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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."
EA ;)
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
And sadly it still won't sell nearly as well as 90% of the rehashed crap on the market this Xmas. The American game market depresses me. The poor bastards should just sell out and make the hero a but-kicking hero in a cloak who runs around smashing crates for the goodies inside. That's what most people seem to want.
Unless they've gone back on what they said before, this is not a sequel to Ico. Yes it's made by the same devteam. Yes it's done in a similar style. However, this does not make it a sequel.
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
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.