We Play, You Play: Shadow of the Colossus

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Oh, oh, thank God you're. I didn't know you were going to be at the studio.
Did you see what happened? No, yeah, I saw it. Nick, Nick got big.
Nick got so big.

He's so big. He's like towering over all of Los Angeles.

He's leaving a path of destruction in his way. There are cops everywhere.
Like the streets are shut down. I think it's up to us, buddy.
I think you know what we have to do.

We gotta climb this motherfucker. We gotta climb, Nick, and we gotta take down this Colossus.
And it's sad because it's our friend. It is sad.
But it's like, it's okay. All right, all right.

Take that Capitol Records building. Oh, Oh my god, Nick, no, okay, okay.
Oh, hey, buddy.

All right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna run, uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna see if I can grab his shoelace, okay? Okay, here we go.

Here, I'll distract him.

I'll just throw this like rock at him. Like, ah,

ow, my eyes are orange now.

All right, I got onto his shoe. I'm gonna climb up.
He's kind of got, he's got a kind of a fuzzy leg. Okay,

climbing up his legs. I'm climbing up too.
All right.

I'm gonna say I gotta shake my leg. Something climbing up.

Oh,

I've got this like

I don't know if it'll work, but I've got like a sword from my house because I have a sword. I have a sword.
No,

of course I have a sword. I have a sword too.
I brought a sword with me. I'm holding it up.
I'm gonna see where his sigil is. Maybe we can plunge the sword in and stop Nick from destroying stuff.

It's the only way to take him down. Oh, really? Trying to find my sigil?

Oh, wait, maybe he'll tell us where his sigil is.

If you could hear us, where is your sigil? Nick, where's your sigil?

Where do you think it is? Uh.

What does that Like, maybe on his head? No, no.

Well, maybe on his tummy? No, Heather.

We gotta go back down.

What do you mean? We can't go. We have to stop

destroying the city.

There's like nothing we can do. What are you talking about?

Wait, wait, like,

I'm gonna get midway up his thigh. Heather, Heather.
No?

Just let him. Just let him.

You know where it is. You know where it is.
You know where it is. Come on.
What?

Is that on his cheek? Maybe it's on the back of his hand.

Heather, do I really gotta say it to you?

He put the sigil on his hog, alright?

He put the sigil on his hog. He wants to get stabbed there.

And I'm not doing it. I'm running out of stamina.
I'm just gonna let go. Let's just let go.

Let him destroy the city. He put the sigil on his hog.

That's it for us. We're done here.

End of discussion. Take that, Hollywood sign.

All of our precious monuments.

All two of them.

Destroy.

Alright, I'm going to go home, I guess. Yeah, I guess, you know, just spend the time you have left with your family.
He's going to rampage through the town. Are you guys leaving? Yeah, we're leaving.

We're not going to. But this, you know, my sigil.

Someone needs to stab it. Stop.
We're not stabbing it. Nobody is.
First off, why is that something you want? Yeah.

I don't want it. Oh, my God.
Oh, that'd be the worst thing that ever happened to me, to giant me. Why? He's pulling down his pants a little bit.
Oops. Just a little bit.
My fly came undone. Oh no.

We gotta go. We gotta just leave.
Take that, Jimmy Kimmel Live Studios. Stop! Stop!

We reflect sunlight off our sword and attempt to ride our horse as we play you play morally conflicted games as art classic Shadow of the Colossus this week on Get Play.

Welcome to Get Played, your one-stop show for good games, bad games, and every game in between. It's time to get played.
I'm your host, Heather Ann Campbell, along with my fellow host, Nick Weiger.

That's me, Nick Weiger, and I'm here with our third host, Matt Abodaka. Hello, everyone.
Hello, everyone, and welcome back, Bucket. It's the show of shows.
This is the episode where we play,

you play.

And it's also that you say what we play.

And we played what you say. That's right.
That isn't always how it works, but that's how it worked this month. We had a few different options, and you spoke.

You overwhelmingly voted for this month's game, which is Shadow of the Colossus, which we'll be talking about at length during this episode. And it's not always how we do it.

It might not be how we ever do it again.

Who could say? We've only done it twice.

One time you picked Persona 5 Royal as

a prank and a dare. And thank you for that.
And thank you for it. And then this time you picked Shadow of the Colossus.
I would say the exact opposite of Persona 5 Royal in terms of length. Sure.

I mean, if they had,

the thing is, because it was God of War, Ragnarok, or Persona 5 Royal. And I was looking for an excuse to play Persona 5 Royal.

And they were like, when, when, when our listeners were like, yeah, we want you to cover it. I ended up putting 130 hours in that game and finishing it.

And I love it. It's an incredible game.
I'll get back into it again someday.

I bought it for the Switch with the intention of doing it again. Me too.
Let's do it. I will play it.

You play it on Steam Deck too, if you want. But my Steam Deck play was frustrating.
It was a frustrating play. It felt a little weird at times, a little janky.
On Steam Deck on

XCloud. Oh, yeah.
So like streaming from my Xbox on my Steam Deck. And I was like, this is not

not ideal. Yeah, but I've I've dabbled in the Switch release and it's perfect.
So we'll play it on Switch then. Don't tell me what to do.

Only only the listeners can tell me what to do. And then

only sometimes. Yeah.
And only sometimes. Only when we ask for it.
They keep telling me to beat the shit out of you

on our Discord. And you do it weekly.
Yeah, you do it. That's one of the things you listen to.
Yeah.

Just backhand slap Nick every single episode. What do you make of this, Matt? So just now, Nick and and I were in the lobby

and he stepped up behind me in line to check in and he didn't say anything. Yeah, he just kind of hung out.

And he just stood behind me for a, for like, I would say six minutes without saying anything. Uh-huh.
Do you think that behavior is sus, or do you think that behavior is standard?

Well, I'm going to stop you right there. All of Nick's behavior is sus.

Do I think that's strange?

Here's the thing. I've done similarly to Nick very recently when we were at Sprouts.
That's true. Because what are we going to to do? Chop it up in the line.
There was like two people between us.

No, he was directly behind me. It reached him.
Here's what it was. I thought you noticed me because

you held the door for me and I assumed you knew it was me. No.
And then I lined up behind you. I queued up behind you.

I queued up behind you. Behind, but not looking.
Yeah.

Letting in a stranger. I queued up behind you

and I thought you saw me. And then some time passed and I realized you didn't see me.

And you had an interaction with someone else in the lobby who said you were dressed cool. So, I witnessed that.
And then

enough time passed where I was like, Oh, well, now I'm just going to see how long it takes for her to realize I'm here. And it was about six minutes.
Yeah,

I will say the thing about like getting into this building is tough if you're not with somebody who works here already because you have to then check in and do all this stuff. Right.

Uh, not that long ago, uh, our pal Cody Fisher and I got in trouble here. You got busted? We got busted by security.
Wow.

Because they claimed that we let somebody in to the building that shouldn't have been let in. And we were like, that's impossible.
That's not true.

Like, there's no way we would have just held the door for somebody who shouldn't have been in here. And then we were presented with a screenshot of us doing just that.

We were just like, what? And we just didn't remember it at all. But it wasn't like it was anything bad happened.
It was just like

some lady that was lost. She was just like on the wrong floor.
And we just didn't,

we just, yeah, she was just lost.

My favorite moment of security cam like footage being presented to me is I went to this bar that is near to near UCB in Los Angeles called Birds.

And I was pickpocketed sitting at the bar. And

they told me, oh, we've got security camera if you want to look at it. And I was like, great.

And I watched the footage and watched, you know, people crowd up around me and presumably a dude pickpocket me and it didn't help me do anything. Like, it was just like, yep, no, I didn't.

Well, yeah, you, it's like, what? I can't. I can do anything with this.

You could, you could hand evidence to a police officer on a silver platter and they'd be like, what do you want me to do with this? Yeah. Fingerprints.
Yeah.

Yeah.

But shout out to Birds.

I love them. Everybody there.
Yeah. Birds is the greatest.
Everybody loves birds. Classic, classic LA hang.

By the way, pickpocketing now sounds like something that would only happen in Victorian England. I don't think of that as like, but I guess you might still take someone's wallet

based on the prospect they might have some cash inside or maybe like a debit card you could clone. I don't know.
I just don't think of that happening as much. What about picksocketing?

Picksocketing, a very cyberpunk. Yeah, that's happening all the time.

That's happening to us daily. If you found a USB drive on the ground,

okay, so I got in trouble for exactly this.

Printing in here is impossible. Like if you can't get on the right thing to be on the right Wi-Fi,

printers have gotten worse over time. They've become too complicated.
Of course.

And

it's just easier for me to dump whatever I'm trying to print on a flash drive and

then put that flash drive into the printer and print from that. But what I often do is leave my flash drive in the thing because it's like it's not natural for me to do.

And I'm very rarely printing anything.

So I just often forget about it.

I left it there.

Attached to my flash drive is my iLock, which is the thing that allows me to use Pro Tools.

It has all my Pro Tools like plug-in licenses and stuff on it. And it was stuck there and somebody found it and I got a long thing about cybersecurity and not leaving

flash drives just around and also not picking up flash drives. I get in trouble a lot over here.

What do they think is going to happen? Malware. Yeah.
Hacking. But like someone like

a business.

But like, okay, so synergy.

They're not, that's something they're not completely interested in.

But that for that scenario, there would have to be also a physical breach of security, right, to get access to that flash drive. Yeah, but you know, have you ever heard about this? Yeah.
Inside job.

Yeah, some people here will let in somebody who doesn't work.

Exactly. Yeah.
It's all

and what if I told you that these two incidents happened within days of each other?

I love the idea that Matt just gets busted at work all the time.

Just doing my job and being nice.

I think if I if I

found a USB drive on the street, I would try and get like a cheap burner laptop and open it.

Yeah. I'd want to know.
I'd have to know. That's why I play a rogue in Baldur's Gate 3.

Would it be worth taking to like a computer store and being like, fuck no, because if there's like pornography on there, then I'm immediately in jail. Yeah.
It all depends on the kind of pornography.

Yeah. If it's normal.
It's all pornography. If it's all above board, you know.
Well, I'm six years old. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. No, you've, I forgot that.
You have to. I can't be in possession.
No, yeah. People on Discord.
Is Heather really six? Yeah.

She can go to jail for that. That's not funny if she's six.
She shouldn't. Any child.
Don't. I like our listeners.
She shouldn't have a job if she's six. What is she doing? Why are you doing this?

They're good people. I know they're good.

It's not everybody on Discord. It's just that guy? It's just one.

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Before we get into

Are We Play, You Play,

we should perhaps more generally talk about other games that are on our radar. Team, what are you playing? What are you playing? Classic episode.
Oh, wow. It's a classic.
A get played classic.

You're calling your shot now. You're saying this is a classic episode.
Well, when I show up,

it's as if it is a classic episode from the vault. Yeah.

Call it an episode that you can't listen to anymore. Sure.
You have to jump through a few hoops. But Resident Evil Merchant, very excited to have you back as always.

Hello, I'm the Resident Evil 4 Merchant, the original, and I'm always asking people, what are you buying? But here on the show, I'm asking, What are you paying?

You know what? Thank you for table setting that. Keep it.
Yeah, just straightforward. Give a nice, clear explanation for as an on-ramp to someone if this is their initial episode.

I've never used a spoon.

Okay. Yeah, so that's more in line with how you normally are.
No, I don't. Well, you said table setting.
I just want to clarify

for the listener. So now what's wrong? Fork or hand.
Fork or hand. You know what?

This is going to be controversial. And this is going to be tough maybe to hear as somebody somebody with a food podcast, Nick.
Yeah. You could lose the fork.
The spoon.

The spoon is done. You could drink most things you need a spoon for.
You could.

It's just, I would take the opposite argument, which is that I think the fork is my default utensil, but it's also if I had to get rid of one of the three utensils, that's the one I'd get rid of.

Because I could do work with a spoon and I can do work with a knife. Have you ever used a boba straw for spoon use?

You could just like get one of those thick boys and drink up whatever it is you need to drink. So you've never used a spoon, but you're quite quite familiar with boba straws.

You contain multitudes. I mean, like, you don't, you don't need to have a spoon at a boba shop.
Fair point.

If I'm out in my board sorts and I'm getting a cold drink, then I got to get boba.

