2D vs 3D Precision

Celia Wagar3 Comments

Do you think that the whole “2D is more precise than 3D” argument/meme that gets brought up primarily by nostalgic old guards has any truth to it? Tbh, having grown up with 3D games, I find 3D Mario much more precise and easier to control than any of the 2D Marios (except the New games). Granted the old 2D Marios had slippery movement and looser controls, but the point stands, that it kind of depends on which one you developed your muscle memory with. Plus, with all the scary-precise speedruns, I don’t think the argument holds much salt. I’ve never even seen anyone specifiy just what they mean by “precision” other than “I find 3D Mario difficult b/c I’m an old man, therefore 2D games are more precise”.

Precision is vague here. Does it mean that in 2d you’re able to more reliably replicate scenarios involving fine movement, or does it mean allowing one to express a greater degree of precision in operation? In 2d games, there are less variables involved in their operation. Especially old 2d games on pixel based platforms, because there literally was no unit of movement smaller than a pixel (even though a lot of these calculated movement in subpixels, the environments didn’t have subpixels anywhere, so it generally didn’t matter), where the same is not true for say super meat boy or Ori and the Blind Forest, where units of measurement can be infinitely subdivided.

3d games can be considered a lot like top down 2d games in most instances, except they place the camera behind the character. Then you have analog movement, due to the analog stick, which is polar coordinate movement with very large number of angles and intensities. Compared to an 8 way 1 intensity control scheme, this is a lot harder to manage. Even games like Super Smash Bros, that are basically side scrolling 2d games, have a lot of analog information in their handling that can’t be precisely recreated when you use the wiimote’s dpad. Lining up down to the pixel in a game like link to the past or the original zelda is a lot easier than the same in link between worlds due to the simpler input scheme. The smallest unit of difference is a lot smaller in LBW, both in terms of position and angle.

The other trouble is that it’s harder to judge position in 3d versus 2d because of the camera angle and use of perspective. In real life we have additional senses to help us out like proprioception and vestibular sense, but watching a screen, it can be tricky to determine how an input will move you relative to the position of the camera and the character’s position and orientation in space, much like learning to drive a car (thought there is also kinetic feedback helping you here too). In 2d games, position is absolute and much easier to determine. If you want to jump from one platform to another, you can directly measure the distance of your maximum jump, or visualize your jump arc on the screen. In 3d, you can’t really do that. What might be the correct distance at one angle, would change if the camera pulls out, or is oriented higher or lower. Your brain needs to make more complex calculations to judge the distance in perspective versus mere distance across the screen. I noticed this playing ratchet and clank recently. Normal jumps are like leaps of faith.

I think what started this trend is Campster’s video on Sonic, which didn’t use the word precision and is fairly clear in the way it is spoken.

At 8:00 and 15:45 he talks about platforming controls in 2d versus 3d. (his comparison of doom’s health meter to contra’s lives is totally erroneous though, that’s down to a difference in attack types and both could be designed to work the opposite way)

His talk about leniency in 3d games is kind of accurate, a lot of 3d games use snap-to mechanics for environmental interaction where a lot of 2d ones don’t, but more likely is that there’s simply been a rise in the popularity of those types of mechanics than 3d games implicitly requiring them. Like for example, if you want a character to catch a ledge, you’ll probably make a box near the top of the character’s head that causes them to snap to the ledge if they’re falling, like what’s found in smash bros, mirror’s edge, tomb raider, ratchet and clank, mario 64. You get things like grind rails in sonic, kirby air ride, tony hawk, ratchet and clank which use this as well.

Playing ratchet and clank recently I found that in the process of running around on platforms I would narrowly fall off a lot and get saved by the ledge grab. But meanwhile in dark souls there’s no such mechanic and I’m able to do things like run across the anor londo rafters much more easily than the equivalent would be in ratchet and clank. Similar happened to me in Link Between Worlds in Rosso’s Ore Mine, where they have some thin planks laid out to walk over. That would be trivial in a 2d game with 8-way control where your movement is perfectly aligned to the thing you were moving over, but in link between worlds it’s really tricky to hold the same direction steady, especially as the character moves up or down in height through perspective, in part because of the strength of the circle pad’s resistive spring.

