A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Here is a QTVR of the new mural that greets visitors to Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. (If you can load the image, you can then drag it around to rotate your view. Whee!) As the corresponding boston.com article notes, it's titled "The Divine Gas", but that's the artist's second choice after "The Divine Fart". I kind of wonder why it isn't called "The Divine Wind" which would be about 10 times funnier than either of those, but whatever.

I should really plan a trip to this museum with certain member or members of my flist who I strongly associate with both museum trips and fart jokes. who could that be

Does this game ever end? Gah.

I can't tell if I'd be happier or less happy with it if the game were harder. I haven't died once yet. I've gotten beat up a lot, but your character buffs up with more hit points fairly rapidly, and healing potions (actually healing doggie biscuits) are cheap and plentiful.

I certainly died a lot many years ago when playing Ocarina of Time, the game that this one takes much of its structure and design philosophy from. Death in that game served as a pacing mechanism; when I got killed I'd usually take a break, and that made the game feel longer. In Okami's case, though, the game itself is just... very long.

I love it and all, but I really hope it stops stringing me along soon!

Okami is a delight. Zarf called it the perfect PS2 game, in that it's published at the very end of the PS2's run (and perhaps at the end of Sony's console dominance), it has everything you'd want from a modern platformer, it's beautiful, and it's bloody enormous.

It manages to sneak in some real innovation in the corners, too. Most obviously, there's the visual style, making the world look like an animated Japanese art-scroll, everything made of thick brushstrokes and watercolors. Yes, it's just a variant of cel shading, which is nothing new, but they did a very very good job at it. I'm still discovering things about it, like the text captions floating in the sky, and the fact that if you look close you can see the grain of the "paper" in the background!

Tying into that is the wonderfully meta way that your character's divine powers manifest themselves, and I won't spoil it for you if you don't already know. (It was a surprise to me, and I loved it.) Really my only ding on it so far is that some of the cinematics run a little long. There's about 15 minutes of press-X-to-continue storytelling at the beginning before you get down to the business of actual play, and I was getting rather squirmy by the time I got my controller back. The conversations since then haven't been a problem, though.

I am especially struck by the subtle characterization of the protagonist. You control a divine animal, a white wolf invested with the powers of a Shinto sun god, but you are not so much a god yourself as an avatar. So even while you can kick monkey-demon ass and call down divine powers with a flick of the L-stick, you are also a puppydog, and do puppydog things.

There is, for example, a Bark Button. What does it do? It makes you bark. What does that do? Nothing, other than make you say "woof!" Am I nonetheless pressing it several times whenever there's nothing else going on? Yes, yes I am. There is also a Dig Holes button, which does come in handy sometimes, and you can bite people and chase animals around if you so desire. (They'll always come back; the game doesn't punish you for following doggie whims occasionally.)

You also have a dog's desire to do good by the people in the game. When you summon the powers of heaven to help an old lady get her washing done, you wag your tail gleefully while she heaps capital-P Praise on you, which acts as the game's XP. This double meaning of the word, suggesting that you receive both godly adoration and a scratch behind the ears, tickles me.

What else. oh, right, the fact that you get most of your XP not by beating up bad guys (though there's plenty of that) but by reviving the world. There are many scenes of withered trees exploding into bloom, grass and flowers bursting from the parched earth, and sparrows and happy bunnies spontaneously springing to life. And then you can feed the happy bunnies if you happen to have happy bunny food and little hearts come out of them and you get even more XP. It's crazy.

So yes, this is a good game.