Boba. It's the drink.

I would go for a different drink. If you like need a cold drink.
Only because it's like, those are typically milk-based. I'm not doing, you know, I'm not trying to be like anchorman over here.

You could do like a, you know, you could do like a mango for like freeze or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't need to get a milk bubble.
I'm always getting that milk. Well, you mentioned board shorts.
Yeah.

You're just going and having fun in the sun all the time. Because I think if he was wearing a trench coat and being covered head to toe.
It's true. Uh-huh.
It's true. 24/7, 364.

I'm wearing trench scarf, hat, helmet,

what do you call it? Hoodie.

Over my head. Yeah.
Long pant, boot, shirt, gloves. Wonder the year to treat myself.
Put on the board shorts, head down to Venice Beach. Get a little sun.
Hit that

muscle area. Drink a bubble.

Leave when the cops arrive. Okay, you're not even doing any

no surfing.

No hanging 10. I can't surf.

My body's not allowed over water.

Can't imagine how impossibly pale you must be under there. Just no exposure to the sun all year round.
Also, the world of Resident Evil 4 is dark. It's true.

There is not a lot of natural sun when it comes to the water.

Yeah, they save all that for Resident Evil 5. You guys are being really generous with your time today.
Usually you want me in and out as fast as possible. I don't know why.
We really like you today.

It's good to see you. That's the thing.
You're oftentimes an annoyance, but when you haven't seen you in a while, it's like we missed you. But we should probably move along.

Matt!

Woody, brilliant. You're starting with me, and I have,

in the spirit of Shadow of the Colossus, I have a colossal update. I love it.
Wow.

I don't know what came over me. I don't know what happened.

Sitting at home, just thinking, just tinkering, wanting to tinker. Jonesing for a little bit of, you know, little

tinkering. Do you take up model kit making? No.
Did you take up tinker toying? No.

Did you build an RC car?

Nick, you simple bitch.

You know. And dream the fucking Pinewood Derby for the Boy Scouts? No, but that does sound...

I would fucking smoke all those kits. You think so? I think so.
I did okay in the Pinewood Derby. I think I could do it.

Is that the one where you make like a toboggan with wheels and you race it down a hill? No, you make like a little model car and you race it down a ramp. Oh, that's a good one.

That's the thing you ride in. Do people still do the thing where you build the thing that you ride in? They can build a thing you ride in.
That's a

nice thing. I do think if given an opportunity to challenge a bunch of children, I would win.
I think

I would lose. Depends on the context.
I could fight them all. I'd challenge children every week in Fortnite and lose constantly.

That's true. Yeah.
No, who am I to say that I'm better than a child? No, I didn't do any of those things. Something came over me.
I don't know what the hell happened. I wanted a PS Vita,

got online, ordered the PS Vita.

The next day, in my hands, I had a PS Vita. I love it.

And I have this motherfucker right here in my hand. It's a gorgeous piece of machinery.
It does look really nice. It's really so slick.
It's so thin. It's so slick.

The fucking Vita is such a good machine. So, this is the point I want to make about this thing.

I've only had this for a few days.

We didn't.

We didn't deserve this.

No, we didn't.

This is a perfect. This is a perfect device.
Form factor-wise, it's great. It's smaller than a Switch.
It's about, I mean, it's the size of a PSP. It's not much, it's a little bit bigger.

It's not much larger than an iPhone Pro Max. That's true.
The buttons... are not very tall.
Like, you could put this in your pocket and not feel too afraid of it being in your pocket. Because

even the analog sticks are,

you know, they stick out far enough where you feel like you're getting good use out of them, but they're not sticking out so far that you're worried about them being damaged in your pocket.

The screen is beautiful. I have the Slim model, which doesn't have the OLED screen.
It has the

L C D screen, I believe.

But it's still

a gorgeous screen. And

I can't believe. I just can't believe how these games look.
For it being a handheld system that is 10 years old.

It's like

some of these games look at the very least like, I mean, they do sort of look mid, um, mid-PS2, mid-PS3. It's like that perfect in-between right there.
They're not fully like so impressive.

They're like, I can't believe this thing, but it's like, it has a lot of power for it being such a small package.

And I've been playing, so I've been playing a couple things on it.

That's kind of the funny thing about this thing is that like

there are Vita exclusives, of course, but a lot of the stuff that came to the Vita are old games. Yeah.
Like, like PlayStation 2 games and the like.

And so I immediately started playing Sly Cooper just to see if I still love that and it's still a home run. That's a great one.
But I wanted to play a true Vita exclusive.

And one of the ones that I have here is

because that's the other thing.

The Vita store is still open, also, by the way. Hell yeah.
And it's only open on the Vita device or on if you have have a PS3. You can get those sexy games, huh?

They've got like sexy games because the Vita. Guys, I gotta go because the Vita's not like

the Switch

because, like, remember, somebody got me a game,

and I was like, I don't know what this game is, and I put it in, I was like, oh, this is like light porno. Yeah, well, I don't even know what to search for.
Like, what should I search for?

Light porno. Okay.

So, but, like, over time, as a PS PS Plus subscriber, I've acquired different Vita games over the years.

And some of them are cross-play anyway, like your Super Meat Boys or your

like the binding of Isaac.

Like all these are like, so like when we played Super Meat Boy on the show, I got a certain way into the game and I booted it up on my Vita and I was exactly where I was when I left off.

I was like, this is, this is incredible. This is great.

But I started playing Uncharted The Golden Abyss, which is a prequel to the very first Uncharted game. So I was like, oh, I've played some of these, but I haven't played enough to like, you know,

like be so invested in it. But I'll try this one out.
The mechanics in this game are fantastic.

You can play it normal,

which is like, you know, how you expect Nathan Drake to play, run around, shoot, climb. You can do everything how you would think to do it.
Or there are Vita-specific controls that you can do instead.

So instead of climbing,

you know, pressing up and X to grab the next ledge or whatever, you can look at the path that you're trying to climb and swipe on the screen.

And then Nathan Drake just goes and travels up.

But you can do that. You can do

you can tap a rope and jump to the rope

like on the screen. I was shocked that you can do anything with the screen at all.
I didn't realize it was a touch screen before I got it.

And there's these little back, there's a back sensor on the back that you can use in the game to like, he picks up like a skull or something.

And then he's like, you can move it around and like clean it off with the screen. We didn't.

We didn't deserve this.

I said this at the time of release. I was like, holy fucking shit, this system is perfect.
Yeah.

And at release, it was staggering. Yeah.
Because like

you couldn't, you couldn't play a mobile game of that fidelity at the time. And then the 3DS came out, I think, concurrently.
Yeah. It was the same year.

I'm bringing up the exact dates here to see. Yeah.

The DS launched in February of 2011 with in Japan and

3DS. I apologize.
And

it was December of 2011 when it launched in Japan. So it was roughly the same time.
So here's also a system that in theory,

if Sony had just gotten their shit a little bit more together, you could have used that as your main MP3 player. Yeah.
Your, like your main music device.

You can Bluetooth headphones to it, which is fucking crazy. I synced my AirPods to it.
Yeah.

And it had the backlog of PS1 games,

a huge

repository of PSP games. Yes.
And then the Vita games that were trickling out extremely slowly.

It is a device where I bet there was a Sony meeting where somebody came in and put it down in the middle of the table and everybody was like, we fucking did it.

Like it's, it's, I think it's concurrent with iPhone 4. Yes.
Like it is, it is so far, it is a device that in 2023 still holds up. And nobody fucking played it.

They didn't make any fucking games for it. Yeah.
And it is, it is the biggest lost opportunity because also remote play was crazy. Yes.

Like to be like, oh shit, I can play my fucking PS3 and PS4 games on this thing. Yeah.
You can remote play from

PS3 and your PS4.

Not five, but not five yet.

There are people working on it

in the modding community.

But

once they, if I could do that,

I'm good. I want to say, other than the Switch light,

the regular Switch doesn't feel like that feels like the final portable system. Yeah.
The PS Vita. Like the Switch, while portable, doesn't feel like...
It feels like I'm bringing...

Like, I don't think of the Steam Deck as a portable system. No, no, no.
Because I've taken a portable computer

or the Switch is like a portable Nintendo. Like, they're big, chunky boys.
Yes. Whereas the Vita is like, I literally could add it to my bag.
Yes.

And it doesn't have to be the primary thing in the bag. Right.

And God, I fucking love the Vita. It's really, it's really a really special system.
I'm really glad I got it, just as like a collector also. And

I was worried about the condition it was going to arrive in because it did say that it had maybe a couple scratches here and there, but it didn't, I kind of took a big risk because it didn't have a, it had a stock photo.

Yeah. And I was like, oh, what are we doing here? Is this going to be okay?

And it came and it's gorgeous. It looks brand new.
It looks pristine for me. So I was still in the video game industry in the run-up to the Vita and the 3DS release.
And I remember we went to E3,

me and some other developers

in advance of these. And we looked at both these systems.

And I remember just thinking, like, fucking. The Vita is going to eat the 3DS's lunch.
What are we doing here?

Like, one of these looks like it's from the future, and the other one looks like a child's toy. And then, of course, the 3DS just absolutely fucking destroyed it because it had,

there was already Nintendo, they just understand the, the, the handheld space so much better than everyone else.

Uh, and yeah, it's, they had, they had better, Tether's point, had better software and all, like, like the ultimately, I don't know. I like that 3DS.
And I like 3DS too. But this is, this.

is at least on par with it. I think it's like a better system just in general.
Like, it feels like the UI is nice. It feels so smooth and so

like, it just feels like nothing is happening, like, at all. Like, I don't even hear a fan on this thing, right? But, like, the thing that I think is interesting about it is it's like,

I don't know. It's, it, it does look like it's like, it's, it's from the future.
It should have done, it should have done way better. I don't know what, I don't know.

The, the window of which it was available is kind of an issue, too. Like,

or that Sony was supporting it rather, because it comes out in 2013.

Sony stops supporting it in 2015 and then completely discontinues it in 2019. Yeah, I think it's a little longer.
More time spent than that.

It was like 2011, 2012 when it was on the market, 2012 in North America. But yeah,

it wasn't very long. And

yeah, it's one of those things where I guess maybe it was just a few years too early because it couldn't quite do what the Switch could kind of do, which was have like basically console games on the go.

Like it wasn't quite at that level of power, right?

But also just looking at

the first gen 3DS was so like chunky and like oversized.

The form factor was like kind of like segmented.

And then looking at that, and that's like the 1000 model, right? Like that's like one of the first genes. No, this is the Slim.
And so this is okay, this is the Slim. So never mind.

But even looking at the 1000 model, like the original PS Vita, it still looks so, it looks like modern.

The 1000 is the one that I have with the OLED screen.

And it is, unlike the Slim, is a single flat plane of glass or plastic over the front of the machine, as opposed to that sort of divided like controller area, screen area.

And it felt slick as it's so fucking nice. And I remembered what I was trying to say a moment ago.
This thing, if Nintendo is the gimmick company and has the gimmick consoles, you know, 3D,

two screens,

you know, Joy-Cons.

This thing is all gimmicks. It's like, it has the sleek, like, modern aesthetic that is like what you want from a PlayStation, from a Sony product.

And it also has a touchscreen on the back for some reason. It has, what's that game? There's this, I think it's called Tearaway, where the touchscreen on the back.

Sees your fingers and puts fingers in the game where your fingers are

Which is disgusting and weird.

But it has a camera, too.

It has a front-facing and a back camera. It has gimmicks.

This thing should have ruled the world. We should have been on Tavita 2 by now.
What's its battery life?

Decent. I'm so glad you asked, Nick.
I probably haven't... I didn't turn this on yesterday.

Why don't I look? I didn't turn this on yesterday, but as you recall, when I turned it on to show you the home screen, I was paused in-game. So I don't know,

it has good game suspension. So you can jump back into a game.
You can go back to the home menu and go back to where you were in the game.

It was at 90% when I was playing it, and then I probably played it for, you know, about

like an hour or something.

It's at 77% right now. Okay, it's hanging in there.
Days later. Days later.
It's doing all right. While running a game in the background.
That's it for me.

I could go on and on about how much I love the Vita.

Here, I'll talk next, right? Yeah. Here we go.
That's the most anyone's talked about the Vita in 11 years. Yeah.

