Which is a mouthful of a title, but bear with me.

I bought this game on release out of a quite naturally-placed loyalty to Penny Arcade. It’s my opinion, and I can say this with absolute sincerity, that PA makes some of the most intelligent, insightful commentary on games right now, more so than many academics that I read. Plus, they can say “shitballs” while they’re doing it. Good times all around.

That said, PAA:OtRSPoD:Ep1* was one of the casualties of last year’s academic crunch, and I didn’t get around to it until this past weekend. Which is a blessing, really, since I can now move directly into Episode 2. I thoroughly enjoyed this game – it’s not perfect, and every now and then it’s a bit glitchy, but it’s rare that a game actually makes me laugh. Challenge is easy, adrenaline even easier. Honest, dialogue-centric fun? It’s been a long time since I’ve been anxious to see a cut scene or followed every dialogue path without thinking, “Hell, this better be worth it.” It’s been an even longer time since a punchline in a game has made me laugh. For the humor alone, it’s worth it.

And it’s not simple humor, some to think of it. There’s a great deal of literary allusion, not to titles or characters but to worlds, themes, and styles. Much of this comes from the overblown “dark apathy” of H.P.Lovecraft, the grand, stylized epics of Michael Moorcock and Robert E. Howard, or the gleeful anachronisms of steam-punk – too often referenced without irony by thousands of hack-imitators, imitated in turn by too many game writers. Yes, you can fight the great evil that threatens us all – but do it in a world with animated trashcans, a hobo king that fights with a sack full of other hobos, the Silent Pope of the mimes, urinologists, singing garbage men, exploding clowns, devious barber shop quartets, a boardwalk full of highly-inappropriate carnival games, and that infamous juicing robot, the FF-2000. Much like Penny Arcade itself, this is style writ large. Much of the world is described in Tycho’s voice: self-aware, overwrought, desperately serious, an homage and a satire on all those pulp- or pop-culture artifacts that we love in spite of ourselves, not to mention a perfect foil for the lowbrow, puerile, aggressive, and often surprisingly innocent Gabe. It’s a clever stylistic pairing, and one that hits the perfect tone for fans of the comic.

I’ll admit too that I’m a sucker for the traditional, turn-based RPG combat. Give me a line of my guys, a line of bad guys, and some semblance of weapon-upgrading or attack strategy and I’m happy -  the setting is hardwired in from my youthful obsession with the canon of golden-age RPGs. With the current crop (I’m looking at you, Eternal Sonata), the problem is always story. As a player and a narratologist, I play to find out what happens next, and the banal, hopelessly juvenile offerings of this generation of consoles has me turning to other genres for my narrative fix – even to the dreaded Console First Person Shooter, one of my least favorites. And yet Bioshock and Dead Space are in my current XBOX 360 rotation**. I miss deep, intelligent, thoughtful stories in RPGs; I’ve grown out of many of the games I used to play, and the ones that still seem worthwhile are harder to play because I expect more from both game design and technology than we had in the mid-nineties. Penny-Arcade Adventures is by no means deep or thoughtful in the traditional sense, but it is intelligent. It is absolutely absurd, and revels in its absurdity. And it’s strikingly well-crafted as well, from a design standpoint – small technical glitches aside. With writing this good, I’m not going to quibble about a few path-finding issues.

I’ll also say that there’s a certain attraction for me in short, 3-5 hour games, things that can be finished in a weekend or an afternoon. Fallout 3 has been on my list of games I’m playing for a long time now, and I’m nowhere close to finishing it. In fact, I’ll often turn to something else, knowing that I only have an hour or two in which to play, and not wanting to get so deep into something that it’s difficult to turn off. I’m also struggling with playing a long experience in such short chunks, like reading half a chapter at a time. I look forward to PAA: Episode 2 because I know I can start and finish it this coming Saturday, if I so choose, and that the time will be well-spent. I’m certainly of the generation that likes both guarantees and (relatively) instant-gratification – don’t get me started on MMO reward systems – but it’s a good thing in this case.