Another thing worth noting is how in Link Between Worlds, projectile items like the hookshot or bow and arrow snap to the 8 cardinal/ordinal directions when held. In the original games you weren’t allowed to hold them and position yourself at all, In LBW, you can do it with almost all your items. The world is still largely aligned to a grid, so this allows you to reliably aim in the most useful directions. You can still aim at off angles if you’re careful in tapping the button, though that might only be true with sword beams. This type of concession is absolutely necessary for the game because of the angles you typically aim.

Lock-on isn’t a totally necessary concession for behind the shoulder 3d perspective games, I’ve certainly played devil may cry and dark souls at times without lockon by manually aiming attacks. The real trouble is the camera needs to be manually operated at the same time and you don’t have enough fingers to do that. OoT didn’t have any camera controls besides lock-on (neither do many later 3d zelda).

Then of course you get Marble Blast 3d, which Campster brings up, that doesn’t have snap-to mechanics of any kind. Though personally I’d compare to Super Monkey Ball, which was also made by Sega, and involves going fast. Both games don’t have any of that input leniency as a concession to it being more difficult to precisely angle yourself in 3d, and Super Monkey Ball doesn’t even have camera controls.

So what’s the difference between these examples of moving across narrow platforms I brought up, Ratchet and Clank, Dark Souls, Link Between Worlds, and Super Monkey Ball? Why is it easier in some of them and more difficult than others? I’m not really sure honestly.

My best guess is that it has something to do with the camera angle for most of these. Ratchet and clank has really poor camera controls and the angle faces so far forwards that it’s difficult to see where you stand. When you jump in many places, the camera will go so high up you can’t see the ground under you. This makes the ground appear like a sliver so it can be tough to see where you are on the surface. In Super Monkey Ball, approaching an edge has the camera tilt higher over the monkey so you can see the ground better. In Dark Souls, the camera tends to stick at a high or low angle more readily when positioned, and has a smooth automatic takeover when you are determined to walk in a specific direction. I already took a guess at LBW, it’s likely a different case than the others here.

In Ratchet and Clank there are additional concessions in the form of a soft-lock on your shots, indicated by an icon that appears when you aim close enough to an enemy, causing your projectiles to home in on that enemy. Most console shooters have some form of auto-aim, in the form of bullet magnetism, sticky reticules, or so on.

Mirror’s Edge uses snap-to for a large number of environmental interactions, vaulting, catching ledges, wallrunning, wallclimbing, springboarding, and so on. 2d games like megaman X or Zero or ZX actually don’t use snap-to for things like walljumping, they require you to press into the wall, but that’s not feasible in 3d, you need to use a snap-to range because you can be angled differently relative to the wall, applying force/momentum differently, where in 2d you always orients into the wall.

The oldest example of snap-to mechanics I can think of is the ladders in donkey kong (or megaman I guess). The ones in donkey kong are extremely rigid, where megaman’s are much more flexible. To say the least, they exist in 2d and 3d, and nearly all environmental interaction requires them on some level.

Yeah, it can be harder to move through 3d environments because judging distance and angle of movement is less easy, because the input device itself is more complicated, because cameras need to be carefully controlled too, and they alter the angle of movement when reoriented.

I guess the short answer is, yeah, 2d games are easier to move precisely in than 3d games.

Rectagonal Hitboxes

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Why is it that collision boxes still have to be boxes and not other shapes that would better conform to the body of sprite?

Simple collisions like squares or circles on a 2d plane are extremely cheap and processor efficient. You could arbitrarily draw shapes on a 2d plane and compare if they overlap if you wanted to, but this costs more processing power per-frame.

The thing is, modern CPUs are actually powerful enough to do this. Game Maker games support arbitrarily shaped collision bodies. This is many times more expensive than rectangle collisions, but modern CPUs can totally handle it. The trouble is that it’s also a lot more time consuming to produce, and less consistent.

