Just got done with an Indiana Jones marathon I put myself through. I got that DVD trilogy set from Walmart this weekend. It's been out for a while, and I've wanted it since I hear about it, and I've been waiting for the price to drop. I figure after so long, the price is about as low as it's going to get for another long while, so I just went ahead and got it. I've had the VHS tapes for ages, but I don't have a VCR on my computer... so I never watch them.

But, man, I'm tellin' ya'... those movies will never get old. I mean, sure, they're old... and some of the special effects are laughable, but I don't think I'll ever get tired of them. I might not feel like watching them sometime, but I'm sure that if someone else put them in anyway, that I'd just become glued to the screen. Except for maybe Temple of Doom. That's some creepy business there. Not even Event Horizon makes me so edgy. Probably because Temple of Doom delves into some... more specific nastiness than Event Horizon's generic "evil". But The Last Crusade is still, by far, my favorite. Lost Ark coming in second.

Got another wonderful eBay bidder this weekend. We sold a couple of items "as is" and they're hopping mad because they weren't what they expected. Maybe they were damaged in transit, I don't know. But if you expect to buy something clearly stated "as is", you should be prepared to take responsibility for the fact that the seller is telling you he doesn't guarantee the condition of the item, and if you commit to being the fina bidder, you need to just deal with what you get. This moron eBay bidder doesn't seem to understand the concept of "as is" and they're disputing the item, claiming that what we sold them was not as advertised. Even though we specifically mentioned that this was being sold "as is". Geez... this happened with that other guy, too, only he didn't whine to PayPal for his money back. What's with the human race these days? They all have a total lack of BRAIN MATTER!

We'll probably have to end up refunding them and garnering a negative feedback. It ticks me off at first, but after a few hours, I cool down and settle back into my "I don't give a care" mode and just do whatever it takes. After all, it's not me losing the money, hwahaha-er... did I say that out loud? Uhm... *ahem*

I cancelled my World of Warcraft account. I can imagine all the startled readers out there... all four of you. But, yes, I cancelled WoW. Only temporarily. I figured... I haven't played it in a month anyway, so why renew it? I've pretty much seen all there is to see and done all there is to do so far, so I'm waiting for the expansion pack to come out before I renew. Unless I get bored enough to play it again, but that probably won't happen for a while. I've got plenty of other things to do.

With the free monthly fees I have now, I decided to spend this month's normally WoW-dedicated funds to a game called Defcon, by Introversion Software. The guys behind the game Uplink and the very neat Darwinia. Anyone around here had the guts to see a movie called WarGames? About that kid who inadvertantly triggers what could be a precursor to global thermonuclear war? Pretty sad movie... typical 80s. Anyway, the game Defcon is based off the computer interface of a system in WarGames. The giant supercomputer that monitors worldwide military assets and nuclear launch sites. Defcon looks exactly like that. It's like a quick (relatively) real time strategy game... a lot like Risk, actually. You place your units in the first rounds (Defcon 5 and 4), and by the time the game timer hits Defcon 3, you can start firing conventional weapons from aircraft and naval fleets. You continue fighting through Defcon 2, until the timer hits Defcon 1, which allows all players to fire nuclear weapons at will. It usually starts with submarine nukes, followed by a wave of aircraft bombers, and then, finally, you launch from your fixed missile silos. (Not at all necessarily in that order, though... but that's what seems to work best.)

When you're launching missiles from your silos, your country becomes vulnerable to other nuclear strikes because, you see, the silos, when they're not in launch mode, act as anti-aircraft/anti-missile defense systems. When they're in launch mode, however, they cannot defend. So it very accurately depicts and induces decisions like "do I risk a first strike or sit through their first strike and then retaliate?" See, if you launch a first strike... then... while you did get off the critical first strike, you become incredibly vulnerable to their retaliation and it's all too possible that you wind up in worse condition then they are.

The motto of the game is "everybody dies... but maybe you can die the least". (Or close enough.) Which is the also the object of the game! To lose the least. You WILL get nuked and you WILL lose cities... but maybe you can hit more of their cities than they hit yours. Really quite the morbid game... but that's what makes it fun! It's really addicting and tense and strategic... and the best part of it all is that they're independent developers. More or less a group of friends who brainstorm and come up with a really awesome game, and then release it digitally.

You can download the demo and see what it's like. It even supports multiplayer, but only one demo client per game. But it's only $17.50... and it supports the best of the "bedroom programmers", and you probably spend more than that on movies, CDs and fast food in a month. I'm tellin' ya'... it's very much worth it!

