point

Maybe you should look into taking a Geology class this coming semester.

[Codiekitty]

Now that you're going to hae to illustrate for me, because I only remember instances of fogs over the lakes and mires - you know, places that might have fog.

So very few of them noteworthy.

And the piece de resistance, fog AND bloom:



On a side note, this is the second time you've mentioned a swamp in this game. What swamp.

Maybe what all this fog is saying is that these lands are ungodly humid, which I guess would explain why the wanderer's hair is stringy and has no volume.

R1 + Triangle.

Doesn't work.

I admit it makes me feel taller, but I fear the reality is less fulfilling.

I also see throwing that word around like confetti without actually knowing what it means or how to use it also makes you feel taller.

But on the other hand, if "soapboxing" to you means "analyzing with the standards I've built from playing hundreds of games and putting some thought deeper than 'how much fun was it' into them", then hey, I'm cool with that.


Where are these lemmings going? Not the Super Nintendo Super Shire! They know to go to Codiekitty.com now!

[The Doctor]

Why can't we all just get along?

Although, FFVII and Cloud fanpeople annoy the heck out of me.

On the subject of SotC, it's not my cup of tea. I willn't bother writing about my problem with it, since Codie has already said most of them.

[Wyborn]

While I admire your tenacity - how nice to find something to read on my return - I don't think you quite got the more relevant part of what I was saying.

See what just happened here? You just posted a completely off-topic post, not even mentioning the whole fanboyism/antifanboyism thing, so large that it took up three separate posts. And why? Because early in the topic I had the audacity to trumpet something I love a lot, and when you responded I incorporated a rebuttal into a broader statement about the nature of the anti-fanboyism attitude still so proudly on display here.

So, you know, thank you for doing my job for me: I don't think I could have made up a scenario in which an anti-fanboy actually writes out three posts in a row, quotes herself several times, and actually links to her blog as if to support a point. It really was breathtaking. Thank you for illustrating everything that's wrong with the idea, so profoundly (I originally said succinctly but decided to edit that out).

If you really want to continue the Shadow of the Colossus argument, drop me a PM - because that is the appropriate place. I will delightedly argue with you there - tear apart your whole series of posts if you want - but I am not so much a fanboy that I will completely take over a topic for the sake of my argument. In that respect, your kung fu is certainly greater.

And nobody says Ninja Gaiden's difficulty lies solely in the camera - whoever does is a liar, and I know at least Lurch will attest to that.

Anyway, yes. Anti-fanboyism is just awful, isn't it? It's almost like they stand on a soapbox to preach about something that nobody really wants to hear, not out of hopes of converting somebody to their school of thought but simply because they can't stand the idea of a fanboy being out there without being derided. Makes me want to verb the word soapbox. How tiring.

[The Willful Wanderer]

Yes, fanboys and fangirls are tough and unpleasant to deal with.

Ranting and raving about them, however, only makes it WORSE.

......and really, there's not much else to say there.

[Lurch1982]

Originally Posted by Codiekitty

I don't have an Xbox (I've been trying to obtain one), and I have it on good authority that most of Ninja Gaiden's difficulty comes from having a broken camera.... hey wait...

Your "good authority" is neither. I'm not going to say Ninja Gaiden's camera was perfect (have yet to find one really), but it was better than its contemporaries IMO (such as Devil May Cry). The difficulty came in the sense that unlike most action games, the chumpchange enemies that came after you could legitimately kill you quickly. That's the thing: the enemies did as much damage as you could, and they tended to swarm. There are very few games where you can pull off "teh strategery" and still lose...Ninja Gaiden is one of them.

Penny Arcade had a good description of the difficulty when it came out:


But I always likened it to the following picture (the player being the sap in green):

[Inferno Dragon]

Originally Posted by Selene Starblade

Failing to do that makes one almost as bad as that lady in that one video that I think Valigarmander posted? You know, the obese Christian lady who wailed and screamed for ten minutes about how some other family wasn't precisely the same faith as her and how it was killing her that someone else didn't think exactly like she did. That one.

actually I was the one that posted that vid.