When you place rectangles, you can compare each frame to the last frame to see if they match up. You can reuse the rectangles even. You can easily scale something down if it sticks out too much, you can check exactly how high up a hitbox is and whether it will hit or miss another hitbox. That, and there’s a ton of weird shit that happens when hitboxes are too close to the model, like gaps between characters’ limbs, bits of the characters’ hittable area that stick out slightly too much. Tons and tons of glitches in all sorts of games are caused by having more complex hitboxes than necessary, which allow the characters to push through things, or miss by being too close or triggering a certain animation at the right time.

The basic idea is, if you keep it simple enough, then it’s a lot easier to build, debug, and results in less weird hitbox shit happening, like multihit combos (think chun li’s lightning legs) randomly dropping because the hit character moves slightly differently for a frame, or the edges of the character are drawn inconsistently between frames.

Probably the best example of this is SFV versus SFIV.
http://watissf.dantarion.com/sf5/boxdox/#cbt4/EC2-5MP-18

SFIV was known throughout its lifetime for having tons of ridiculous hitbox oddities that nobody could explain. SFV is keeping it simple, moving the boxes as little as possible, and it’s resulted in a vastly more consistent game to play and understand. I don’t think all games should go for this approach. I like games with highly articulated hitboxes, like smash bros, but it’s best to keep it consistent in most cases. And even smash uses more general hitboxes for stage collision.

Depth and Meaningful Complexity

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What is the difference, if any, between gameplay depth and meaningful complexity?

I use them as synonyms personally.

Possibility space is essentially raw complexity, it’s all the possible states and outcomes, even the pointless and redundant ones.

Depth is what you get when you cull the possibility space for only the relevant and non-redundant states. It’s the complexity that’s left over.

In layman’s terms, we know that games are better as they get more complex, but we also know that some games are complex on a surface level, but end up being simple in execution. Like, you have to sort through a ton of variables, but the actual sorting algorithm is simple, despite being time consuming.

Games need to become more complex overall to have more meaningful complexity, however the way in which they’re constructed can lead to a more complex game that isn’t more meaningfully complex.

The enemy of depth is optimization and redundancy.

Killer Instinct Combo Assist Mode

Celia WagarLeave a comment

http://www.ultra-combo.com/growing-the-killer-instinct-community-combo-assist-mode/ thoughts on this? Its a game’s solution to getting in new players.

I read about this on Shoryuken, and in part brought up the KI combo system on twitter recently because I read it. Reminds me of the L cancel trainer in 20XX and 20XX TE, but it lacks the feedback indicating you did the input correctly.

In this case I guess they genuinely managed to decrease execution difficulty without any penalty to the decision-making game. I can’t honestly think of a downside to this. Good on them. It only really works with a combo system like Killer Instinct’s of course, but it’s a clever move. Perhaps the only trouble with it is the way that the same button can do auto-doubles and linkers back to back, makes it a bit less clear what’s going to happen when you press a button.

It also begs the question of why players shouldn’t play with this on all the time. I don’t have an answer there.

I still think better singleplayer content that teaches people the game is still the best method of bringing people in. If you give people the tools to bootstrap their way up, similar to having a mentor on hand, then you can get them into the game. Otherwise it takes dedication, research, and putting your nose to the grindstone a bit.

(In regards to KI) the mode can mess up manual timing. Manuals can replace Auto doubles in Combos. It can also screw with other characters combo traits. Manuals need a certain amount of time connect or else they become an auto double, topping it off any linker placed after a manual must be the Same strength or weaker. (Heavy manuals make Light mid and heavy linkers, light manuals make light linkers only) The heavier the manual the tighter the timing and the easier it is to react. Though the upside is 1-frame link manuals have 1-frame break windows

Uh, reading this over, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t affect manual timing at all. Like, if you want to do a manual after a linker, I’m pretty sure you’re capable of doing that with this system, because it’s just a matter of linking the manual, rather than canceling the linker with it. I don’t really see how the manual restriction makes a difference here, because this system doesn’t affect the timing or framedata of any of the moves. I mean, your rhythm might be different pressing the buttons, but otherwise manual timing should be the same relative to the move.

The only real drawback of this system that I can see is that if you have more than 1 linker or ender on any given button, you can only use the one they chose for assist mode, which is especially important for enders, because the enders have all different functions, like damage, corner carry, ground bounce, meter building, etc. Not sure, but I also think you can’t use Shadow moves, which are useful for extending combos, and can be used at any point in the combo, not just as a linker.

