I love beautiful video games.
Where to begin?
The most touching of all...
ICO (2001) PS2 - designed by Fumito Ueda
[cover of the official soundtrack]
vincent.sunkingdomstudio.com
vincent.sunkingdomstudio.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkcPkcAsKNI
Where to begin?
The most touching of all...
ICO (2001) PS2 - designed by Fumito Ueda
[cover of the official soundtrack]
vincent.sunkingdomstudio.com
guardianFumito Ueda broke new ground with PlayStation classic Ico. As he prepares his return, Ollie Barder took an exclusive tour through his sketchbook
Ollie Barder
Thursday 18 August 2005
Four years ago, a Japanese game called Ico hit the PlayStation 2. An ethereal and elusive opera, it never became a financial success, but it remains deeply respected by gamers and is regarded as one of the few creatively influential PS2 titles. The game's creator, Fumito Ueda - whose next game, Shadow of the Colossus, is due for release in October - says he always planned to be different.
"When we began to work on Ico, we made sure to gather staff that did not have fixed ideas about video games," he says. "We did try hard throughout the process of making Ico that the game would not resemble anything else as much as possible."
The premise behind Ico was deceptively simple: a boy, the title character, is trapped in a castle. He finds a girl, Yorda, who does not speak his language, but they work together to escape. Ico's inclusive design is probably one of its strongest points, and reason enough for its critical success. It is unsurprising, then, that Ueda intentionally created the game this way.
"There were people around me who did not play games: I very much wanted them and other people to play the game," he says. "When you confront a game that takes 100 hours to clear, your fighting spirits would falter. If a game has a scenario, the best thing for that game is to be neither long nor short. So on Ico, we were thinking about five to six hours' playtime. But it also seems that there are mixed opinions about whether the game is substantial enough."
Ico was also a departure from the norm because its gameplay predominantly portrays benign cooperation at a time when most titles tended towards violence.
"The game is not about antithesis," says Ueda. "I play various types of games myself, and I think that the desire for destruction is also a human instinct.
"At the same time, it is in our instinct to protect something or someone, as Ico does in the game. I don't think one instinct is good and the other is bad, and I did not regard the element of cooperation so highly. However, this could not be dismissed in terms of game design."
The main character in the story is mute, and not by accident. "If conversation had been possible, the player would wish to control Yorda via conversation. I thought that taking one's hand was more meaningful since conversation would be difficult to implement. Therefore, the game is not about good versus evil. Ico has his own reasoning and the queen has hers, too. I wanted to leave the decision whether what Ico did was right or wrong to the player."
Ueda was a very inquisitive child. As he explains: "I enjoyed catching and keeping living things, such as fish or birds. Other than that, I liked both watching and making animation. Basically, I seemed to be interested in things that moved."
At school, his favourite subjects included art, which still plays an active role in Ueda's life and could have ended up being his career. "If I was not in the games industry, I would want to become a classical artist. Though I regard not only games but also anything that expresses something - be it films, novels or manga - as forms of art."
The way Ueda approaches games is rather telling, as is his first meaningful gaming experience. "Lemmings impressed me, as I sensed life on the TV screen for the first time in my life. I often import games from abroad and play them. On such occasions, my imagination sometimes gets stimulated more, as I don't understand the language. Ico is a game that intentionally tries to achieve that."
vincent.sunkingdomstudio.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkcPkcAsKNI
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all on youtube--the lighting and everything so lovely
