• From: Norway
  • Registered: 2009-12-01
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Re: Unplayed games - a backlog adventure.

SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS

Okay, so, uhm, this game has always been on my radar. Haing pirated it on my chipped PS2 back in the day, only to have it be one of the few games that for some reason did not work.

However, being without a PC has made me move more towards console games.
Shadow of the Colossus is one of those highly appraised titles that always comes up in conversations of the best games evvver.

And I just don´t see it.

Now, let it be known that I played the PS4 remake by Bluepoint games, which is considered a 1:1 remake.
So, the visuals and music is all remastered etc, and the controls are modernized. That being said, the controls are still a bit wonky.

That aside, the game starts with Wander, Agro and Mono riding over a massive bridge across a canyon The first being our protagonist. The second our trusty steed, and the latter a dead girl. Wander confronts a god-like voice to have them resurrect Mono. The gods claim this is not a feat for mortal beings to be given, and that it is not possible. However, as Wander has a forbidden sword or something, it may actually be done. He just has to complete a trial which includes slaying 16 colossi first.

You can already sense where this is going. Sort of.

You use the sword as a guide to locate the first colossus. A giant. But a gentle one at that. After climbing it, you find a weak point, and penetrate it for the first kill. Fairly easy, but you get the gist of how it´s done. After that, you wake up in the temple at the end of the bridge. A shadowy figure stands you as you wake up. A statue representing the colossus is destroyed. The godly voice tells you about your next foe.

And then, that´s sort of it. The story is completely absent until you defeat the 6th colossus. And then it´s not really a story beat, more of a possible future, and it´s about 10 seconds long.

Again, rinse repeat is the name of the game as you slay these unassuming(and some assuming) beasts. Not until Beast 12 has been defeated are you given more of the story.
And while the game is not very long(I used 5 hours and 20 minutes), the scarce, drip-fed story is too little for me. Yes, the world is gorgeous, the art design as well. And the music is absolutely fantastic, sure, but I don´t see the hype.

After the 16th and final colossus(Okay, that fight was pretty damn epic, I will give them that), the story ends. On a predicted, but melodramatic and dark ending. All very much open for interpretation, which is fine, but unless you are a die hard fan of this game, and it´s predecessor "Ico" (which is supposedly set in the same universe some 100-ish years later), my interpretation is thusly:

It´s fine. It´s not great. It´s fun enough for 5 hours, but had it been 5 more, I may have called it quits.
The ending,

SPOILER ALERT: is that the godlike creature sent you on a fools errand. They had been split into 17 entities. 16 physical and one spiritual. Buy destroying the 16 physical manifestations, the entity is free, and claims Wander as their host. The guys from the second drip of the story from colossus 12 seem to know what is going on, and promptly re-seals the bad guy, and it seems like all hope is gone for Wander, who is definitely killed in the process, after getting radiant eyes and a couple of horns.

Then, after the credits, Mono wakes up, Agro greets her, and they find a newborn infant with horns.


.. Okay. That, was and ending alright.

SPOILERS OVER


I don´t know what I expected going in, apart from boss battles with bosses that mainly won´t try to kill you or anything, but it certainly wasn´t a story like this. It feels artsy for the sake of being artsy, and that´s just not me.

Mediocre+, as it was fun enough to keep going, but nothing more. Took me a fairly short amount of time, and will not be going back to it for any additional trophies and/or upgrades or collectibles.

-Tom out.

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  • From: Norway
  • Registered: 2009-12-01
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Re: Unplayed games - a backlog adventure.

ASTRO BOT
Yes, I'm still here, and yes, I still play games.

Astro Bot. Holy goddamn piece of stellar feces what the fuck is this?
It makes no sense. Astro's Playroom is a piece of tech demo that comes bundled with every PS5, and it's a small platformer that's genuinely fun and intuitive. It imagines a "mascot" for the Playstation in Astro Bot, and imagines what it would be like if Mario was imagined up by the devs at Sony as they were making their own console to play on.
Fast forward a few years and Team Asobi made a fully fledged game based on that formula. Astro's Playroom was a top tier tech demo you could play, and had a bunch of collectible that were "residual images of the digital self". You gather a bunch of collectibles that have full 3d models of every piece of hardware that Sony Computer Entertainment made. PS1, PSone, Memory cards, multi tap, PS2, PSVita, Memory sticks, you name it, it has a digital copy in the game. Of course it also has the sounds. Hit the PSone, and it will give you that PS original startup sound, making sure your geese have bumps.

