Ico impressions

Well, I know I am extremely late to the party when it comes to Ico, but I have an excuse! I never had a PS2 until summer of '08 (I was a GameCube kid, what can I say). From what I have played, -- which is about 4 or 5 hours -- the game is absolutely beautiful. The game came out in North America in December of 2001. In my opinion, the game could probably be passed off for coming out within the last year or so, the developers pulled off a really cool technique with the graphics, where they kind of blur everything (which I read is called Bloom Lighting). To me, it makes the characters look a lot more realistic.

Probably one of my favourite things about this game is the level design. As someone who actually wants to be a level designer in the future, I tend to pay attention to the ways that environments are put together. In Ico, the developers did such an amazing job making the each area fit together perfectly. In fact, they did it so well that I didn't even get the feeling that the levels were each a separate area, but sort of like a path. How each area leads seamlessly into the next. It felt like you were actually in one big castle, all built specifically for you to escape from (which I think is what I think Team Ico was going for).

From what I have played so far, all the enemies are essentially the same, just opaque shadows that come out of black portals in the ground. The enemies are harmless to the main character, the only damage they can do is push you down -- their purpose isn't to go after you, but to go after the princess. If they grab hold of her, and take her down a hole, you have to revert back to a checkpoint.

Before I said that the game came out in 2001, so that means that Ico will be 8 years old in December. It's crazy that I never even played this game until now. It's so good.

The only thing I don't like about the game is not even the game's fault, but Reverend Anthony on the newest episode of Podtoid. I was listening to the ending of episode 87 and all of a sudden they started blurting out spoilers to the game, so I now know the identity of the shadows due to Podtoids douchyness, good thing I turned off the podcast before I learned more. I just hope that it wasn't too big of a spoiler.