To keep the streak of Crystal Towers 2 work going, I decided to see if I could work out a second boss (out of at least eight) - a centipede type affair. To test out the idea I did up a small proof-of-concept application that had a "head" freely moving and an arbitrary number of "tail" objects, put in place by checking their unique IDs against a hidden string of points that the head recorded as it went along. (And that worked out rather well - it's here, if you can open MFAs.)

With that done, my computer obligingly threw itself off a bridge, in that the power cut out and the PC speaker screamed an alarming alarm at me. This is the sign of the safety cut-out for the processor running too hot, so it seems that I had been stretching its abilities a bit by running it pretty much non-stop as a BitTorrent seeder for a couple of months. I tried it again an hour or so later and the innards are all right, but the temperature was definitely climbing steadily (to 70C before I turned it off). I'm hoping that all it needs is a dust, because being under a desk for that long must have blocked it a bit.

So the rest of this post is going to be about Okami instead. We joined Gamefly, an online game rental place, this week, and Whitney had been wanting to try this for a while. Unusually for our game playing I've only been involved very loosely, with Whitney doing the vast majority of the playing, so I can only describe it vaguely, but in today's increasingly genreless definition it seems to be an action RPG steeped in Japanese tradition and culture. Not falling into the traditional "start totally useless" tradition of most games like these, you play as a wolf-shaped sun god called Amaterasu.

You wander from place to place, being given various odd jobs by various odd people and having to clear them to get the ability to progress further, fighting monsters and clearing evil mist along the way. The fighting is sort of a combination between something like FF12's seamless battles and more traditional separate-screen ones - when you get too near a monster a fiery arena grows up around you and you can only then escape by defeating it (in which case you'll then be rewarded depending on your time and damage taken, both represented as various bits of tree of varying desirability for some reason) or finding a gap in the arena to run away. The game's real draw (aha) is the special mechanic of being able to hit R1 and paint on the screen at any time.

Not that it actually does anything, most of the time - you can't draw up a couple of giant bipedal robots to help you vanquish the marauding evil - but it works based on patterns that you draw around certain objects. Your main objective, as I mentioned, seems to be to remove the evil mist and enemies and turn it into puppies and butterflies by use of the Celestial Paintbrush - drawing circles around things causes them to grow and gets you more Praise points from watching cute animals, drawing squiggly vines connects things, and you can also summon bombs by drawing a line through a circle, if you can muster up the dexterity to do so. And it's all very interesting - the way that the screen dissolves into a drawn scene when you prepare to use the brush is particularly incredible.

As you may have gathered from my last post if you somehow hadn't noticed already, the Japanese seem to be good at unintentional strangeness, and this has got that in spades - you're accompanied by a talking flea called Issun who acts mostly as your voice as Amaterasu is mute throughout, and all talking is represented as a sequence of insane squawking noises that sound like what would happen if you took all the vowels out of this post and fed it into one of Microsoft's text-to-speech tools. Backwards. With the speed turned up to maximum. Often people won't bother to animate talking at all and their hats will bounce about a bit instead. It's definitely stylistic, but sounds disturbingly like Weebl and Bob.

That's about as far as I can describe it, because I haven't really played it myself. But I'd like to, because it looks really clever. And as I type this my laptop is now at 167F, so it might be about to explode in my face as well. Our flat isn't a good environment for computers just now.