Fast forward, and Team Asobi made their sequel. A top tier 3D platformer aptly named "Astro Bot". The premise is easy enough. Astro and his friends are cruising through space, when a giant, evil space squid shows up, and dismantles their space ship. Their PS5-shaped space ship.
Astro is now stranded on a desert planet, with a ship that needs repairing. So you choose the first level, and go. As you move along, the PS references are resplendent. Each galaxy (world hub) has a final planet that's a play of a PS classic. I won't spoil all of them here, but if you are a fan of "Ape Escape" or "Uncharted", for instance, this game manages to pay homage to those  franchises, but still keep it very much on the level of what the game is. The platforming is solid. The music is downright GREAT, and the presentation, ie the grahpics, is top notch. They took what they learned from the tech demo and amp it up. In every aspect.

Astro bot was goddamn amazing. It shouldn't be, but I still managed to platinum the game, because I had fun every second of playing it. It's a goddamn 3D platformer, that in 2024 still managed to break the standard, and introduce something new and exciting for every world.

If you own a PS5, I'd highly suggest playing this title. It's damn fun.

-Tom out.

Last edited by Tomahawk (2024-11-03 00:12:06)

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  • From: Norway
  • Registered: 2009-12-01
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Re: Unplayed games - a backlog adventure.

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA - SKYWARD SWORD

I said I'd get to it.

The very beginning of the much-discussed split-in-three Zelda timeline. Where it all begins. We finally get to learn how it all started. How the lands were formed, how the cycle origined, how the Master Sword came to be.

But you know what? No.
I tried, so hard, and got so far, but in the e-
erm.
No.
This game looks fantastic, it sounds fantastic, but it plays like absolute dog shite.

I don't even mean that in any positive way, if there is one. Skyward Sword was 100% made for the Wii. Unlike it's predecessor Twilight Princess that released on Wii alongside the Gamecube, Skyward Sword was made from the ground up for the Wii motes. And it doesn't age well.

I opted to play with the Pro Controller, because why wouldn't you? And after about 12 hours, that feels like an eternity and a half, I couldn't stand it anymore. See, how do you map a "1 to 1" hand movement from the wii motes to an analogue stick? You don't, as it turns out. Normally in these games, the left stick is movement, while the right stick is the camera. In Skyward Sword? Right stick is the sword hand. YOU TRY PLAYING THAT! 12 hours in, I still swung my sword around instead of pressing the Switch-equivalent of R1 to ENABLE THE CAMERA ON THE RIGHT STICK, all the fucking time.

I did, after all that, try to switch to the joy cons instead, and while it was definitely more doable, the damage was already done. I just can't with this game. I'll go and watch a playthrough or something instead.


And to add to it; my girlfriend did try it after me, and started with the joy cons. She just quietly stopped playing it, and isn't eager to come back. I get it now. I get why it isn't highly rated amongst the Zelda games.


I actually tried this awhile ago, and forgot to write anything about it, because I didn't complete it. Now that I know I never will, I'm okay with writing about it. In fact, since then, I completed The Wind Waker again, and it was an absolute BLAST of a game. Love it!

But watching paint dry is better than Skyward Sword.


-Tom out.

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  • From: Norway
  • Registered: 2009-12-01
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Re: Unplayed games - a backlog adventure.

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA - THE WIND WAKER (HD)

THE WIND WAKER is one of those games I bought an entire console for. I bought a Gamecube, complete with a limited edition Wind Waker, that came with a copy of Ocarina of Time and Ocarina of Time Master Quest(The rumoured Ura Zelda) back in what must've been 2003. I bought the console for that sole purpose. And sold it to a friend after.

It's not that I don't like some gamecube games, on the contrary, but I didn't need one to play Smash bros or Mario Kart. Everyone had one. And to Owen's great dismay, I hated Super Mario Sunshine.

I played Wind Waker, more or less 100%, and haven't touched it since. Not even the HD-remaster that came in 2013, but it is the version I played now. See, I actually bought a Wii U. Granted, I got it in 2022, and haven't really played it either, but that's beside the point. I played Wind Waker HD on my PC using an emulator. Because I'm a big boy, and all, but not big enough to use the Wii U gamepad. Holy carp that thing is wildly uncomfortable.

The HD version of the game is more or less the same game. Some controls are refined, there's a speedy sail that makes sailing more than twice as fast, and there's some streamlining towards the end of the game, to speed up the process. The graphics are also touched up a tad, but not much, and they're more or less exactly how I remember it looking.

Now, let's get to it.

