PS DON'T TELL ALISON

Something that struck me whilst playing Shadow of the Colossus: A COLOSSUS'S FIST if you call Agro whilst fighting a Colossus, Wander's cry is much more urgent than it is when you call her in a Colossusless situation. It's a tiny detail, but a rather nice one.

Also, if you're not holding a weapon and press Circle whilst riding Agro, Wander will pat her neck. It is sort of adorable.


The eleventh Colossus is so tiny I am not sure it really counts as a Colossus! Many months ago, I dreamt that I was fighting a 'Colossus' of about the size of a cow and was amused when I woke up by how thoroughly my subconscious had missed the point of a 'Colossus'; I hadn't realised it was foreshadowing.

Then I fell off a waterfall twice on my journey to the twelfth. It was embarrassing and rather horrible. Struggling helplessly against the current! I'm sorry, Wander.


After defeating the twelfth Colossus, I managed to swing the camera at such an angle that it gave me a close-up of Wander, and then paused, puzzled, when I noticed that he appeared to have black veins on his face. Had those always been there? He seemed quite young; it struck me as an unusual character feature.

Then I read up to where I was in twilit_wanderer's gamelogs and realised that she'd been commenting on the weirdness of Wander's appearance for some time; I'd kept thinking, 'hmmm, I didn't notice anything, but I'll check that out the next time I play,' and then completely forgetting.

So I reloaded the game, steered Wander into a corner so the camera could have a good look at him, looked up an image from the opening for comparison, and, no, I'm not imagining things. His hands and face and neck are veiny; his clothes are dirty and tattered; his hair is matted and almost black (it was red when the game began). With every colossus Wander kills, his appearance deteriorates just a little more. His girlfriend, meanwhile, is looking far more vibrant than she used to.

I think this is basically the awesomest thing in the world. It's horribly unsettling, of course, but it's such detail in such a minimalist game. I'm trying to think of another character whose appearance gradually evolves over the course of the game, and the closest I can come up with is Seifer's trenchcoat becoming tattered in Final Fantasy VIII.

(I was terrified that one of the effects of Wander's slow transformation was that he NO LONGER AFFECTIONATELY PATTED AGRO WHEN HE DIDN'T HAVE A WEAPON EQUIPPED, OH NO, but then I realised he just didn't pat her when she was actually moving. Thank goodness. Wander's love for Agro is so true, and I would be immensely distressed were he to stop caring about her.)


On the subject of awesome details in videogames: I've never played Left 4 Dead, a zombie apocalypse first-person shooter, but I've looked at screencaps, and this made me laugh really hard. Even in a world of immense danger and no Internet, you can't escape anonymous trolling.

(image source: cowgirlmaxwell's comment in zarla's L4D picspam (fascinating, but beware of many, many, many large images).)