One of my very first posts was me talking about how I’d gone through the backlog, picked out half-a-dozen of the most critically acclaimed games I owned, and then set all of them aside and played Shenmue instead.

To save you any click-through, the games were Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Psychonauts, Beyond Good & Evil, Killer 7, and Okami.

I’ve played through the first five of those since that post, but it took me until this last weekend to start Okami.

I have been dreading starting Okami, but not for the usual reasons.  I have heard nothing but good things about the game since its release, which is why it made the aforementioned list to begin with.

What has worried me is that I’ve heard that it is a crazy long game and that you can spend as much as 80 hours on it.  That’s the sort of game you need to be able to put large chunks of time into, and with a school and work schedule that takes up as much of my week as it does, there’s no way I could have played through it in less than 2 or 3 months.

On the other hand, I had my last final exam of the term on Saturday, and I have the next three weeks school-free, with a few work holidays in there as well.

It seemed a good time to get down to it.

I’ve played it for, oh, 9 hours or so and I feel like I’m just getting started, so I think what I’ve heard about length is accurate.   I also think that, at least from what I’ve seen so far, every bit of praise I’ve seen heaped on this game is well-earned.  You just feel good after playing it – not just because the visuals are pretty and the music soothing, but because you generally feel like you’re being a nice guy.  Wolf.  Sun-god.  Whatever.

Your primary goal – the only one you can’t decide not to do, really, most of the goals in the game are strictly optional – is to restore a country corrupted by an evil dragon-thingy.  In the process, you plant an awful lot of flowers and feed an awful lot of woodland creatures.  Not terribly manly, no, but surprisingly satisfying.

Now, I’ve been playing Okami on our PS3, which is hooked up to the TV in our living room.  Since that’s a shared TV, I don’t always have access.

I DO always have access to our Xbox 360, which is hooked up to my monitor in the computer room, so I’ve been playing Dead Space on that, which was an early Christmas gift.

This is, so far, the second-freakiest game I’ve ever played, beat out ONLY by Fatal Frame II.  I’m finding that I can play it for about an hour before I need to find a save point and take a break.  🙂

That’s not a complaint by any means.  When I play a game like Dead Space, I’m playing it for the heebie-jeebies, and it’s delivering.

The two games complement each other almost perfectly; if I – when I – get too twitchy to keep shooting necromorphs, I can change gear and feed rabbits for a while. 🙂

And yes, I know, it’s an Electronic Arts games and I don’t buy Electronic Arts games.  It was a gift.  I can therefore retain my down-the-nose sneering in the general direction of Redwood City while still enjoying the game.