To switch topics... I have an announcement! Okay, not really... I'm just going to show off. But I moved my blog to a new server... my server! I figured out how to get my paid-for domain name to work with a dynamic IP just yesterday and decided to do what I've wanted to do all along! No more funky port redirections and complex domain names! From now on, it's just www.rivenwolf.net! Behind the scenes, my blog loves it! I got bombed with pingbacks when I first loaded up the new dashboard... It's finally able to tell me who links to my site now!

I probably won't be using my server for anything heavy. Just a light personal site, like I've always had. But, of course, TW wants to fix his server now, since I've stopped using it. Hah... after losing a customer, uh-huh. Well, too late! I already love it here. You're going to have to find a way to make me WANT to move back. This'll be interesting, bwahaha.

I love dynamic relative websites... you can just pick them up and move them to anywhere and they'll automatically update all their links. I wonder how many people noticed (if it was even possible) the 5 or so minutes of downtime. Had some craziness with the domain name servers, and with SQL not wanting to export and import properly... but that's all fixed now!

But anyway... I'm going to find something to eat. I'm hungry, and I'll bet there wasn't anything fixed for supper, so I'm going to have to find something like... dry cereal or something bland like that. Hooray!

So we went to see The Illusionist tonight with my brother, a friend, and his cousin. It was good. Not an action flick... very story driven and lots of make-you-think stuff. I'd recommend seeing it very much. I might discuss that later. I just want to make mention of what happened after the show before I forget.

It's about 11:15pm. We get up and we head for the main entrance. I wasn't paying much attention to the particulars, but there were an awful lot of people crowding around the doors. As we passed through (which I commented was rather like a maze) I suddenly noticed that there were about... oh... maybe seven people in uniforms congregated around the entrance who were surrounding a small mob of regular folk. Yep! Police officers! As we passed, I heard one say "we're really sorry about this, we..." but I couldn't catch the rest. Friend's cousin said they were talking about how they "jumped the gun on this one". Hmm!

That's some major excitement for around here. Never heard what exactly was going on. There was an SUV with fenced windows and a very angry dog inside. It looked like the truck was unmarked, but it was really dark, so I don't know if it was the police car. Since there was a dog inside a truck designed for carrying it, and assuming it was the police car, we came to the conclusion that it was a call on drugs or something. That, or it was a bomb-sniffing dog. All this happening while we were happily watching our movie.

Also, let me take a break to trash Microsoft haters. Yes, I'm probably talking to YOU! *ahem* But anyway... people are making such a gigantic fuss about how Microsoft is abusing the definition "Release Candidate" by using them as releases to test bugs on. I don't know WHY they're whining like they are... but they are. "Release Candidate means that this release should be ready for release! Not another beta bug hunt!" Whine, whine.

Maybe that's true. Maybe Microsoft shouldn't do that. They've put out Release Candidate 2, with bugs fixed from RC1. People are still going on about how they shouldn't use RCs as a bug hunt. But, oh, hey, look! Mozilla Firefox 2 has entered Release Candidate 2, also! Is anyone complaining about THAT? No... they're not. They're complaining about other things, but not the "abuse of Release Candidates" for use as bug hunts.

Seriously guys... making fun of Microsoft is so 1990s. It's time to grow up. At least when we make fun of Sony, we have some pretty good facts to go on. We're not freakin' hypocrites who laugh at a company we don't like for doing one thing, and then embrace the company we do like for doing the same thing. That's really lame and goes to show how immature you really are.

It's almost as bad as basing promotional advertisement for your product around making the competition look bad. I ought to make that a tagline. "It's a sign of weakness when the only way to make yourself look good is to make your competition look bad." I'm-a-PC-I'm-a-Mac, anyone? Just... stop it with the elite fanboyishness! It's only cool when you don't let it cloud your judgement and make yourself look like a fool.

But I guess elitism is something ingrained in humanity... Maybe that's why I like to say I'm a wolf. I'm ashamed to call myself a human. Stupid humans.

We're baaaack! With another installment of everyone's favorite segment: Sony Says!

In this issue, we're going to cover what Kaz Hirai says about why they're not including rumble technology with their "innovative and original" motion sensitive controller (that they copied from Nintendo). First, though, a little backstory!

