The GHZ Forum

I just finished this and would like to state that it's one of the best games I've ever played, right next to Out of this World. I'm only sad that I played this after playing Shadow of the Colossus, which rules just as well. The ending is very beautiful and I'm really looking forward to the next game that will close the trilogy (c'mon, it HAS to be a trilogy!).

Now, to play again with subtitles for that little girl's gibberish talking.

Did you remember to grab the watermelon? I didn't...

One of the most interesting things to me about Colossus, and nobody ever seems to mention this, is that once you're on the map, there's no loading. Ever. You can travel straight from one end of the world to the other without ever crossing "screens". It's totally unsegmented, which I think is a huge evolution - even Shenmue didn't manage that.

It's true! Although a few times I did manage to crash the game by (presumably) riding through an area too fast when it hadn't finished loading.

It was almost always in the same area... to the North, on the east side of the bridge to the castle, in the sandy area right after the narrow walkway across the big chasm. If you try to plow through it at max speed, sometimes your horse will suddenly freeze in place. You can still move the camera, but the horse just hangs in the air, in whatever pose he was in before the crash. Sniff!

You mean the big desert between the walkway where you fight that aggravating tiny lion colossus and the ruin where you fight the second-to-last colossus? Because I ran through there all over the place and it never froze on me even once.

Did you remember to let ol' Hoss drink? I bet he was just pissed at you.

Shenmue was around well before streaming came along and developed as a technique. Unless you count the loading people on the fly thing, where people would phase in right in front of you. I'm so curious about what a next-gen Shenmue would be like... we can only dream.

Also, GTA:SA (at least the PC version) has no transition loading either.

GTA counts for nothing. Even if it did it first, it doesn't count because it's GTA.

What about Crazy Taxi? Granted the area was much smaller, but I'm sure there had to be some kind of streaming going on there.

Or Metroid Prime!

Jak II and it's bigger-then-it-should-be city...or Wind Waker.

Wind Waker had no excuse not to load on the fly, it's not like anyone else was doing anything while on that damn boat, the game might as well be doing something.

In Halo each individual level did have to be loaded, but some of those levels can take an hour to play through and once loaded aside from small "loading" areas there were no transitions or loading screens. In fact, try this for size. Play some campaign on Halo, then quit and shut off your Xbox. Boot it back up and join in the same game. No load time at all. Thank you Xbox hard drive.

Considering Xbox's hard drive, most of the games should have been able to have on the fly loading. The only reason they didn't was because there was no guarantee there would always be enough space on the drive.

Which is a reason so many people (myself included) were utterly confused at Microsoft's decision to not make the HD built-in on the 360, much less reserve HD space for caching. Supposedly Oblivion does it anyways, although I'm not quite sure how exactly it works. Does the game just permanently eat a couple hundred megabytes off your drive?

Nah, from what I heard Oblivion makes a cache on bootup and then clears the cache and makes a new one on the next bootup if you hold down A. So yeah, I guess it does sort of permanently eat a chunk of your HDD, cause I am pretty sure it doesn't get cleared until you do that. They said if your game had some issues with sound or loading or some crap, just to reboot it and hold A down during the boot.

Unless you are pirating games or loading huge volumes of music on your Xbox, I don't see how you can fill up the Xbox's hard drive. I had over 10,000 "blocks" and the system told me 50,000+/50,000+ whatever that means.

Mine has said 50,000+ blocks of free space forever, and I've never gotten it to say anything else no matter how many saves I have. Anyone know how big in bytes an Xbox block is?

One of these days I just might make a boatload of saves in KOTOR, since they take up a sizeable chunk, and just see how much space the hard drive has.

I know it is 8 gigs, but yeah, I have no idea how much that actually is in blocks.

I've had Agro freeze in place on several occasions, but it's always been a momentary lag, not a crash. It's actually kind of pretty to watch him hang in midair for an instant.

Light Speed wrote:Or Metroid Prime!

Metroid Prime's world was heavily broken up into different areas. In fact, it had rooms that were entirely devoted to slowing you down while the following areas loaded; remember those featureless tunnels filled with debilitating beetles?

The Wind Waker is a pretty good example, except for the towns and dungeons and such.

The sense of scale and distance in Colossus is much more impressive than in any of those other games, though, and the structure of the landscape is far more intricate.

Except it's mostly empty. I think GTA:SA deserves mention for two things: its gigantic map size and the ridiculous amount of objects/people/vehicles/buildings it was loading, all on the fly. It's probably one of the biggest technical achievements on the PS2. Of course, all that streaming did kill some people's DVD drives...

Light Speed wrote:Wind Waker had no excuse not to load on the fly, it's not like anyone else was doing anything while on that damn boat, the game might as well be doing something.

They wanted to accurately emulate the experience of sailing, massive gaps of nothingness and all.

I think never crashed on Shadow of the Colossus. Ever. And I really abused of that horse, making him fall and riding standing and jumping and stomping lizards and pigeons and patting his head. Never gave him a drop of water though... you can really do that? Cool.

Aside the whole background world thing, what I really liked was Wanda's animation. Sometimes I just ran and jumped to see him trip and fall badly on the ground. And that stuff wasn't rotoscoped or motion captured, thus explaining the "poetic freedom" of the animation.

I love how the main character would trip just by the vibration of the a colossus. one time I just started a fight with a collossus, his first step caused me to trip and roll under his other foot as it stepped on me. and then I died right there in one hit. that was the fastest death i ever had. funny though.

That's what I loved about Hard mode. You'd actually die from falling from the colossus' head.