Though I don’t play KI, so I really don’t know. I’m basing what I say off the guides I’ve read.

Yeah you’re right it doesn’t. I was unclear with my thinking. http://forums.ultra-combo.com/t/growing-the-community-combo-assist-mode-discussion/3441/71 that post pretty much covers all concerns one could have about the combo assist system.

Yup. I read it.

Games with Neat Visual Styles

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Can you give examples of gritty serious games whose art style you enjoy, as well as cutesy colorful ones?

Does Zelda Twilight Princess count as gritty and serious? Despite my misgivings about it, the art direction of the twilight realm enemies, wolf link, midna, and the palettes used across the game were pretty great.

Shadow of the Colossus is also pretty great all around for art direction of the Colossi, Wander, Mono, and many of the structures in the environment (as well as the larger landmasses, though they can be pretty ugly up close.)

Metroid Prime has one of the best art directions of any game, which is part of why the graphics have held up so long, mostly thanks to Andrew Jones. Even the shapes used to construct the environmental structures are extremely identifiable to this day.

MGS has always had a solid art direction. I think MGS1 had the most distinct visual style though. Shadow Moses has extremely iconic areas all throughout, and snake’s design is great too. Plus the bosses.

Deus Ex Human Revolution really nailed the future aesthetic, and I think its hallways and doors are generally really identifiable. The guns stand out too, as well as the particular musculature of the augments, the way they look like kevlar muscles essentially.

Bioshock was solidly put together too, art deco was a great pick for it.

Legacy of Kain has good character design, and that’s about it.

Remember Me had a solid artistic direction in a lot of ways, even if it was a really boring game overall.

For cutesy stuff, Touhou has laughably horrible drawings, but I guess the designs themselves are pretty good, they look nice when drawn by practically anyone else.

The Wind Waker look was certainly inspired.

I like Platinum in Blazblue even if I’m not a big fan of the art direction overall.

Darkstalkers was pretty much a masterpiece.

Ghost Trick was cool as well.

Guilty Gear Xrd is so cartoony it’s practically on the cutesy side, especially for May, elphelt and ramlethal (when’s bridget?)

Jet Set Radio is pretty great.

The new Kid Icarus did a great job reinventing the style of the original game.

Kirby’s had solid art direction and spriting in a number of their games. The enemy designs are great too. Especially love Canvas Curse.

Megaman Classic designs are a favorite for me. (Though I think Zero/ZX really revolutionized it)

Loved the Splatoon designs since I first saw them. Lots of spunk, but very cute and I love spats.

Skullgirls has a distinct visual style and great animation all around.

The World Ends with You has a nice style for itself, drawing from graffiti and the modern vector look with nice costume design.

And that’s all I got right now.

How Could a TMNT Game Play?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What mechanics do you think Platinum could use for their upcoming TMNT game?

I guess not weapon switching, since the turtles are pretty set in their weapon preferences. Maybe they could experiment with tag team stuff, a la sengoku basara or four swords adventure? Could take some inspiration from Ninja Gaiden perhaps, using projectiles to link juggle combos, guard breaking moves strategically sprinkled around each turtle’s moveset, and blocking + dodge out of block + counter attack out of blockstun? Also more command moves, less combo chains because I always ask for this and never quite get it.

I think they should avoid witch time, blade mode, wicked weave/vehicle finisher, and try something new. The main character/support character damage system from W101 would make sense here, only take real damage on the main character selected, other characters can get stunned and need to be picked up. All four characters could have separate health bars, maybe regen health akin to marvel or skullgirls when swapped out to keep people switching.

Maybe you can’t cancel, but you can switch in turtles at any time, while the previous one finishes their attack, which is effectively like a cancel. Allow some moves to be canceled late in their animations into shuriken to link combos together, have a lot of launchers be weak ones midcombo on some chains, so you gotta land some tight links to have it work.

We’ll see what they actually end up doing in like a year.

Making Great Mobility Systems

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What makes a great mobility system in videogames?

Different mobility systems accomplish different things. Mirror’s edge has a great mobility system relative to the level design of the game, much like Mario 64 does for those levels, Tribes needs a large hilly landscape to really work out, where Quake/Half Life/unreal tournament has one that works for nearly anything.

