Okay I will now play Sky Odyssey, a game which nobody cares about but has music composed by Kow Otani

It's a PS2 exclusive from 2001. As far as I'm aware it's basically an arcade flight sim. No combat, just cool canyons and stuff to fly through with a reasonably complex input system

I put about twelve thousand hours into the Just Cause 3 wingsuit so this sounds extremely my jam

The graphics are Bad but there's shadow of the colossus music so who even cares this rules

GAME
OF
THE
DECADE

so my first 2.5 minutes in this game have been an absolute joy

excited to see the outcome of further minutes

Okay wow either the first level is ridiculously intense or you're not actually SUPPOSED to just leave the throttle maxed out at all times lol

It's got Proper flight controls, meaning you mainly turn by rolling sideways and pitching up

but the camera doesn't roll with the plane so if you go inverted all your controls feel backwards

okay so the pusher-prop plane I was using in that video above goes literally 4x as fast as the biplane lol

also holding L1+R1 is a brake, which is never explained outside of the physical paper manual

okay this game has established a really solid system where you're constantly deciding "okay do I use the slow boring plane and spend 10 minutes flying through this canyon, or do I pick the other plane that goes FOUR TIMES AS FAST and then spend an hour crashing and restarting"

the manual also explains that you can deploy landing gear mid-flight and use it to pinball yourself off of walls without exploding, which is a level of Videogame most of us could only dream of designing

To address this phrasing: okay actually a WHOLE LOT of you care about this game; my statement was based on the fact that it got middling reviews and costs like $5 and I've heard it mentioned on this website literally once ever lol

Okay I cleared the labyrinth level with the fast plane it took like an hour and a half

The actual successful run was 7 minutes, with the FAST plane. There aren't checkpoints; you've gotta just nail an entire 7+ minute run flawlessly or start over

this game is hard wow

the mission order is sorta nonlinear, and you get upgrades after clearing a level, so maybe that was one you're really supposed to just return to when you've upgraded your planes more, but dang

(also it seems like the unlockables are less "upgrades" and more "tuning options" that let you adjust handling characteristics, but everything that boosts one stat penalizes a different one)

the designers of this game genuinely believe that the lcoolest thing a human could ever imagine is Flying Past Falling Boulders

I just completed an entire level and then exploded on the runway at the very end because I forgot to deploy landing gear

you should play this game but you should play it on an emulator with save states lol

it's REALLY hard, which I honestly appreciate, but like... having to replay the beginning section of a 5- to 10-minute run every time you make a single mistake is not a fun form of difficulty

this is probably the most esports thing I have ever done

collision geometry doesn't entirely line up with visible geometry, in true early-2000s videogame fashion lol

Sky Odyssey dev meeting: "guys, what if.... guys... hey what if thereGUYS
WHAT IF THERE WERE ROCKS
THAT FALL DOWN"

This game's graphics are pretty primitive even by 2001 standards, and even then it has pretty serious framerate problems, so I was pretty surprised that it does clouds using a TON of gigantic alpha quads

...then I remembered oh right, that was like the PS2's Whole Thing

I don't know enough about hardware to know why, but in comparison to everything in its era (including PCs) the PS2's fillrate was INSANE, which resulted in a ton of games having visual effects that relied on absolutely incredible amounts of overdraw

famous examples being the fog in Silent Hill 2, and the shell-based fur and vegetation in Shadow of the Colossus