Rock Band 3‘s signature song is Bohemian Rhapsody; and, as a video game, that song is a very odd experience indeed. Unless you’re singing, you spend large portions of the song waiting for your next chance to play; whether or not you’re singing, the style and difficulty vary wildly from section to section.

This is a huge change of pace from most games I’ve played recently. Yes, video games frequently involve standing around, in the form of cut scenes: but those are short compared to the action sections and are in a different mode, whereas the gaps in Bohemian Rhapsody are fairly long and are of a piece with the rest—indeed, you would be playing during them if you’d chosen a different instrument. And, while games move you from region to region, they do that on level boundaries: you’ll typically spend an hour or more in a given context and, outside of platformers, different levels in a single game typically have quite a bit more in common than the different sections of Bohemian Rhapsody. And Bohemian Rhapsody’s difficulty curve spiky graph would be completely out of place in any game that I can think of.

The thing is, none of this matters! Or rather, it matters, but in a good way, in that these comparisons completely miss the point of the virtues of playing the song. The song has a (quite!) distinctive vision, and the goal of playing through one of the instruments in the song isn’t to go through a checklist of what makes a game-playing experience pleasant (or, for that matter, what makes a musical experience pleasant), it’s to experience a portion of that vision.

I don’t want to throw away traditional guidelines for what makes a video game experience enjoyable, what makes a video game well crafted: I enjoy the sort of refined experience that is produced by years of thoughtful evolution as much as the next person, and I would find it exhausting if all games were as idiosyncratic as Bohemian Rhapsody. Having said that, the game that I played in 2010 that is rattling around in my brain the most is Killer 7, and for much the same reasons: it presents an experience that is quite different from anything else I’ve ever played, and that experience is a powerful one that I still don’t know how to make sense of. If you’d asked me what sort of characteristics an enjoyable action game would have, being on rails would be very low on my list; but that sort of checklist comparison is completely overwhelmed by the vision that illuminates Killer 7, and I’m more than happy to place myself in the light of that vision and see where it leads me.

By all means, refine your craft, and don’t put barriers in your users’ way out of carelessness. But listen to what emerges during the night, and if those visions lead you somewhere unusual, embrace them.

Still, I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with my unrelenting march: I reread books not infrequently, and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t be doing the same thing with games. Part of my hope in co-founding the Vintage Game Club was that it would give me an excuse to revisit old favorites; it did so with Majora’s Mask, to mixed results. And more recently, we chose Killer 7, which I’d been pleasantly bemused by on its original release. So: how would this return go?

Wonderfully, as it turns out, as was clear as soon as I began. Or even before I began: as soon as I heard the creepy laugh on selecting the options screen when loading the game, I knew I’d returned to the right place. I’d remembered something about the gameplay, the mood, the graphics, but I’d forgotten how well the game uses sound: to set a mood, to support gameplay, to reinforce repeated events. (I’m strangely fond of the squeak of fingers sliding across guitar strings when turning in soul shells at the Vinculum Gate.)

And then I started to play the game, with its quite idiosyncratic control style. But this time, it seemed like the most natural control style in the world. Between the time Killer 7 was originally published and now, I’ve seen a fair amount of discussion (most notably around Resident Evil 5) of the horror genre, in particular how, by taking on first person shooter characteristics, it has lost much of its power. Killer 7 isn’t solely a horror game, but it draws much of its power from that wellspring, and restrictions on movement and camera work very well with the game’s mood of uncertainty.

The graphics, of course, continue to delight. They haven’t aged in the intervening half-decade since the game’s release; meanwhile, so much of the rest of the industry continues to march towards a banal realism. (Or, perhaps, a banal hyper-macho fantasy of realism: tree-trunk-like arms laced with bulging veins are even less to my taste.) We do admittedly see increasingly frequent retro nods in games; that’s a pleasant change-up, but rarely leads to the sort of self-confidence we see in Killer 7, to a game that knows what it is doing and has its own vision (visions!) that it places before us. (We see a similar self-confidence in the gameplay elements that the game chooses for us: nods to traditional action and puzzle solving, but it’s done solely to the extent that the game finds it useful for building its mood and gaining strength from a conversation with those traditions.)

Or at least I assume the game knows what it is doing; to be honest, I had no idea what is going on in terms of plot through much of the game. I’d tentatively been working under the hypothesis that the plot was more there for impressionistic purposes than because there’s a real narrative underpinning it, and I was just fine with that; Target 05, however, makes it clear that there’s a story lurking in the game if you want to dig it out, and Target 06 makes it clear that you should also look at the game in terms of recurring archetypes. (Which the repeated sound cues and the repeated level construction atoms—most notably the Vinculum gate, but also aspects such as the odd engravings—also reinforce.) I assume that I’ll replay this game again in another half-decade or so; I hope that, when I do so, I remember enough about writing this post that I’ll look up enough of the narrative details online in advance to be able to piece together more of the game’s backstory and its cross-sensory themes.

Because, to be honest, I still don’t get the feeling that I understand this game at all. I am convinced that it’s a wonderful game, indeed that it’s one of the pinnacles of our art, but I don’t think I’m more than beginning to understand why that is or what it’s doing, to put my belief in words that any of my readers are likely to find convincing. Which, in its own way, is also cause for joy: if I can make progress down that path of understanding, I’ll have accomplished something.

Earlier this summer, we went to see Puccini’s opera The Girl of the Golden West. Which was quite the spectacle, but my first thought after it was over was “after this, I’d better not hear anybody ever complain about video game plots again!” Its plot was threadbare and ridiculous; I’ve certainly played video games with worse plots, but most of the narrative video games I’ve played this year did better, some of them significantly so.

The thing is, when judging an opera, that doesn’t matter! Perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but really what I’m looking for in an opera plot is something that supports a string of scenes in which characters can break into song and make beautiful music together. I didn’t actually think The Girl of the Golden West was very good, but the plot had nothing to do with that: the plot served its role adequately, I simply didn’t like the music.

And then last weekend, we went to a production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. Again, a threadbare and ludicrous plot; apparently P. G. Wodehouse worked on it, and there’s a certain similarity in tone, but its story doesn’t have anything approaching the richness of his books. But, again, that’s okay: the plot is simply an excuse for musical numbers (and, as an extra bonus, dance numbers!); in Anything Goes, unlike The Girl of the Golden West, those are stunning. (And, actually, the songs’ lyrics really are clever, so it’s not completely abandoning literary virtues.)

Which leads us to video games. If these well-respected art forms can use a threadbare narrative as a vehicle for glorious set pieces, why on earth shouldn’t we do the same? Take Professor Layton as an example: it has a plot, it’s a pretty silly one (though no worse than the ones in the works mentioned above), but the game’s designers manage to shoehorn the plot into an excuse to throw puzzle after puzzle at you. And the puzzles are awesome, and that awesomeness is enriched by the art work, the music, and even the plot that surrounds them.

