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In the Shadow of Greatness
1up.com has a piece on the making of Shadow of the Colossus, the sequel to Ico (arguably one of the first innovative titles for the PS2). From the article: "In the works for nearly four years now, Shadow of the Colossus is clearly the result of different thinking. While Western development teams try to one-up each other in terms of how big their guns are, how interactive their environments can be, how urban their attitude is, and how much their X-treme soundtracks rock, Ueda's studio is cutting its game from an entirely different cloth. One look at Shadow and you'll realize that this game carries the DNA of Ico, from its sun-soaked environments to its minimal cast of characters to its austere "level" design. But while the majority of Ico's discovery and puzzle-solving elements were confined within the walls of a finite space (in this instance, a castle), Shadow of the Colossus, shall we say, branches out."
And really out of touch with reality here, from the summary:
While Western development teams try to one-up each other in terms of how big their guns are, how interactive their environments can be, how urban their attitude is, and how much their X-treme soundtracks rock, Ueda's studio is cutting its game from an entirely different cloth.
Um, first of all, there are many western companies making interesting and innovative games. Secondly, there are also Japanese companies that are churning out crap(as well as good games)... That just seems like a pointless slight made to make the submitter feel superior to other people....
Monstar L
You're missing out if you play games exclusively on PCs. And with the crashing prices on consoles (don't forget eBay too), it's just silly not to buy one if you're a broad gaming fan.
For the majority of one-PC people whose machine sits nearby and is connected to an "OK" PC sound system, a "good" gaming experience is actually pretty poor (I'm talking about the A/V quality not the gameplay), although most people happily live with it, until they experience better. Disks and PC fans are intrusive, even when low volume, and the playing posture and environment is usually more suited to office work than relaxing.
Of course, there are exceptions to the above, and my setup in my study has all the computing machinery tucked two rooms away in the computer room upstairs, and the digital sound is routed to a pretty reasonable secondary HiFi sound system with large speakers well mounted on walls and the study well soundproofed with soft but heavy drapes. There is total silence, you can hear a pin fall on the table.
But despite that, my PC gaming in the study is still crap compared to my console gaming in the lounge, which benefits from a high-end home theatre A/V setup and a great environment. The regular PC gaming experience just cannot be compared to this, not even when it's a good one like I have.
So, I understand entirely why their focus is on consoles rather than PCs, given the very mood-oriented nature of Ico and its followup. Ico was sheer mood perfection in addition to its novelty, and in a supportive gaming environment it just took your breath away.
While I play a lot of games on the PC (hence the investment in the great study), anyone who thinks that this is on the same footing as console gaming as an immersive experience just hasn't sampled the possibilities at the high end of the latter. And it remains true at the low end --- for most people, the lounge is a nicer environment than the PC workplace, it's that simple.
And no, you can't place a PC in the lounge environment without destroying that environment, not even if the machinery itself is in a remote room, because the basis of PC gaming is keyboard and mouse. And if you remove those, all you end up with is another console, so the argument is no longer even relevant.
Take almost useless character from point A to point B while protecting it (her) from low-level enemies and solving puzzles along the way. Done. I loved Ico, but its genre of gaming has been in video games for a long time - at least since early Final Fantasy - and is present within current-gen games like Metal Gear and Grand Theft Auto. Forms of it have even been in place in games from the Commodore-64 days, like Lemmings. So where is the innovation?
The only innovation I can think of is the invented gibberish language spoken by the characters. But that wasn't really part of the gameplay and the effect of this invented language is no different in effect than using an actual language not spoken by the game player. Other games might have used invented language too. I know FF X did. Ico's contribution to gaming - beyond fun - was in its total, unmatched, artistic beauty. The graphics were solid, but the use of composition, color, tonal depth, contrast, scale, lighting, atmospherics, and such were unique within in-game play.
-- and I'll say Rez was the first innovative game for the Playstation.