Once upon a time, there was a company named Immersion. They have a patent on a particular type of rumble technology. Microsoft and Sony used this technology without licensing and Immersion sued them in this wonderful country where people can get away with suing for anything. Microsoft settled in court and agreed to pay for the technology they were using and they are currently using it in the Xbox 360 today. Sony, on the other hand, did NOT settle (and is apparently still an active court case) and decided not to license the technology and they stripped it from the new PlayStation 3.

At E3 2006, they covered this a tiny bit. Just in passing, after introducing their new "motion sensitive" controller that is "innovative and original and will change the face of gaming as we know it", they dropped a little tidbit that it will not have rumble technology because it interferes with the motion detection. Which, I might add, we all instantly saw as a complete lie because Nintendo's Wii controller is motion sensitive with rumble technology. A technology they invented themselves, since Immersion has not sued them.

See, people are claiming that Immersion is a jerk for suing over something so trivial as a shaking controller. However, the fact that they have NOT sued Nintendo over their rumble technology tells me that they're not suing over ALL rumble packs... they're just chasing down the companies who're using the ones they made. Maybe the Wii licensed the technology from Immersion right off the bat, but, if they had, I think we would have heard about that by now.

So the way I see it, Sony is being an arrogant slimeball and saying "well, if we can't get it for free, then we're just not gonna use it! So there!" Typical, if you ask me. Then they invent all these dumb stories about why they left it out... and it's never been about Immersion... that is... until now.

GameDaily.biz reports that Kaz Hirai has finally come out and told us the "real" reason why they're not including rumble in their new controllers. You can read it yourself, but I'll just review what he said. He now says that "sure, we can fix the interference with the motion sensors, but we don't want to in order to keep the price of the console down". He claims that motion sensitivity is far more important than rumble (wait, didn't they laugh at Nintendo's motion sensing controller? didn't they call it a gimmick?). But apparently, we should all be cheering for Sony because they're trying to keep their console cheap. Right. This from the company charging $599 US dollars.

Ah, but there's more. Also from GameDaily.biz, Immersion sent off a response to Hirai's crazy claims. In a long response, he basically says that "Sony says they're not including rumble because they claim that fixing the interference issues will cost more money? Not only does our rumble not affect motion sensing enough to be an issue in the first place, but we've already devised some fixes that DO NOT INCREASE THE COST OF IMPLEMENTING RUMBLE."

It's worth noting that the comments on Slashdot are really tearing Immersion up over this "stupid patent" they have and how they're "manipulating the media to promote their selfish case". Uhm... okay, then. Let's just totally ignore that Sony released their press release first, and then Immersion RESPONDED almost 6 hours later. An Immersion media ploy? Give me a break... Sony is grasping at straws to avoid the real reason (that everyone knows anyway) they're not including the rumble technology is because they're too stubborn to say "okay, we're sorry for infringing on your patents... we'll license your technology or stop".

(Side note... you might say that I just contradicted myself. That Sony's not including rumble in the PS3, so why are they still in court? Well... you forget the PlayStation 2 controller. The "Dual Shock"? It's still being made with Immersion's rumble technology, and Sony's not doing a single thing about that. They're ignoring Immersion and still making money off what is technically stolen technology. But Sony never steals technology, do they? Oh, no... not Sony! So until Sony either licenses the technology (at least for the PS2) or stops production and/or disables all current Dual Shock rumble packs, Sony is going to be haunted by Immersion and the courts.)

The comments went on to show their amazing grasp on reality by stating that the Nintendo Wii's sensor bar (that goes above or below your TV) is for aligning the controller to adjust for rumble interference... WRONG!! See, people are still of the belief that the PlayStation 3 controller (officially dubbed "Sixaxis", as if it has twice the dimensions of our physical universe) is the very same thing as the Nintendo Wii controller. Wrong, wrong, wrong!

The Sixaxis is basically a tilt sensor. It'll sense you tilting the controller all over the place, like that guy who demonstrated Warhawk at E3 2006. Looked like he was going to dislocate his shoulders? Yeah, that one. The Wii controller has that, too. It can sense all that movement, PLUS, with the sensor bar, it can determine its location in 3D space. The Sixaxis can't do that. It can only register tilts... the Wii remote can figure out how high it is in relation to the sensor bar.

Totally different functions! It has nothing to do with the tilt sensor! Nintendo says some games might not use the sensor bar, which means that tilt function is not based on that! Nintendo has rumble technology working side-by-side with tilt functions not relying on a point of origin. Get your facts straight, and give Sony the crap they deserve!
So! To recap:

The reason Sony isn't including rumble technology in the PlayStation 3 controller is because, Kaz Hirai wants us to believe, that the process of fixing the (non-existant) issue of rumble interfering with motion sensitivity will cost money to implement and Sony is interested in keeping the price low for us.