Absolutely. And here's the thing.
I could have kept going, but I'm done. That was great.
I'm playing Boulder's Gate 3. Wow.

I have not gotten very far into the first act, and I've already had a party member leave my party in disgust.

I look.

So here's the mistake that I've made in the game. Early on, because I'm playing a rogue criminal, I'm going going to be pickpocketing.
I'm going to be like opening chests that I shouldn't open.

That's how you got to play the game if you're playing a rogue criminal, right?

The problem is that when you, when you're level one and you're doing that, you get caught a lot. And then you have the option of either going to jail or like murdering the person who caught you.

And I'm a criminal, so I'm like, it's better to murder than to go to jail.

I have created a snowball effect from my very first encounters in this game, which are like propelling me forward to the bottom of a ravine like an avalanche.

I met a character. I don't know how, I don't want to spoil anything.
I met a character. The character's like, hey, can you help me get a chest from a mountain pass that is like it's

being raided by bugbears? And I was like, oh, yes. And I was like, oh, in my dialogue options, it was, I had found that place before I met this person.

The bug bears had murdered the people who were trying to protect the chest.

I

spent hours

finally killing these bug bears. Yeah.
Because I was not supposed to be in this area at the level I was, but I also have a habit of picking up any barrel I find full of gunpowder.

So I will like make traps. Yeah.

Kill all the bug bears. Everybody, you know, you get that nice level up sound, hop across a ravine.
There's a chest there. I open the chest, take everything out.
And I'm like, yahoo, this was fun.

What a cool little encounter. I have no idea what this was.
Many, many, many, many hours later, meet the person who's like, hey, do you think you can help me? You got to get,

you

got to get this chest that we're trying to escort across this Bugbear Ridge. And I was like, oh, I've already done that.
Like as a dialogue watchant.

And she's like, please tell me you didn't open the chest. And I was like, how the fuck would I know not to open the chest? Yeah, so I tried to hand her this stuff from the chest.

I was like, I'll be a good criminal here. I'll be like, yeah, all right, I don't even know what I'm supposed to do with this shit.

Tried to hand it to her, and she was like, What have you done? You've killed us all, and everybody in this area attacked me. And I had never been there and never met any of these people.

So

this

cascade of violence that follows my characters

has before I've gotten to the goblin camp so real early in the game yes

because also I play by I want to see everything in the map so like I'll go to every area in a in a quadrant of the map before moving forward yeah before I've gotten to the goblin camp a character has already left my party in disgust and said I cannot follow you where you are going I'm just glad that there's a way that Heather can play

the most Heather way she can. That's amazing.
Like,

haven't even, I know of the Bugbear encounter because I've seen like stuff about it online, but I didn't even do that. And like, there's like, I think about the map in this game and how

it's so big, there's like just stuff that I'll just never see. Like, well, I guess I could go there.
You gotta, you gotta clear out any dark area on your map. That's what you have to do.
Yeah.

If you're playing like Heather, and anything you encounter, do your best to engage it as a role player.

And if it falls apart and they attack you, do do not exit combat yeah and you must murder the people that you are talking to that is so it's perfect i i have killed a lot the so the thing that changed my why it was the guy who left why it was like i you can't i cannot do this anymore yeah was because i murdered a lot of people in the druid village Not because I was trying to hurt anybody, but because they have chests lying around.

You murdered people not because you were trying to hurt anybody.

No, like, here's the thing. Like, I'll go into hide mode.
Yeah. And you see everybody, everybody's like, um,

like the red area where it's like, oh, don't walk here because it's dangerous.

And there's like a dude hurting a little girl, like, or, or like yelling at a little girl. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And he's like, she stole something from me or something, right? I know. I'm like,

I'm not a, I'm not a criminal criminal. I'm a criminal with a heart of gold.
So I, yeah, that little girl's like, oh, he's got my thing. Or I don't remember what the fucking story is.

And I was like, oh, I can get this back. I'll sneak up and I will pickpocket this dude.
I pickpocket the guy, fail the check. He stands up and is like, what are you doing? And he attacks me.

So I murder him and his friend. But then other people.

in the druid village see that and they come to kill me. So I murder those people.
And that it becomes like this concussive explosion of violence. Yeah.

And now I've killed, I mean, like most of the druid village just because everybody keeps coming to combat me. And all I was trying to do was get this like little girl's thing back for her.

There's like... Maybe that's what that pickpocket was trying to do to you and birds.
You ever think about that?

I didn't murder anybody. Well,

sounds like you might have. It's just interesting, too, that there's just like

there's just stuff in the the game i just know that i'm not doing i see that i could hide if i wanted to i've never hid i've not done

i've not done any of the stealth like stuff in this game at all i'm just not playing that way i only do stealth for the initial encounter because like

the

I'm not charging in and immediately like opening fire on dudes.

I will sneak in for that hidden bonus attack, like my stealth attack, my sneak attack or whatever. like that initial hit that initial strike does so much damage

and then after that it's like full war party but yeah I saw a funny tick tock of somebody doing an encounter somewhere and I'm I'm not really sure

where

where it's taking place, but they like you have

collected a bunch of barrels over time and just set up a bunch of barrels around the like boss in this thing.

And it's not like one of those encounters where I guess, like, you know, you walk in and it's like a cutscene.

They've like talked to this person and like sort of, you know, been on their good side or whatever.

Put a bunch of barrels around the boss and everywhere in this room and threw one fire arrow at one of the barrels and just set the entire room on fire

and killed everybody instantly. It was so, I'm just like, you can do anything you want in this game.
And I think when we get to the end of this year

and

you know, the game of the year conversation happens, there's just no way I can say anything else. There's just not, there's just no way.
Other

Baldur's Gate? No. You got some time.

I don't think so. Wow.

Matt's locking it in.

What am I going to say? Spider-Man 2, 2,

of course, that's going to be great. Say that.

Like, Tears of the Kingdom, yes, but I think now at this point, no, I've definitely played Tears of the Kingdom more, but I've thought about Baldur's Gate a lot more.

It's a really impressive game. I mean, it's just like the

scope of it

and just the amount of variations that it accounts for. It's really, really impressive when you compare that to other games that are a lot more limited in scope.

Yeah, genital one, genital two, genital one, genital two.

Nick, oh, and by the, also, I'm back on my shit with Fortnite. Fucking love that game.
Wow. Let's fucking go.

I've squatted back up with some listeners. I've squatted back up with my

mainline squad.

God, I fucking love Fortnite. I love it.
That's it, but I'm not going to talk about that anymore. It's almost been a year of Fortniting for me.
I guess it's true, Hawes. Yeah, because of October.

That's right.

Nick, what are you playing?

I'll be brief. Most of my gaming time was doing a full playthrough of this month's We Play, You Play, which we're going to talk about in a second.

But I did spend a little bit more time with Sea of Stars, which I'm really enjoying.

To complete opposite sort of RPG of Baldur's Gate 3. It is really limited in scope, pretty linear.

But it's delightful.

Great music thing.

I'm trying to remember what details I have and haven't mentioned.

I don't think I've talked about the character portraits, which are really great and have a bunch of different emotes that are used judiciously.

But it is the sort of thing of like, especially because Baldur's Gate 3 is so zeitgeisty and the two of you talking about it, both on and off pod, and other friends talking about it.

I do kind of feel like I'm missing out on some Baldur's Gate 3 right now because I've been away from it for a bit. So I don't know.
I might pause

the old voyage through the sea of stars, although I am going to finish this game because I'm really enjoying it and resume some BG3 action because I don't want to be too left in the dust here.

I also want to shout out, I haven't played this yet, but I am intending to play this. But

I meant to mention that there's more DLC for the Case of the Golden idol,

the great puzzle game that came out last year. It's one of my favorite games of last year, and I like the previous DLC.

And there's a new one, the Lemurian Vampire, that supposedly ties a lot of this lore together. So I'm going to be looking for that.

But yeah, that's pretty much been what's on my gaming docket is this month's game, Sea of Stars. And yeah.

How many hours do you think you are into Sea of Stars?

About 15.

So it's like a 30-hour game. Yeah, I would say stick with that until you're done with with it, and then

but here's what's going to happen: I'm going to get to the finish line of this thing, and then we're going to have next month's game to play for a we play, you play. I'm just going to be playing that.

Yeah, and then all of a sudden, it's going to be fucking the end of the year, and I'm still going to have Baldur's Gate 3 just like sitting in my queue.

Yeah, but at a certain point, I got to abandon something.

You know,

when you choose to do something, you're choosing not to do something else. Why don't you abandon hope?

That happened a long time ago.

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So let's talk about

our WePlay U-Play, Shadow of the Colossus, first released in 2005 for the PlayStation 2. Released only about a year before the PlayStation 3 launched.

So this is one of those tail end of the generation. So they're really, really pushing the hardware to try to get

last bit of gas out of it. Developed by Japan Studio and Team Eco.
Team Eco previously made

the titular Eco

that was their earlier game. Released in Japan as Wanda Tokiyozo, Wander in the Colossus, Wander the player character's name, directed by

Fumito Ueda, and the remaster that we all played was by Blue Point Studios, who also did the God of War Collection, Uncharted Collection, Demon Souls,

a good sort of remaster house. I would like to say a couple of things about

Fumedo Ueda. Yeah.

From Wikipedia, Ueda played a lot of Sega Mega Drive games, which influenced his work. He was a fan of Flashback and Another World.

Now, I've talked about Out of This World/slash Another World on this podcast before. It is one of my most influential video games of all time.
Not that I'm a fucking designer or a developer.

But Flashback and Another World are really, really well

constructed environments. They are games that achieve their successes through how atmospheric their storytelling is.

And I think that the line from those games to Eco and Shadow of the Colossus and eventually The Last Guardian is so direct because

Shadow of the Colossus tells a story in its environment as much as like it's not a story with a fucking ton of cutscenes.

Like when you see stuff in this environment, you're like, oh, man, what happened here? Like, what is this world? Where did it come from? What are these ruins? Why are these colossi here?

And I think that when I heard or read that he was so inspired by Out of This World, I was like, oh, that totally tracks. Because Out of This World, you show up in a place that you've never been.

There's no explanation for the place. And you're like, I fucking, I don't have any idea what this building is, but I guess I have to go inside of it is very much the eco Shadow of the Colossus ethos.

Yeah. The other aspect of that, a smaller thing, but I think a thing that that's that's big in both of these games

is

the animation, which is really meticulous and articulated and, you know, kind of

a little bit less gamey, a little bit more, you know,

trying to proximate realistic movement.

And that's the thing I think of from Out of This World, and I think of from certainly from Eco and from this game, like, especially compared to the other games of this era, it was one that was really trying to make it feel like

a character's movement was really flowing like real human movement.

And I think this is, and Prince of Persia, like the, I'm not talking about, I'm talking the old school, like Jordan Mechner, like Prince of Persia, like 2D games, like those were ones that were the original that were like, oh, this actually kind of looks like how, you know, this actually tries to recapture locomotion.

This isn't just like a gamey version of it.

And again, I also want to say I did drop it into the PS2 for a little comparison.

And I prefer the PS2 version

because

the sort of

blurriness of the graphics implies more. Like it asks you to be like, oh, what am I looking at? In a way that the remaster doesn't require you to imagine.

It's like when you put a bunch of filters on pixel art. Yeah.

You smooth out all the rough edges and it's like, well, now all of a sudden this looks like something else. Yeah.
And so like with

the frame rate was

kind of incredibly bad. It's atrocious.
Kind of, kind of amazing. Yeah.

Like you felt like.

You felt like your PlayStation was also fighting the Colossus at the same time.

But

I really, really preferred, like, even the bird in that opening cut, like

the cinematic where you're like riding up with your wife or your dead girlfriend or whatever into the past to start the game. Like the bird in the PS, the remaster is like dynamic and beautiful.

And in the original, I was like, this suggests a bird. Yeah, yeah.
It's like

the idea of a bird.

Two things about the original design that I found fascinating. I didn't know

and looking into this is that, first off, this was originally developed as an online game. This was supposed to be more of an MMO approach, which is weird to think about.

But the other thing is that the original design doc called for 48 Colossians. 48.
48. That's too many.
48 Colossi.

I would have been pretty fatigued by the time I got to Colossi 46.