One last thing: the classic adventure game, which Penny Arcade Adventures certainly draws from, can be funny but runs the risk of also being frustratingly arbitrary, particularly when it comes to puzzles or “riddles”. The team at Hothead Games has walked a very fine line here: the game is easy to follow, not difficult to finish but still engaging, and hilarious in the vein of the best Penny-Arcade comics – but never random. Everything ties togther in a way that makes contextual sense, and this isn’t an easy world to make sense of. Funny, absurdist, and logical. Well done, gentlemen.

In other words – man, fuck these giant evil robots. *cracks knuckles* Let’s go make some friends.

*Doesn’t that look great as an acronym?

**Why I didn’t just buy these on PC? Call it a dependence on GameStop and their wonderful 3 for 2 sales. Hopefully my shiny new Steam account will help with that.

I’d heard of Johnathan Mak’s game in the context of “independent things worth playing”, but I didn’t think much about it until I heard it discussed at a lecture on “art-games”, up against games like Ico, Braid, Bioshock, and Gravitation. In all honesty, I don’t remember what position the lecturer held: if this was truly a piece of art, or just something arty, or a game with nice graphics (which it is). Looking at it myself, I’m struck by how much it feels like I’m playing through a piece of visual art.

In presentation, the game feels like an album, actually: a series of musical tracks in a particular order, through which I’m allowed to play with some beautiful visual pieces for my enjoyment*. Not much of a message here; the game doesn’t require much of myself, doesn’t have a clear statement on what it means to be a human being, not does it come across as an important (by which I mean self-important) game. On the other hand, it also doesn’t offer the sort of contemplation and questioning that much of modern art does. I’ve always felt that you have to bring a lot of yourself to a Rothko or a Paul Klee before it means something to you, but with Everyday Shooter my mind is caught up in the simple pleasure of shooting, gaining points, and surviving. I come out of it relaxed, happy, and entertained – which for small games like this one is highly underrated – but I don’t feel as if I’ve learned something momentous.

Much of this can be summed up in what I think of as the artist’s statement, Mak’s notes on the game. Paraphrased, his original work involved the “new game”, art, innovation, meaning, profound statements, and was, as he discovered, absolutely a mess, and not fun. Lost in “a ridiculous concoction of self-indulgent, games-are-art-theory-innovation wankery,” he decided to return to the games that got him into games in the first place: the simple, everyday top-down shooter, where “even the simplest of things can be the most beautiful of things”. And so we end up with a small, quirky, fun game.

I don’t think art has to be serious, certainly. If the message here is to take ourselves a little less seriously (whether you read the artist’s statement or not), he’s certainly succeeded. Everyday Shooter is a game I’m actually quite bad at (so far, I haven’t passed Level 3), but it’s one I keep returning to, every day since I installed it, a few minutes at a time. And it makes me smile. On a Monday morning, that’s all really need.

A note on the music as well: I haven’t yet found a game that lets me really interact with the music, and most of the heavy lifting in the game’s soundtrack has already been done by Mak himself. Each level has some simple guitar riffs and pleasing chords, which isn’t much in music theory. But I like that every action you take in the game adds something to the soundtrack, and makes it feel a little different every time. It’s a far cry from interactive sound, but it’s closer to dynamic sound than most games get.

Everyday Shooter is available on Steam and elsewhere. Go on – support your indie artists. It’ll make your morning.

*As someone not very good at this game, I would like the ability to shuffle through the other tracks. Happily, I can unlock them with the points I’ve earned. Unhappily, it takes somewhere in the neighborhood of 8000. Can’t have everything…

Continuing this week’s theme of great music, good gameplay: Guitar Hero II, the first of the major rhythm games that caught and held my attention. After the flurry of World Tour playing in this household, I missed the music in this other game. A shame that one can’t port tracks between titles – not that there’s any shortage of rock to go around.

