Okage, a Retrospective, Goodness, golly, me.

[Trainman 2000]

After many fruitless attempts at getting the old purple Okage disk to read on the equally old-and busted up Playstation, and fueled by a near-maniacal compulsion to revive some glimmering moments of childhood, I finally managed to get an emulator running on my junk-machine of a computer and fired up Okage for the first time in years.

The graphics didn't come out too well, and the music would intermittently switch between going comically fast and comically slow, but the game still worked. By golly, what a game Okage is. The light whimsy of the characters and the subtle humor finally hit me. I'd never really appreciated what a great game Okage was until just a few days ago, seeing those familiar faces which helped me make it through some rough childhood years. The jokes had gone over my head then, as had the whole concept of classification and the interesting undertones thereof.

Playing Okage, of course, I was reminded of the forum where (looking back upon it), I'd spent a good few years... was it really that long?

Reading the posts I wrote four or five years ago is positively bizarre and I feel almost alienated, hardly able to remember a single one of them. Ah, such is the magic of the past, and this place is without a doubt a part of a past I almost completely forgot about... the glorious years of junior high and the grand immaturities therein. Ah, Wilderness!

It's pretty strange to think that I've graduated high school, when back then I hadn't even an inkling of how I might turn out. And yet, here I am, playing Okage: Shadow King, once again. Maybe I'm just playing it so that I can connect back to my past self. Maybe the past self I have in mind is just a figment of my imagination, and not at all the silly young fellow who had little regard for coherence or sanity or punctuation or any such nonsense (I don't think I've changed an awful lot in the first two categories). Who knows? Does it matter?

Anyway, it's good to be back and playing. Sorry to rant on for so long. I was just wondering if anyone else was still around and had thought about who they'd become and who they once were.

[Boogie Knight]

It's always a little surreal to look back at one's own posts after some time has passed, even more so to once again play a game you played to death many years ago. Activity has been sparse, but I do appreciate the insights. I just might play Okage again myself in the near future.