Oooookami!

Monday, September 25, 2006

I'm six hours into Okami and wondering when the game is going to start sucking. Certainly there are some annoying things, like having to fight this creep Waka (no, not that Wakka) and how the PS2's joysticks are not even the slightest bit suited to painting. But everything else - everything! - is just perfection.

It also warms my heart to see a game take my... uh, unannounced advice and clone a successful title in a genre then slowly add their own spin. Okami is like Zelda, right? I used to think that was just a useful analogy. No. My jaw dropped when, while inside a giant tree, I found myself leaping from one flower to another as they floated serenely in the sky. Sound familiar? Still, that's the long and short of it (I don't consider bombs to be entirely original to Zelda).

The combat gets really fun when you start getting new weapons. I currently have a set of rosary beads as my secondary weapon, allowing Ammy (the white wolf) to be a mini machine gun in between bouts of smacking enemies with her oversized mirror. You start using the celestial brush in combat a lot, drawing circles to open up flower monsters and cutting the strings of monsters with giant banjo things. Many of the monsters are monkeys, slapping their butts at you when you miss. I vaguely remember the Japanese having this thing about dogs and monkeys hating each other, much as we have dogs and cats.

I'm still struggling along with my revived comic. I remember why I put this stuff down: it's hard as balls to come up with five rows of content that (a) push the plot along and (b) are even funny in the least. Plus a snappy title and witty quote and something to talk about on the home page that I haven't discussed here (being obsessed with Okami, it's more Okami chatter). The reason I've been able to keep going this long is the Grand List of RPG Cliches, also known as The Vague Outline for the Rest of The Villain. Where do real writers turn for inspiration? Alcohol? Drugs? I'm on my forth bottle of Dasani today and I haven't come up with a single line for #105. Dear mom: send booze.

For Christmas I've decided to head down to Ft. Lauderdale for a few days. Plane rides from Tallahassee are running $300 right now. I've been told to book early just for availability, as the pricing isn't going to change much. If any of my old friends read this blog, feel free to say hi. Or don't say hi and just make a small hole in your itenerary sometime between December 22 and 27. Yeah.

I'm also debating starting a Tallahassee Gamers League (or some nonsense). I know the place to go for gamers my age is FSU's campus, but my schedule doesn't permit a whit of that and I can't sniff out anything on the local networks. Facebook and CraigsList are barren of gaming events in Tallahassee and so is FSU's own Student Life Building page. Since my search for a female relationship in this miserable city has stagnated, I wonder if I couldn't rustle up some hardcore gamers. I know my good side has considered a Tallahassee Programmer's Group... should I try to scare up some like-minded gamepad jockeys? Good idea?