I’ve already talked about tipping points and popularity with World Tour, but Guitar Hero II makes me wonder in a more personal sense. Assume, as I have, that the game works because it makes you feel cool, lets you tap into that rock star fantasy with no more than a basic understanding of rhythm and the ability to push some buttons. At what point does each of us make the leap to feeling cool from “Okay, I’ll wear this bright red, plastic kiddie guitar- in front of my friends, no less – and pretend to play it.” Yes, you can buy more a more serious, adult guitar now….but this is the default controller, this flimsy, undersized anathema. I don’t think we could look less like rock stars if we tried.

And yet, that physicality is what makes the game work on a fundamental level. Holding a normal controller, as we do with every fighting, platforming, and shooting game out there, wouldn’t have anywhere near the same kind of gut emotional response for me that I get when I’m holding something that, for all intents and purposes, is a guitar. It’s one gimmick that doesn’t feel like a gimmick – rather, it feels necessary. And yet, it was embarrassing that first time to pull that cheap strap over my head and stand there as if I was holding a real instrument, and tap along to something written by Motley Crue or Nirvana or Rage Against the Machine.

I’ve thought this before, but “fun”, as we define it in practice, seems to have a large element of “potentially humiliating and patently ridiculous.”

Perhaps that’s part of it: that we do these silly things, and let other people see us doing these silly things, and are unashamed. There’s enjoyment in nonsense, in letting go of all things serious – and it is certainly not serious to play Guitar Hero. And yet, in the moment of playing, we take it very seriously, as a challenge we enjoy working through. Excepting, of course, those of us playing Buckethead’s “Jordan” on Expert. (That damnable track! If “Freebird” is the final boss fight, “Jordan” is that worthless optional boss that is so ridiculously hard, so laughably out of balance with the rest of the game, that the rewards for winning are by definition useless, and only the zealot uberfans even bother. …Maybe I’ll beat it this week.)

I’ll say as well that given the nature of the Guitar Hero series, I prefer the multiplayer experience. Yes, there is a duelling guitars mode in II, but it’s not the same as when three or four of us are “playing” together – in every sense of the word. I know my biases, and I’m certainly a singleplayer gamer by trade – but here, I’m not as deeply immersed or single-mindedly challenged as I am in my complex, highly narrative platformers or action games. Here I want to argue about which track to play next, to complain about Significant Tim’s lousy taste in classic rock, to save the band by hitting a perfect streak of notes at just the right time….It’s not as fun playing guitar by yourself. Although I’d still like the option, for those times when everyone else is busy or I just a few tracks to myself. Which says something about both the genre and the medium of music, I think.

Now, if they’d only start working on Jazz Hero… Buckethead’s got nothing on Charlie Parker.

In honor of Bill Kaulitz (who looks, terrifyingly, like a tweenage Square Enix hero come to life – this is where Guitar Hero has brought us!), I’ve returned to one of my favorite games that shouldn’t work.

Someday I’ll have to look up what really happened, but the legend of Kingdom Hearts‘ genesis is that Square and Disney share an office building in Honolulu, and two executives came up with the idea during an elevator ride. Regardless of how the game actually got started, Kingdom Hearts is one of those titles that everyone I knew mocked incessantly in the months before release – and then played for hours and hours and hours.  Apparently, Square and Disney have a lot in common.

Looking back on it, there are things I love about the design, and things I desperately, passionately loathe. In a way, Kingdom Hearts was the beginning of the end for me and Japanese RPGs: much as I love the sheer, balls-out bashiness of the gameplay, and as perversely satisfying it is for the Little Mermaid to be one of the best fighters in the game, Kingdom Hearts contains some of my all-time least favorite elements, the sorts of things that will make me pass over a game without a second thought today. This is the game that cemented my hatred of cryptic, pseudo-philosophical, “meaningful” plotlines and all the stilted adolescent dialogue* that comes with them: things like “The time when the door will open is both very near and far away,” or “Your shadow is longest when the light is brightest, so keep a strong heart,” or the general shallowness of the friendship-is-good, darkness-is-bad, memories-are-important story. It’s also difficult to forget, even just playing through the intro, that at its core Kingdom Hearts is about the burgeoning sexual tension between three awkwardly-dressed twelve year olds. This is not a story for adults.