Last Guardian, which was the next game in this sequence,

was delayed so many times. It comes out like 11 years later.

It would show up in like E3 a couple years after this and then would disappear for years at a time. And all of us, like Eco Shadow of the Colossus fans, were like, when is this game going to come?

Yes.

But the length of that development cycle that was evident to everybody who was paying attention, I think is hidden in the Shadow of the Colossus development cycle because it goes from being Nico, which is the online multiplayer version of the game, to a version of the game that is 48 Colossi.

There are assets in the PS2 version, which if you no clip through the through the environment, there are entire areas that are unexplored in the main game, that were like either

Coliseums for other Colossi encounters. There's like

like, there's dead, I don't know how, dead code of other Colossi. It is a game that's a random chilies.

Yeah, there's a chilies. You have to order in the chilies.
And then you have to wait for the food to come to you. They bring you the food.
Right.

That's the big, you can't just go get it from the kitchen because that's not how a chain restaurant. No, you got to sit down.
You got to sit there. You got to eat your chips and salsa.

And here's the thing. You go and you love it.
You're having a great time. You love it.

You love it. It's like, I should never leave here, but I want to revive my dead wife.

Before we let Matt talk about Shadow of the Colossus, because he was a newbie. Yes.

So he had not played this before, I want to say a couple more things, and then I feel like we should give the floor to Matt. I also want to say something.
But yes, we should give the floor to Matt.

You guys say as many things as you want. Okay, we are going to give the floor to Matt, though.
Matt's going to get the floor.

All right, let me talk Vita.

Well, now he has something to say about the Vita?

So

I haven't experienced a game

where

there was a sense. So there was a sense sense of discovery in Shadow of the Colossus because there's so much shit in this game that you can do that is not necessary to play the game.

Like killing and eating the lizards was just like somebody tells you about that. Yeah.
And you're like, wait, you can what?

Like you shoot an arrow into the fucking lizards and then you eat the tails and then you get more stamina. Yeah, same deal with the fruit.
It's like a thing you just sort of like, wait, huh? Okay.

Or hopping on to the birds and flying around on a fucking bird. Matt looks staggered.
That's what this game,

what's

almost impenetrable about Shadow of the Colossus is, they tell you what, you got to get to hold up your sword, run towards the thing, figure out the colossus.

But the world is rich and alive, and there's all sorts of weird shit you can do in it, like tricks on your horse.

Oh, oh, Matt.

You can do tricks on your horse. You can do all sorts of stuff, but also this stuff is like, it's unnecessary for progression as you know, as you experience.

like a lot of it's just like extra stuff that's in the game that just sort of adds to the sense of discovery and adds to kind of the sense of like oh this world is bigger than i realize

it reminds me of uh a kojima game where like you're like wait you can you can do what like so many kojima things are like yeah almost like the delight of gaming encoded into a game. Yeah.

And that's kind of what Shadow of the Colossus feels like at times, where it's like, did you know you could jump up and like grab a bird and fly around on the bird?

So when I saw these birds, the only thing I tried to do was shoot them with my arrows. I was like, I should try to shoot them, but I just could never, I could never get them.

It's a bummer if you hit one. Is it really? Yeah, it just dies.

Okay, so my eco fandom is what led me to this game, and I was pretty hyped for this game back in the PS2 era.

And I do feel like, you know, I was also super hyped for The Last Guardian because Last Guardian looked like it was going to merge what's cool about Shadow of the Colossus, the idea of like a giant creature, and then also the thing that was novel about Eco, which was just the idea of like you had this companion, this NBC companion, who you were with the whole game.

And it was kind of like a game-length escort mission.

But, you know, I actually never ended up playing it because it was so delayed. By the time it came out, people were like, eh, it's like a seven.
I'm not sure. I'm not sure if you actually played it.

I did play it, but gave up.

Here's why. She's kind of a bummer.

I like Eco,

but Eco's a little too puzzly for me. It's very puzzly.

Which is my shit. I get it.
And

Last Guardian, similarly, a little too puzzly for me. You might be thinking, Heather, there are puzzles in Shadow of the Colossus.
What the fuck? These are fucking puzzle combat fights.

But they're puzzles you're killing.

And so my brain is tricked into,

I just have to figure out how to kill this thing. Right.
which involves like climbing onto a ledge or flipping over a thing or like getting it to trip.

Like, but that feels like combat to me instead of, I don't know, I got to slide a box over to this thing to activate a pulley. Like that, that is exhausting.

But Shadow of the Colossus, I felt like, oh, it's a boss fight. I just have to memorize the boss and what the boss is doing in order to beat it.
Yeah. Instead of being like, how do I, what do I got to

move, I got to move a rock over to that symbol.

Right. It's a little bit more direct in terms of I'm just like, how do I summit this thing and where do I put my blade? Yes.
You know, yeah, it's, it's just, it's straightforward.

It's glowing on its belly and that's how do I get up?

Yeah, yeah. There's no fur there.
And then there are like environmental

aspects too that you're sort of like, okay, like there's these

geysers.

What are the, how do I, is this part of it? What do I do with these things? And then you do realize you do need to, you know, use the environment to help you in certain cases.

Yeah, or just how do I get up, how do I get him to, to, you know, how do I trigger a specific

action from this Colossus so that I can, you know,

so that he can be vulnerable. Yeah, it is very puzzly.
And

but it's you're killing the puzzle.

Yes.

Here's what I'll say. Uh-oh, he's going to say it.
No,

I love this game. I think it's incredible.

I was definitely, at the time it came out, a little bit like I was such a frame rate guy, and I still am a frame rate guy that I feel like just like its performance, I felt like was a little bit of a hindrance to me

being as absolutely blown away by it. But I did like the story is unbelievable.
The scope is incredible. The ambition is admirable.
And like coming off of eco, I was like, oh, wow, this is cool.

This is more of what I like about this developer. This is more of this sort of weird ethereal world.
And, you know, the right questions remain unanswered.

And this is also like really trying to say something about like what it is to be alive through an interactive medium. So

I absolutely appreciate all that. And coming back to it now and playing the remaster.

Before you dig on the game, I just want to say I think we need to get a t-shirt that's that just says i'm a framerate guy

yeah exactly pretty good

exists johnny frame rate over here

i'm not i'm not i'm not gonna dig on the game yet but i'm gonna i am gonna say something in a in a bit but i i do want to say uh i i i will get into details in a second

I was hoping that it had aged a little bit better gameplay-wise. I'll just say that very, very gently and then I'll go into details.

But I want Matt to have a second to talk about this game coming into this fresh. So

I remember when this game came out. I remember 2005 very well.
I think of 2005, for me, one of the great years of my life. First birthday.
My very first birthday.

The first time I tried cake.

My family blew out the candles. It scared me.

George Bush inaugurated for a second term. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, maybe

on the whole, not a great year or time to be alive.

Time has only gotten worse. But I remember being at home, and this was a time in my life when I was getting electronic gaming monthlies

every month and I was watching a lot of G4.

And I remember, I think it was on X-Play, on the G4 show X-Play, Adam Sessler talking about this game. And I remember just being like, I have to play this game.
This looks fucking awesome.

This looks great. And I just never did.
I just never did it. Never got it.

You know, a Tony Hawk game probably came out that year. Kingdom Hearts 2 came out this year.
Yeah.

This game, by the way, was a hit. It sold really, which is like Eco was such like kind of like an art house, like critics sort of like, oh, have you played Eco?

You know, it's this game with weird box art, but it's actually like really good. But this game was like a, like a big old hit, especially in Japan.
Sold a lot of units.

So I remember being interested in checking it out, hearing how good it was.

Because I guess at the, this was also at a time in my life where I didn't know that like

where I was learning that games could be good or bad. Sort of like when I was a kid, I was like playing just any game, you know, the Emperor's New Groove,

like,

you know, movie adaptation video game or whatever, and just being like, I love this. This is great.
You can be Cusco in the game.

Bunch of stuff I worked on.

I love this. Honestly, that was my bread and butter for sure.
Like, any type and it's a type of game that I honestly do kind of miss.

I do. If there was a movie tie-in game for new movies, I'd be down.
I think it's good. I think it's a good idea.
I think all the Lego blank games are that. Yes.

Like, any Lego variant is going to be fine. Yeah.
Oh, yeah, for sure. Some are pretty good.
Yeah. I mean, you get to be Legos.
And they're funny. It's like, it's good.
Lego's great. Lego's great.

Love a Lego. We love a Lego.
I'm pro-Lego. Yeah.
I'm extremely pro-Lego. I've got a Lego store.
I love the Lego stores.

I have to build. I have the Titanic.
That's cool. I got to build it.
They're weirdly are not good avatar Legos, which is really a bummer.

Because there's so many cool vehicles and shit there could be, but there really isn't anything on the level of like all the Star Wars or Marvel Legos.

I gotta just say this while we're on this. Yeah.

I saw TikTok the other day. Someone, some guy with the fucking one of those like pressing machines.

I don't know what they're called, but it's like a, you know, it's like a hydraulic press of some kind.

He built like a square of Lego, and he had been doing this to see

what the limit would be if the thing would crush the

structure of the Legos and he built one and he finally Basically like broke the machine like it wouldn't press

for I don't know what the stats were but he it wouldn't press his Legos and I was like Legos are the greatest invention we have. That's incredible.
They're the best. They're they're they're so great.

Legos incredible.

I love it, but anyway love Lego So this is at a time where I was like learning that games could be good or bad and then that also that games could be more interesting than just

you know grinding on a rail or you know

showing friends the light inside of you or whatever. Yeah.

And

so I wanted to play this bitch, never did.

You know, I got a PS3. I think it's available on there too.
Never played it there. Never played it on the PlayStation 4.
So by the time. I think Blue Point did the PS3 remaster.

Yeah, they did both remasters. So by the time we cut to now,

I had, and, you know, it's come up on the show a little bit.

Like, you guys have talked, because you both have played it so it's like been mentioned like things that you like about it but

going into this i basically knew almost nothing about it somehow i didn't know i knew that there are colossus colossi

and i knew that the main thing that you do in this game is climb them and and kill them

but everything else was a brand new

experience for me

The um

there's no UI. Yeah.
There's no just the minimalist nature of the game was a very fun surprise to me and something that I actually really quite enjoyed.

No like mobs, no like goblins or bats in the environment. It's just open space and wilderness.
Just open space.

No mini map, no like,

no waypoints, no anything like that.

You know, you have a health bar that pops up when it, you know, you get hit or something, but it goes away very quickly.

And it's also like regenerating as well.

Or I was playing, I was playing on easy because I was just scared that I wasn't going to be able to finish it. And then I did sort of think that I could have played

a little bit harder.

Because once you figure it out, you can just do it.

That was my experience with all of these Colossus and these Colossians and just looking at them, being like, what's happening? How am I failing? Why am I failing? And then

going from there and learning what to do. This game does a great job

of

letting you figure out how to play, which I think is like is unbelievable. And not every game does that well.

Even like, you know, a lot of games have tutorial levels and stuff like that. This game sort of just throws you right into it.

The tutorial is climbing up a mountain, sort of, right, to get to the first Colossus. You sort of learn everything you need to learn

getting to that one.

And

it doesn't really tell you much. It gives you like obtuse clues, kind of, as to what to do if you're not really sure what you should be doing.

And they repeat those obtuse clues a lot if you really don't know what you're supposed to do. Yeah, Dorman, who I think is the name of the

kind of all-knowing entity who

will kind of both tell you what you're supposed to do and then also like, yeah, chime in with clues

depending on where you are fighting of an individual Colossus. And so I should say too, I obviously played the remaster.
I don't have it on PlayStation 2.

And I was just,

I don't know.

Like, I was just blown away by it. I was really just like taken aback.
And

it's just so interesting. Like, the story of the game is interesting.
The presentation is interesting. It's all very good and very, like,

one of a kind. I've never played a game like this before.

I,

you know, the ending, which we'll get to later, fucking rocked my, you know, rocked, it rocked my shit.

I was just like, this is unbelievable that this is like the resolution of this game here, what, what, what has happened.

But

I could have, I could have fucking played 48 of these guys. I didn't want to stop.

I mean, I mean, you know, once you get to the end, you do want to stop.

