Shadow of the colossus ps2 controls how to#

The game forces you to make decisions about whether or not to attack the colossi, a choice you have to make over and over, at each step of the way.

Shadow of the colossus ps2 controls how to#

You have to find the colossi, ride across an entire continent, and then figure out how to kill them. This choice is inherent in the rest of the game as well. Unlike God of War, killing your enemies is far from automatic or easy - itвЂ™s a concerted effort and a pre-meditated choice. The blurring of the line between Wander and the player becomes particularly important with respect to the titular colossi.

That is to say there is never a rift between whatвЂ™s happening on-screen and whatвЂ™s happening in your hand.Д¬ompare this to a game like, say, God of War - you press X once, and youвЂ™ve killed 8 skeletons, deflowered a virgin, and ransacked a city - and you realize what a feat UedaвЂ™s accomplished. Again, the player is never separated from Wander and controls all his physical actions. Similarly, to attack a colossus, the player must press the O button once to raise his sword, and O again to strike. The physical associations between holding onto a ledge and holding down the R1 button allow the player to always have a connection with Wander. The distinction is subtle: you donвЂ™t just push R1, you have to hold it. In order for Wander to grab onto things - ledges, walls, colossi - the player must hold down the R1 button. However, I want to argue that Wander and AgroвЂ™s controls contribute in some important way to the artistry of Shadow of the Colossus. To simplify, ponder this question: How does mapping вЂњjumpвЂќ to the X button contribute to the overarching theme of a game? Well, by and large, it doesnвЂ™t, and thatвЂ™s fine. ItвЂ™s hard to appreciate just how creative the control scheme for Shadow of the Colossus is - particularly in the way it achieves an artistic goal - without comparing it to other games.

IвЂ™m not talking about good, responsive controls, or button mapping that is particularly intuitive I mean a control scheme that, in and of itself, has something artistically important to say.ДЇumito UedaвЂ™s Shadow of the Colossus does just that. Unless the control schema is laughably bad or unnecessarily confusing, it gets nary a mention.Д®ven worse, the control scheme is almost exclusively relegated to a basic function and fails to convey any sense of artistry or contribute to an overarching metaphor. The controller is the fundamental aspect of videogames as a medium, yet developers and fans alike seem to totally overlook it. What I mean to say is that while lots of the elements of the game are designed and featured in artistically and culturally relevant ways, a huge part of games is left out of the artistic amalgam: the controls. Unfortunately, games fall short in one crucial, yet easily overlooked, way: they only go half of the distance.

We laud innovative game designers for forcing us to make morally ambiguous choices about ourselves and the characters around us. The вЂњvideogames as artвЂќ movement is a funny thingДЄrtsy wonks like myself love to wax philosophic about the potential that games have in terms of narration or eliciting meaningful, emotional player responses.