I am not proposing this aspect of operas and musicals as a general model that all video games should follow: non-narrative video games are just as valid as non-narrative music is, and for that matter video games are so multifaceted that they’re entirely capable of learning from the virtues of any other art form. (We need more experimentation with the possibilities of video games, not less!) But I think it’s a useful counterpoint to the comparisons of video games to movies: consider thinking of narrative as a cord to string pearls along rather than as diamond that, while horribly flawed, nonetheless makes the rest of your game look tawdry.

Or, perhaps, give up on similes entirely: that’s a pretty bad one. But, if you follow me down this route, I have one last suggestion: consider the sorts of narratives that you do find in operas and musicals. There are certainly opera narratives that are as grandiose as any video game plot, the Ring being the most obvious example. But a lot of them are rather slight, quite aware of the supporting role they play, dancing lightly along with the music, with even tragedies not expecting the world to be consumed by their grief.

Shouldn’t more games do the same? Focus on your gameplay set pieces, get them right, and let the story skip along with them. And, while you’re at it, maybe consider following musical forms and make those set pieces rather shorter, too.

Mitch Krpata recently wrote a parody piece injecting Hydro Thunder into the “games as art” debate. The thing is, I played that game with friends last Thursday, and we all had a great time, because the game did such a good job of helping us focus on enjoying our play together in the context of the constraints that the game placed on us. And it did this while treating the context that surrounded that gameplay respectfully but not particularly seriously. So yes: art it is, and my world is richer because of it.

(Quick poll: are the pictures a good idea, a bad idea, a good idea in theory but I chose bad pictures, or something else?)

Still, it’s a genre that I was once very fond of indeed; and I enjoyed noodling around the camp at the beginning. Not so much once I dove into the first level, though: it’s of the linear level school of 3D platformer design, and I’ve really never enjoyed those platformers as much as the more free-roaming ones. (With, of course, that same glorious exception; though, as I’ve claimed before, Super Mario Galaxy is its own unique beast in the taxonomy of platformers.) Moving from A to B was pleasant enough but rarely grabbed me; and the ridiculous numbers of items to collect got really old really fast.

So, fairly soon on, I was only playing it out of duty. But then, a strange thing happened: I got to the Milkman level, and it was wonderful. The psychological issues turned from a more-or-less arbitrary way to suggest design elements of the level into something that grabbed me unexpectedly; and the gameplay turned from a straight linear wander into something with a few more twists. And the same thing happened with the Actress level, and with the Board Gamer level.

And then, somehow, the magic went away just as suddenly as it appeared. I think it happened part way through the Board Gamer level for me: a combination of running into a bug, of getting overly seduced by collecting, and of not figuring out how to deal well with one of the enemies flipped the switch back to tedium for me. Where it stayed through the end of the game, alas.

So: what to make of the game? If I went back, would I find more to like in the earlier levels as well, would I see a magic that I didn’t notice before? Maybe, but I’m not convinced: too much of the game seems to me to be following genre conventions without really making a statement about why the game exists. Coming right on the heels of playing Another World, Psychonauts doesn’t have more than a fraction of the clarity of purpose of that game, of its uncompromising attitude to waste.

To be sure, I don’t want every game to be as spare as Another World—but what I do want is for more games to ask the question of what purpose their design choices serve, and for the answer not to be an uncritical acceptance of genre conventions. (A critical acceptance is great, though: many genre conventions have evolved because they work rather well!) Perhaps Killer 7 is a more interesting model; that game took genre conventions that I’m even less interested in but treated them so roughly as to make it clear that they were only the barest of scaffolding, all the while animating them with a vision the likes of which I’d never seen before. There were glimpses of that here, but never as bright or as sustained.

This year is special in that it has also brought ‘games of the decade’. About which I have fewer misgivings: while part of me finds that sort of ranking ridiculous, at least the passage of time gives some amount of distance. And there’s also the pleasure of being reminded of an old friend that you haven’t thought about for a while.

But I don’t really want to write one of those, either, for various reasons. Instead, I’ll present you with a different list, or rather three different lists. I’m not going to say anything about the games here, though many of them are good candidates for me to replay and say more about in the future. I’m sure there are many other games created over the decade that are as good or better than these, and even other games that I’ve played over the decade that are as good or better; there are not, however, other games that I’ve played that have grabbed me in such a deep and direct fashion.

First: games that have lodged into my soul. These are games where I shudder when I see them, that filter up from my brain at unexpected moments.

• Passage
• Shenmue
• Shenmue II
• Shadow of the Colossus
• Killer 7
• Majora’s Mask
• Flower

Next, games that delight: games that bring a smile to my face just thinking of them.

• Katamari Damacy
• Space Channel 5
• Okami
• Grow Cube

And finally, a trio of games that, in their own ways, try to push onto both of the above lists.

• Animal Crossing
• Rez
• Jet Grind Radio

And reading more about the game didn’t help. From a mainstream source I get the impression that it’s a brawler mixed with a bad GTA clone; I was fairly sure that the review was missing something important, but just what? Moving on to territory where I feel more comfortable these days, I’m happy to learn that, as a devoted gamer, I’ll enjoy it, but how exactly? All comers agree that it’s over-the-top violent, in a way that’s intended to be funny; I’m not really sure how I feel about that these days.

Eventually, I got around to playing the game. And, at the beginning, I still wasn’t sure what to think. The brawling gameplay was pleasant enough, I guess, but a bit repetitive. I quite liked the floating icons made out of 3-D pixels; the lack of antialiasing in the overworld made my eyes hurt, though.

So I was rather surprised to find myself quite enjoying myself at the end of my next play session in the game; I was even more surprised to think about it a bit and realize that my dominant emotion was simple delight, that the adjective that I would use to describe the game at that point was “charming”. The aforementioned 3-D pixel icons; the lawnmowing task to earn money; the cat in your apartment (and its fondness for pounce toys, belly rubs, and ceiling fans); Travis’s accent (just where is that accent from, anyways?); the dojo master (hmm, maybe “charming” isn’t quite the mot juste there); Blueberry Cheese Brownies; Sylvia (the gameplay mechanic for the calls, her accent, her predictions of your impending doom); the rank up screens (the rank up music, ah the rank up music!); the Easter Island heads. In fact, even the over-the-top violence turned out to register on the charming scale: something about one of the missions where you had to kill 100 people, each of whom saw fit to complain about their spleen rather than, say, the fountain of blood coming out of their neck where their head used to be attached, just made me smile.

And I was even more surprised to find myself rather addicted to the gameplay by the end of my next session, and (as I dug into that feeling a bit more) to realize that I felt it was one of the best paced games I’d played in ages. I’ve played game after game that takes a game mechanic and runs it into the ground: I’ll be happy if I never see a JRPG overworld again, and even very good games can be prone to excessively long levels.

