Idle Forums Game Club 2 - Shadow of the Colossus edition

[elmuerte]

Oh crap... still need to get rid of the third one. Damn standby week...

[Erkki]

That fucking jump up to the platform where the fight takes place took me at least 10 tries.

Should we spoiler things like these? I didn't. Anyway, good to know I wasn't alone with that problem. That was the most excrutiating thing in my recent gaming history.

[Sno]

I think you guys are crazy, i have never had trouble with that jump.

Did the PS3 version break something there?

[tegan]

I actually had a much easier time getting to the colossus than I usually do, but a much harder time actually fighting it.

Third colossus (Gaius) thoughts:

Gaius is easily my favourite colossus, so it's all downhill from here. I love that it's basically just a duel to the death between two swordsmen in an open battlefield. No tricks, no bullshit. Gaius also seems a lot more intelligent than most of the colossi, too. He's one of only a handful that use tools, and he rises to challenge you. He's the only colossus that does that. All of the others are just doing their own thing or patrolling an area, but Gaius alone waits for you to come to him and then immediately starts trying to intimidate/attack you. You would think that this would make me feel better about killing Gaius and worse about killing the other colossi, but no. I respect Gaius.

I always start this fight the same way. Even though I already have his attention, I whistle. Then I start shooting arrows art him. Deliberately inciting a colossus isn't something that I go out of my way to do (I prefer to fight Valus without attracting his attention, for instance), but I make exception for this guy. There's just something about fighting Gaius that makes me feel like deliberately starting a fight.

Finding fruit: the big trees out in the open, the ones with climbable moss on the trunk, will almost always bear fruit. It's easier to see the fruit by climbing to the top and just shooting it down from there.

[syntheticgerbil]

Whoa! I didn't even know you could climb the trees! Argggghhhhh, that would have things much easier!

[Sno]

Whoa! I didn't even know you could climb the trees! Argggghhhhh, that would have things much easier!

Man, i didn't even know that one. Huh.

[syntheticgerbil]

Finished colossus 3 Friday, and I'm really starting to warm up to this game despite some frustrations. I mostly feel lost concerning controls and whether or not I'm able to do certain things. So jumping to the hanging platform to get to no. 3 was the first confusing moment as I was actually able to make it in the first jump but could not figure out how to jump sideways to the main platform at first. I was trying to do a Prince of Persia type thing where I push the controller away and just press jump, but my character kept jumping upwards. So instead, since I knew you could hold triangle to jump straight up from a ledge you were hanging on for greater height, I kept trying to get on top of the broken path way so I could jump from there. I eventually ran out stamina and fell into the water to the boring swimming sequence. I proceeded to miss the platform 6-7 times, swimming again, before I got on and finally figured out to hold to jump sideways. I guess that should have dawned on me much earlier than that.

Also I could not precisely tell, but when I swim underwater, am I swimming faster? Seemed so.

On the colossus itself, I don't know how I triggered to armor to break. I failed to climb up after the hint popped up and instantly knew of the breakaway part because of the polygon seems. I was shooting it from the ground with my arrows, but it seems like the colossus damaged it on his own hitting his sword around away from me. After that he seemed to no longer want to hit his sword in the ground as a ramp for me to climb and kept doing straight down. I ended up just jumping while it came up and grabbing on the side vertically, since the game let me and I was getting bored of waiting for the right sword formation as I did not know how to trigger it (was it random?). Tried to do my newfound sideways jump from the arm hair to the stomach, as I saw the weak point there, but the game would not let me. After resting on the shoulders for a bit having stabbed the head, I fell to the stomach platform on accident and finished him off from there.

[elmuerte]

Just finished #3. The camera and controls are really a pain in the ass, and the fighting was tedious as usual. It took me a shit load of tries to walk up the sword because the player kept falling off even though I was pressing hold. And then there's the boring long chipping away small parts of his hitpoints and then waiting for the shake animation to stop, and repeat.

[tegan]

Also I could not precisely tell, but when I swim underwater, am I swimming faster? Seemed so.

Yup! It's a useful trick.

On the colossus itself, I don't know how I triggered to armor to break. I failed to climb up after the hint popped up and instantly knew of the breakaway part because of the polygon seems. I was shooting it from the ground with my arrows, but it seems like the colossus damaged it on his own hitting his sword around away from me. After that he seemed to no longer want to hit his sword in the ground as a ramp for me to climb and kept doing straight down. I ended up just jumping while it came up and grabbing on the side vertically, since the game let me and I was getting bored of waiting for the right sword formation as I did not know how to trigger it (was it random?). Tried to do my newfound sideways jump from the arm hair to the stomach, as I saw the weak point there, but the game would not let me. After resting on the shoulders for a bit having stabbed the head, I fell to the stomach platform on accident and finished him off from there.

