Mon, Oct 22, 2001 page24

• New game has tiny gestures that upstage demons

  VIDEO PLAY Sony has come out with an intensely realistic game for PlayStation 2 featuring character responses, intelligent monsters and breathtaking 3-D graphics

  • By Charles Herold / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  A boy and a girl walk across an old stone bridge, stopping when they reach a section that has collapsed. The boy jumps across the gap, reaches for the other side and pulls himself up. He stretches his arm out and calls out over the roaring wind for the girl to jump across. Nervously she paces the edge, trying to decide whether she can make the jump, then stops and leaps. For a moment it seems she will miss the boy's hand, but he grabs her wrist, almost pulled off the bridge by her weight.

  As she hangs hundreds of feet above the water, a dove flies by, dropping a feather that floats down into the mist. Breathing heavily, the boy pulls his companion to safety.

  Jumping has been a part of videogames for decades, but it has never been as enthralling as it is in Ico, an action-adventure game from Sony Computer Entertainment America that turns game play into rare and wonderful art.

  

  In the fantastic landscapes of the game Ico, top, characters move and behave with the same fluidity as real people. Portal Runner takes Vikki, a minor character from the Army Men series, and places her at the center of a game of exaggerated action.

  PHOTO: NY TIMES

  The Game

  The game begins as the boy, Ico, is abandoned to die in a decrepit castle. His village considers him cursed because, like one boy in each generation, he has horns growing from his head. Breaking free of his chains, he discovers and frees a caged girl, Yorda. Fragile, mysterious and glowing with an ethereal light, Yorda speaks in a foreign tongue and is unable to answer Ico's questions.

  The player controls the movements of Ico, whose goal is to escape from the castle with Yorda. Ico can leap over chasms and climb ropes, but frail Yorda can do little, so Ico must remove obstacles and create pathways so she can cross. He must also fend off the shadowy creatures of oily black smoke that seek to drag Yorda back to her cage.

  In spite of fanciful touches like Ico's horns and the shadow demons, the most striking element of the game is the sense of reality conveyed through the characters' movements. If the player has Ico take Yorda's hand and start running, she stands passively still until her arm is pulled taut, then stumbles forward, her weight slowing Ico for a moment before she starts running along with him.

  That small series of movements takes less than a second or two but brings the characters to life. The movements are so real that I assumed they were created through motion-capture technology, in which people are filmed and digitized, but I learned later that the characters were animated by hand.

  Yorda's reactions are as realistic as her movements. When Ico is not holding her hand she may get distracted and run over to look at an object, sometimes excitedly running from one thing to the next.

  If Ico calls Yorda, she looks around to see where he is and then runs towards him, stopping at corners to orient herself. If Ico hits the wall with his weapon, Yorda will step back with a cry.

  The shadow creatures are unusually intelligent, and two may attack Ico while a third grabs Yorda and runs or flies away with her. While the fights are not especially challenging, the creatures' evident intelligence makes them remarkably compelling.

  The castle the two children must escape is a wonderful creation, a crumbling behemoth set on cliffs overlooking the ocean with a weak sun shining through the mist. Desolate and beautiful, Ico creates scenic panoramas as gorgeous as anything in Myst but with fully rendered 3-D environments rather than still images.

  Strange thrill

  There is a strange thrill in gazing down from a castle turret at the rotating sails of the windmill you climbed hours before. Ico is the most beautiful game yet created for PlayStation 2, which suggests that even with newer, more powerful consoles coming out this fall, PlayStation 2 is still a force to be reckoned with.

  Ico's simplicity is remarkable. As a game, it is simply a collection of clever, challenging puzzles interspersed with mild action, equal parts Tomb Raider and Myst. While other games try to woo the player with elaborate plots and clever dialogue, Ico is a pure game experience: The story is nothing but the player's thought process as he guides the protagonists.

  Personality is expressed almost entirely through movement and sound. At times you'll want to stop playing just to observe Yorda's tentative movements or to hear the children's ragged breathing and unsteady footfalls echoing through the castle. Ico is not a perfect game, but it is a game of perfect moments.

  A competitor

  3DO's action-adventure game Portal Runner offers a similar kind of jumping and puzzle-solving but replaces Ico's minimalist sensibility with bright colors and a nonsensical story. If Ico is as perfectly drawn as a Kurosawa film, Portal Runner is as garish and goofy as a Hollywood action movie, and just as much fun.

  Like nearly a third of 3DO's games, Portal Runner is part of the Army Men series, in which all of the heroes and villains are small plastic toy soldiers. While the conceit is a clever one, the games themselves tend to be forgettable. More spinoff than sequel, Portal Runner stars a peripheral character from the series, the reporter and army brat Vikki.

  The plot is fairly absurd. The buxom femme fatale Brigitte Bleu decides to marry Vikki's boyfriend, Sarge. Describing Vikki as "a precious treasure ready to be buried," Brigitte lures her through one of several accessible glowing portals into a prehistoric world.

  With the aid of a friendly lion, Vikki battles dinosaurs, jumps across gorges and solves puzzles, all of which have so little to do with the story that I was surprised when the plot kicked back in.

  Portal Runner is a wonderfully calculated piece of entertainment, with a spunky heroine for girls, a zebra-skin bikini for adolescent boys and a friendly lion for younger children. For older girls, Vikki has a costume change with each new world, and one can imagine every outfit in a Britney Spears video.

  While Ico's lyrical, melancholy finale is far more affecting than Portal Runner's noisy one, both games succeed in their goals. Portal Runner's toy action figures are as plastic as Ico's characters are real.
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