Not so with No More Heroes. The gameplay goes in regular cycles: fighting a sequence of enemies to reach the boss; fighting a boss; exploring what new there is to do in town; doing a non-combat job; doing the newly opened combat jobs; repeating a previous job or two if you don’t have enough money. (Further punctuated by cut scenes involving Sylvia and/or the boss.) That sounds like it might be repetitive, especially done nine and a half times over, but it’s not: each individual part is reasonably pleasant (and frequently surprisingly charming, see above), and (more important) each part only lasts 5-15 minutes, meaning that you have a change of pace before it starts feeling like a grind.

And there were enough variations on that structure as the game progressed to keep it fresh. In your first couple of iterations, you’re just getting to know the game and the city, seeing the new shops that open up. While doing that, I’d happened to run across the Lovikov balls, but didn’t know what they were for; but then you learn, and in fact learn that they affect game play, so I spent a bit more time on my next city break looking for them. And on the city break after that I decided to really hunt for them, and noticed them on my map (I’m a slow learner); if I’m remembering correctly, the balls kept me amused through three bouts through the city, including starting to get frustrated by not being able to tell them apart from money on my map, discovering how to locate the money without stabbing at random into the ground, still not finding the last ball, and then correctly hypothesizing how to find the last one and succeeding at doing so. (And also finding some amount of money and T-shirts from dumpsters: note that the map tells you how to find the visible useful collectible and the invisible (largely) useless collectible, while not telling you how to find the visible useless collectibles, which is the correct gameplay choice.)

And, as that was ending and I was starting to have my fill of the city, the game again reacted accordingly: it changed up other aspects of the missions (e.g. the boss that you didn’t have to fight, the random old arcade game sequence thrown in one of the approaches), and the pre-boss sequences got shorter and shorter. (Especially the last two.) It was similarly sympathetic to pacing in the job fights: while it would occasionally ask you to kill 100 enemies, it would never do so without having those enemies be especially underpowered. And, while I rarely found the main game challenging, I expect it would have been if I’d played at a harder difficulty, and there were the optional single-death missions for those who wanted to hone their craft. I was also expecting the pre-ranking-battle money earning to be a grind, but it wasn’t: I did a fair amount of shopping (buying all the non-clothing items except for the last sword, and some amount of clothing), and I don’t think I ever spent as much as 10 minutes just earning money to advance after having finished all of the new jobs that had opened up.

And then I came to the last two boss fights; at first, I thought that both of them were a drag, and they (combined with the bad ending) were a downer. So: a pity for the game to end on such a note. Now, though, I’m not so sure: while poking around the web doing some reading in hopes of finding enlightenment, I ran across this Cruise Elroy post, and there’s definitely more coming to the surface towards the end of the game (but present throughout) than I’d been paying attention to.

Until I’ve figured that out, though, I’m happy enough to stop with my earlier assesment: No More Heroes is charming and exquisitely paced. And if I were prone to losing faith in this medium, this game would point out in no uncertain terms how wrong that would be.

Some interesting links I ran across while preparing for this (and thanks to Matthew Gallant for his suggestions of reading material); I wish I could have taken more account of them:

• The Brainy Gamer.
• Fullbright.
• Destructoid.
• Schlaghund’s Playground.
• The Aberrant Gamer.
• Cruise Elroy.
• Discount Thoughts.
• Mitch Krpata in The Phoenix and Insult Swordfighting.

This would seem to be a bit of a tall order. Fortunately, it also turns out that the real guilty parties love to appear as witnesses in court cases, so you have a chance at catching them in some sort of contradiction, after which everything starts to unravel. At least if you don’t try the judge’s patience too much.

The mechanics of the game alternate between evidence gathering and courtroom scenes. In the former, you wander around various areas (the scene of the crime, related locations, police offices, etc.) gathering evidence (i.e. touching various parts of the environment) and talking to people; in the latter, you cross-examine witnesses, pressing them on various points, whipping out evidence that contradicts them, and the like.

And it’s fabulous. It’s witty: the characters are funny, the situations are pleasantly outlandish, but with enough internal consistency to have it cohere nicely. I inadvertently laughed out loud once during the game (at the end of the third case, for those of you who have played it), and was quietly amused many more times. There’s a plot connecting the various cases, with enough surprises to keep me interested. I liked how they (completely inappropriately) reused character sprites from the evidence gathering phase in the courtroom phase (e.g. the hotel bellboy carrying a tray with a tea set on it); I liked the over-the-top reactions to courtroom triumphs and setbacks, coupled with animations that would be in place in a 2D fighter.

The gameplay mechanics were also solid. Liesl and I managed to finish it without having to resort to gamefaqs, which is quite an accomplishment for a traditional adventure game. There were, admittedly, situations where we mostly had to guess at which piece of evidence to present – various pieces seemed relevant, and we couldn’t quite figure out which one the game was expecting at a given juncture – but there weren’t so many of those as to be really oppresive, and, in retrospect, I often felt that I could have figured it out on my own. (Fortunately, you can basically save at any time, so if you get really stuck, you can just do an exhaustive search without worrying about the judge punishing you.) There were a couple of times when cases went a bit far outside the game’s internal logic – in particular, I was a bit nonplussed by the time when the judge went as far as declaring your client guilty before a deus ex machina dropped in – but it didn’t abuse that sort of thing too often.

I don’t quite understand why it didn’t have multiple save slots – save data must take up all of 100 bytes or so. As it was, one person had to finish a given episode before the next person could try it. Fortunately, in our case, the first person trying each episode managed to finish it without needing outside help, so that wasn’t a huge barrier.

It’s now my favorite DS game. (Though I’m not sure I’d feel that way if the DS Animal Crossing had been my introduction to that series.) Which, admittedly, says as much about the DS as it does about this game: while I’m glad I got the console (I need a portable console, and the DS is clearly a better choice for me than the PSP), there just haven’t been that many traditional great games on it. Of course, games on portable consoles are by nature less ambitious than their tv console brethren, but that’s not entirely an inherit limitation: in particular, the two Golden Sun games are some of my favorite games ever.

Having said that, this game is exactly what is so wonderful about the DS, and what more publishers should take as a lesson. It’s a traditional adventure game, with a simple engine, simple artwork, and a fair number of words. A very small team should be able to pull this out: I could imagine a single programmer, a single artist, a single writer (plus help with music, playtesting, etc. as needed) pulling this off in half a year. You’d want that artist and writer to be quite talented, because they make or break a game like this, but the overall development costs for this game must have been a hundredth the costs of a top-flight Xbox 360 game, say. At that price, you don’t need to appeal to everybody: if you have a vision that’s well-executed that will appeal to a niche market, that’s enough to make a successful product. Which is apparently the case here – the series is on its fourth iteration in Japan, I believe, two of which have come out so far in the US, and other publishers have noticed and started to put out their own entries in the genre.

