Guillermo Del Toro, the visionary director behind such fine filmic fayre as Hellboy II, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, Blade 2 and both parts of the forthcoming Hobbit movie has just named the only games that he considers to be “masterpieces”. Yep, we’re intrigued.

In an interview with edge-online the world’s foremost hirsute Mexican auteur reveals his admiration for GTAIV’s “beautiful” game engine and was similarly impressed with big-league battlers such as Call of Duty 4, Medal of Honour: Airborne and Army of Two. Readers won’t be surprised to discover that he has a fondness for games with a somewhat darker edge too: “I absolutely loved BioShock. I loved the world, the design, the lighting, the beautiful art direction and cinematography. I’m a fan of Silent Hill, Resident Evil and Devil May Cry. I love them all. The first Silent Hill was so beautiful, almost like a Lynch, Polanski or Romero type of horror experience,” he gushes.

However, none of the above quite achieves masterpiece status in the Director’s considered opinion. Indeed just two titles are deserving of that accolade – Fumito Ueda’s ‘Ico’ and ‘Shadow of the Colossus’.

We salute your exquisite taste, sir! Although Shadow of the Colossus gets a touch dull after a while and doesn’t offer sufficient intrigue in between the awe-inspiring boss battles. However Ico is seriously one of the finest, most involving game’s we’ve played in the last ten years – if not ever! More’s the pity that it was so widely ignored both times it was launched. But then genius is so often ignored in its own lifetime, right?

Elsewhere in the same interview we learn that Del Toro is “very happy” with the frankly mediocre Hellboy: the Science of Evil game released by Konami recently. Oh well, guess his quality filter doesn’t work both ways...