Plaidophile

Yesterday at the mall when I was buying aforementioned dress shoes, I stopped in on EBWorld to see if they had anything nifty, and in the used games bin was something nifty: a copy of Ico, like I'd been trying to locate for quite some time. (I mean, a working one, not a formal rental which had been scratched to hell being sold on eBay as "like new" by a seller who likes to rip people off by claiming that they never got the return back.)

It's extremely beautiful, ambient, and spooky. Very good use of light and texture and so on.

It's difficult, mostly in obnoxious ways, like trying to find levers to open doors, which are always hiding in shadows, though I have a sneaking suspicion it's my projector at fault there. I might try hooking the PS2 up to an NTSC monitor I have lying around to see if that helps any.

The fighting sequences are hideous on my wrists. Lots of button-mashing.

No idea why saves take so long. It's not as if there's a huge amount of necessary state... I mean, the amount of state in DDRMax is pretty huge (which songs have been played how many times, scores for every single song, which songs have been unlocked, etc.) and it takes about half a second to save, while in Ico it really only needs to keep track of where you are, the state of the puzzles which have been encountered, and which clusters of monsters have been defeated (and my understanding is that there's really not that many of those), and yet it takes about 15 seconds. I wonder if they're saving out every little bit of information, like exactly where every single monster, block, and switch in the entire game is, even if most of that's basically useless after you encounter it...

Anyway. Ico seems like the sort of game which I'll complete at a nice, slow pace, just so that I can savor it, and not get too fed up with how there'll obviously be a lot of repetition in certain groups of puzzles.

Also, I don't know why the various reviews have said that the princess is blind, because she obviously isn't; she's just kind of, well, stupid. :D