ICO creator to speak at GDC Comments by Robert Purchese

Let's hope so

What with my Xbox 360 having just RRoD'ed such an announcement could be just the thing that would finally make me go out and get that bloody PS3.

Son of A!

One of the few years that work keeps me from going to the GDC (gotta try to hang onto that paying job in this economic climate) and the ICO guys decide to show their new project. I bet they do a bloody hands on too!

I love the work of the ICO guys. It harks back to the days of the spectrum and C64 (not the visuals I mean the gameplay mechanics) where you have a lone hero out to save the world. Kind of like games like fairlight and wizarddy (the edge version). These days it's all fps and the arcade adventures/exploration games seem to have been removed from the equasion. The ICO team brought them back in style.

I came.

It's a roundtable discussion.

Not the place to announce anything at all. Rubbish reporting on the net as usual.

What is Emil Pagliarulo doing there? Telling everyone how to turn Fallout into Oblivion with guns? That guy should not be allowed anywhere without his parents.

So, errr, no Lost & Damned then eh?

j/k ... but still, is it just me or is every new PS3 news boring as sin these days?

If he says the word, I'm buying a PS3 immediately.

Miiiguel..... It's just you!

yesterday ?

back2funk: was a 1 on 1 joke. See Halo Wars thread...

"Telling everyone how to turn Fallout into Oblivion with guns?"

Never played any of the previous Fallout games but the change certainly benefited the horrible Oblivion. With its terrible 3rd person camera, ridiculous animation, awkward 1st person melee combat and arrow-resistant enemies as soon as you leveled up once or twice, the addition of guns that actually allow you to kill your foes without running backwards for 10 minutes, hoping you won't fall off a cliff, is huge... ;)

uhhh YA!!!

want it!

ICO was a milestone in gaming PERIOD!

Fuck all those other exclusive and subsequent non-exclusive games, Ico 3 is the reason I bought a PS3. IMHO, Ico and SotC are peerless.

wwwww--ooooo-aaaaaahhhHHHHH!!!!

fantastic. all intrigued. what's gonna pop up? finished three games the last few years: GoW:CoO, ICO and colossus... (the first was over before I knew it). got bored of all others before seeing the end of them -although corruption's looking good so far.

anyhows, if games can be art, ICO and colossus are two prime examples. here's to hopes. :beer:

@Luckyjim

Not peerless but I guess a lot of you were not about in the spectrum and c64 days when graphics were totally irrelevant and it HAD to bge all about the gameplay.

Wizardry for c64 (the edge version) was a great game where you had genuine fun puzzles and spells that required you to use them sparingly or only in one particular place.

Fairlight, where you explored a castle looking for a book to free what you thought was the good guy all the way up until the final scene. You could continually fight these regenerating knights until you discovered that killing them and then taking the helmets from which they regenerated and destroying those, would remove them forever. Objects had weight and you could stack them to get to seemingly inaccessible places (remember this was on a 48k spectrum!).

The ICO team go for gameplay first and foremost. The reason their games are so good is that very few developers these days go for gameplay over graphics. As a result the latest games look amazing but, play like dogs!

@ Penhalion

I'm 27 and cut my gaming teeth on the C64. But, saying that, I'm first to admit that games of that era hold no value to me other than nostalgia. As for Ico and SotC it's less about the gameplay but more about the atmosphere. Both games do a terrific job of telling a story and giving you a sense of place purely through interaction and not, as most games seem to do, verbose dialogue. It's the starkness and ambiguity of both titles that really hit the emotional target for me. As many have pointed out on EG, there is a real sense of guilt when dispatching each colossi. It is in this respect that they are peerless.

Well it looks like I'll finally have to buy a PS3 then.

Obviously I want to see what else Team ICO can pull off, but part of me wants a new version of SotC. I thought the combination of gameplay, astomphere and awesome set pieces in that game deserves a full on next-gen sequel.

I wanna play it again right now, but SFIV has taken over my gaming time.

@Luckyjim

Fair enough. I found the same purity of environments and atmostphere on those old titles, when I first played them and that is why I don't find ICO to be peerless. When those old blocky spectrum or C64 graphics were all I knew, there was no expectation that they should have bloom and hi-def textures etc. etc. You just read the developers backstory and played the game based on that.

Even today, playing ICO again I find the graphics distractingly blocky and I know that I couldn't ever play Fairlight or Wizardry again and get the same buzz I got the first time around. If any of those games was re-made today. It would need to have the full gammut of special effects thrown at it to even get a good review score from todays hype addicted journalists.

I can't wait for this, but it would be pretty stupid to buy a machine for something you've never seen.

@Les

You could give the previous Fallout games a try, I believe they stand up really well today. They _are_ excellent, after all.

Fairlight was insanely good. I still turn it on occasionally in the ZX emulator I have on my dashboard. That said, the one that really moved my imagination was Tir Na Nog.

@ Menage

Why? I'd say most people do that - buy a machine for the potential games. At least Team Ico have a good track record.

True, but as I recall the Timesplitters series also was pretty decent, and now look at Haze.

Don't get me wrong, I bought a PS3 when MGS4 came out and am loving it a bit more every day. But buying something for something which MIGHT be good isn't really the way I would spend 400 euro's. Buy it for LBP, Killzone 2, Wipeout, Nobi Nobi, whatever, but for a game which you know absolutely nothing of???

Also, if you bought it for that game, you could have saved a few quid me thinks if you would have waited.

As time passes my appreciation for ICO and - especially - SotC grows larger. Fingers crossed for another superb and unique experience from those guys.

Damn, let it be so!! If there is a new Team Ico game coming this year, I hope they don't have ridiulous 4 month delay like SotC did... Seriously, there wasn't exactly alot of dialogue to translate, all they added was motion blur to disguise the awful frame rate!! (which somehow didn't interfere at all with the games quality)

Come on ICO guy, give us something ffs.

If he says the word, I'm waiting for a release date. Then waiting.