Everything well designed in games is a microcosm of the trends that create depth. It’s about how many elements of the system remain relevant and non-redundant.

Also interesting to note is the way that movement mechanics can have synergy with other mechanics, like in the case of FPS games, shooting. Mirror’s Edge, Quake, and Half Life all have very poor synergy with shooting, because they all require you to aim your mouse precisely to move fast, either because mouse movement itself controls your speed, or because you need to look at environmental objects, like walls, or the cursor’s position is affected by the movements. If you want to move fast in these games, you need to make a choice between moving fast or shooting accurately, though you can switch very quickly and in half life/quake’s case, you can make occasional shots without losing speed. Unreal Tournament and Tribes by contrast have very strong synergy between advanced movement and shooting. Unreal Tournament allows you to dodge in 4 directions regardless of your mouse orientation, so you can usually dodge around in the middle of a fight without requiring you to stop aiming. In Tribes, you carry your momentum forwards, leaving you totally free to aim while moving fast. Gunz is another good example of this, with movement controls similar to UT, allowing players to focus their fire on their opponents most of the time, especially true given the weapon of choice is shotgun, which gives you a bit of time between shots to look away for advanced movement purposes. Imagine Quake bunnyhops with UT dodges. Fast elegant cross-map movement with viable dodging during firefights. Someone should make that combination, I’m amazed Toxikk didn’t see the opportunity.

Smash Bros Melee, and especially Project M, have an awesome system of interlocking relationships between their movement techniques. Everything has different levels of commitment, range, speed, utility, leaving a ton of tradeoffs. Project M has a few techniques like reverse aerial rush and B-reverse that fill in some gaps Melee left behind. Though crawling is just plain fucked up, especially on Sheik who has an even lower crouch than in Melee.

I’m hoping to make a video on Mirror’s Edge’s movement system in depth in the near future, that should illustrate a bit of what I’m talking about.

Can You Make a Game Too Hard?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Is it possible to make a game too hard?

Yes. Absolutely. It’s easy even. Just make a game where you need to do something that highly skilled people have trouble doing consistently multiple times in a row, like pressing a button on a 1 frame window, also releasing it on that frame, like 6 times, spread semi-randomly across a second. This is an extreme example, but it’s not hard to imagine more concrete ones.

On a more practical level, games need scaffolding for players. They need a difficulty curve for practical reasons. You can’t start someone off on the hardest combo trial, you gotta have them build their way up.

This is part of why depth is nice, because in deep games, there are a lot of ways to succeed. This means that if you can’t beat a challenge straight up, you can try it from another angle. Maybe you’re winning neutral a lot, but your punishes are really weak, so you can step that up. Maybe you’re not using your healing items as efficiently as possible. Maybe you’re taking too much damage in your focus to output damage. Should try the route on top versus the bottom, could try pressing the buttons a different way. This allows people to succeed at small things, even if they can’t beat the overall challenge, they can still see that they’re making some kind of progress, and there’s significant variation between each time they attempt.

Even back in the combo trial example, because combo trials don’t really have any depth if you consider them by themselves. They’re a straight up, do this really hard and specific thing, or you fail. If you just hand someone the hardest trial, they’re going to have trouble with even the first cancel or loop. If you work your way up through the trials, then it builds your skill, allowing you to begin tackling the harder ones, or even do better at combo trials in other games.

Probably the real mistake isn’t making something too hard, it’s not placing anything easier around it.

Psychonauts Overview

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Thoughts on Psychonauts 2 getting a funding campaign?

If they have a solid platforming system again, and levels that actually take advantage of it, then it might be a solid game.

The speedrunner here sums it up really well at some point how he’d like more platforming and the like, and Tim acts like a total child the whole time.