Those of you who think the industry is forgetting its past, or those of you who like to read, take heart. And, as I have said before: go Capcom.

You play a wolf. You’re also a god, with powers derived from brush strokes. In Zelda terms, the brush strokes replace stuff like bombs or the hookshot; you can use them in the world to solve puzzles as well as in battle. They’ve also worked this into the art style, making the whole game look like it it was done as brush paintings. Which is really pretty, and the most interesting presentation twist that I’ve seen since Jet Grind Radio. Not that I want other games to start directly imitating it, but I do want other games to think more about how they could adopt a distinctive presentation style that works well in the context of the game.

Acquiring brush strokes is one way to level up; another is to increase your health, magic (number of times you can paint in a row without resting), etc. In Zelda, you improved those by acquiring specific objects. In Okami, however, you do that by making things happy. For example, one of your early brush strokes lets you bloom things; after that, when you see a withered plant, you can bloom it, and you’ll get some points. Or you’ll run into animals; you can feed them, and get points from that, too. And you can do errands for people to get points. Basically, you go around making the world a nicer place, in a much broader sense than traditional errand-based methods. (And, as you run through the world, grass and flowers temporarily appear in your footsteps!) Honestly, one of my favorite parts of the game is when, soon after entering a new area, I’ve removed the initial blight from the area (typically by finding my way to a big tree and blooming it); then I get to wander around blooming flowers, feeding animals, meeting people, and just getting to see what’s new. A very humane way to design a game.

(Maybe it’s too nice, actually: entering a new area is always lots of fun in any game like this, because of the inherent novelty. So maybe adding extra enjoyment on top of that is the wrong thing to do, in terms of making the game more enjoyable overall? I’ll have to think about that for a while; not clear to me how they could have spread out the pleasures more in this game. And new areas do take some time to unfold, so it’s not like you have one big high followed by a long letdown.)

And there are still more ways to level up – you can get new weapons (three different variants, each with different levels), learn new moves (my favorite one is when you learn to pee on your enemies; maybe if I’d earned enough money to learn Brown Rage, that would have been my new favorite). Nothing stunning, but I do like the range of leveling up mechanisms, along with the different rhythms at which they take place.

So that’s leveling up. Another genre convention: the town / overworld / dungeon split has been around at least since (early in) the Apple ][ days. (It was certaintly present in the original Ultima; any good examples from before 1981?) Which has its virtues – cities give you concentrated plot, dungeons give a rhythm of accomplishments to the game (typically coupled somehow with progessive unlocking), and the overworld ties it all together.

You can still see that in Okami, but the boundaries are very blurred indeed. You start off in a town. (Well, you start off in a miniscule mini-dungeon without any monsters, if you want to get picky, and then move to a town.) After a bit, you move to an overworld. (Except there’s another, slightly larger but still quite small, dungeon right near the start.) But, as overworlds go, it’s full of people – there’s a bomb guy, a potter, a dojo, a priest, a merchant. There are some monsters, but you can avoid them if you’re in the mood; it’s all relatively compact, so you’re not going through league after league of boring areas.) After doing some stuff, you go back to the village, take part in a festival, go to another part of the overworld. And there are several people there, too, along with a relatively classic dungeon. (But even the most classic dungeons are more about progressing through a relatively short sequence of areas and less about going through a long gauntlet of monsters.)

And then you get to another overworld area. It’s similar to the others; there’s also one classic town off of it, plus another smaller town. I could go on, but you probably have the idea by now: towns and overworld interpenetrate, overworlds are destinations rather than simply areas to traverse on your way from town to town or dungeon, and the extremes of dungeons are muted. (Side note: Jim and I were just having a conversation about how, in Japan, you don’t have the same sort of wilderness as in the US, and there’s been much longer continuous habitation in forest/mountain areas; I wonder if this game is perceived in Japan as trying to explicitly build a really Japanese game?) Some dungeons are very un-dungeon-like indeed: the most important dungeon in the first part of the game, in fact, is a monster’s castle that you sneak into with an amusingly bad disguise, and then have to do tasks for the head monster’s chef. So very little fighting, lots of problem solving, and in many ways it feels more like a town than a dungeon. (Just a town that happens to belong to the bad guys!)

So, just as the leveling up system proceeds according to a more complex, subtler rhythm than is the norm, your journey through the various areas also proceeds according to a more complex, subtler rhythm. Rest assured, however, the game has a strong plot. Not Square RPG all-dominating melodrama or anything, but it’s there. (Arguably, the variations in external rhythms actually increases the plot’s strength: the game can’t get away with leaning on typical game conventions to mask the paucity of the plot.) You care about the world, it gets threatened periodically, it is punctuated at pleasant intervals by higher-drama tasks.

Which brings me to another one of my traditional pet peeves – boss battles. (And game difficulty in general.) They are the traditional way to cap off a high-drama task; this game is no exception. (Though the traditional boss battle / dungeon link is weakened – not all dungeonish areas have boss battles, not all boss battles are in dungeons.) The boss monsters are pleasantly varied, and not particularly hard – you have to do a bit of thinking to figure out their weakness (which is almost always linked to your newest brush stroke), but you can almost always make it through boss battles without dying. And, if you do die, the next time you’ll have that boss’s info in your monster book, so you’ll have hints about its weaknesses. Over the years, I’ve gotten to like hard games less and less – difficulty is no substitute for solid game design – and I’m quite comfortable with this game’s difficulty level. (I wouldn’t have minded if I’d died a few more times, actually.)

Even games that get most bosses right can fall sorely flat on the final boss: I am thoroughly sick of final bosses that are much harder than any of their predecessors and that, the first two times you kill them, resurrect themselves in new, tougher forms. (With no save spots, of course; in the worst case, you can spend most of an hour just hacking back through to the place where you were killed last time.)

The final boss in Okami isn’t entirely divorced from that tradition. The final dungeon actually consists solely of boss fights: it starts by forcing you to fight five of the previous bosses. Which turns out to be surprisingly pleasant: the fights are well-enough designed, you’re powerful and knowledgeable enough to make them pretty fast and easy, and you can save between bosses (which also replenishes your health), should you so desire.

And then there’s the final boss. Who is intelligently multi-staged: you start off by losing all of your brush strokes, and over the course of fighting him, you regain your brush strokes; every four or so brush strokes, he (or she – the main character is female, and for all I know the final boss is as well) changes in order to be more suitable to fight with your current bag of techniques. One of my favorite fights of the game.

