Games and Love: Shadow of the Colossus

This is my first post for Critical Distance's Blogs of the Round Table for February. The theme for February is Love. For this post I will be talking about one of my favorite games of all time, Shadow of the Colossus.

[[spoiler warning for Shadow of the Colossus]]

It's no secret that I love Shadow of the Colossus. That game was an incredible experience for me, and I will never forget it. When I think about love being conveyed in a video game, I think about Shadow of the Colossus. I believe Shadow of the Colossus conveys love so strongly because it does so without words.

Mono, the girl
Shadow of the Colossus starts off as the story about a boy who steals a magic sword so that he may gain access to a strange land where he can resurrect a girl, whose name in Mono. We are never informed about the boy's relationship with the girl, but I'd assume that they were in love, given the apparently similarity in their age. Other possibilities are that they are siblings, possibly twins. But it's not the nature of their love that matters, it's the quality.

When the boy reaches the land he is told by a spectral voice that calls itself 'Dormin' that it can bring back his love, if the boy slays the sixteen colossi. Without hesitation and without question the boy embarks on this quest. As the game progresses, the boy becomes weary. He looks dirty, corrupted, and has a much more difficult time getting up after he is knocked to the ground, but still he presses on to resurrect his loved one. Eventually the quest consumes Wander, and he struggles for his life so that he may see her alive again. You truly know that he would do anything and everything in his power to bring Mono back, because he truly loves her.

And while the game is about the love a boy has for a girl and his struggle to bring her back, that's not the love that the game fosters. There is another love.

Agro, the horse

Agro is your trusty steed througout the journey. He carries you wherever you need to go, as far as he can. There are even several boss battles that could not be done without him there to help you. He's even different from horses in other games. He's more intelligent. When navigating through a narrow passage, you don't need to steer him, he'll avoid the sides and lead you through. As I played the game, I came to care deeply about Agro.

This connection that you have to Agro is facilitated by the game's controls. When you're controlling Wander, you just tilt the left analog stick in the direction that you want to go, as you do in any other video game. Agro doesn't control the same way. When you are riding Agro you use the X button to kick your heels and go forward and use the left analog stick to steer left or right. Many people complained about this control scheme, saying that it was awkward and made going long distances frustrating because you had to keep pressing the X button. But what this scheme does is it make you connect with Agro the way you would a real horse.

You, the player, have to form a physical connection to Agro. When I walk, I tell myself to walk and my body doesn't disobey me, unless I trip or something. Compelling and animal to move is a very different story, and Shadow of the Colossus forces you to communicate with the controller in much the same way that Wander must communicate with Agro. Then you add in Agro's very realistic rendering and animations and you have one fastastic video game horse that puts any incarnation of Epona to shame.

When you call out to Agro, Wander's tone is different depending upon how far away Agro is. If he's far enough away, the call is loud and almost sounds desperate. He's your only companion in this strange, harsh land, and you need him. You need him to survive. You need him to complete the mission.

I grew to love Agro. I could feel Wander's love for Agro, and I could feel Agro's love for Wander. Every time you defeat a colossus, Wander passes out and wakes up in the temple where the game begins, and every time Agro is there, coming back to find/meet you. He knows that you'll be there and travels back to the temple by himself so that he can be with you and help you on your journey.

Before the final boss, there is a bridge that you have to cross. As you run across it on Agro the bridge starts to crumble. You can't make Agro go fast enough and as you're just short of the end Agro throws Wander off of him so that you land on the other side and he...he falls into the gorge, plunging into the river below.

It was at that moment that my heart sank and I felt absolute rage. This last colossus was going to die so that Agro, my friend's sacrifice would not be in vain. After killing the last colossus and fulfilling some final scene responsibilities, Mono is alive in the temple. Then, at the front of the temple you hear it, the sound of a horse's hooves. Agro had somehow survived the fall into the river and made it all the way back to the temple one last time, limping, to be with you. Mono takes Agro and the two of them make their way to the top of the temple to presumably live out their days together.

That, dear readers, is a love greater than any that has ever been conveyed to me in a video game, and it's one I hope to never forget.

20 Days of WoW Blogging: Day 15 - My desktop background

My current desktop

I have this desktop because I abso-fucking-lutely love Shadow of the Colossus. There tons of really great SotC wallpapers out there that can be found just be doing a search for "shadow of the colossus wallpaper". That particular wallpaper is the first result if you search for that.

I keep strange things on my desktop. There's WoW, Starcraft II, and Dustforce (it's the one with the broken image). Then there's Google Refine, Mumble, Picasa. In my pinned items there's TeXnicCenter, Eclipse, and R. The folder in the top left holds reference documents for TeX and R.

I guess that's it. Bye! Come back real soon, ya'll!

20 Days of WoW Blogging: Day 9 - My First Blog Post

Smile!

Day 9 of the 20 days challenge inquires about my first blog post. Oh lord. I was afraid of this. This was my first actual post on the blog. In it, I was considering watching a very visual anime without any English, as if it were an opera. That's pretty much it. You'll notice that it has absolutely nothing to do with World of Warcraft. It's not even really something that I can imagine someone would want to read. It's devastatingly short, and...I'm ashamed of it. This blog is the first real writing project that I've undertaken, so it's very understandable that the content towards the beginning would be, for the lack of a better word, awful.

My next post was my first WoW post and from the looks of it was about 6 months after that previous post. At the time, my shaman was my only level-capped character and I thought that maybe I could turn this into a shaman blog. So I started what I hoped would be a series of posts on what totems have niche uses in the heroic dungeons that were out at the time. I originally started by doing one dungeon at a time, with The Nexus having the inaugural post.

It's horribly formatted, contains no links to wowhead.com for any of abilities or bosses. It doesn't explain WHY the totems are useful. It's two paragraphs of blech. It contains so little information. Back then I just didn't know how to expand content. Writing papers in school was always tough for me because I couldn't expand the content out. I didn't elaborate on the things I was writing. I was awful. Awful, awful, awful.

The writing got slowly better from there forward. I wrote a 'how to enhancement' post and a few more editions of 'Totems of Note' before I changed to elemental. Later came a post about Shadow of the Colossus and a post about why it's mathematically optimal that the Deeprun Tram not wait for people very long at each of its stations. I'd like to say that I've really come quite a ways from where I was then, and I'm sure I have. I will always write niche content, it's just who I am. I just really need to find a way to frame it so that it's interesting to most people.

I'm really glad to have that stuff behind me. This all brings me to some good questions. What would you all actually like for me to write about? What do you like to read about? Is there anything about my math/statistics/programming background that you would like to hear about or see applied to World of Warcraft?

Companions: Storytelling in Team Ico games

Wrong kind of companion

People look at the Team Ico games and try to find connections to prove that they're all in the same universe. They'll talk about boys with horns, art style, etc. There is, however, a common thread in the gameplay which I feel is what makes the stories in these games so powerful, despite the lack of dialogue. Each game features a companion. In this instance, a companion is a character that stays by the main character's side throughout the majority of the game.

Why would they make all of their games this way? I think it's because it really has a powerful effect on the story. In ICO, your goal is to escape from the castle with Yorda, the daughter of the queen of the castle. The Queen plans to use Yorda to extend her own life. Yorda is mostly useless, only occasionally being able to help by magically activating certain doors. When plalying ICO, I felt a strong need to protect Yorda as if she were my younger sister. That's a bond that I never have with the main character of a game, who I'm used to seeing die. That's one reason that I, as a player, got pulled into ICO's story. Yorda's constant presence and vulnerability made me want to protect her, giving me a stronger connection to the universe and its events.