A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

GTA made me unconsciously size up cars as they trundled by.

Katamari Damacy made me unconsciously sort everything around me by size so I could start working out an optimal roll-up path.

Shadow of the Colossus is not making me unconsciously look for hairy surfaces on nearby tall objects. Discuss.

I think I've gotten the hang of this game. The game has sensed this, and has upped its meanness. The whole game is just mean... not in a cruel way, just a brutal one. I'm a little confused at the alternation between sweeping, beautiful landscapes and frantic, desperate violence, each more or less exclusive of the other. Of course now that I put it in so many words I think of many recent big-budget Asian action/adventure movies I've seen in the last five years. Does this work in a video game? I am not sure.

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My mood has been rollercoastering since some time before everyone went home. Doubt and optimism duking it out more than ever. When I'm actively working and absorbed, or talking with someone about the whole thing, I feel great, and confident. When I'm alone, *foomp* comes the rain.

This month is the month of the office appearing, unless the seed-capital effort completely fails. I will feel consistently better when it's done.

I let myself be talked into buying Shadow of the Colossus a couple of days ago, and I think this may have been a mistake. It was very expensive and I am not convinced that I am enjoying myself. It's damn hard -- only experienced gamers are going to get past the very first stage -- and very time-consuming. After an hour of play this morning I've got the current guy I'm fighting down to maybe two-thirds of his hit points.

The big timesink is that making one slip-up with the controls can result in losing several real-time minutes of progress. This fills me with hate. Seriously, I'm sometimes standing in front of my screen, loudly cursing out every character on it, because I mischorded the buttons in such a way that my guy fell off the damn colossus's back once again, forcing me to start the whole climb over from the beginning. I curse out the colossus, I curse out my guy, I curse out my guy's horse. It's pretty bad. I fear for the health of my one last working controller.

You know what would have been a vast improvement on the game? Removing the grip meter (which gives you a time limit for how long your guy can hang precariously, in a game that's all about hanging precariously). Seriously. Ico didn't need no grip meter, and the protagonist here is a youth in his prime, not a little boy... was it the horns? I don't know.