The levitation flying glitch could be done without though, way too degenerate. Bunnyhopping could stand to have a small buffer period put in for jumps to make it slightly easier, like 4-10 frames. Make tricks like this easier:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/416986/webm/psychonauts%20canoeskip.webm

But you know it’s gonna be a ton of adventure game + collectathon bullshit. That was one of the things I hated about psychonauts, the very deliberate telos of everything. You have all these figments you can collect in people’s minds to level up, cool. You have all these arrowheads you can collect to buy items, cool. Then they place barriers in your way that absolutely require these things. You NEED the cobweb duster, because certain cobwebs are completely impassable. You NEED the arrowhead finder, because the cobweb duster is so damn expensive (okay, this one is a bit less of a need). You NEED invisibility to get to Gloria’s dressing room, which means you NEED to collect all these fucking psi cores and figments to level up. It’s like no elements of the game are allowed to overlap in any way, everything that can be done has one strict way of doing it, a key that opens the lock. This means that rather than the collectathon bullshit being something additional, like hey, you unlocked the ability to launch enemies from afar, now you can juggle them with ranged attacks, now you have this crowd control ability, now you can zip forward, things that are nice to have and don’t totally overshadow the existing mechanics, but aren’t strictly necessary, you instead have these abilities that will do this one lock-and-key thing for you that you gotta have or this section is impassable. Screw that shit.

Shadow of the Colossus and Ico

Celia Wagar3 Comments

This is old writing I dug up from a long time ago, posted only to twitlonger. I mentioned in my other Shadow of the Colossus post on here how I had sworn I wrote something but couldn’t find it. Here it is:

Ico was completely lame and Shadow of the Colossus had a way better more interactive formula. Ico was lame because it was static. Ico’s gameplay challenge was primarily based on solving puzzles, fighting shadows, and escorting Yorda. Shadow of the Colossus’s primary challenge came from the scaling of the colossi, and exploring the world to find the colossi.

In Ico, Yorda is used as a key to open doors, so all puzzles require that she must make it to the next door. The primary hurdle with the puzzles is getting an AI companion to pass by various barriers when they have less movement capabilities than you do, only being able to climb up short ledges. So you must work to create paths the AI can traverse to get them to the next door. The solving of puzzles, rather than requiring actual logistics is more frequently a process of having Ico climb to the next point of interest along a relatively linear path and activating the thing that moves the game along, then dragging Yorda through to the next area. In a very zelda-like fashion, progression is defined largely through activating things rather than actually having to solve interactive systems, like portal, braid, or trine. Predictably every single puzzle consists of leaving yorda, navigating the environment, and activating something to let Yorda progress past a road block.

The other point of conflict is fighting shadows. Shadows are constantly attacking Yorda and Ico, and attempt to kidnap Yorda, dragging her into a portal. If this is successful, the game is lost. In most sections of the game, the shadows can be ignored by running past them. In others you are actually forced to fight the shadows, which is a complete slog. You only really have one attack, done by pressing square. when a shadow hits you, you get knocked down and have to sit through a lengthly getting up animation. In general, fighting shadows is not fun, it’s completely tedious. You thwack at them with your one attack, and they have tons and tons of health, having to be knocked down multiple times to actually defeat them. This isn’t dangerous nearly so much as it is dull and grindy. The enemies don’t have a lot of health to force you to attack right and efficiently to take them down, they have a lot of health to draw out the process of fighting them. The worst part is that in some sections you are forced to fight them and are not allowed to progress until they are all defeated, in which case they are made annoying by skittering off into corners and avoiding you as frequently as they attack. This is especially irritating in the late part of the game where you obtain a sword that can destroy shadows in one hit and they avoid you.

The biggest trouble with Ico is that the game has absolutely no flexibility. There is one way to solve every puzzle, there is one path to the next area, there is one attack that you spam. The game has a much larger focus on the environment and the idea of characters holding hands than any of its actual gameplay. I dare say that the concept of design for the game is outright unsalvagable, because no combination of the game’s existing mechanics or new mechanics could really serve to make the game interesting short of changing it into an action game. The game is gratuitous with its scenic vistas to the detriment of the game itself. It loves unskippable filler content. The AI that controls Yorda is unresponsive and has to be yelled at to get it to move anywhere by itself in any reasonable amount of time. The entire game gets no better than this. The level design doesn’t improve, the puzzles don’t get harder, the enemies don’t vary,

Speedruns are rarely an indicator of the quality of a game, because different pressures and dynamics generally apply, but they can frequently be a good tell. This is the Ico speedrun:

This speedrun is pretty notable among speedruns just because of how closely it follows the game’s original route. Minor tricks like jumping instead of running are employed in many areas, but largely, every single player to ever play this game will repeat the exact same actions as this speedrunner, only with more fumbling around trying to figure out the topography of their environment. This speedrun is a complete testament to the inflexibility of the game and the dullness of trying to play it. Ico isn’t a game based on interaction with your environment, it is a game based on participation with the route they want you to take.