But like the mode of doing it,

this is all the game is right

you wander into wherever you're supposed to go

Platform to get there do whatever you got to do

Take down a Colossus it resets you go and do the next thing and each one is like a different sort of like way to take it down, which is fun.

I could have

Give me Shadow of the Colossus 99 and I'll just like do this on a loop forever. I had so much fun doing it.

You can I mean you can go back and do like the boss attack, like time attack modes, which if you think about for too long is sad

and bad, but you're allowed to do it.

Can I say one thing real quick, just because you talked about you could have fought like 48 of these? I actually think this game is the correct length.

I think this is a thing that the game does really well. And I know it was maybe an accident of the design process, but this game.

One of the biggest endorsements I can give of this game is like there are countless games I've spent 60 to 100 hours in that for me are like, oh yeah, I played that.

And this game is like six hours long, and I think it sticks with you forever. Absolutely.
It just makes such an impact. Well, I also think that

like we've become so accustomed to these like solemn, sad,

like

The Last of Us and God of War,

you know, the new one, where it's like, oh, this, this is sad in some way. And The Last of Us is sad, you know? Just no way for these people to revive their dead loved ones.
Right.

Like, like, I would say that when this game came out,

sad gaming wasn't really

like, uh,

like, it wasn't zeitgeisty.

No, and there were also, you know, this was well before any sort of indie scene was kind of like a big, like, oh, people are trying all these artsy, sort of the gone home sort of games, you know.

So there's got to move. For a major Sony release to come out, and you beat that first

Colossus, and

there's a feeling of like, oh, no.

Like it's not, there is no triumph after you fell the first Colossus.

It drops. It looks upset,

you know, and also looks upset when you're doing it. Yes.
It isn't attacking anything. There are birds flying around it.
It feels like

a piece of nature. And you walk in.
Slay the fucking thing. It drops.
And then you are penetrated by tendrils of smoke

as the music goes minor key and you're like, whoa, no, oh no.

Like there's the feeling was unusual and almost literate. Like it felt like, oh, it's, it's a game doing a new thing.
Yeah. And I'm not saying that there weren't console games that were set, were sad.

It wasn't just like,

I would say that this puts its sad foot

forward throughout the game. And And that was unusual at a time when

the other big hits on the PlayStation 2 are like, you know, fucking Grand Theft Auto. Yes.
Yeah. Certainly among console games, this was a

huge novelty. It's like the instant, the instant that Mitchell and Webb look, you know, thing of are we the baddies? Like you're feeling it immediately.

And I think throughout this game of like, it's like there's some real moral ambiguity about what you're doing and to what end.

And, you know, there's certainly like RPGs in this era where you can role play as like bad or whatever, but that's sort of a different sort of thing

versus like the actual quest you are on. The main narrative thrust is that the player character is maybe doing something you shouldn't be doing and you're facilitating that or you're acting that out.

And it's sort of, you know, you're saying this, and I'm thinking about this is my first time playing it.

That didn't really set into me until like,

you know, a few in, where then I'm like, they're not, like,

actively like attacking you.

Like, yeah, it had occurred to me halfway through because I'm like, I'm staying, you know, there's some where you have to aggravate them to be able to get them to do something.

They're just minding their own business until you shoot an arrow at them. Yeah.
And they're like, hey, stop fucking shooting arrows at me. And then they put their arm down or something.

You're like, oh, great. Now I can climb on their hairy arm.

But then it was in one of those moments where I was like, oh,

if I just kind of stand here and leave them alone, they sort of don't do anything. Yeah.
This is really sad. Yeah.
Yeah.

But I mean,

all the same, I could have done 100 of these fuckers. They are,

it is fun. There's also a contrast.
I want to say, because I did bring up the music just now,

the music that plays after you fell a Colossus is like...

choral orchestral, like sad sound. But there is a music cue in this game when you get the upper hand on a Colossus, which is among my favorite tracks in gaming.

And I think I even brought it up in our boss fight episode, like boss music episode, because it has stuck with me for the like since the game's release.

When I think about getting the upper hand on something, often the Shadow of a Colossus theme will appear in my head. Yes.
Like, I'll be like, oh, I got this.

I want to play just that,

just that, that cue,

which is also, it's an invisible transition. It's not like you are, you're playing in silence and then this music starts.
It is

the music that blends into

the standard music that's playing while you're fighting a Colossus. And that, that theme changes for each one.

And then this triumphant music, I believe, remains the same every time you get the upper hand. Yeah, there's some some dynamic scoring that comes in.
It is like, and it is

like the kind of thing where it's like, the way I've always interpreted it is like, oh, this is like kind of this character's internal feeling. Yeah.

Because it certainly contrasts versus like what you're seeing, you know?

But yeah, it's very majestic.

As you're like riding on the back of a horse. Yeah.
Or no, like you're riding on the back of like a fuzzy beast that is like

really like sad looking and like kind of trying to brush you off or shake you off. And you're climbing up his back and you pull up your sword.

And also the control scheme is really interesting because you aren't.

X doesn't stab. It's two button presses.
It's prepare sword and then plunge sword. It's like a charge and then

so it feels also like

worse.

Right.

You're on the back of the last

white rhino and you're plunging a broad sword into its spine. It's like you're doing something wrong.
But it's also like

the fact that it is two button presses is interesting

from

a gameplay standpoint because there's room for error.

There's room for the Colossus to try to shake you off, and then you miss your opportunity to attack in that specific spot, which I think is really great.

You have some really tight windows for some of this stuff, but to me, that's one of the frustrations of this game. Oh, no.
And let me say this. Again,

this is a masterpiece from an artistic standpoint. And it's so ambitious.
It's so incredible what they pulled off.

I think every gamer who cares about games should play this game, should experience it. Thank you.
You've listened to Get Play.

The top level design is phenomenal. It is visionary.
It is innovative. The issue is the implementation feels a bit crude.

And I think a lot of that is the byproduct of like, this was uncharted territory and this was tech that was just not really ready.

Like all the stuff they were doing, like even what you're talking about, like, okay, I'm on the back of a moving. creature.
You know, a lot of uh

a lot of the they have all this dynamic collision that's happening. They have all these, you know, the these physics-based surfaces that you're on, which wasn't how a lot of these games were working.

There was like static environments, even if you were like standing on an elevator. They might have been like, it's not necessarily like a physics object that's moving up and down.

They might have faked the collision. You know, it might have all been scripted where it's just like

moving in line with the up the y-axis and in line with the animation. So like they were trying some real things that

were innovative for the time. And again, was kind of uncharted techno territory tech-wise.

But, like, in terms of actually playing it now, and especially with the remaster, Heather, to your point, that looks like a modern game, it decidedly does not feel like a modern game.

It feels very crude and cumbersome. The camera, I would say, largely sucks, even with the button that you can use to focus on the Colossus.

And unfortunately, the camera is in your way a lot of the time, and that can be very frustrating.

The animation is really great, but as a result, the control feels a little stiff and unresponsive because there's so many frames

to, again, sort of render the stuff semi-realistically.

Your jump is super floaty.

And, you know, like you get knocked down. It's like a super long loop, which you can get stun locked in some of these fights.

A lot of this shit is just kind of annoying. And again, like, I don't want this to, I like this game and I'm rooting for this game.
I want people to play this game.

But if you haven't experienced it, I think you should know what you're in for. And I think you should recognize that it's going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass to play through.

I think one of the ways that modern gaming disservices us is that you can't play these games, these retro games in context. I think that remember that Pong

or Atari, we played in Atari. Atari 50 collection.
Yeah, that

game did such an excellent job of being like, here's the game that came out before and after this game that you're playing.

You should play all three of them so that you can see what this game specifically is doing differently and why it was remarkable.

And like, here's a Wikipedia entry about the game so that you can like really understand

like why this is a historical document.

And I think that Shadow of the Colossus, if you pull out a PS2 and hook it up and play the games that came out that month and then play Shadow of the Colossus, you're like, holy shit.

Like,

just the idea that you could get onto a thing that was big and moving, like just that you could do it

was fucking crazy. It's but

there, I mean, absolutely, absolutely insane. And as it being my first experience,

I, there were a couple of times while playing this where I wanted to snap my controller in half. Of course.
Yes.

Like, where I was like, not even just like, because I was losing, but because, you know, I couldn't maneuver the camera the way I wanted to, or I got knocked off the Colossus and the loop took me so fucking long to get up there to begin with.

I got to have

the idea of having to do that again or repeat the same things. There's that one

where he's the Colossus is like in

it's one of the like the amphitheater type. Yeah, it's like there's two sides and you have to get him to smash part of the ground to make a ramp so you can jump and then get up and get to this bridge.

Having to do that three or four times is a nightmare. I will say, well, we're not in spoiler country yet, but in particular, the final boss should be an absolute triumph.

Like, it is the sort of thing, like, this should fucking rock. And unfortunately, like, it gets in its way in terms of actually playing it.

I'll spare the details for now. Well, yeah.

And yeah, that does kind of happen throughout, and it's kind of a bummer.

I'm looking at, I'm looking at 2005 in games, just to just to done some of these real quick, you know, Resident Evil 4, Ninja Gaiden Black, God of Horror, Metal Gear Solid 3 Subsistence, Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas.

I don't know. I think all these games probably still play a little bit better.
I mean, we played the Resident Evil 4 Remaster, obviously, so that's a different thing, but I feel like they,

again,

yeah, this game is a product of its time, but also it's a product of just trying to do something so ambitious and so like beyond the

technical capabilities of its hardware.

I'm sure God of War plays better than this. Yes.
Oh, yeah. I played it.
I played it last year.

It plays fucking great.

You can play it on your Vita now. Yeah, I could if I wanted to.
I have it right there. But

in the same breath,

I don't ever think about God of War.

That's no, that's my whole thing is like, yeah, like, like, I'm, I'm saying all this, and it's, and I don't want to sound like I'm being negative about a game that's so fucking incredible.

So like, I'm saying this because I feel like it's a necessary disclaimer, but I don't think it detracts. And Matt, you can certainly speak to that.

I don't think it detracts from like the overall experience of this game. You know, I think it's just like a thing to take into account and to acknowledge.

I also want to say the one thing in the remaster I really loved was how much furrier they looked. They're so

furry. They're like, They're kind of cute.
It's even sadder that you're killing them.

It's awful, but I was really surprised. I'm stabbing Snuffle up, I guess.

I was really surprised, you know, even though it was a PS4 remaster, how nice it looked. I was like, wow, this is like, they really did such a nice job with this.
And, you know, despite the,

you know, issues with the camera

that I had,

and, you know,

everybody says that. It's not like I'm discovering that or whatever, but there were a couple issues that I had with it.

I don't know.

I think this is one of the best games I've ever played. Like, it's like, it's still like, I, I can't, I can't believe it exists.
I can't believe

the swing that it takes with it. And I also just can't believe, like, the, um,

I can't believe none of it was spoiled for me. Like, that's something that is really kind of staggering for me.
And maybe if details about it have been spoken about on the show, I just like forgot.

No, I don't think we've, I think that.

Most of the time when you talk about Shadow of the Colossus, you want to protect the person who hasn't played it. Yeah, I think, I think, then you guys, you guys did me a solid turn.

It's like godfather spoilers. It's like, it's like, hey, this is a thing you're going to have to get around to at some point.

And if you, the listener, haven't gotten around to it, like, it's like a black and white movie is paced different. It's edited different.

It's a little bit more challenging to pay attention to because we are used to consuming content in three-minute chunks, but ultimately, the Maltese Falcon is rewarding.

And in the same way, like all the stuff that you're expressing about Shadow of the Colossus, Nick, is completely valid.

But like the ways in which we have adapted the language of film in order to be a more streamlined process

for watching something,

these

ambiguities and the rough edges on the control, I think, are what are

they're not too big a barrier of entry. Like it's a fucking great game.
Yeah,

it's always the tricky thing because it's interactive, right? Like in talking about the Atari 50 collection, I feel like some of those games were just like basically unplayable.

That's not the case with this one, but it's like, you know, you could watch a super old movie.

You could watch a fucking silent film from the 20s and or like something from like the late 90s or something.

You watch something like that. Like you're watching like the first Austin Powers movie.
Yeah. Super old movie.
But there isn't like a thing of just like, oh, my remote works differently.