But it is a game for adults. Taking just the mechanics (and ignoring the abysmal camera control and the lack of skippable cutscenes – this was ‘02, people), Kingdom Hearts is an excellent way to kill an afternoon. It’s fluff, but it’s nostalgic fluff, for both Disney and Square fans. In essence, it’s fan fiction come to life, but with all the balance, timing, structure, and production value of the best Final Fantasy titles. There’s joy in very simple things here – I had forgotten how much I like gathering physical experience points, or stringing weapon combos together, or even the lovely graphical representation of the “string of pearls” that serves as the map between Disney-themed worlds. For me, it’s a nice example of how great gameplay can transcend other flaws. And yes, there are people who think that the story in Kingdom Hearts is great literature with deep meanings that “speaks to them personally.” When they grow out of it, the game will still be there.

I have a student who recently wrote an essay on “embarrassing games” – titles like Pokemon or Princess Debut that are fun and challenging enough for serious gamers, but shameful to purchase because of the content. I had forgotten that Kingdom Hearts used to be one of those titles, back when all we had was the set-up. The franchise has become of Square-Enix’s most popular, and most successful, but there’s a little bit of shame there for me. I can play this game in my office, but I feel the need to apologize for it – that it’s technically quite good but not something to be taken seriously, not like a Portal or a Braid. It’s a guilty pleasure, and a conditional one. I can’t talk about the game to colleagues without making my disdain for the narrative abundantly clear. But I still play it. Maybe it’s not gameplay, but just fun that transcends all – however we choose to define “fun” this week.

*Don’t even get me started on Kingdom Hearts II. If I ever teach a course in painfully maudlin, overwrought, incoherent melodrama in interactive form, this one’s first on the list.

The Guitar Hero series always makes me think about tipping points. The technology is nothing new – we’ve had it for fifteen years. Rhythm games are nothing new. The music itself, in fact, is nothing new (one of the series’ main selling points). The original Guitar Hero was innovative not for what it did but for making the rhythm genre mainstream, for popularizing it both critically and commercially. I’ve always felt that so many games are power fantasies at heart: we want to save the princess and the world, kill the bad guys, feel cool. Guitar Hero plays into that same fantasy, but rather than Conan the Barbarian, James Bond, or Batman, this time we get to be Jimi Hendrix or Axl Rose. And part of me always thinks, of course we want to be rock stars too. Why didn’t anyone think of this before?

I have a hard time keeping GH World Tour separate in my mind from Rock Band (do non-gamers have the same problems telling Half-Life, Far Cry, and Gears of War apart?). Essentially, one to four players can take up the traditional instruments: guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, and play along by pressing buttons according to the rhythms on screen. This would never work with a standard controller – part of feeling cool (and also a bit ridiculous, which I suppose is one of the definitions of fun) is that you’re actually holding and strumming a guitar,  singing into a mic, or hitting the pads of a drumset. I have never in my life sat down in front of a set, but World Tour contains none of the hard work of actual drumming. As a pianist, I can use both my hands and my feet at the same time, and I can keep time – and that’s all it takes to get to the flailing sticks and the driving beat. For obvious reasons, this is a game best played with friends.

I have a number of colleagues in sound design and recorded music who find the games fascinating simply because they exist. Every now and then someone asks me about one of these “music” games, and I have to explain that it has nothing to do with making music, learning to play music, or even music appreciation. The beauty of the Guitar Hero series, particularly World Tour, is that you can feel like Buckethead without having to be as talented as Buckethead – the same thing stealth and action games have been mining for mechanics for years. In effect, you “win” by managing to keep the music from stopping, not by adding anything original to it yourself. And that’s fine. It’s actually one of the best party games I’ve seen in years, particularly for large groups – whoever wants to play is in charge of keeping the music going. And as World Tour includes tracks from rock, pop, country, and metal, it’s not hard to find songs that appeal to everyone’s musical taste – at the very least, songs that are more party-friendly than the background music for Smash Bros. levels.

