Steady sir

Fair enough I have not played Link's awakening, but I have played Twilight Princess, Wind waker, Majora's mask and Ocarina of time. My background of playing zelda is not too shabby, at the end of the day my good friend. The Ico games are far more unique than zelda, Shadow of the colussus will put any Zelda game to shame. With the Last Guardian and the new zelda set for 2010 things are looking interesting

Im ready for round 3 sir

Sorry, but Avinash_Tyagi's argument is so ridiculous that I just have to put my 2 cents in.

I'm not sure if you understand, but your theory of quality = sales must agree with one of two things:

1. Marketing, popularity, price, (and some other factors) affect sales. We can then conclude that these 3 also affect quality. It's kind of strange that you think commercials and price cuts can make a game better, don't you think?
2. Marketing, popularity, and price do not affect sales. This is even more ridiculous than the first point, so I'll assume you won't agree with this one.

Alright, on topic - I haven't yet tried Ico, but Shadow of the Colossus is one of my favorite games ever. It stands out from all other games - while the same can be said about the Zelda series, the same cannot be said about the most recent Zelda games. SotC had a bigger impact on me than TP, for example.

Even then, TP was an amazing game. The Team Ico series has a ways to go before it overthrows a series containing: Zelda 1, ALttP, OoT, to name a few.

lol, you call SotC unique? It has 16 endbosses and every endboss looks like an endboss from Zelda games...

See your argument is flawed, because many games that have marketing and price cuts don't sell and many games continue to sell long after the marketing and price no longer matter, when was the last time starcraft had commericals?  Still sells great even after all these years.  Popularity occurs because people like a game so the market is making a decision in popularity based on what they prefer.  Sales remin the only objective measure of the market's preference.  What the market prefers, they will buy, even when the commercials are not there

An example, xbox 360 and PS3 get a lot of marketing, I see tons of commercials for 360 and PS3 games and hardware, much more than for Wii, but they are still getting slaughered by the Wii, even with price cuts they Wii continues to outsell them, even with the arcade dropping below the Wii's price, Wii keeps on selling.  The popularity of the Wii is based on the market preferring the Wii.   When the generation began 360 was already out and had tons of marketing and PS3 was expected to dominate.  But what we have seen is the Wii has thundered into an insurmountable lead

No actually I don't have to agree with either bullet point, because neither is accurate, see the truth is it may have no effect, or it may have a small effect, as there are plenty of cases where marketing has little or no effect on sales, many games without commericals sell very well and many games with commercials sell very poorly, however, we can't be certain that marketing has no effect, since we can't compare the same game selling both with or without marketing, so the conclusion is that if it does have an effect, its a small one.