Immersion responds, saying that even if there was a problem with rumble messing with the motion sensors, they had their engineers devise a couple of methods to fix this "problem" and that it will have no additional cost, and they go on to say that Sony has still not honored their patents by doing something about the production of the Dual Shock controllers.

What do you think? Do we believe that Sony has the best in mind for us? Do we believe that Immersion is a money-mongering company who's suing people left and right for building shaking bits of plastic? Some do...

So... I'm bored. Maybe I'll get ya'll up to date on random goings ons in my boring ol' life.

First, I tried to triple-boot my desktop computer with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X. (Interesting combination, no?) I was going to shoot for grand quad-boot with those three plus Ubuntu Linux, but I ran into a bit of a snag. See, when I installed Vista, it totally rewrote the boot record to something that no software besides itself can recognize. (Simply because it's so new.) Well, when I tried to install OS X, not only did it not recognize the harddrive, but my preparations for installing it messed up the boot record. It would have worked properly had OS X installed, but it didn't, and I was left stranded without a booting computer.

Luckily, I was able to fix the floppy drive and make a boot disk with a small program to clean up the crazy drive partitions and now everything works properly again. Save for the fact that the new Vista stuff is still there, and I'm not quite sure how to get rid of it.

Second, I never blogged this, but, several weeks ago, I was swimming in our cousin's in-ground swimming pool. They were gone and told us we could drop by and swim whenever we wanted... so we did! Well, I only did once... because, you see, while I was swimming, I decided to kick off the edge of the pool and get some easy momentum on my little floaty rafty thingie I was on. Welp... the cement walkway was a lot closer than I thought, and I brought my left foot down on it with an agonizing crunch. (Literally... ouch.) I'd say it wasn't too bad, but only for the fact that I only broke one toe, hah. The second one from the big one... It was okay at first, but I think I was in shock, because it REALLY started to hurt after a few more minutes.

But yeah... that hurt for a very, very long time... and the reason I brought it up now is because it's hurting again, but I haven't told anyone what happened to begin with, so I thought I would, since I'm bored... and I did! So there!

Third, speaking of them cousins, they moved to Arizona last week to work as sort of missionaries to an indian reservation there. But they had a dog they couldn't take with them... so we're sort of keeping him until they get a house that they actually own. Or at least call their own. So yep! We have a dog now... a Golden Lab, I think. But it's officially "temporary until further notice". If it doesn't work out for them, we keep him permanently, but they don't know yet.

Fourth, I've been reading some new Wheel of Time books. Pretty deep stuff, that Wheel of Time series... and I don't mean "deep" as in it makes you think. I mean "deep" as in, you're waist deep in the muddy muck that is boring, useless actions that make conversations drawn out over the course of the entire chapter. We don't care that this guy itched his beard, WHY he itched it... HOW he itched it... we don't care that this woman brushed the wrinkles out of her dress. Not only do we forget about it when we turn the page, but we're forced to read it in case there's something important buried in there. Lucky for Mr Jordan, I want to know how the story finishes, but I'm getting sick of reading 800 pages when it could easily fit into 300, and I'm dead serious. He wrote a short called New Spring, which is a prequel to the entire series, that he recently released as a novel and it's 300 pages and simply AMAZING. None of the pointless stuffing that makes all the other books just plain crap. New Spring proves he can write good books still, and I completely fail to see why he insists on writing such gargantuan books! 5x7 inches, text the size of this blog, and 800 pages! Insane!

In short, if you really, honestly have to write that much junk? Write more books spaced closer together... it's been almost two years since I read Crossroads of Twilight and I'd forgotten every scrap of the storyline there ever was, except for a few obscure moments. That's really bad, man. Write smaller books, closer together, so they're easy to read and we don't have to wait until we're 50 to get the next installment!

Fifth, while making that banner for the Okami review (in which Ammy is NOT SNEEZING), I decided to make some webboard avatars, too. But since I don't visit any webboards anymore, I guess posting them here is the next best thing!

Tada! Some of them are grainy... some of them are pretty nice. The first one is concept art, and I like the sixth one, personally. Looking up to see where the heck that starlight is coming from. ...and, if you MUST know, she IS sneezing in the second one. Or... coughing... or gagging, maybe.

Seeeee?