Of course, there are always down sides. My iTunes playlist has certainly expanded, and there’s always the danger of falling in love with a song before you realize it’s being sung by a bunch of emo German teenagers with a screaming, tweeny fanbase (which doesn’t stop me from taking Monsoon off my playlist). But I’m mostly waiting to hear from the guitar instructors. How many students will swagger into their classes explaining that they’re already ahead because they can play World Tour on expert mode?

I’m a fan of zombies – but what geek isn’t? Specifically, I’m in the new school; I prefer the fast-moving horrors of 28 Days Later and the dark comedy of Shaun of the Dead to the groaning, shuffling, George Romero classics, and I’m still waiting for Kirkman to finish his apocalypse saga, The Walking Dead.  In other words, I’d rather watch or read something that comments on our culture, instead of an artifact of an earlier time.

Left 4 Dead doesn’t spend much time on social commentary, but it certainly comments on zombie movies as a whole. The idea is to put the player into the fun parts of a horror film: you and your buddies escape the hordes of (undead/aliens/monsters/mutants) that have invaded your (town/city/country/planet). Some of you die, it’s better that all of you live. And here’s the first difference: in the horror film, part of the fun is betting on who of our rag-tag bad of survivors will die first, or in the most gruesome way, or if any of them will survive. In Left 4 Dead, there are lots of possible grisly deaths, but it’s more fun to live – and the four characters help each other survive not because it’s the right, “human” thing to do but because it significantly improves the odds of survival. As Tim says, the game is expert at getting players to work together without forcing the issue. There are some very nice design pieces here, in particular the way med kits and pain pills can be transferred between players and bots, and the mechanics of getting knocked down and “rescued” by another player. You learn quickly: stay with the group, or the horde gets you.*

And the horde is certainly of the new school. These are fast zombies: they stand in corners until you startle them, then they head straight for you. At least once in every level, they get to swarm: dozens of them come screaming from every direction, overwhelming your position. And these are “science” zombies, with a number of mutant strains that cause you additional problems. There are smoker zombies that drag you off with their long tongues; hunters that jump out of nowhere and pin you down while slashing; “boomers”, fat sickly things that vomit on you and explode (which attracts the horde, of course); tanks that react to bullets and explosives exactly as the name would suggest; and witches, which the game itself cautions you not to fight but to avoid. There’s a lot of Alien in Left 4 Dead. The versus mode, in which players control both the survivors and the zombies, feels a great deal like AVP2 (the excellent game, not the horrible film). It’s a refreshing addition, and a nice change to the core game as well: when some of the zombies have a human intelligence, things can get extremely interesting.

As far as the atmosphere, there’s a movie quality to everything that makes Left 4 Dead game more fun than frightening. This is a cinematic invasion: the four campaigns are titled as cheesy movies, complete with poster and taglines, and survival always has a finale setting: the top of a hospital, a ruined airport runway, an abandoned farmhouse, a lakeside cabin. And while the story is simple – don’t die, get to the chopper – there are some nice touches that bring the space to life. I adore the writing on the walls in some of the safehouses, ostensibly from previous occupants: in particular, the one that starts “We are the real monsters,” followed by variations on “No their zombies, u moron” and “IDIOT”, and ends with “I miss the internet.” It gets a laugh, but it reminds you where you are and what the world used to be like as well.

The sound and music cues certainly play up the filmic atmosphere, but they’re surprisingly important to gameplay. Until I played against friends, I didn’t realize how much my survival depended on paying attention to sound. For example, you’ll hear a “boomer” long before you’ll see it, and as soon as you hear it you need to start aiming; and when you’re playing on the Infected side, success as a “boomer” depends entirely on timing, as the other players will hear and start tracking you as soon as you spawn.

I have discovered, however much I love the game itself, that I hate playing it with people I don’t know. I’m not much of a shooter player, and there is a culture there that bothers me: that easy anonymity that leads to arrogance, frustration, and generally immature behavior from, I assume, otherwise sane and rational adults. I’ve said before that I prefer the culture of an MMO, where competition is drawn out over longer periods of time, but also where the world itself is the primary antagonist. Not all players I meet in World of Warcraft are friendly, not by a long shot, but it’s easy to avoid the ones I don’t like, and it makes the world feel more alive for humans to be running around in it. Left 4 Dead feels more like a playground than a world – and it is. I simply prefer to play with my friends, and the “friends-only” lobby assumes that I am friends with everyone on my friends list, and all their friends, and all their friends….It doesn’t take long for someone with a misspelled name to sign in, rush through a level, bark out orders, call us all fucking noobs, and drop. (This may be the moment I look back on, years from now, when people ask me when exactly I became old and crotchety). There are some slick pieces to the lobby functionality – the voting system, for example – so I’m sorry to see that this piece of it isn’t as customizable.