Meet Link. Or Fritz. Babe, Knil, whatever you want to call your main protagonist. We'll stick with Link, for all purposes. Link is a young lad living on Outset island with his grandma and his sister. It's a quiet, easy life.
One day, a massive bird appears, a young blond girl clenched twixt its talons. Totally not Zelda. It lands on top of the island, in a dark forest. Our hero promptly sets out to seek out what the hell happened, and to rescue Ze, er, this girl.

Of course things go sour. He rescues this girl called Terra, but his sister is abducted in the chaos, and taken to THE FORSAKEN FORTRESS.  Link decides to go with the newly appeared pirates, to whom Zeld- eh, TERRA is the captain. They set out towards the fortress, Link goes on his merry way to rescue his sister, and is completely bitch slapped by a tall, red haired brute of a man. He is thrown out to sea, and wakes up on Windfall Island, guarded by the King of Red Lions. A small boat that can talk. After a bit of chit chat, it is revealed that the tall man was, to nobody's surprise, the Gerudo King himself; Ganondorf. I know, big shock! This of course, sets a number of events in motion to defeat Ganondorf, and rescue Link's sister, and the other girls that were taken capture.

Wind Waker is an absolute gem of game. The art style alone is worth it, but the gameplay is, while classic Zelda, really good. The music is also Zelda, through and through. Some themes of old, some themes of new, and an entire different take on most characters design and such. Yes, the sailing in the OG game was a bit tedious, as you'd have to use the titular wind waker to compose tunes to change the direction of the wind, in order to go faster. But in the HD remaster, you can get your hands on a super sail, that never cares about wind, and always travels twice as fast as the original sail. Great success! It made the sailing that much less bothersome, and it never got tedious.

Of course, the world of the Wind Waker is mostly water. In fact, it's the great ocean, and some mountain-y islands scattered across it. Once you get further into the story, you do understand what's going on, where Hyrule is, and so on and so forth. The story, for a Zelda game, is actually quite good, and often times much darker than it has a right to be. Most of the characters are fun, and my favorite character, without a shadow of a doubt, the manager of the Battleship mini game. "spliiish" and "ba-boom!".

The Wind Waker isn't a massive game. It can be long if you don't use any sort of walkthrough, and there are definitely missable stuff that helps your journey. Like most older games, it rewards exploration, and seldom tells you exactly where you need to go. It does, but it leaves out that you should probably head to that Island you weren't able to access that time. As such, I'd recommend a spoiler-free walkthrough for a better use of your precious time, and you'll have an absolute blast.

Love this game, even 20 years after playing it originally.

-Tom Out

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30 Reply by Tomahawk

  • From: Norway
  • Registered: 2009-12-01
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Re: Unplayed games - a backlog adventure.

It's been a minute.


Actually, it's been about 8 Months, by my count.

I know, we use the discord, and it works, but every now and then, I feel like WRITING, you know?

As most of you know, I've played a game called

CLAIR OBSCUR: EXPEDITION 33

A game made by a brand new company called Sandfall Interactive. The Game Director was working for Ubisoft in 2019, and quit because he had an idea he knew they'd never bite. He left Ubisoft and started a company with friends, that over the years grew to about 30 members. A company that by Triple A standards, is ridiculously tiny.

And then it snowballed.

Let's make a JRPG like the golden age of JRPGs, but let's modernize it, he said.
Let's make sure it has turn based combat, fills all the tropes, has a great soundtrack, an overworld, a lot of skill, is serious but still silly, and takes about 80 hours to complete. Like back in the day, he said.
Let's make it over the top. Let's make sure it has fantastical environments. Magic. Airships, silly creatures, an incredibly deep story, and a goddamn rock that talks.
I swear, he said all of that.

And then he finished: "Let's also make it Belle Époque, for no good reason!"

And so it came to pass.

Clair Obscur is a French JRPG. A FJRPG, if you will.
It takes all the things from the JRPG genre that makes it good, and adds a solid dose of France on top of it. And mon dieu, it fucking works.
It works so good, in fact, that after 80 hours non-stop, I really wish I could go back and do it all again. Forget the entire story, and just replay it. Have a fresh experience, and enjoy every goddamn second of it once more. But I can't. And that's ok.

Let me be 100% clear. And 100% Obscure.
This game is a 10/10. There isn't a shadow of doubt.

So, let's get on with it.