You know what I mean? Like there's not like a thing like where my, I have to be worried about this sort of interface aspect. And I know that's not even

a great direct comparison. Well, if you, if you, if I can, uh, think of it more like

there are barriers of watching film when it's a movie that you can't get that's out of print, that's only on VHS.

So you have to dig out a VHS player and a CRT in order to watch a video that you can't stream.

And in the same way, I think that this is like an older game where it's like, okay, you can't just jump onto the thing and climb up it. You have to hold a button while jumping up the thing.

And like, it's, it's, it's a different interactive language, but the story and the experience of the thing is ultimately extremely rewarding. I'm kind of what I wish.

I wish like the remaster had like the thing that some of the like the monkey island remaster had, which is like basically a toggle where you can go to the old graphics.

And I know that's an incredible technical challenge, but but wouldn't that be cool if this one had, like, you could play this PS2

effectively?

Maybe it has a better frame rate. Maybe if you want to have that little bit of compensation,

but other than that, it's like the exact same presentation as the original. So you can.
Because also, just from an archival, like historical perspective, it would be nice if that was preserved.

Every remaster should have that. Yeah, it would be.
It's probably such a pain in the ass, but I think it should be possible. I have an idea for a thing.

I think Criterion Collection should come out with a console. And I think the console should be able to play accurate original versions of the games, but they're all on a single console.

And they only play Criterion versions of those games.

So for example, you could play Shadow of the Colossus in its original fidelity and frame rate on the Criterion console, but you could also play The Last of Us on the same console.

And you could also play Donkey Kong Country on like that it was a single console that was like here are the remarkable releases of all time and here is a console that is gated from all you can't drop an Xbox game into it yeah but you can drop the criterion version of uh super mario 3 yeah into the criterion console look and it's kind of an emulator either yeah i was gonna say well

i was also gonna say you gave away too many of your good ideas on the show you got to keep some of these in the chamber. Someone's going to do something about it.

One of the other frustrations. I mean, we talked about the camera.

The horse is tough. So Agro is a great horse.

And by the way, as per Ueda, it's a female horse. I think in some of the localizations in English, it's referenced as a key.
But

great horse. And

a little frustrating to ride, certainly. I think kind of a pain in the ass to maneuver, especially in tight spaces.

But to say one positive, one thing I do really like about Agro, first off, the animation is great. Great horse animation.
Great.

And then the

I think the AI is pretty good. Really?

It's not like perfect, but just in terms of like positioning itself, in terms of following you, in terms of

coming to you when you call it. I don't know.
I think it's all pretty responsive. Can I say something about the horse that I love about this horse?

I'm not going to spoil. I'm saying something about the control on the horse because i saw matt start to smile and i knew what he was thinking that i was going to say but i'm not saying that

what i like about this horse

is that unlike say the elden ring horse torrent where i feel on torrent like i am steering like i am torrent yeah when i am playing

and when i am mounted on torrent i am torrent and the player character is just an accessory on its back

in shadow of the Colossus, I feel like I am still Wanderer. And

the interactive, the way you drive the horse is that the horse feels separate and you are kicking it and tugging it. And it feels more like riding a horse than it does like steering a car.

Yeah, it's more like, I feel like this is, that's kind of akin to how Ocarine of Time handled a pona. And, and it's like, yeah, it's, it's a little bit more indirect.

I think also thematically, it works really well because this so much of this is about you know it's kind of this radical environmentalist uh

sort of theme where it's like talking about how you can't tame nature and you shouldn't try to you know put these things under your control and that includes your horse uh who has his own autonomy and agenda

uh her yes

well agro yeah

her own um yeah it's so it's

agro I agree, although

it just feels better to ride torrent around is the thing.

That's the thing. It's just like it is a thing you control as a video game.
It can be tricky too because like,

you know,

you could be riding aggro and try to

go a specific way. But like if you're too close to the edge, she won't turn around because she doesn't want to fall off or something.
Or, you know, it just, it feels a little clunkier than it should.

But

the thing that I the thing that I would really love about this game,

when you're getting fucking whipped around by one of those colosses, you look so funny. Like

you look so loose. Because

the physics in the game are so good.

And you're like, I do love the

controlling,

like the modality of control in the game where you have to hold on. Because if you let go, you let go.

It's not just like you're holding on, you know, you press the button to grab and then you're grabbing forever.

It has like a, you know, and you have stamina. So you can only hold on for so long.

Yeah, like Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdoms climbing feels better, but this sort of climbing where you're a little bit out of control and yes, where you have to like, it's a press and hold feels, so there's more intentionality behind it, feels more fitting for this design.

I love the speed runs I've seen of this game where somebody uses the physics of

letting go as the thing moves to flip you so far into the air that you land on its head or something. It's so great.

And it really shows that the momentum in the physics engine is somewhat accurate because if you let go of a giant building-sized moving thing, it's going to throw you 30 stories up into the sky. Yeah.

I guess.

Oh,

I didn't realize this about the game either. I didn't know about this.

They're talking a fake language. Yeah.
Love, love those fake language. That's so fun.

It's just a fun design choice. Like, not every every game has that.

Obviously, it's subtitled English, and I think it's

drawn from a couple of different languages.

But I love that as a surprise. Every element of this game was a surprise to me.
I just had no idea.

Yeah, I don't know. Everything, it feeling just completely like this is a completely foreign culture with a completely different value system is just,

that's really,

again, just like the mystery of the world. It's, it's like mysterious and ambiguous in a good way.
It's not the sort of thing where you feel like cheated. You feel like, well,

I thought I was going to get some answers here, but I'm not. It's like, no, they answered just enough.

Before we get into spoiler country,

we had talked to our audience about the fact that we were going to watch Rain Over Me. Yes.
And some people took it as a serious. Yeah.
It was a joke. We were doing a bit.

But I think we, you know, Nick, Nick has asked that we watch the Shadow of the Colossus scene from Rain Over Me together.

And I think we should do that and invite the listener in to a clip from Adam Sandler's masterpiece about September 11th.

Yeah, let's watch this scene. This is Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle.

And here we go.

We'll play some or all of this.

Come in.

Colossus.

Hey.

Hey, hey, buddy, take the shoes off. I told you.

Told you.

Hey, didn't you, just

right?

Sandler and Cheetler are sitting on a couch.

Let me tell you, Sandler is straying Shadow of the Colossus. Okay, how do you shoot it? Square's

a little bit of a master bird. You want to shoot him, get his attention.

Alright, alright, good.

Game what?

Footage from the game is full-screened while this is happening.

Something else is funny.

Alright.

That'll call your horse the triangle second gentleman. Okay, okay.
Okay, very good. Alright, stab his arm.
Come stabbing him in the arm. No, you gotta stab him in the right spot.

I'm stabbing it right there. You gotta be on the light.
Stab him. That's not gonna work.
I gotta climb this big son of a bitch.

Look, just put it down, all right? Rest. Next time you come over, you'll be even better.
You gotta let it all soak in. No,

there's right now. No next.
Now.

I thought you don't have an addictive personality. That was the line of the night, man.

You're an addict. Say it, man.
Say you're an addict. Okay, I'm an addict full screen shadow of the colossus footage cross fades between our characters it's basically a montage of like

every colossus being filmed

so there's a uh a 2007 kotaku piece by brian ashcraft that gives a lot of context about this uh so the the idea to use this game

The idea to use this game in particular came from one of the film's editors, Jeremy Roosh. And I'm just going to read this from

this Brian Ashcraft piece. Here we go.
Director Mike Binder's latest script was called Rain Over Me, and Roosh was slated

to co-edit it along with Steve Edwards. It followed the story of Charlie, a New Yorker who lost his family during the 9-11 attacks.
The character tries to avoid his problems and cover them up.

Says Roosh, it had Charlie Adams' character playing a video game that was very much the typical fake game that you see in TV and film. The game was an arcade-type shooter with aliens.

An avid gamer himself, the editor's first instinct was that Charlie should be playing an MMO. He could have a social life, but not have to interact with people.

That was in my first set of notes I didn't give to him, says Ruch, because that night it occurred to me this was the same thing my own father was doing.

The Vietnam War left his father 100% mentally disabled with post-traumatic stress disorder. After getting treatment at a VA hospital for several years, his father was discharged.

Unable to work, he spent the days and evenings watching sci-fi thriller Aliens over and over again until he actually had to buy a new VHS tape.

Aliens is a thinly veiled kind of Vietnam veteran kind of story, Roosh explains, and watching it is a way of thinking about it without telling yourself you are thinking about it.

The movie was visceral therapy for his father. That's when it hit Roosh.
Refusing to accept the death of loved ones, seeking out an escape from that truth. Giants falling in slow motion.

You could see where someone who was dealing with 9-11 would be engrossed by a giant that keeps collapsing over and over again, he says. Charlie's therapy was Shadow of the Colossus.

Stars Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle were Shadow's experts by the time they arrived on set.

In one scene, Sandler's character Charlie explains to Cheadle's character Alan how to play Shadow, giving a detailed description of the controls. The scene wasn't in the script, says Roosh.

If you needed to learn how to play the game, Adam could teach you, he rolls.

In order to capture the reality of the characters playing video games together, that's precisely what Sandler and Cheadle did, played video games together.

Some of the moments where they failed we use in the film, says Ruch. The failure, the frustration, and the happiness are all part of playing the game.
It's hard to act in some ways. I don't know.

It's just like it's kind of, it's a really cool way of using the game cinematically. And it like ties in thematically to

what the movie is about. Maybe not the greatest movie, but it's like it had.

I like that there was that amount of thought put into it. I like that.

It's such a strong choice. I'm so happy to hear that Sandler and Cheeto broed out playing this game.
That, like, fucking ruled. Yeah.
But, like,

the acting thing of people playing video games just bothers me so much in games because

I don't think you have to press the buttons as much as he was pressing them in

the scene to play the game. Like, not as fast as he was doing it.
Like, he was just doing some acting at the top of it, probably where they weren't showing what was actually happening on the screen.

He was kind of just doing,

you know, stage business with the controller. But

it happens in every movie. It's not just him.
I wonder how much of that was Foley.

Like, I wonder if they added the clickiness, because you can move a controller around while you're trying to beat a Colossus. Yeah.

And you don't constantly have to be hitting X, which is what it sounds like he was doing. Like X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X.

And

I feel like... If I had been on set playing that game with my co-star and then saw that Foley, I'd be like, man, it sounds like I don't know how to play that game.
Yeah, right, right.

100%. It sounds like I don't know how to play that game.

Well, yeah, because a lot of times if you're a national hero,

he's a god. You're just like moving the left analog stick, maybe, right? It's like maybe doesn't seem like read like the most active thing, but you are in control of this game.

But when he did start to explain,

you know, the

triangle button brings your horse over. Yeah, I was like, that, when,

having not seen that scene before, I was like, he, that wasn't like he said that. That was real.

That was like a real, yeah, he was explaining this fucking rule. Yeah, that it's not complete, it's not bullshit.

They actually understood like how to play the game, and you know, that's I don't know, and then that's a part of the scene. I don't know.

It's it's honestly, it's so well integrated versus a lot of game stuff that it feels like it's branded content, but it's not.

It's that they were like, they think they thought this worked artistically and then got permission to use it.

It's also frustrating because branded content has desensitized us to the artistic integrity of this particular scene

in a movie about nine.

Like nobody in their right mind would be like, they thought this through in this Sony movie to actually have a game that makes sense for the player to be or the character to be playing in the wake of losing his family in 9-11.

And you read that article from Kotaku and it's like, no, they did all of the right stuff.

It was exactly what they were supposed to be doing. I want somebody to follow up with them in present day and just ask them what they remember about playing that game, what they liked about it.

Oh, man, it was so good.

It would just be interesting because I feel like sometimes... you know, actors do stuff like that and then just never have a second thought about it again.
But I wonder if the Sandman

remembers playing Shadow of the Colossus and if he's played a video game since. I would love to know what other games he's played.

And then I would love to contrast his answers with Kieran Knightley's answers about being in Star Wars Episode I Phantom Menace, when she legitimately said, I wasn't in that.

And she was in that. Yeah.
Yeah. That rules.

I love that. That's great, too.
Actors are great.

That article also said Fumido Ueda personally signed off on the usage,

which is interesting. All right, let's go ahead and mount our horses and ride on into spoiler Country.
Oh, that was awesome.