On the other hand, the AI is quite intelligent, almost too much so. Again, I’m not much of a shooter player, so I’m learning a literacy here, particularly with aiming speed and precision. It’s not much of a challenge when the AI players are so quick that they take out the threats before I even know they’re there. A bit like playing with experienced players who are not also teachers, and have no reason to be.

Bottom line: this one’s worth a playthrough. It’s already become my “start the morning” game – what better way to wake up before work than with a cup of hot chai, comfy slippers, and masses of undead that just need killing?

*In which case, you are placed in the survivors’ path and “rescued” again, rather than respawning or waiting until the next round. It’s an elegant solution, and it fits with the movie theme as well. Nice work, Valve.

So, what next?

It’s not a question of whether there will be a third expansion to WOW – the rumors, in fact, say there will be five in total. It’s more a question of what’s coming next. Wrath is the second go-round, and there are two major additions: the continent of Northrend, which lets you get to 80 (and fight Arthas once you’ve gotten there, in theory) and the hero class Death Knight, which is a title only Blizzard could sell unironically.

It’s a lot of fun, this expansion. The Death Knights start off ridiculously overpowered and gradually settle in to a balance with the other classes. The new profession, Inscription, isn’t so different from the others but has certainly made the trade-skill driven economy more interesting. The new continent is snowy and beautiful and exquisitely rendered. But I’m beginning to feel the repetition: that constant, combat-centric cycle of do-quests-to-get-loot-to-do-harder-quests-to-get-better-loot….When you run out of quests, there are dungeons, and when you run out of those there are the same dungeons, but harder, and some raids, and the same raids but harder….And then what? Am I really going to have to fight to 90 next time around? Or as a non-PVPer, is this about to become a merely social exercise?

So let me know, Blizzard: how much more god-like am I going to get? Because there are only so many special abilities you can hand me, and the hard-core players are already complaining that Wrath has been too easy (hell, someone hit 80 within the first 27 hours after release.) I’m a more casual player: I enjoy making new armor sets and potions, exploring new landscapes, seeing new creatures. But it still all comes down to that cycle of achievement, and I’m getting bored with it.

It’s the defining problem for a persistent world, I think. It’s awful if your MMO fails, of course (and so many of them do) – but when you succeed, how do you keep succeeding? How do you give your players more of the same without boring them? How do you create content that’s different, exciting, innovative, but still fits with the tried and true mechanics that your players are already paying for? Because of their reputation, we expect Blizzard to have clean, perfect solutions locked in a vault somewhere, ready for the next ten years of development, but I wonder how they can top themselves the next time, and the next, and the next. I’m certainly not going to level to 145 or play 37 alts. Sooner or later, I fear that WOW will have to change or disappoint, and it’s easy to do both.

Until then, however, it’s still one of my favorite casual games when I have fifteen minutes to spare, and one of my favorite multiplayer games when I have a free afternoon. I look forward to how WOW will evolve over the next five or ten years, whether I choose to keep playing it or not.

That said, my money’s still on a complete reinvention of the mainstream MMO, plans for which are locked up in that vault at Blizzard, waiting for the day that WOW starts to die. Let’s call it World of Starcraft, shall we?

I can’t help but notice that my last entry prior to this one is dated November 12th. On November 13th, two things happened: Wrath of the Lich King released, and all my projects went into crunch mode. So what better way to get back into things than with that most academic of game types, the educational title?