The trigger is tricking him into bashing the stone disc in the center of the arena with his sword. The impact tremor makes his armour crack.

That is, you know, if you're a scrub.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=ncVcYpjdzbY&feature=endscreen

[Sno]

Yeah, you definitely move significantly faster while swimming underwater.

First time i played the game, i just accidentally put myself into a situation where Gaius cracked his armor right off, just blew through the fight without any issue. Second time i played the game, i took forever on that fight, i was not able to understand why i couldn't get him to do it again.

I had been operating on the assumption that i just needed to coax him into that doing that attack repeatedly, that he would do it at a certain range or something. Eventually figured out that the trick was the stone disc in the center of the arena.

[syntheticgerbil]

Ah that makes sense. I think I was so turned around that I didn't know I was near the middle, but it appears I was.

[toblix]

Aaand I'm out. I started on the third one, and after swimming over to and climbing the huge thing, and unsuccessfully trying to jump across to the other thing four times, I realise I really don't have the patience for this kind of gaming anymore, especially when I've already completed the game once before. I'll be following the discussion in this thread closely, though.

[Sno]

Man, what were you guys doing that was making that jump so hard?

I don't get it.

[toblix]

A couple of times I was about the jump, the camera suddenly shifted, making me jump into nothing. The other times I was able to grab the other thing and shimmy around, but then the next jump failed spectacularly and I fell.

[Sno]

The camera doesn't shift though! I went back to that spot and checked it again! Were you trying to line the camera up perfectly and take a direct run at it or something? Is the camera resetting after doing that? If you just leave the camera alone and make a jump that is just slightly angled to the right, there's no issue.

As for making the jump from the handhold, you can tell which direction Wander will leap in by observing the direction he leans while charging the jump, just fiddle with the analog stick until it's right.

[toblix]

I guess I just suck. Anyway, I can't wait to read all your discussions about the rest of the game!

[Sno]

[youmeyou]

I'll hopefully be getting to the third colossus tonight. I'll queue up Chariots of Fire to play as I make my run toward this much maligned jump. I guess I should also keep a slide whistle handy, should I miss it.

[Erkki]

I completed the fourth colossus right now, but I'm waiting for everyone to finish the third. Was it Mondays or Tuesdays when our colossus is incremented?

[elmuerte]

Tuesday. We started on the 1st which was a tuesday

[miffy495]

Oh, ok. I've been working on the Mondays, but that's better for me this week anyway. Crazy big assignment due tomorrow and there was no way I was going to get to SotC as well. Tomorrow, giant stompy death.

[Sno]

Well, it's tuesday, so everybody go enact horribleness upon that 4th colossus

[Luftmensch]

This is actually the first, and only, game I ever played on a Playstation console. Really great experience, unfortunately I don't own this game so I can't really join in the discussion that much. I love the fur. Shell-textured fur is the best. I guess people still use that technique but I haven't seen it since Star Fox Adventures.

[Erkki]

So I finished the 4th one yesterday, but that was just continuing a session where I left the beast half-damaged in frustration about one and a half weeks ago.

I actually didn't remember damaging it before, or even successfully climbing to its weak spots, but it was damaged when I got there yesterday. Firstly, it took me forever to figure out the way I could even grab onto it.

I tried jumping onto it's legs, from argo, from the mounds, this way and that way. In hindsight, paying more attention to details like the underground bunker and its braids should have been a good clue. More waiting and waiting for actually getting it into the position where I could jump onto the braids. It took me a while but in the end I figured out where I have to stand so it does that consistently, but it is still 3 or so minutes for the next one if one attempt fails. At first, I thought I have to jump onto it's legs, and failed some more, but when it turned out its just a straight climb along the braid to the top of its head, it felt really underwhelming. Hanging onto the fur at the top of its head, frustrating filling me as Wander hardly managed to do anything besides holding on while it tried to shake me off, I fell a couple of times and had to do the climbing again. Eventually I killed it, but the only feeling was relief that I'm done and can continue on to the next one, which I hope will be better. I think it's a flying one?

[Sno]

So the fourth colossus!

I remember this one bugging the hell out of me when i first played the game, i just kept over thinking it way too much. You just have to be patient and draw it into the right position and then run through the tunnels. When you emerge from the other side and run up behind it, it will sit down and try to look into the tunnel you first went into and at that point you can grab onto a stone overhang at its rear and climb up.

Then it's just a matter stabbing it in the neck to force it to lower its head so you can get at the sigil on top. (There's two additional sigils, one above each of its front legs, that i think are exclusive to the hard difficulty?)

It can be a very finicky fight though, since if it isn't in exactly the right position, it won't crouch down and try to look into the tunnel and you won't be able to properly deceive it. You just have to be patient with it, give the AI some time to decide to begin its routine.

Erkki: It looks like we found different solutions for this one.