I loved that. You press the triangle button, you get on a whole aggro right to spoiler country.

So, okay, so we are going to spoiler country. We are going to talk about the end game.
We are going to talk about the ending cinematic.

So, if you have not finished the game or don't want to hear that, you know,

whatever, fucking skip ahead till when we start to get to we've talked about too, like the overall what is happening, yeah right but like just to refresh you are a guy who rides into this mysterious little area uh on horseback with your dead wife or girlfriend on on the on back mono a mono uh on the back of the horse and then you place her og dead wife game we talked about that last on on the dredge episode wander the ultimate wife guy too by the way uh he loves his wife so much he wants to bring her back to life

can i say my joke yeah uh dudes will really travel to the cursed land cast cast the forbidden spell, and slay 16 colossi instead of going to therapy. Nick, that's the best thing you've ever said.

That is so good.

I wish we had played this game when Twitter was a less toxic place to be because that would do numbers. Oh, my goodness.
All the retweets, all the phase. Yeah, yeah.

We don't even call them that anymore. They're reposts now.
Oh, boy. Anyway.

I don't even recognize that place. That's the new cursed land, as far as I'm concerned.
Nick, two for two.

He's on fire, this guy. Would you? I'm going to cast a forbidden spell and delete my account.

The turkey.

I'm retiring my jersey. I want to know if Nick would, in order to save his real wife, would enter Twitter and tweet non-stop for years.

She wouldn't want me to do that.

No, just leave me dead, buddy. She's just like you.

I married me in a wig.

It's just like your hand, sort of with like hair on it.

I, I, so, um, but yeah, so you're going, yeah, you go, you're, you, you go to this temple, you place her down, you make a deal with this unseen entity, this voice, Dormian is his name, right?

Uh, and he's like, kill these beasts in this, in this, you know, this forbidden land, and we'll bring her back to life. So that sets you on your path.

Each time you go kill a Colossus, you get reset back at the temple after after being injected with black smoke yes and throughout the game this happens to you time and time again you can't outrun them you can't escape them they just enter you like that you look worse throughout the game is something that you should yes right you're sort of decaying and also when that occurs to you yeah like especially in the ps2 version where it's a little bit more subtle at first

you're like

wait wait wait wait wait i look different like it's like it's it's like this moment in that i always remember from silent hill 2 when you realize that you were in the same location, it just looks worse.

And you're like, oh, no, it's the same hallway. In the same way, when Wander starts looking sick, you're like, oh, no,

when did that happen? Every time you bring up Silent Hill 2, I remember how bad of a time I had.

Like, just like you saying that, I was like, oh, yeah, that's the scariest thing I've ever seen. Yeah, this is horrible.
But so you're going through, you look worse as you do it.

You kill all 16 Colossi, right? I believe it's 16.

Yeah, so you don't really have, you never have all that much of a sense of what's happening, but around Colossi 12 or something like that, I think you start to see there's another group of people.

You haven't seen any other people yet, who arrive are on horseback and are sort of like, what is he doing? What's going on? Or like, the time is almost near.

You know, we're getting sort of some ambiguous hints that there's some larger thing at play. Yeah.
And then, you know, you get to

the 16th one, and then all fucking hell breaks loose. Yes.
It gets all crazy from there. So, so you've got, so we should first talk about Aggro and Agro.
Oh, yeah. So, you're writing.
Look,

this is foretold early on in the opening cinematic, which is there's a moment, there's a little bit of foreshadowing

where there's a gap that Wanda is trying to leap, and Aggro is like resisting.

And this is before he even gets to the,

you know, the cursed land. And like, he fights against it, but he kind of like makes him makes Aggro do the jump.
Agro. Or she rather fights against it.

The same sort of thing happens here, except it's like you're riding across a narrow bridge. And this is on the run up to the 16th Colossus.
This is where this happens.

So

you're riding on a narrow bridge, and there's a gap at the end, and the bridge is collapsing.

And Agro

lurches forward to projectile throw you across the gap to save the rider as she descends into the abyss below. And I texted you guys as soon as this happened to me, and it's like, wait, no,

my horse.

And then there's a, I won't spoiler country another game, but there's a recent AAA game that tries the similar, has a similar thing. I think you've played, Matt.

We've all played. We'll talk about it off bot.
But

that tries a similar move with your mount

in the game's third act.

And I think it's like kind of an homage, but it doesn't quite have the same impact because you don't, it's just like there's a unique bond you kind of have with this, with this horse, just the way the gameplay feels.

Nothing, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

It's the only other thing in this world with you. Right.
Yeah.

There's like truly nothing else. Because

I try and recapture that emotional feeling in Red Dead Redemption 2 over and over again by killing horse after horse after horse. And none of it feels like when you lose aggro

so okay. So this happens, then you're you're by you're you're completely alone and you have to climb to the top.
You fight this uh the final uh colossus.

The colossi uh classi all all have names like Latin names, but none of them are canonical.

Um, but you know, you fight the final boss, which is again cool in theory, but a little bit frustrating to actually play.

And then, but you finally you get over it, and then it leads to uh, the all all the colossi are dead and you absorb all of a dorman's form and you kind of i'm trying to remember the sequence of events but you ultimately like become dorman you become this gigantic shadow of demonic horns

yes yes and it should be said that um because i don't know if we've spelled this part out of it yeah necessarily the black tendrils that are uh coming to get you at the end of every colossus fight it are are parts of the spirit of dorman yes he was set he was split into 16 pieces.

Yeah, and trapped. And those were what the Colossi are.
But also, there's like, when you're lying on the ground of the sanctuary where Mono is, there's like smoke children standing over your body

who are like smoke child versions of the colossi.

It's almost like when he was split into all these different pieces, each of those pieces became sentient in some way and took on like a life of their own or personality through the colossi because when they're looking at you they're not angry they're like

almost they kind of almost give off the energy of the colossi themselves like this sort of like like dazed curiosity it's really yeah haunting yes and there's giant idols within the temple that collapse when you destroy each of the colossi so all this is happening uh you the the this uh this group of interlopers or whatever whoever they are uh they have arrived these these sages have arrived at the temple they've confirmed they're kind of like what have you done?

You know, they're really like, Jesus Christ, man. Fly out of the holy fucking shit.
They're mad at you immediately. They're so fucking mad.
You took the sword. You came here.
You did that.

Jesus Christ.

And you've just been having a fun time playing a video game. They're like, you've ruined everything.
Yeah, exactly.

And then basically, all of this, these black tendrils, all of this energy converges into you or merges into your form.

Your skin turns like a colossi. Your eyes turn like they're they're blue, you know, like sort of gem eyes, and then you grow to giant size.
But you're not like a kaiju.

It's like you're like the giant smoke monster, effectively, Dorman's form, and then you just kind of kind of wreck house and get to shoo them away. And that leads to the end game

where they throw the sword, they have taken a sword, they throw it into like a pond, and then that... causes some energy sort of storm that pulls you into it.

And that's basically the end of you and the rebirth of Mono.

And then

we get a little baby with horns. That's fun.
Yeah, so you become a baby. I think my head canon is that you get babality,

but it might be like that you have like a new child has been born that's like emerging. It's like a rebirth of Dorman or something like that.
Well, you get this.

There's

through lines between Eco and this game because the character that you play in Eco is a horned kid. Yes.
And there's some thematic stories.

And there's smoke characters throughout Eco. Those are your maiden enemies.

Yeah, there's some thematic story being told here about like the outcast with horns or like embracing a power that you shouldn't have and having horns. Maybe Eco takes place

on the other end of Shadow of the Colossus, years later, where they're like, hey, horned people are bad. They must be thrown away.

Yeah, they have said it's not connected, but there certainly is a lot of sense.

Come on, it is. Right.
That's like saying that Miyazaki movies aren't connected. They are because of the author.
Or the Kevin Smith, the View Askew Universe.

You're going to tell me those aren't in the same world? It's a different movies in each movie. No, that's lunacy.

I like the theory that you're bay-balladied. I think it's funny that if it's just a baby and then your dead wife has to raise you as a baby, don't encourage some secret garden.
Yeah.

It's a, yeah, it is, it is a thing of just like, but it is

there's there's a it is a and maybe as a comment on gamers in general but it is like a like and how and how game characters uh as the center of things just like kind of wreck the world to shape it to their own desires yeah because you the end game is you've ruined everything including your own life you have condemned the your the your uh significant other the one person you love your partner uh who you've like like gone through on this great journey for you've condemned them to live in exile in some abandoned land.

You have

completely devastated the landscape here and the ecology and killed these ancient beasts.

And to what end? Like, it's just because you could not make peace with your own existence. But then a couple of things happen, too, right? So

agro

lived, is okay. Got a limp.
Guys, a limp, but it's okay. It will be fine.
I'm going to kill it, though. No, you have to put that horse.
The horse is done. The horse is done.
Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I think you have to kill a horse just by getting off it.

Like, anytime you get off a horse, you got to. No, that's what you do.

But so then that's like a car. It's like a

car alarm. It's like beep, beep, except it's a gun.

So, yeah, so aggro's back. You're a baby.

Your revived wife has to raise you. Yeah.
The group that came and yelled at you is escaping on this bridge that is self-destructing. Yeah, the one bridge out of this land is being devastated.

The one bridge out, the one bridge in, too. Yeah.
Because they're like, this cannot happen again.

This is fucked. This whole thing is bad.

And so now it's just this injured horse that they're going to have to kill, a baby, and a previously dead woman trapped here, and the spirit probably somewhere. I would like to read

our texts. Okay.
Because I don't think we've ever done that on the show.

1:48 p.m., Matt Apodaka writes, hey, what the fuck?

S-O-T-C,

my horse.

Nick replies at 1.56, oh, Matt.

At 2.20, Matt writes, holy shit.

And then, wow.

And at 2.28, ha ha ha. Fuck, what a game.
Yeah. I think that what that is one of my favorite like beat-by-beat synopses of the ending of a game.
Right.

I would put forward my own playthrough of Death Stranding when I texted you guys. I think I just beat Death Stranding.
And then an hour later was like,

I think it's still ending.

That was like truly the whole experience for me right there was that like,

you know, you, the Last of Us 2 makes you think about your actions in a video game, right? And I'm sure there are other games that make you do this as well.

I don't know if I've ever felt worse playing a video game than playing this. Wow.
It was, it was horrific. Just the idea of then, like,

I don't know, summoning an ancient curse off for what? To die?

Horrible. And it's the kind of thing where it's just, you know, I think that the best examples of games as art use interactivity as

like, like,

as a means to an artistic end, which is here, like, if you were, if this was a passive experience of watching a film about a character who did this, it would work, but like, there's something about having to take control of that and having to take ownership of all of these actions and having to be the one to plunge the sword into each of these ancient beasts

that makes it feel even more impactful. It also

plays on a thing that a movie doesn't do. Like you can turn off a movie, right? But you're not choosing the actions of the movie.

But when you're a gamer, you could stop playing the game, but we are all, we are programmed by video games to want to see and complete and do the next thing.

So the tension in this game is that you kind of start realizing that you're doing something bad, but you also want to see what happens.

So you have to choose to keep doing it, which is not like you can cover your eyes in a movie and be like, oh, I don't like looking at this. And you're not, you're not, it's not coercing you.
No.

But like the disc itself, the controller, the nature of games is like, well, don't you want to see though, like what might happen next?

Yeah, you're, you're, you're one of the scientists in Oppenheimer. You're like, well, fuck, who built this thing? Yeah.
Fucking blow it up. Yeah, maybe we will blow up the world right now.
Let's see.

Yeah,

it's great. I think the word you use, Heather, is singular.

And yeah, I think it is a singular experience. And I think if you want to really boil it down, I think

the story in the world is so good that it's worth dealing with any frustrations anyone might have with the gameplay. And it's short enough.

where I could see myself revisiting this down the line in a couple of years.

Let's give that a talk, like give that a spin again. What a treat.
What an absolute joy. I'm so happy I played it and added it to my list of completed games this year.
There you go.

I think it is also funny that we would play this masterpiece, like a truly artful game, and then follow it up with next month's We Play You Play.

Hey, there might,

we don't know if they patched it to include art.