And here’s the turnaround, Shadow of the Colossus is the opposite, a legend stepping out of the shadow of failure. In Shadow of the Colossus the primary gameplay segments are exploring the world on horseback, and scaling colossi to stab their weakpoints, killing them. You start every colossus hunt at a temple in the center of the world, use Agro, your horse to ride to the next Colossus, and do battle with it before starting over.

The biggest point against Shadow of the Colossus is the process of locating each one. In the sunlight you can hold up your sword to direct you to the next colossus, and Agro is helpful in getting you from place to place. Getting to each colossus frequently means riding to a location, and climbing a little to get to the actual arena. To help make exploration of the overworld more interesting, there are rewards for players who explore outside of just going straight to every colossus in the form of fruit and lizards. Fruit found will increase Wander’s health, and Lizards shot will increase Wander’s strength. Shooting lizards is tricky because they run away quickly and are small, making them hard to aim at. They can also be slashed or trampled by Agro, but this is more difficult. Between these, the open world is less filler and more worthwhile to the game, also offering greater freedom to explore freeform than Ico’s castle.

The real meat of Shadow of the Colossus however are the Colossi themselves. The game doesn’t waste time with smaller enemies, the Colossi are the embodiment of the game’s strongest system, climbing. The colossi moving underneath Wander’s grip and the addition of the grip gauge are what create the greatest tension in the game, requiring the player both to figure out a way forward, and pace themselves carefully so as not to fall off. Successfully defeating a colossus involves a careful game of evaluating when the colossus will shake or move, where to climb to next, if jumps are necessary, where the next weak point is, and how long to risk charging each stab for maximum damage. Along the way you must find footholds and places to rest to restore your stamina. Every facet of the colossi design is about putting your climbing skills to the test. Each colossi has a different physical structure that can be climbed, many have arenas that need to be climbed, multiple and changing weak points exist to make you climb all over the boss and to keep you engaged in climbing rather than staying in one place. They shake to make it so climbing wrong is punished and you have to carefully manage your stamina meter. Each boss has different movement behaviors that open up new avenues to climb or new ways to climb. Defeating each boss is much more than just following a static route to a static destination.

The big thing about Shadow of the Colossus is also its flexibility in killing the colossi. It’s possible to whistle to attract colossi attention, it’s possible to jump around on top of the colossi, it’s possible to see opportunities and run over for them and risk getting thrown off. It’s possible to do all these things because Shadow of the Colossus has such a robust simulation of bodies in motion. The bonus unlock items help highlight this in of how each of them can create unique interactions with the colossi. The colossi have senses of sight and sound and an AI to themselves and manipulating that AI can be useful in defeating each colossus.

In contrast to Ico’s speedrun, here is Shadow of the Colossus’s. Throughout every colossus there are tons of tricks used to win each fight, special jumps from flinging yourself off the colossus, moving around during cutscenes to break sequence. Most of these tricks are well and beyond a normal playthrough, not really something that you can totally judge the game on, but the fact that they exist is in part a testament to the robustness of Shadow of the Colossus’s system. There are many different ways to tackle each boss, and every player will have their own experience finding how to fell each Colossus because it is such a wide system of possible interactions. Also important is that it is a system that directly challenges the player to work out strategies for beating it. It is not just do what I tell you to, it is figure out ways to beat this. The Colossus quakes underneath you and between the tools you have, you must make it do what you want. The system isn’t participatory, it is based directly on interaction. Not on repeat back to me, but on you playing notes and the game playing back, on being able to change how you play rather than just do the same thing with less mistakes. It’s not about having fancy tricks, it’s about the game being designed in such an open way that people can solve things for themselves or make their own tricks, make their own way forward.

This is the difference between a good game and a bad game.