I was almost certain that I wrote something about The Last Guardian back in 2012 or thereabouts but I just can’t find the post.
So I must not have.
Which is too bad because I would have totally linked to that post today and said “Remember this post? Man! That was years ago! Anyway, the game I talked about in that post is finally coming out!”
Anyway, now I can write the post that I would have written then.
Way back in the PS2 era, there were a couple of downright amazing games that came out of a little corner of Sony Interactive that weren’t like anything else. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.
Ico was a game where you played a little horned boy who gets locked in a fortress by his village after they determine that horned boys are bad omens. You quickly meet a young woman in this fortress who is going to have the life sucked out of her by the queen of the fortress and you both decide to get the heck out of there. At that point, it becomes a puzzle game where the boy and the princess have to make their way through various rooms and the boy is the only one who can move blocks around so that the princess can climb them and the princess is the only one who can open the doors at the end of the level.
Without getting into the social criticism of the game, everybody who played it said something to the effect of “wow… I’ve never played anything like this before.”
Then, just a couple years later, this same team released Shadow of the Colossus. And that was yet another game that was like nothing we’d ever played before. You were just a guy and his horse who had to defeat (well, kill) several different colossi. The game was just riding your horse to these different stories-tall creatures, figuring out how to climb the creatures, finding their weak points, then exploiting these weak points. The feel of the game was strange… the colossi were huge and, for the most part, silent. There was this feeling of “these guys never did anything to me” and it was a very, very sad game even as it was technically amazing. (I only killed the first two colossi and then put the game away, depressed.)
Well, the team that made those two games has finally completed The Last Guardian:
As far as I can tell, this is going to be the most depressing game in the world and I will be left sobbing on the couch as I watch this beautiful creature die.
I can’t wait to get it.
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]
Well, as I was out of pocket for a week with family, we tended towards those old-school, real world games. The kind with actual physical objects.
Love Letter (a card game) was a surprising hit for all ages. My nephews both loved it (ages 8 and 9). I had owned the game for awhile, but hadn’t had a real chance to play it. I’d heartily recommend it as a family game for 3 or 4 players. (You can do 2 players, but we only tried 3 and 4 player).
We also played Guillotine and Pit (the latter being a classic Milton Bradley game). Pit’s always been the “late evening, perhaps not entirely sober” game of choice for the family.
We also tried Boss Monster, which was solid but not nearly as good as Love Letter. Boss Monster basically recreates a side-scrolling adventure, with you in the role of the Boss Monster building his dungeon for the heroes to, hopefully, die in.
I also got to play the fun game of “Shoot my new crossbow” which also included the bonus game of “Why can’t I cock this?”. (It was a real puzzle that required looking at the manual. Turns out I was trying to cock it wrong, which was akin to trying to pull back a compound bow after removing the pulleys).
After that it was “stick holes in target” and cackle with glee.Report