Gotta be the nicest looking PS2 game running at 512x224. Interlacing? Hell no, me and the boys about that low-res progressive scan.

I don't have much to say about Ico, which I guess is a little surprising because I feel like Ico is also a game that is important enough to be discussed at length. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Another World with its meticulously keyframed animations and focus on creating a particular tone, though a bit wonky from a pure gameplay perspective. You spend much of Ico jumping between platforms, climbing, and solving puzzles, and on its own none of that stuff feels particularly good to me. However, it's all in service of something more: selling you on the bond between Ico and his partner, Yorda.

The thing that makes Ico work is how effectively it conveys the relationship between its two lead characters without relying upon dialog. It's all communicated through action, a lot of which you're participatory in, and though I find certain aspects of its gameplay to not always be fun to interact with directly, the way it loops back into Ico's emotional core is what makes it all work in the end. Plus, holding hands is pretty nice. Call me "touch starved" or whatever, but I'd like to grab someone by the wrist and yank them around really hard while going "Uh! Uh!"

Ico is a good game, but it's also not one I find myself all too eager to return to. I think once you've absorbed what it's about, you've gotten all you're going to get from it. Or at least that's true of me. Shadow of the Colossus is the more approachable of the two, but that's because you get to fight and kill a bunch of cool monsters. Uh, heh, sorry Ico, but I'd take a cool guy action game over a contemplative hand-holding sim any day! B-)