The article is smart and wonderfully written, for the most part. However, I take issue with the following:

"Mostly, having to choose enhances the emotional resonance of the choice itself, as whatever the player does, whatever violence he eventually undertakes, it is of his own volition. Because the player is at liberty to choose, the consequences and sense of morality carry more weight."

Sometimes choices do allow for decisions of great moral consequence. However, I disagree that the ability to choose necessarily makes a story more touching or powerful. True, games can be like choose your own adventure books, but games can also be like novels. If you made a list of the more recent games with enthralling atmosphere and touching story, you'd have games like Psychonauts, Half-Life 2, and Bioshock; none of which have any choice whatsoever.

Ultimately, Shadow of the Colossus does not try to make you believe you are the character. You are experiencing the story of a helpless boy and his absurdly loyal horse, driven by passion and love. In the same way that a great author can make you feel like you are in some other time, Shadow of the Colossus can make you feel the boy's emotions, the sense of emptiness and the scale of the whole thing.

Choices, however, would be gratuitous. Not only that, but they would be going against the atmosphere and the story of the game. Nineteen-Eighty Four is a powerful book without choices, so are Ender's Game or This Side of Paradise. There is a reason the novel still stands, and why we're not all reading Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Similar to these great novels, this game is telling a story. I'm not saying any game with choices cannot be as touching, just that games do not need to have this sense of choice in order to be emotionally powerful.

Oh, also, when did you call it quits? If it was before the flying colossus, you should give it another shot. It gets better after the first few.

Also, uh... I guess maybe I shouldn't bother wondering why every third poster keeps harping on how I must suck if I have such problems with the game's controls.

I... don't remember even mentioning controls. I remember describing what a couple of buttons do, in an expressive context. That's about it.

Haha, couldn't get into it either but the speedrun:

http://speeddemosarchive.com/ShadowOfTheColossus.html

...was pure bliss.

sotc was amazing. I played through it in a day. I wish I could make games that good.

Its a nicely written article. Since I love the game so much I can't really take the points very seriously. They seem like nitpicking.

I'm having some serious issues with the er... issues... that the author raises. First of all, while I agree that the application of a HUD was a step back from Ico, why is this treated as a specific fault of Ueda? The author has clearly played a number of other games, with considerably more obnoxious HUDs, so why is this a failure of Ueda and not simply a bad gaming convention in general?

The camera issues he cites confused me as well. I never had a single issue with the camera, and in fact was consistently amazed at how Ueda managed to focus the action considering how wild the boss fights became. Not to mention the massive physical discrepancy between the player and the Colossi.

And fighting the Colossi (and the puzzle solving that went along with it) was hard? I'm at a loss. Yes, some fights took me longer to "figure out" than others but, like Ico, the solutions were always logical. And, like Ico, I had a habit of figuring it out when I wasn't playing it, and just going over the movement patterns in my head.

Normally I wouldn't nitpick at issues like this, and just chalk it up to a difference in opinion, but statements like this make me balk: "Mired in the annoying and insufferable gameplay..."

Annoying and insufferable gameplay? Where did he pull that from? His critique focuses on problems so minor that I have no idea how he comes up with that conclusion. Especially considering what he cites as problems are issues that are synonymous with video games in general.

An interesting article but still, I just can't shake the feeling our boy was talking completely out of his ass.

Logical in videogame terms, perhaps. But that's the crux of the problem right there.