Preview of Shadow of Colossus

My birthday is soon but my parents were kind enough to give me a couple things early. They like to shower me with gifts, well, more like a splash, but you get the idea. At any rate, I received Shadow of Colossus and it is pretty. I’ve only played for a bit but I can tell you I like it. The premise is that you (your character) has to kill 16 or so Colossi, which are the incarnations of Spirits, in order to resurrect your sister or girlfriend (it doesn’t say the relation of your character to the dead chick you carry). So far there hasn’t been any little bad guys (and I don’t think there will be), the only enemy is whichever colossus you are going after at that time. But first you must get there, which so far isn’t that hard. You’ve a horse to help speed along the way and there’re some jumping/climbing puzzles. The one Colossus I’ve defeated thus far required me to stab it in the ankle then climb up its back and deliver the final blows to its head. It tried to stomp me and hit me with it’s big as a house club while I was floundering around on the ground. The game is beautiful. A nice draw distance and everything has that ancient feel to it. Character animation is very life like. The scale of the Colossus is amazing. The game designers were thoughtful enough to provide a button to look at the Colossi, which is damn handy and just makes me say ‘wow’. I was pleased as punch to see that they included progressive scan in the video options. On any normal TV the game would still look beautiful but on a relatively nice HD compatible TV (like my monitor) one sees every little pixel and it just looks kind of blocky. Turing the progressive scan on improves this immensely. One still sees the ‘jaggies’ but that is because of the Playstation 2’s lack of anti-aliasing. Despite the ‘jaggies’ the game looks great on a HDTV with progressive scan on or on a normal TV with it off. There’s no music in the game (that I noticed) but there’s certainly ambiance, wind etc., which really fits well with the visuals.

Now for some reviews of some stuff:
Green Russian: delicious
Godmother: delicious
Whiskey Sour: delicious
White Russian: Heaven

“Just try to fucking stop us!” – Dr. Tiki