My Chinese Coach sounds like a great idea: learn a difficult complex language in small, simple lessons through fun games! If only the practice held up as well as the theory. I can say “hello”, “goodbye”, and “thank you” now, but learning a little vocabulary is a far cry from fluency, and there’s a long uphill climb towards that. One thousand lessons, to be exact, apparently in one long linear string.

My first problem with the game is that I don’t have a good sense of what I’m learning, and as an academic myself I’d like to know where I’m going.  But rather than question whether this game teaches well or is worthwhile for students (the general consensus seems to be that the My Language Coach games are better as refresher courses, and not for from-scratch beginners), I’d like to know why we build these games at all? What I get on the DS are the small advantages of convenience:  portability, the ability to learn at any time (but not at my own pace) without a class or teacher, and affordability (i.e., it set me back thirty bucks). What I’m missing? Any understanding of the hows and whys, and the ability to ask questions. I’m already worried about my pronunciation. I don’t know if I’m learning Mandarin, Cantonese, or Chinese itself. I don’t know if the game addresses the tonal nature of Chinese. And I don’t have anybody I can ask.

Of the two fun games I’ve unlocked, it also bears mentioning that one is a multiple-choice test, and the other is a “hit-the-gopher” word game that does more for my hand-eye coordination than my understanding of the language. Yes, sometimes it’s about repetition, so maybe I’m learning more than I think I am (all you educational research guys, let me know, please?). But it doesn’t feel like I’m getting anywhere. And I keep wondering: with all the fascinating innovations in gaming in the last decades, the best we can do is digitize our multiple choice tests? Where are the real, immersive learning games? Or is learning a foreign language – of which I’ve always heard that immersion in the culture is the best way to go about it – simply too much for current technology? Do we need AI teachers to go any farther?

As for My Chinese Coach, it was a fun thirty or forty minutes, and I can say “thank you” to my Chinese colleagues now. But like Wii Fit, I’m not sure that these first forays into the digital realm for self improvement are as helpful without a real person. And as I’m not prepared to wait for AI, I should probably sign up for a Chinese course instead.

This is a game that makes no apologies. Violent, frenetic, overly stylized, often profane, certainly amoral, and never less than wonderfully surreal.

No More Heroes begins with the main character, Travis Touchdown, explaining in about thirty seconds that gamers don’t have any patience, that he’s an assassin, and that he’s on a mission to kill the ten best-ranked assassins in the world – and if the player thinks that sounds like fun, then he’s welcome to come along for the bloodbath. Travis is a particularly apathetic character, in the truest sense of the word. Yes, he comes out and says “I want to be the best,” but he seems to want that out of a lack of anything better to do; and even then, he’s only on this bloody quest because some hot chick with a French accent browbeat him into it. He’s designer Suda51’s commentary on gamer culture as a whole: a skinny, anime-and-comics obsessed, hedonistic slacker with no direction that isn’t forcefed by someone else, and no sense that anything he or anyone else does matters. Generation Whatever. And look what he offers us. Here’s a senseless bloodbath! With cool poses! Isn’t this fun. Enjoy.

And damn, if it isn’t fun. I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about the combat system, but it’s fluid, easy to intuit, and gleefully gory. There are some nice bits with the Wiimote that make you feel cool, by putting your motions in sync with Travis’. The game is shot beautifully as well. There are some camera issues in the missions themselves, but the way that Travis moves around the hub apartment is shot and cut like an interactive montage, and by itself is one of the slickest interfaces I’ve seen yet.

Frankly, it’s nice to see a game of this maturity (by the ESRB’s definition) making use of the Wii’s potential, regardless of the system’s family-friendly base. That said, perhaps there’s a maturity in the way Travis is brought into the system. I don’t think gamers are in danger of becoming sociopaths, not by a long shot – but Travis treats the game world the way that your average player would: none of his actions matter (because they can be replayed), everything in the world exists solely for his enjoyment (which it does), violence is entertaining for its own sake, and so on. The difference, of course, is that I realize the world of No More Heroes is fictional, and that my actions in-game have no consequence on my real life*. Characters usually don’t, particularly those tasked with saving Hyrule or Azeroth or what have you. Travis speaks through the fourth wall; he realizes he’s just another character, and acts accordingly.