And then, after killing him, he resurrects in another form. Sigh – they were doing so well, and then blew it! Actually, it wasn’t so bad – the new form only had a single stage, and while I was glad I had a couple dozen medium bones around for healing purposes, I didn’t come close to dying. (Especially once I started paying attention to when he was most vulnerable.) So, as gratuitous extra bosses go, not so bad. And, actually, there was a quite nice plot reason for the extra boss: it gave them an excuse to have your companion marshal up support for you throughout the land, with lots of pictures of people cheering you on and praying to you. Really rather charming, and it would have been harder to work that in without the boss resurrection.

(Side note: the idea of mass support while fighting the final boss was, of course, used to fabulous effect in Space Channel 5; that final boss had one overly difficult moment, but if you made it past that, you had a cast of thousands dancing with you, chanting out “left right left right chu chu chu” or whatever it was. Honestly, one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in a video game. I suppose it’s been a few months since I’ve done my Dreamcast lament, so I will briefly revisit it here: the Dreamcast was Teh Best Console Evar, why can’t Sega make good games these days?, and I really really really wish they would make Shenmue III.)

So: if you own a PS2, go out and get a copy of Okami. If you don’t, well, buy one and reduce your situation to a previously solved problem. (Not the best console ever, but this isn’t the only great game the console has seen.) It’s not perfect, but the first half is pretty close – honestly, once I’d gotten that far, I was beginning to despair over the likelihood that the new Zelda, which will come out in a mere three weeks, will pale painfully in comparison. The second half doesn’t contain the same revelations as the first half does, but it’s still thoroughly enjoyable and solidly constructed.

What a year and a half Capcom has had. I can’t believe that they’ve always been this solidly good, but clearly I’d vastly underestimated them; I should delve further into their library.

• Improve the appearance of pages with long fields: now the long field doesn’t get forced to start on the next line. I’d hoped this would fix the Internet Explorer problem, but it doesn’t (though it improves it): for reasons that I haven’t yet investigated, I have to have the key float: left to get its width to stick, which triggers the IE bug.
• I removed the ‘own’ field. Which was my first bit of database tweaking; yay.
• I downgraded all ratings by one. Which was my second bit of database tweaking; yay. (Though I didn’t tweak the database in the most stylish way possible.) Definitely a good idea: it turned out that I hadn’t rated any books as 1, and I’d only rated one game as 1.

No particular lessons that I learned; it was all pretty straightforward.

Which brings us to today’s topic, Killer 7. Honestly, I just don’t know what to make of this game: it’s so different in so many ways from what I’m used to that my brain is having a hard time figuring out how to approach it. I’m not convinced that it’s not better than all of the games mentioned above (though what could be better than Katamari Damacy, really?); it probably has more flaws than any of them, but I also suspect game designers will still be (or should still be) learning from this game a decade from now.

I’ll start with my current basic categorization of video games: is this a game that I would allow Miranda to watch me play, or is it a game that I don’t want Miranda to watch? (That categorization is why I’m normally in the middle of two video games at any given time: right now they are KOTOR, in the former category, and God of War, in the latter.) This game unquestionably falls into the latter category; I don’t mind a bit of gun violence, but the weird creatures attacking you in the game are enough to disqualify it. (I don’t want to have her waking up screaming after dreams of invisible vaguely zombie-like monsters that lurch towards you, grab you, and explode.) I’m not sure I feel like explaining to her about the character who can break through barriers by slitting her wrist and spraying out a sheet of blood. And I’m not sure that she would react well to walking through a laundromat, opening a dryer, seeing a severed head in there holding a ring in its mouth, and having it talk to you. Probably the blood-spattered ghost of a boy that warns you about each level’s miniboss would not go over entirely well. And then there’s Iwazaru, who periodically gets lowered down from the ceiling via wires, wearing a red latex suit, a strange harness, collar, and straps across his face, whispering secrets to you; probably Miranda would be fine with him, actually, but it’s hard to say for sure.

(Completely unrelated note: there would seem to be an opossum walking through our backyard. Fortunately, the Zippy defense squad is on the case. I didn’t realize that opossums carried leaves and branches with their tail like that.)

The way the game handles multiple characters is fairly unusual. Multiple characters have always been a bit of a pet peeve of mine, though I won’t repeat my rant here; in this game, you have a choice of eight characters, who are all supposed to be alternate personalities of the same person, or something like that. (I’m not entirely clear on several aspects of this game.) You can switch between six of them at will (the other two of them are only for special circumstances), and they each have a special ability that you need to use in appropriate areas. It mostly feels like a game with a single character with several abilities, but there’s a bit of an RPG feel in there as well, since there’s a low key leveling-up system (using blood you’ve collected from killing enemies) which affects each character separately. It’s an interesting enough setup; works well enough, though I won’t say it’s rampantly successful. For one thing, the abilities are only used in certain specific areas; they could provide more differentiation between characters in the core gameplay, so that you could have a choice as to how to approach the game. (Which, actually, might not work so well in as strongly scripted a game as this one.) Also, most of the abilities are rarely used; for example, the aforementioned wrist-slitting only comes into play two or three times.

The game also tells you where to use each ability. (Though I think there’s a way to turn off those hints.) Which, surprisingly, doesn’t bother me too much – one of the things that I’ve learned over the last year or so is that, while I like it if a game requires me to do some amount of thinking, I’m actually pretty flexible on the exact amount as long as there’s enough going on to hold my interest. There are a few other puzzles in this game (e.g. using information from a poster that you saw elsewhere in the level to unlock a drawer); fine by me.

It’s done in a cel-shaded art style; I haven’t been thrilled with examples of that since Jet Grind Radio, but it’s a great fit here. Some levels also feature a distinctive style for their cut scenes – one level, for example, uses a superhero comic book style, and another level has a key enemy introduced in a very amusing anime fashion.

It doesn’t use normal controls for character movement – if the controls from the early Resident Evil games drove you crazy, then don’t think about picking this one up. You don’t use the joystick to move around: instead, the green button moves you forward, while the red button turns you around, so you can move in the other direction. And at some (but not all) places where the scenery branches (intersections of streets or corridors, fronts of buildings, etc.), you’re given a choice of directions to move in. If you hear a spooky laugh, then you probably want to select the R-trigger, which drops you into a first-person mode where you can look around freely (but not move at all). Which raises two questions:

1. Why did they do this?
2. Why isn’t it driving me crazy?

My best guess at an answer to the first is that it allows the designers to control the presentation and focus of the game. The game isn’t about you running around freely, exploring everywhere, developing a fighting style, searching everywhere for objects. It’s about you going where they want you to go, fighting enemies only as it advances the plot or as necessary to keep you from being bored while moving from place to place, solving puzzles in tightly scripted situations.