You start the game as Gustave. An engineer who's learned to make pictos into luminas. It won't make a lick of sense yet, but you'll get there. You also start in the city of Lumiere, and looming o the horizon, is a great paintress. A paintress perched on a monolith with the number "34" on it. The story starts as she's ready to paint "33".
67 years ago, there was a great fracture. The paintress and her monolith appeared, and she painted the number 100. It wasn't obivious the first years, but after a while, it became obvious that once she paints a new number, anyone older than that number, simply ceases to exist, in an event known as the Gommage. The process involves people simply vanishing, and left in their wake is rose petals and dust.

67 Years ago, the gommage was started, and Expedition 0 went north to figure out what was going on. The year after, Expedition 99 attempted the same thing. Nobody returned.
Fast forward, and this year is Expedition 33. Everyone above the age of 33 are dead.
But those who came before all had a purpose. To make the expedition easier "for those who come after". So, for instance, Expedition 69, the climbing expedition, knew they wouldn't be able to solve the mystery, but they installed climbing posts, for those who come after.
Basically, each expedition has made changes to the locale to make it easier for the next expedition to get further.

Gustave, the engineer, has figured out a way to turn pictos into luminas, which will make Expedition 33 over powered.
(In game terminology, pictos are equippable abilities, and luminas are the same abilities, but permanent. So instead of equipping an "attack up", it's now permanent, meaning you can have far more of these than the base 3 thingies. It makes sense when you play it).

As such, Gustave embarks on his journey, along with a plethora of peers, to break the cycle. But not everything is what it seems. As soon as they make for land on the continent, a mysterious figure wipes out almost all of his companioins, and Gustave is left alone to make way. That is, until he finds a few of his crew still alive, and when one falls, WE CONTINUE.

Clair Obscur is a turn based RPG. But with a twist or 3.
On your turn; use an attack, an ablity, or a Tint. The first is self-explanatory. The second, an ability of your choosing; you can equip 6 at any given time, and the latter, a revive, heal or boost. But when it's not your turn, the enemy *will* attack. For your own safety, you're given the abilities to counter, dodge, jump or gradient. Counter and doge does what it says on the tin. Jumping is evading with a counter attack, and gradient is a massive counter attack. All 4 have button assignments, and you'll grow accustomed to them all. On your turn, bide your time. When it's not your turn; PAY ATTENTION.
It's a modern take on the turn based system, and a modern take I've come to love. Some enemies/bosses will basically be tutorials on one of the aforementioned techniques, and you will only be able to defeat said foe by utilizing one specific manoeuvre. A massive switchup from the norm of JRPGS, but a welcome one.

The world is exactly what you'd expect, if the glory days of JRPG's had a natural evolution from the overworlds of the SNES/PS1 era. There are levels/worlds/areas that you explore, and when you're done with them, you're burst into the overworld, which is a tilt-shift-esque version of a world, with small representations of locations you can enter. Classic PS1, but in glorious Unreal Engine 5, which Sandfall has embraced to great success.

Along the journey, Gustave and his siter Maelle run into several companions and enemies. My favourite perhaps, is Esquie, a magical being that uses rocks to perform actions such as flying and swimming. Like airships, but an actual character. And his neighbour Francois. Goddamn Francois.
It's a JRPG by default, so expect random-ish encounters, grinding, leveling and upgrading equipment and abilities, as well as a multitude of sidequests and minor stories.

The story of Clair Obscur is one of the best stories I've ever experienced so far. It's romantic, it's dramatic. It's comedic, and it's unexpected. It takes you on a journey through love, unconditionally, all the way through hatred and joy. And there are twists I daresay are better than KOTOR, if you can believe it.

But herein lies the problem with these types of games. Talking more about it is *hard*. Because as River Song would put it: "Spoilers".
This game is seriously great.

And with great gameplay comes great music. Lorien Testard, a first time video game composer was discovered on an obscure forum not unlike this one. He was posting his music, and the game director happened to be on the same message board, the same day. Testard then went on to compose one of the greatest soundtracks to date, without any "real experience". Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 truly is a first in many ways, and it's fucking excellent.

It's on Game Pass, if you don't feel like paying $59 for the game. But let's be honest, $59 is cheap these days. There aren't any plans for DLC or an expansion, and $59 will give you the full game, full stop. No online account, no daily login rewards or additions. The game is done, and they charge what they feel like their game is worth, without pretending that $89 is a fair price for a live service game that tempts you with cosmetics and pay 2 win mechanics. A Full game, at a fair price, without any addons.


Seriously, play this game.



Unless you hate good stories, RPG's, an excellent soundrack and prefer multiplayer shooters, of course.


-Tom out.

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