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Shadow of the Colossus. Wow. I am so glad I've still got that old PS2 that AJ gave me with MGS3.

I read up on the game after seeing a hint of it a review video of another game. It was noted as being original, innovative, or different. Not many games are any of those things. They might have different storylines or different settings, a concept might be pulled off better in one game than in another, but games aren't that different.

It makes me laugh and/or cringe when people slate Halo 3, crying out that it's just another first person shooter and that it only differs from other first person shooters because you play as a different character with a different gun in a different corridor shooting a different type of enemy. Then they go and play Call of Duty and hail it as the bee's knees or, better yet, Need for Speed which certainly isn't like any other racing game. Right?

But this post is not about the minor differences between racing games or first person shooters. I want to talk about a game that really is different. Different in a Pokemon Snap kind of way. Different in a Beyond Good and Evil, Katamari Damaci, or Braid.

The storyline is minimalistic and up to the interpretation of the player. It's not contemporary art or laziness; it works. It really works. Within a forbidden land, the nameless "Wanderer" asks a being called Dormin to bring a young woman back to life, whatever the cost. In order for this young woman to be resurrected, Dormin tasks the wanderer with slaying the sixteen Collosi that inhabit the land. With his bow, his horse Agro, and a magical sword, the wanderer sets off to accomplish his task to bring this nameless young woman back from the dead.

The wanderer is not the Prince of Persia. He climbs slowly (for a computer game character); he runs and swims like Ace Ventura shot full of tranquilisers; and swinging the sword around is a slow, clumsy affair. He's an excellent shot with his bow, and is more than proficient in horseriding; but since the sword is the only object capable of defeating the Collosi, Agro and the bow are merely tools rather than effective weapons.

And then you see the first Colossus. Holy crap. It's massive. You see the monster on the game's box art? That's the first Colossus. And they get bigger. Much bigger.

I've not completed the game yet, but I'm getting pretty close.

I was telling a friend about it, and his reaction to it was "isn't it just sixteen boss battles". A lesser man, enthralled by this game's enchantments, would have slain him then and there with a napkin and a salt shaker. Saying it's just sixteen boss battles is like saying the Internet is just millions of pages of text and images, or that skydiving is just jumping out of a plane, or that Warhammer 40,000 is just orcs and elves... IN SPACE!

Each Colossus is a puzzle. Each one is (more-or-less) unique amongst its fellows. You will remember each one. From the giant soldier to the horned bull-like felid, from the long-necked skeletal dinosaur to the titanic sand worm, the archaeopteryx-esque raptor to the half-submerged island that rears up on massive legs to attack with bolts of thunder and lightning.

The music is fantastic; the scenery, in places, is breathtaking even on the PS2's dated hardware (I guess some game designers just put more effort into their graphics than others?); the animations are smooth and believable, the controls are easy to learn, and the interface is easy to read. It's a bloody well done game.

I'm slowly running out of steam here. I think I started writing this post at about 10:30 this morning and it's gone 14:00 already. I suppose work is not the ideal place to write an intendedly short blog entry.

So now that the energy I originally had for this post has mostly dissipated into other things I've been called on to do during the day; allow me to put it simply.

Shadow of the Colossus is awesome. If you still have a PlayStation 2 and you want to play something unique, interesting, thought-provoking, and inspiring, then go get yourself a copy of Shadow of the Colossus. You will not regret it. Unless the disc is scratched.