And my answer to the second question then is, their design is rich enough that I’m happy to put myself in the designers’ hands and go with the flow. The visuals, the character and level design, the plot are all the product of a strong vision; I’d rather explore that vision than fret about the fact that the game mechanics aren’t what I’d normally prefer. Don’t get me wrong – open-ended game play is great, too. But several games over the last year have taught me that games can do quite a lot of scripting for you, as long as they throw in a little bit of work for the game-player – witness the recent proliferation of Shenmue-style QTE’s, or the whole last chapter of Shenmue II.

There’s more to say about the game – its resurrection method of handling death deserves consideration, and I should say more about the plot (for that matter, I should figure out what on earth is going on in the plot) – but I’ll stop here. One question that remains: has Capcom always been this good? I am very glad that I played both this game and RE4, and Okami is the upcoming game that I’m looking forward to the most. In the past, I haven’t played many of their games, and in fact there are several well-regarded series of theirs that I’ve ignored completely; was that a mistake? I should investigate further.

The process was reasonably pleasant, and I ended up with a nice abstraction layer hiding the details of the SQL code. Some sort of layer was necessary just for testing purposes, though perhaps I could have found a pre-written testing layer. But writing my own testing layer wasn’t very hard – right now, I’m using a very small subset of JDBC, and doing just a handful of SQL queries – and it actually ended up making the code much more readable. For one thing, it helped me make a clean separation of SQL code from non-SQL code – I only used java.sql classes in three short source files, and the only job of those files is to translate into java.sql classes. (For the curious, they are implementations of abstract interfaces called SqlRow, which is an abstraction of a single row in a table; SqlRows, which is an abstraction of a collection of rows in a table; and SqlSource, which is an abstraction of a connection to a database.) And, for another thing, the abstraction layer gave me a convenient place to translate from my custom types into standard types – otherwise, I’d either have had to come up with a layer whose only job was to do that translation or done the translation by hand in many places.

Maybe the single most annoying thing was handling dates. I was aware that Java has a class java.util.Date which is now frowned upon, in favor of a superior class java.util.Calendar. And I’m even somewhat sympathetic to that idea – it’s good for people to have to deal with internationalization issues, and time zones are certainly part of that. But I don’t care about time zones for this project – all I care about are dates, and I can’t say that I’m too interested in the argument “not everybody uses the Gregorian calendar”. So the upshot was that I had written my own Date class (which was useful for other reasons, e.g. to handle books that I’m in the progress of reading right now).

But when writing out to SQL, I wanted to do things the appropriate JDBC way, which meant using its class java.sql.Date when writing out SQL dates. I was hoping that I could easily convert from my own Date class to the JDBC Date class – after all, an SQL date is just a date, it doesn’t have a timestamp, so there’s no need for, say, abstractions to handle time zones. And the JDBC Date class does have a constructor taking a year, month, and day, which I could have used, but it’s marked as deprecated. Instead, for better or for worse, you’re supposed to use the constructor whose argument is the milliseconds that the date started after January 1, 1970. (The argument can be negative, for dates before 1970, though the docs weren’t crystal clear on that matter; they also mutter something about normalization, which I can’t say I understand, either.)

After a while, I finally came up with the correct code: the right thing to do turns out to be

new java.sql.Date(new java.util.GregorianCalendar(date.year(), date.month() - 1, date.day()).getTimeInMillis())

Which is wrong on several levels. For one thing, when converting from one abstraction of a date to another abstraction of a date, I shouldn’t have to talk about milliseconds. For another thing, “getTimeInMillis” is a lousy method name. And for a third thing, why are months numbered from 0 to 11 while days in a month are numbered from 1 to 31? Sigh. I am glad that I’m starting to understand how to use Java dates “correctly”, but I’m not impressed with this aspect of JDBC’s design.

Anyways, I’m pretty sure I have the database populated correctly now. (And doing so turned up a couple of mistakes in my database schema, too.) The next thing is to write code to read from the database. I’ll have a bit of free time in the middle of the week, so I’ll be able to get it started soon; at first I was optimistic that I’d actually be able to finish it in the middle of the week, but now I’m thinking it will be a bit trickier than that. If it were just a matter of writing JDBC code to read from a database, then I don’t think that would take too long – it would take a little while, because I’ve never done that before, but I think I understand all the ideas, and have a pretty good idea of what most of the new necessary abstractions are.

(To be sure, I’ll probably spend a fair amount of time playing God of War instead of programming. Good game, though not quite as superb as some people make it out to be; not something to play while Miranda is around, though, while I can program when Miranda’s around, so I’ll probably spend a fair amount of time on that. And I have some blog reading and writing to do; in particular, I want to talk about the stunning Killer 7.)

But, setting aside other matters competing for my time, the next step will also force me to approach certain notions from a quite different angle than I’m doing now. For example, right now, when I create a book, I add that book to an internal table attached to that author, so that, when I ask the author to generate its HTML page, it can list all the books by that author. But, in the new world, the right way to generate that list is to look it up in the database; so, instead of keeping a collection of Books in each Author, I’ll either want each Author to contain a pointer to some sort of database abstraction, or I’ll want to pass a database abstraction to the method on Author that generates the HTML. Right now, I’m leaning towards the latter, but it’s not entirely obvious to me what the pros and cons are; I can easily imagine proceeding a fair way down one path, realizing that it’s a mistake, and backtracking and heading down a different path. (Hey, I just thought of a way to get the former to work well – each entity (Author, Book, whatever) already has a ‘Key’ associated to it; I could stick the database backpointer in that Key. That would only require minimal alterations of my current code, and it’s not immediately obvious to me that doing so would be inelegant.)

I am looking forward to the day when I can get back to adding new features. I really want to add a list of links to each entity, so I can have pointers from dbcdb to the blog, not just pointers in the other direction. And I just finished a book with three authors, which I currently can’t represent. And I’m thinking that it’s time to add more media types – CDs, certainly, and eventually DVDs. And at some point I want to switch to Ruby: I already suspect that working in a typed language will make my next step harder than it could be.

There’s still a little bit of refactoring to do on the code that I’ve checked in, and a little bit more code to write. But the previous constructs held up reasonably well; easy enough to add the new item types (video games, game consoles, game developers) through a mix of cutting and pasting, reusing existing classes, and one class extraction. A shade more cutting and pasting than I’d like, but I’ll deal with that soon enough. Or at least try; I suspect that I’ll run into more places where C++ templates would be more useful than Java generics.

One interesting non-parallel between books and games is the way I plan to handle series. (I haven’t yet added series of games yet; next weekend.) Some book series are quite straightforward: the books are named Series, volume N. In others, the book names aren’t so predictable, but at least there’s a straightforward order and notion of volume number.

You’d think it might be the same way with video games – surely Resident Evil 4 counts as the fourth item in its series? Well, no: the games in the series so far are Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Resident Evil 0, and Resident Evil 4. Plus some spinoffs and ports, some of which (the GameCube and forthcoming DS versions of the original) are remakes with more significant changes. So there’s no useful notion of “volume number” in a video game series; you might as well just sort them by release date. Also, different games in a series can be published on different consoles and even made by different developers, so there’s no attributes of a game that you can glean from its presence in a series.