Mister crazy-guy-with-an-orange-on-his-head (named Mr Orange, even) is preparing to reawaken the Guardian Tree of Kamiki Village, which he claims includes the consumption of some pretty strong "sake"... which is, well... pretty much just homebrewed booze. It, of course, goes straight to his head and he talks right in poor Ammy's face. The ultimate alcohol test... letting a wolf smell your breath.

Here's the screenshot I used for the NOT SNEEZING banner:

See! Look... they're testing out Brush-made lily pads! Neither of them like water. Maybe it's nervousness or something. She was huffing like that and Issun freaked and told her to wipe that smirk off her face. Something tells me she was plotting something... but nothing ever came of it, because he distracted her with a treasure chest. Sneezing... pfft.

Ah, heck, while I'm on a roll, here's the other banners I made and was picking between them all before settling on the NOT SNEEZING one and started this whole tirade!

The last one is that concept art one. I've got a big ol' 1600x1200 image of it as my wallpaper! So coooool... and now that I've thoroughly bombarded you with a bazillion topics and images, I'm gonna go now!

THE WOLF IS NOT SNEEZING!!

Man, I just don't know where to start on this review... I lie to you not when I say it's the best game I've ever played in my life. The story was amazing... the characters, the plot, the gameplay, the music... it was all spectacular. I bought a PlayStation 2 specifically for this game, and I had extremely high expectations, and it totally blew me away. (In other words, I like this game.) This is definately, without the shadow of a doubt, my new all-time favorite game ever.

Let's see... well, you probably know that, in the game, you play a wolf. (Which is what caught my eye to begin with, heh.) The wolf is a personification of the sun goddess Amaterasu, who is called back to the mortal world after a mysterious being inadvertantly reawakened an eight-headed dragon named Orochi, who, incidentally, Amaterasu originally helped to get rid of the first time, but was "killed" in the end and slept for 100 years, letting things become neglected in the meantime.

So Orochi is reawakened and he decides to wreck as much of the mortal world as possible, Amaterasu is reawakened to help defeat him again, once and for all, and clean up the mortal world in the process. At the beginning of your journey, you're joined by a tiny bug-sized guy named Issun, who acts as a sort of guide (and the comic relief), since he's been travelling the world for some time. He also takes it upon himself to talk to people for you since... well, wolves can't talk. Which they actually play on a few times, when you have to try to talk to people without him there. Personally, I thought he was very much like me, at least as far as his reactions to things go. I would see something that completely took me off guard, and then Issun pipes up with exactly what I was thinking... and then people in the game would answer him, which would essentially answer me, since I was thinking the same thing! (If you follow.)

So when Amaterasu (or... "Ammy", as Issun affectionately refers to you as) reawakens, she's pretty much without any of her former power, since she's been gone for 100 years. Her power is displayed through the use of what Issun terms the "Celestial Brush". You directly interact with the world using certain brush strokes that affect different things. There are 13 brush techniques that Ammy used to know, but when she "died", the powers were scattered and you have to track them down before you confront Orochi.

So (third paragraph to start with "so", just to point that out), Ammy and Issun embark on a quest to track down the brush techniques and regain her original strength. Of course, along the way, you have many, many, many side quests and an ever thickening main quest. (So many quests, in fact, that I completely missed several of them, and am currently replaying the game at a slower pace so as to find and finish each one!) As you finish these quests, you'll earn "Praise" from whoever you were doing the quest for, which you can then use to upgrade your stats, like health and ink and a few other things. It's interesting to note, however, that nobody knows you're a god. They only see you as a plain white wolf wandering around. (If you run out of ink during insane usage of your Brush, your power will temporarily disappear and you'll see yourself as everyone else sees you.)

The story is incredibly huge and complex with so many twists and surprises that it constantly kept screwing up my predictions, which was awesome. After hanging around the characters so long, you start getting attached to them. I mean, hey... look at my internet name. I had absolutely no problem getting into the role of playing a canine. Ammy was me, pure and simple. I got very attached to Issun, because he was always helpful and knew when to make jokes and was just an all around awesome character, and Amaterasu got attached to him, also, which made for some pretty emotional moments. I can't really go into that, though... unless you want spoilers!