That said, this is a pretty tame version of Grand Theft Auto IV, when all’s said and done. Travis’ assassination missions are bloody as hell, but the world itself? There’s no running rampant that’s not specifically prescribed by the game. Apart from the ten major missions and numerous side missions, Travis can spend a lot of time exploring the town of Santa Destroy – and yet there’s none of the mayhem you’d expect from other, similar sandbox titles. If you try to run down pedestrians, they jump out of the way. If you try to smash into cars, the cars win, and you and your bike have to dust yourselves off and drive off in shame. So there’s violence, yes, but violence, oddly, with a time and place. You’re a mindless killer most of the time, but during the day you have to mow lawns and collect coconuts just like everyone else.

The more I play of No More Heroes, the more I’m convinced that the entire game is a commentary on games. Sure, the main characters often speak cutely out of context (“push the A button, stupid” or “how dare you throw in a late-game plot twist!”), but it’s the actions the player is allowed to take that really say something. This is far cleverer than Postal 2′s “It’s only as violent as you are” tagline – an unfair assertion, when the player is given nothing to do in-game but be violent. Here, the player character is a fan of anime, action figures, hot chicks, and Star Wars (just look at his homemade “beam katana”), has little to no purpose in life, is full of snarky one-liners and a desire to be powerful pretty much for its own sake….He is us, or at least the popular conception of the stereotypical gamer. And he says as much to us! More than that, the sound effects, many of the in-game items, and the HUD itself are gloriously 8 bit, presented with all the flair of casino-inspired mid-80s pixel art. There’s nothing quite like hearing that bleeping “new mission” sound effect; this is retro style at its best, and it works for a game so steeped in gaming. The world of Santa Destroy doesn’t stand on its own; it stands on at least 40 years of digital gaming history. Even the title makes a comment: we’re used to heroes in games, but they’re often the ones that do the most damage to the world. Not this time – Suda51 isn’t giving it to us. Instead, we’re forced to look at ourselves, and at the ridiculousness of the worlds we enjoy.

So maybe we should just turn our brains off, as requested, and enjoy it. Short and simple enough for ya?

*I’m talking about single-player here, of course. When other people get involved, things get a lot more complicated.

I’ll start with the obvious: this is a wonderful game. I love that it’s indie, DRM-free, full of physics, and that one becomes so emotionally attached to the adorable, delicious Goo. (Say “Delicious Goo” out loud – it’s a lot of fun). Aesthetically, this is a beautiful, detailed game: a bit Seussian (more stripes would help), a bit “dark wacky” by way of Tim Burton, and with some of the best accordion music I’ve heard lately.

I also love that the game was created nearly in total by only two people, both Carnegie-Mellon graduates. Apparently, most of the work was done on laptops in coffee-shops – an enviable way to write games, and a far cry from the EA Widows.

But I’ll admit that as much fun as I had with World of Goo, it didn’t quite live up to my admittedly-high expectations. The game failed for me in one very small, ultimately important way: a lack of cohesion.  Honestly, these two game developers have so much to say about consumerism and corporate society and technology and the cult of the young and who knows what else…. I felt like their ultimate message was nearly incoherent, more a collection of witticisms and sly, sideways references than an actual point or message. Very much in the same vein as Braid, but with Jonathan Blow’s game, I found more substance the deeper I looked. Here, despite my worries about where my beloved Goo is actually going once I’ve sent it up the pipe, I’m not convinced that something has been said. And that’s unfair of me. Not all games need to have a clear point or a deeper meaning. Maybe pointing out the hectic, everyday existence of a mall-driven, beauty-obsessed culture is enough for this game. But just pointing it out isn’t the same as making a statement, or making me think: my reaction at game’s end was literally, “Yes, okay. And?”

Again, it’s a fantastically fun game. It’s absolutely worth playing. But it feels to me like the harbinger of things to come. I’ll be interested to see what these two developers come up with next, after they’ve grown up a little bit. They’ve gone after some easy targets here, particularly for an indie game audience. I can’t wait to see how they tackle the hard stuff.