For that matter, even the definition of a series isn’t well-defined – if you take the original Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Sunshine, Paper Mario, and Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga, how many different series are they part of? I can imagine any number from 1 to 4 as an answer. So while I think I will add the notion of a video game series, there won’t be the same structure as in the book case, where I had classes BookLike, Book, Volume, and Series in a sort of V-shaped inheritance diagram.

There are a few features I’d still like to add, most notably links to blog posts, but they’re all relatively straightforward. I should really spend more time learning about SQL and Ruby, so I can play around with changing the underlying implementation.

The remake of the original on the Gamecube got a lot of attention, though. So I bought a copy, and I’m glad I did. While I’m not a big fan of the genre, it’s healthy to dip into different genres every once in a while to learn from their best examples. The graphics were stunning – this was near the start of the current generation, but even now they’ve held up well, I suspect. I wouldn’t want most games to have a fixed camera, but they used it to reasonable dramatic effect, and if that’s the price to pay for the graphics, so be it. I’m not a big fan of respawning enemies, but if there’s any game where that makes sense, that was the one. Limiting saves was a bad idea, the control scheme was awkward, there were probably other flaws, but even so, really good game.

Not a good enough game to make me go out and buy the rest of the series, mind you, or even to get me to buy the first new game in the series on the Gamecube, Resident Evil Zero. But then Resident Evil Four came out to much acclaim; the acclaim is well deserved.

To start with the superficial: it turns out that a fixed camera is not necessary for excellent graphics, you just need a really good development team with time to get used to the hardware. So they use an intelligent mix of third person with moving camera that goes into first person when you aim. It looks just as good as the earlier game; the cut scenes are done by the in-game engine, and look as good as most game’s pre-rendered cut scenes, but without compression artifacts.

On a side note, it would be interesting to track the development of POVs in action games; maybe it’s my imagination, but in this generation, it seems like there are a lot more games that are mixing first and third person, where last generation would have settled on one or the other. For example, I can imagine this game being a FPS in a previous generation, but third person plus first-person aiming works well. And, in the opposite direction, this generation’s Metroid games have gotten a completely different feel out of first-person than a traditional FPS, but those also drop into third person when necessary (morph ball).

Interestingly enough, it’s actually not much of a horror game. At the start, it was pretty scary: after fighting off the initial horde of enemies in the village, I was afraid to wander around much, being wounded and low on ammo, lest more people attack me. But more people didn’t attack me: after finding a save spot, I went back into the village, and wandered around it more, completely unmolested. So once the scary music stops, you really are safe for a while. Once I got used to that, I found that the game had a very nice balance in its enemy attacks: some areas have a few enemies around every corner, some areas have almost no enemies, some areas throw a horde of enemies at you that you just have to try to survive, and there are several boss fights. It keeps you on your toes, it’s pleasantly varied, and there’s always time after fighting enemies for you to explore and get to know (and loot) your environment. And no respawning to be found, unless you re-enter an area after being gone from it for a very long time.

The save points completement this well. You can’t save everywhere, but there are enough save points that, while there’s some tension getting between them without too much damage, you don’t have to constantly reload your game or block off hours of playing time to make sure you’ll make it between save points. (And you can usually go back to your previous save point without encountering enemies, should you so desire.) In addition, most times, when you die, it restarts you at a more recent point than your previous save spot: for example, if you die in a boss battle, you just have to refight that boss. And, mercifully, they gave up on the stupid “limited number of saves” idea from previous games in the series.

They also threw some bare-bones RPG-ish aspects into the game. Every video game has to have some aspects that make no logical sense, but are utterly necessary for gameplay reasons; items are a classic area where suspension of disbelief is necessary, and we see that here. You start off with a pistol, and pick up a shotgun quickly; periodically (once every save point or two), however, you find merchants, who are happy to take the gold that you’ve stolen and either sell you new weapons or, more commonly, upgrade your existing weapons. Exactly what these merchants are doing there and why they haven’t been infected by the parasites that have taken over everybody else’s body is never explained (good thing, too), but as a gameplay technique, it works fine. There are a few classes of weapons distinguished by the kind of ammo they use; you end up picking (at most) one weapon from each class, and upgrading it.

But they couldn’t let you carry around arbitrary numbers of weapons or other items – that would be unrealistic! Instead, you have to fit your gear into an attache case; as you progress in the game, merchants will sell you larger and larger attache cases, so in practice the size of the case is rarely a problem. So instead of something horribly unrealistic like letting you carry arbitrary amounts of items, you instead carry around larger and larger attache cases (which never show up in the third-person view, oddly enough), with loads of weapons, ammo, and healing items (but not key items or treasures – those you carry in some other, unexplained way), being able to switch weapons in and out of your attache case instantly! Much better.

And, like other games in the series, there’s ammo scattered around the environment; the amount is very well chosen so that you’re always under some amount of ammo pressure, but if you’re reasonably careful, you never quite reach the end of your ammo. The merchants can’t actually sell you ammo (even though they’re happy to buy ammo from you), except that they’ll refill your gun if you upgrade its ammo capacity, so you end up not reloading a weapon that you think you’re about to upgrade. None of this makes any sense, but the gameplay is very well balanced; the resulting illogic is more than worth the results.

The plot revolves around trying to save the president’s daughter; half way through the first part of the game, you find her, and get to protect here. (And occasionally she gets to help you, too.) Which is a pleasant enough change of pace, but ultimately an Ico style of gameplay wouldn’t fit this genre very well. They solve this problem by having her get recaptured three or four times during the game. So, as a result, she’s only with you maybe a third or a quarter of the time: you get the benefits of variety, but it doesn’t compromise the basic gameplay.

What else? There are some Shenmue-style quick time events; not many, but it makes the cut scenes a bit more interesting. The plot is interesting enough. It’s a good length (25 hours, maybe?). The boss fights are well designed. The levels are well designed. The puzzles, while hardly intricate, provide some structure to the game other than battles.

Don’t let the details here distract you: this is a great game. At every point, I felt that I was playing a game written by people who are confident in their artistry, who know the ins and outs of game design, who can throw in variety and interesting gameplay elements appropriately, and who are more than capable of painting some very attractive pixels on a television screen. My only regret was that, since I didn’t want to play it while Miranda was around, I was lucky if I could play it for as much as two hours a week; it took me months to finish, which I’m sure lessened the impact. But they were very pleasant months indeed.

Anyways, I gave it a try. It’s a sort of RTS, which is a genre that I think I’d like but have essentially zero experience with, because of its PC-only nature. (Part of me is glad, because I suspect that its mouse usage would kill my hands.) It’s apparently a pretty basic example of the genre: you have set missions with set troops (both friendly and hostile), controlled from a third-person point of view (not top-down), where you’re directly controlling one character (you can change whom on the fly) while giving orders to other characters. No building units, no long-term development.

