Okami and the PS2

I’ve decided not to get a Wii - not for Christmas anyway.

Instead, I’m going to get Okami. I’ve been waiting for Okami for some months now, and I know that if I bought a Wii so soon I’d probably never get around to playing it properly. Which would be a crime

It’s something of a cliche amongst so-called “hardcore” gamers that the dying days of a console are its creative prime. That by the time the wider industry wants to render a platform obsolete, the most talented developers have cracked the strengths and weaknesses of the system and are making its finest games. Games which in many cases defy popular opinion of what the hardware is capable of.

For instance:

The SNES had Yoshi’s Island
The Saturn had Panzer Dragoon Saga, X-Men Vs Streetfighter and Radiant Silvergun
The N64 had Zelda: Majora’s Mask
The Dreamcast had Rez and Shenmue

Etc etc…

I’ve had a bit of a love/hate relationship with the PS2. At first I sneered at it for having lousy games, then I resented it for so successfully crushing the Dreamcast, then I gave in and bought one - which I never played, then I sold it and got a Gamecube, then when I moved into the shared house I bought a new one - a slim model mainly to be used as a DVD player.

This last couple of years though, the PS2 has earned my respect. Games like Ico, Fahrenheit, Shadow of the Colossus, God of War etc have delivered on the PS2’s original promise and vindicated all that ‘Emotion Engine’ PR.

And now there’s Okami. I won’t labour the details of what the game’s about, but suffice it to say that it’s an epic adventure and possibly the most beautiful game ever made.

… running on the least powerful machine still in production.

I’m not going to buy a Wii for Christmas because the PS2 deserves its last hurrah before it’s retired to my cupboard.