It might be art now. Wait, are we playing something different next month that I didn't think about? No, we're playing,

we're doing cyberpunk. We're announcing it right there.
Cyberpunk.

I'm hyped about Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty. Yeah.

I actually think that will.

We'll say, if early reviews are any indication as of this record, it looks like it. Yeah, I was teasing the game.
I'm so fucking hyped about this.

I did see a friend.

You were saying, like, you were talking about we're going to play Conquer's Bad Fur Day or something. I was like, what are we playing? I was like, okay.

I did just see a tweet from a friend of mine right now that said, wow, high reviews for Cyberpunk. I'm really excited to check out the new Cyberpunk.

We've never seen high reviews for Cyberpunk before.

All right. Any other thoughts on Shadow of the Colossus? I am so thankful that we got to play this.
Thank you guys for voting and allowing me to have one of the greatest gaming experiences of my life.

Wow.

Oh, my God. I loved this video game so much.

And

if you didn't play this month,

give it a try if you're able to.

It's a home run. It's fucking great.

Even with, as Nick was saying, even with the frustrating parts of it, it's still absolutely worth your time.

And hey, some of you did play it or have played it, which means it's time for the you play of our WePlay Uplay. It's your review crew, the Ryu crew.
Hello, Gundry.

This first one is from Deli Man on our Discord. Love that.
It's high deli man.

Deliman.

Deli Man writes,

first game that I thought of as art and not just a video game.

Yeah.

I think depending on where it hit you, that was the case for a lot of people, for sure.

It's definitely now something that I will point to as an example of that when people will, you know, that conversation's kind of maybe

dead now. That's fucking done.
That conversation is done now. But were, there was an era where people were like, all right.
Yeah, but what, an Atari is a Super Mario is our

exactly. And like, yeah, it is.
And now it's like, yeah, no, it literally

is. Yeah, it is.

This one's from

our pal and moderator, Drop King. What's up, DK? Hi, DK.

What's up, Robert? Drop King writes, For me, it's a masterpiece and ultimately, so simple. Just you, a horse, a sword, and a bow.
That's it. The designs of of the Colossi are so cool.

We didn't really talk about that. Yeah.
The Colossi are really cool. They are really cool.
They're really imaginative and creative and, you know, just like visually striking. One's a turtle.

One's a crab. One's like a sort of big guy.
Yeah. They're all fun.
One's a bird. One's like a big

different bird. And they're all big, but they're differently big.
Some of them are like just big and some are like really big. Some are like little tigers.
Yeah. Yeah.

Well, to finish to finish Drop King's comment, the designs of the class are so cool, especially the size differences.

And the journey to each one lets you explore a new little chunk of the mysterious land.

Yeah, I, I, man, I, you know what I love so much that we just touched on, but I do, I do want to give a little bit special emphasis is just there's so many maps.

You're talking about like waypoints and there's so much like like cluttered mini maps that you're dealing with in so many open world games.

Here, the navigation is your sun reflecting off of your sword,

pointing somewhere into the horizon. And I just, it's just enough.
It's just enough to say, go here. We're not going to tell you how to get here, but this is where you need to go.

Yeah, because like the light beam starts frayed until you position it into the direction you're actually supposed to go, which is genius, is absolutely genius design. It's also like,

not to say it's how it would work, but if you're in a magical world, that's how it would work. Yeah, 100%.
You have to keep, and also you keep like, am I heading in the right way?

Let's hold up my sword again.

It's like, that's what it should be. It's, it's, it's, it's great navigation.
I love it. And I love that the screen is, just lets you take in the world.

That's like, that's, that to me is the best part. Um, this one's from, this one's from the Fennmeister.
What's up, Fennmeister? Fennmeister.

Uh,

I tried this when it came out, but I was too young and optimistic to get it. Going back as an adult solidified the beautiful simplicity of the game design and the haunting narrative and atmosphere.

Five out of five, good horsies. Wow.

Love that. Well said.
Yeah.

This one's from Swan Ronson. Hi, Swan Ronson.

Hello, Swan Ronson. Hong Kong.
Yeah, Hong Kong.

As it were.

Swan Ronson writes, One of my all-time favorite games, incredibly haunting scenery, the loneliness of the Colossi, the desperation of the protagonist.

All the times I accidentally rode aggro off that one cliff, I will always remember my time in the shadow of the colossal.

Uh, yeah, where do you put where does this go? Is it top 20, top 50 game all time? It's somewhere in there. I don't know where exactly it ranks.

I'm comfortable in top 25 in your games or in all games. I mean, I don't know.

However you want to think about it. In my list, I don't think it doesn't make my top 10 because it's just, that's just tough.

And I don't think it makes a top 10 in an overall list, but I think it needs in the top 20 top yeah top 25 range yeah i mean it's been

so many years and people are still like oh it like nobody like pushes back on shadow of the colossus being good i think there is i think there are some people who will talk about just its

in terms of how it plays and i and i could see the argument

no no

some people with gaming podcasts and two co-hosts will yeah no i i i think there is i think there is a segment that would like, look, you could definitely, when you start to argue with games that have been inspired, took an inspiration from this game, like a Breath of the Wild, like an Elden Ring, which we both talked about on this podcast.

It's like, you know, both those games came out years later and

there's a lot of iteration between those. They are a lot more expansive.
I kind of feel like fighting a Hinox in Breath of the Wild is like...

as and fun in a very different way as fighting a Colossus in this game. And those games are also trying so much more stuff that I think if you start making a list of games, you're like,

maybe Elden Ring, I think Elden Ring probably does go above this, you know? I don't know.

It's when it becomes more than just like a,

when you actually try to try to make the list and it becomes a little bit less abstract, it becomes harder to slot it. But I do think it's somewhere in there.

It's somewhere in the top two dozen to four dozen games ever made.

Do you think the last time, because this is, when you play Shadow of the Colossus, you're like, oh, this is a new type of thing. Yeah.
Right. You're like, oh, fuck.

And then there are a bunch of games that come out like Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring, et cetera, et cetera, that sort of draw on the legacy of Shadow of the Colossus.

And I think are cited by the developers as influenced by it. Yeah.

The only game I can think of from the last few years that has done something where I'm like, oh man, there's going to be more games like this is

the new Zelda game with the fucking like, here's a bunch of parts lying around

And make shit in the world. And then you can, like, use that shit to do stuff.
Even though the rest of the game is all retread. Right.
Like, I felt like, and I, and I also weirdly don't think about

that Zelda game whose name is escaping me.

It's Tears of the Kingdom.

Like, I can't, I, I don't think about Tears of the Kingdom at all, but I do think sometimes like, oh, I wonder how long it's going to be before I see another make shit in the world game.

Well, yeah, yeah, I mean, and even that obviously draws from Minecraft and other sources. But I kind of think like, you know, like, look, I feel like there's

the, you even see some, some,

I, I, I feel like a game like Disco Elysium felt like it was trying something completely new.

I feel like a game like Vampire Survivors, you've seen a lot of clones of, even, you know, that's, that's not quite as earth-shattering, but that was a game that kind of was like, oh, it's trying something new.

You know, I talked about Case of the Golden Idol earlier. Like that felt like it was trying something.
I feel like there's still a lot of,

but I guess what you're saying is in the sense that a bunch of AAA games that followed were like, we're doing exactly this. It's not stuff that's existing in kind of a more niche indie space.

So, yeah, I don't know what the answer is.

There's still stuff in Shadow of the Colossus that I'm surprised isn't

in every game. Like, obviously, they took a lot of, like, other games took a lot from

Shadow of the Colossus, but like, I don't know.

There's still, like, to me, not a great, like, you have to jump on some stuff in Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild but it doesn't feel as good as doing it in Shadow of the Colossus I'm surprised there hasn't been a game that it so I feel like one of the strengths of and I'm sure that

like a Dark Souls is honestly like a that's a game that everyone is

from yeah I feel

like there's something we're missing yeah you're totally right it's it's dark souls yeah all right uh

and and honestly I wouldn't be shocked if Baldur's Gate 3 sort of sets a template for what especially contrasting that with Starfield, if everyone's like, well, shit, this is how you make one of these open world RPGs now.

Yeah,

those are some great contenders for sure.

This next one is from The Voice Against. What's up, The Voice Against? Hello, Voice.
I don't like this game. Okay, I get your gimmick.

This game was one of the first times I really thought games can be art and good art. From the beginning to end, the feeling of aloneness is really striking.

Even after the credits roll, you just can't help but feel like you did something bad. And it makes you think about other games with that same perspective.

A lot of games where, like, solitude is scary, but this one, it's like, it's more just like genuinely lonely. It's just sad.

Yeah, absolutely.

And then, you know, final, at the end, you gotta be a baby again.

When, wah, change my diapey. You do that shit again? I need my freaking

ass wiped. I could do that myself just earlier today.
Now I'm a baby again. Yeah.

Hard. It's hard.
Wait, you guys wipe your asses.

No, use one of those fucking sponges like

the Romans did. A sponge on a stick.
That's a call forward. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's okay. We can do that.
That's fine. You'll hear about that in a couple of weeks.

And finally, this one's from Human Riggs. What's up, Human Rigs? Hello, Human Rigs.

This game is dated in many ways, and a lot of the encounters can be frustrating, especially when the disembodied voice keeps giving you the same hint when you fucking already know what to do. Yeah,

but it's still one of my absolute faves, and there is still kind of nothing like it.

I didn't intend to replay it for this episode, but I reloaded an old save, completed the last Colossus, and now I'm halfway through a playthrough on hard mode. Capital C Classic.

Yep,

no, no complaint about that comment. I completely agree, though I did not play it on hard mode.

You want to know what surprised me?

Is how it's been so long since I played the game and I walk up and I was like, oh, I remember what I have to do. Like immediately I was like, oh, oh, right.

I remember what I, I kind of have to remember. It's something like this.
But like immediately, as if I had played the game like two weeks ago, the like

the grinding of figuring out those colossi back when the game came out had stuck with me like a language. Thanks for everybody for writing in for the Ryu crew.
And I'm excited.

I'm excited about next month. Oh, man.
I am so excited. Phantom Liberty, Cyberbunk 2077 2.0 patches is on the horizon.
I think it will be out as of this episode's release. That's right.
So

we'll all be playing through that. And that's this week's Get Played.
And hey, returning to Engineer for us this week is our friend Jordan Duffy. Thanks to Jordan, check out Jordan K.

Duffy on Instagram. And Jordan has a new EP at jordanduffymusic.com.
Also, check out our paywalled show, GetAnimate. Heather was still watching Foodie Cootie.

We're watching early 2000s mega hit and adult swim mainstay, FLCL, also known as Foodie Cootie. And this week is our final episode covering FLCL, I believe.
That's right. So if you are,

if you like anime, or if you just like listening to us talk, you can check out our anime sister podcast, get animated at patreon.com slash get played. That's patreon.com slash get played.

I think we should just say that after we wrap this up, after we wrap up FLCL foodie cootie, we're going to do cyberpunk edge runners on get anime. Let's fucking go.
We're doing cyberpunk.

Heather, would you like to say what you, the, the phrase you coined for this month? Here's, I think it's going to sneak up on us. I think it's the autumn of cyberpunk.

And by that I mean, if I say the fall of cyberpunk, it's going to sound like I don't like cyberpunk. But I think the anime is going to experience a resurgence.

I think people are going to be playing that 2.0 patch. And I think Phantom Liberty is going to get a lot of buzz.
And I think people are going to come back to cyberpunk just like we are.

We're on the sister podcast. We're watching Edge Runners, which I will spoil.
Matt has not seen the end of. That's right.
So

it's a journey for him. I might be texting O Matt again.

And then we'll also be playing cyberpunk.

So come along on the cyberpunk adventure. And you know what? I think I might get my haircut in a cyberpunk way.
Let's fucking go. Let's fucking go.
Like IRL? Yeah, IRL. Fuck, that's awesome.

Like, maybe like a little Viking, a little cyberpunk?

And if your barber knows what to do, sure.

She does. She's been my barber.
I come in with a drawing and she's like, what is this? And I'm like, it's from an anime from like 2015. Can you give me this haircut? And she's like, yeah, sure.

Sure, yeah, whatever.

Well, there you go. And hey, I don't think anyone got played this month.

I think Wander did. I wonder, actually,

he played himself. Yeah.