I could go into more details, but I won’t; after playing through four or five missions, my brain again asked why I was doing this instead of playing Jade Empire, to which I had no good answer. So I switched over to the latter, which proved an excellent choice.

(Addendum to my Xbox post: one thing I don’t like about the controller is the D-pad. It only has one major job, to tell if you’re pushing up, down, left, or right, but can’t do that reliably.)

So: back to our normal subject matter. Today: Shenmue II. The second part of a three-part series telling the story of Ryo Hazuki’s quest for revenge in his father’s death. At least I hope it will be a three-part series: sales of the first two parts were such that Sega will need some convincing to produce the third part.

I played the first part when it came out on the Dreamcast five or so years ago; as I believe I’ve indicated here, it had quite an impact on me, the best of the games from that console’s short but glorious life. (Others being Soul Calibur, Jet Grind Radio, Space Channel 5.) It’s mostly an adventure game: get to know your map, figure out what the next key item or event is, find/trigger it, repeat. It also has a full-fledged fighting engine built in, with a hundred or so different moves.

Which is a distinctive enough combination, but there’s more. For one thing, the world of the game is glorious to explore. You start off the first part in your house, very closely modeled with tons of items that you can pick up, examine, carry around if you want to. (And not if you don’t: this is one game where the text adventure reflex of picking up everything will lead you astray.) As you make your way into the world, there are apartments full of doors to knock on, streets full of stores to shop in, and a pleasing wealth of other characters to talk to. You even get a daily allowance that you can use in those stores (or in vending machines): buy soft drinks, collectible toys, casettes, or play old Sega games in the arcades. And then you can just sit in your room (in the game) listening to those casettes, as I frequently did, if you’d rather do that than make progress in the game.

The other impressive aspect of the game is the theatrical nature of the game: it tries to feel like a martial arts movie (at least when you want it to, when you’re not listening to music or drinking random soft drinks), and carries it off better than any other game I’ve seen. The plot progress is very well done; while that’s a point of emphasis of most RPG’s these days, Shenmue has nothing to be ashamed of on that front. Such scripting, of course, depends on a variety of events coming off in sequence; the game provides the basic structure through key (adventure-game style) events triggering cut scenes, which are elaborated either by using the fighting engine (when appropriate) or, more simply, by forcing you to press buttons at certain times to get your character to, say, dodge appropriately in a cut-scene chase. These latter “quick-time events” may sound hokey, and obviously you wouldn’t want them to be a game’s main focus, but they really do work to keep you involved in long cut-scenes that are necessary for dramatic purposes. (Resident Evil 4 has also adopted QTE’s to good effect.)

And, on top of that, it has a pleasant selection of quirks, of which my favorite was the fork-lift races. What more could one ask for?

Well, a game that didn’t end in the middle of a massive cliff-hanger, for one. Apparently the original game was planned as the first of 16 (!) parts; I don’t really think they ever thought they’d release 16 separate games in the series, but the second part (the boat ride to Hong Kong) was jettisoned, parts 3-6 (Hong Kong, more Hong Kong, Kowloon, the road to Bailu) are in Shenmue II, and the remaining 10 parts will all be crammed into the third game in the series. (Given how the plot has progressed, I don’t think they’ll have any trouble coming to a successful conclusion in one more game’s worth of play.)

When I started playing Shenmue II, I’d forgotten the details of the first game. (It came with a preview movie, which I skipped.) Partially because of that, it took me a while to get back into the game. (There were other external causes; in particular, either I got a bad disk or have a bad optical drive in my Xbox, and the game wasn’t programmed to handle that gracefully.)

But the truth is, Shenmue II doesn’t start out nearly as well as the original. In the original, you could just spend time goofing off, getting to know the game, even getting an allowance every day to buy stuff. In the sequel, you have to earn money to pay for your hotel room every day; unfortunately, the main way to do that (working in a warehouse) is really tedious. They try to make the job interesting by turning it into a game, but fail miserably at that: the game has control issues, and it’s impossible to play the game well enough or badly enough to change the amount of money you make. (I suppose it’s possible to play badly enough to lower your paycheck, but you’d have to work hard at it.) And the amount of money you make in a shift of work, while more than a day’s rent, isn’t enough more to give you significant spending money. (Especially since you’ll want to spend most of the remaining money on maps.)

They do, I suppose, ease the pain by not giving you as much frivolous stuff to buy, but I can’t exactly see that as an improvement. And, if you wanted to break realism, I suspect that the game would let you get aways without paying for your hotel room; it also starts you off with items to sell, if you wish. But I didn’t like either of those solutions to the problem.

It gets better half way through Hong Kong, fortunately. On a game mechanics level, you stop having to pay for your hotel, freeing up your days. And even though I’d been spending my days with my nose to the grindstone, I’d seen enough of the city that I was starting to enjoy just wandering around in it. At the same time, the plot was getting me hooked again, getting me to care about characters I’d been meeting and introducing me to some interesting new ones.

So the rest of Hong Kong was a lot of fun, as was Kowloon. The level design in Kowloon was pleasantly different: most of it takes place in skyscrapers. Kind of weird skyscrapers, though: they arbitrarily decreed that most elevators would stop on a random subset of the floors. Well, not entirely random: it let them set up puzzles getting from place to place when an elevator ride would otherwise suffice.

The details of the gameplay felt pretty different from the original; I still enjoyed it, but I’m not sure it was a rousing success. There’s still a fair amount of fighting, but a lot more of other sorts of puzzles (e.g. having to press buttons to make it across rickety bridges). Unlike the first game, there’s no way to actually practice your karate, so you have to hope to be able to fight well enough in battles just by button mashing. Which, it turns out, you can; in fact, some key fights can be gotten through by just hitting X over and over again. (I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have worked in the first game, but who knows.) I’m not sure this is a bad choice – it means that you can enjoy the game even if you only enjoy adventure games, not fighting games. Still, it feels like a bit of a loss.

So that’s Hong Kong and Kowloon; next comes Guilin, specifically the road to Bailu. And here the game takes a completely different and wonderful turn. No fighting, no shopping, no wandering around a town. Instead, you’re just walking down a road, through gorgeous scenery, talking to a new character you just met about her and your past. It’s basically an extended cut scene, with a few events thrown in to give you some buttons to press, existing only to advance the plot. (And to look pretty.) By the end of this, the plot threads are coming together, you know what the game is named after. (A tree, it turns out.) And somehow you’ve spent the last two hours of a video game doing basically nothing, watching an extended cut scene, and having a great time doing it.

So I’m looking forward to the third game. I just hope they make it…