I like to think I don't use caps lock that much, but I'm probably deluding myself.

Obnoxious, over-the-top bombast aside, there is an interesting point here: You were perfectly willing to put up with being instantaneously clobbered several times over before figuring out a vague approach to survival in SotC, whereas Okami struck you as uninteresting until Hour 10. On the other hand, the obvious futility of SotC was an instant turn-off for me but the tedious side quests and incessant dialog were no barrier whatsoever.

Something I hoped you would notice - you can't play Wipeout without having your thumb on the throttle 100% of the time. It's just not possible to be competitive unless you're literally flooring it always. Which means if you want to look backward, you have to do a weird reach-around with your index finger. If you want to fire a weapon, you have to do a weirder reach-around with your index finger. The actual ergonomics are much worse than SotC but I just don't give a shit.

And I think it's the failure rate.

Let's be honest - dying in Okami is a bitch. You really have to mean it. It's one of those games where spasmodic flailing will allow you to win most battles eventually, but proper execution will win them rapidly. Likewise with Wipeout - you can bounce off the guard rails in short bus mode and clumsily fire every weapon you grab and you might just place. Employ actual strategy, though, and things start to go a lot better.

SotC? If you don't know what you're doing the minute you start doing it, you're dead and you start over. Attempts at experimentation are met with retrial. There's no real "puzzling it out" from a controller perspective - do it even vaguely wrong and it's over.

Another game we tried recently - Last Story for Wii. It's got a fairly complicated battle system, but it builds on you. If you don't understand how it works you can still smash things and win half the time. Over the length of the game, however, it starts to reveal the complexity and strategy necessary to really pull it off. It was dope.

Compare and contrast - the PS3 I inherited came loaded up with all sorts of games (most of them terrible). We were looking for something Last Story-like and discovered that we had a copy of Final Fantasy Tactics installed. You start playing that game and you discover an 80-page tutorial on how to work the battle system and what one, two- and three(!)-key combos do what.

That's as far as we got. Again, I want to play, not learn your mechanics.

I should probably fix the drive on that thing. It doesn't work. As such, we've been stuck with "that which is already on the machine" and "that which can be downloaded via PSN for free" (he's got a subscription and he left it hooked up).

Which means the last game I played on there was Tomb Raider. Talk about a shitshow.