Shadow of the Colossus -- Revisited and (OH PLEASE SAY IT AIN'T SO!) Reviewed!

Note: This "review" was posted on that wonderful Shakespearean website, IGN, a few years back. It's not very good -- even by IGN standards! -- seeing how I received a "thumbs down" from some jerk on the internet. Oh well. Can't win 'em all!

Well, after a year of holding down the R1 button, desperately trying to cling to the grassy-hair stuff on the back of a giant colossus, I decided enough was enough.

My right index finger was getting cramped. I needed to beat this foul beast of a game and I needed to beat it NOW.

So I did. And it was extremely frustrating.

But at the same time, I was totally in awe of what I was experiencing.

There aren't many "Holy Crap" moments in video games anymore. The last game I played with these moments was Twilight Princess -- I'm hoping that riding an over-sized top while fighting a giant floating skeletor-head made other people shout "Holy Crap, this is fricking awesome" at their television sets while waving their controllers in their air and weeping with pure joy.

But that might be just me.

Shadow of the Colossus doesn't have giant skeletor-heads. Instead, it has a huge flying worm that makes you turn to your brother and scream directly into his ear, "Holy [expletive], this is [expletive] epic!"

I kid you not. Shooting the bulbs on the worm's belly, riding neck-and-neck with its arms, making a death-defying leap onto its climbable appendages, rushing headlong through grassy-hair, and then shoving your sword into the poor worm's convenient weak points -- aw, man, I did not want that battle to end.

No other game, I thought, made me feel so much like a badass. I felt that Shadow of the Colossus wasn't just a game -- it was an experience.

But, after I massacred a couple other colossi, those feelings did a complete 360.

And that was when I met the final boss.

* * *

Some games make you want to throw your controller at the wall, and then run and cry into your pillow, cursing the world for all its misery.

When those fricking balls of electricity began to plummet in my direction, I could feel the frustration-factor start to sink in.

I was shot. I was shot again. I was knocked down. I could not get up.

"Get the [expletive] up, you dirty son of a [expletive]!"

Why the hell wouldn't the game let me get up?

Oh, because this is an experience, and not a game?

In a game, when I get shot with electricity, I get knocked down, and then have the ability to immediately get back up.

However, since Shadow of the Colossus is an experience that walks the fine line between reality and fiction, I have to wait ten seconds while frantically rotating my joystick, all the while screaming at the TV for the down-and-out character on screen to get to his virtual feet.

And then I get shot again. And again. And again.

And then I got mad.

Anyway, I beat the game. Great twisty ending, yadda yadda yadda, you've heard it all before.

But while the credits were rolling, I reflected on what had made this game so different from anything else I had ever experienced.

And then it hit me:

I have not been more scared in a videogame than when I swam out into a calm lake, all alone, anticipating the cold icy fangs of death to form beneath the dark surface and consume me, all the while a faint wind howled along the walls of the valley.

It evoked a Jaws-instilled fear that has never released me from its ever-tightening grip, even in the most shallow of swimming pools.

And for that, I -- someone who has the coldest of hearts, numbest of souls, and the personality of a brick -- commend Shadow of the Colossus for making me feel something.