Although, speaking of emotional moments, there was a certain dungeon you had to work yourself through to get to the boss at the top. Of course, dungeons are never particularly easy, and this one was no exception. However, they mixed things up a bit for this one. This dungeon had a gate keeper... a little floating piece of paper that watched over the gates to each dungeon level. To pass to another level, you had to race this paper guy through some pretty rough obstacle courses. This paper was sentient, and was very polite and to the point, actually, calling me Sir even (even though I was a goddess, sheesh, mister blind-paper). Issun and I were getting pretty ticked off at Mr Paper, since, all this time, Mr Paper was actually having FUN racing us through this deadly dungeon

Eventually, it got to a point where he just wanted to race to play, and he didn't care if we won and got to the next level or not... he just wanted to see our amazing abilities in action. (His words, not mine!) At the final gate we passed, Issun and I started gloating over the fact that we won against all odds and that we were going to head up to his leader and teach them a lesson. Rude, I know... but... yeah... we learned our lesson. The paper started talking about how wonderful it was to have known us, and that he was so happy to have seen such a competitive spirit in his life. Issun and I both came to the sudden realization that he was going to die, and I'm serious when I say we both went "What?!" at the same time, heheh. (I'm not joking when I claim Issun said what I was thinking.) But, yes... the floating piece of paper told us that having willingly failed his duty as gatekeeper, he had to forfeit his life, but he told us not to worry about him, since he didn't regret what he'd done... and then he fluttered to the ground and disappeared in a flash of flowers.

I don't know exactly WHY... but I was pretty choked up at that. Edrick laughed at me when I told him... but hey! Papers have feelings, too! But, yeah... that totally took the wind out of my sails and I didn't quite have the energy I had to go and get rid of the boss. I'm telling you... Okami is an awesome game to make me mourn the death of a PIECE OF PAPER!!

Okay... I think I've got the point across that the story was really, really good. Especially the end... man... so good. Better than most books or movies. It was perfect. Music, too, was phenomenal. I'm contemplating buying the soundtrack. I don't do that for most games, but... wow. You can listen to each track and it will flawlessly recreate the emotions from the game. I'll let someone hear a track because it's just plain good music, but they don't get that whole emotional inflection with it.

The graphics are what's called cel-shading. Nowhere near realistic, but incredibly awesome. The little banner up at the top is what the game looks like. It's designed to look like something painted on old Japanese scrolls. You can even see the grain of the "paper". That's not a compression problem... that's what it looks like in the game. It's crazily stylized and... it's amazing. It's the kind of game that will make you look at 3D photorealistic games with no story and just laugh at them. Okami proves you don't need real looking graphics when you have a knock-your-socks-off storyline.

The gameplay style is a lot like Zelda (no, I'm not going to compare the game TO Zelda... but it DOES play LIKE Zelda). Realtime battles with a small amount of moves, but never boring. You can actually skip battles (that aren't required, like... say, a boss battle) really easily and just go adventuring. Although fighting enemies is your primary way or making money, so while you CAN skip fighting, it's probably not the best thing to do.

There's even a button for digging and barking! Both of which are incredibly fun to use. I like to run around and just bark... because it's fun... I don't know... shut up... Digging, though, actually has a use in some quests, and for digging up treasure chests.

You know... I guess this isn't really a review... or... maybe it is. I've covered story, music, and gameplay. Oh! I didn't talk about the Celestial Brush, duhhh... You hold down one of the trigger buttons anytime, anywhere, and the game world turns into a sheet of paper that you can actually draw on. There are so many things you can do with that Brush it ain't funny. Especially during fights. You can use weapons in the fights, yes, but I guarantee you'll be using the Brush, too. Hold the trigger, and draw a simple pattern on the paper and then let off the trigger and voila! The brush stroke goes off and does whatever it was you wanted it to do! Sometimes it gets confused with a couple of similar stroke patterns, but nothing really serious.

If I had to score this... it'd be a perfect 10. There's absolutely no reason NOT to play this. Well, unless you don't have a PlayStation... or can't afford it... But I would even say that you should get a cheap used PS2 JUST for this game. It's so goooood... and I've been blabbing about it for days now... and it's getting late here, so I'm gonna end this.

In closing... get Okami!

(Oh, by the way... I forgot to say that this game is probably around 30 hours standard gameplay time, but you can easily have more time spent on it by hunting and completing all the side quests. I was expecting maybe 15 hours of gameplay time. So I actually reached a boss battle at around 15 hours and thought the game would end there. Silly me, I should have known since I only had about 6 of the 13 brush techniques... but the game was over twice as long as I expected it to be, and I would have been plenty happy if it had ended there. But it didn't... I think I have 35 clocked hours on my first time through, and I missed lots of quests.)

I had a nice review all planned out, but I got distracted by making a banner image and now it's late and I'm not in the mood for writing it now! So you're just going to have to wait...

I did make a category for game reviews, though!