Where to begin, where to begin. No More Heroes is at once familiar and new; both traditional and wildly unique. You've never played a game quite like it, but if you play games, you'll feel right at home. More than that - No More Heroes is, in so many words, a game about people who play games. It makes Contact's treatment of the fourth wall look like child's play. It's also a damn awesome game. Unless you have a particular aversion to rough language, sexual themes, and hyperbolic violence, there's no excuse for not playing it. And if you like those? You may as well buy the game right now.

No More Heroes has two core gameplay components. One of them starts out awesome and becomes just plain outlandish. The other starts out disorienting, and becomes awesome. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

You control Travis Touchdown, a modern anime nerd who recenly won a Beam Katana (lightsaber) on eBay. Now he's broke and needs to pay the bills. So what's a guy with a laser sword to do? Become a professional assassin, of course. At the behest of a hot chick named Sylvia, Travis goes a little crazy, and decides to take on the Top 10 ranked list of assassins, one at a time. (You don't actually play this introductory part - it's all in the game's opening cinematic.)

The first core component is action. You start the game in the foyer of an opulent mansion, and some guys in suits with cheap iron sticks come at you. Guess you've got to kill them. A thorough tutorial walks you through the mechanics of combat: the nunchuk stick moves, and the Z button targets enemies. Press A to strike, holding the Wii remote high or low to perform high or low attacks. String them together for combos! Strike at the same time as your enemy to perform a blocking counter! Use the D-pad to evade attacks! Wii remote gestures are used for counters and to finish off an enemy. A proper finish activates a roulette wheel that has a chance to activate a special Dark Side power, which is timed on the UI by a tiger walking toward a goal. Charge up your sword's batteries by shaking the remote!

It gets a little weird, but the basic idea is that you can tear shit up by properly deciding when to attack and when to block and evade. The roulette stuff is a little underused, but supercool when it goes off. Anyway, in the end what you've got in the battle system is a great way to send buckets of blood flying every which way at a moment's notice. It's way fun, and in boss fights, can get pretty challenging. There are ten bosses, as you climb the ladder of the assassin ranks; each assassin has a unique personality (from a washed up English rock star to a philosophical army girl with a Planet Terror gun-leg), a unique setting, and unique abilities, making for a completely ... unique fight, each time.

The stages surrounding them are different each time, too. The mansion in the beginning belongs to the rock star; another boss, Destroyman, is holed up in a movie studio protected by a bunch of flunkies wearing paper sacks over their heads. Each stage has an interesting setup, and while the early ones tend toward Killer7-esque level design, the later ones have sweet gimmicks all their own, including a bus ride and a baseball stadium massacre.

So, how do you get to the stages? That's where the second core component comes in: the overworld. The town of Santa Destroy, which appears to be, supposedly, between the California beach and the Mexican border, is a city of the walking dead, people who've elected to lead lives of apathy, where human life holds no value except to take it. In theory, anyway. The actual overworld, which can be navigated on foot or using Travis's "Schpeltiger" rocket-powered motorcycle, is fairly dull, especially in the early game.

Its primary landmark is the No More Heroes motel, where Travis lives (he's apparently got a good long-term deal on his room). Inside, you can heal up, check out items you've collected, take a look at a town map, play with the cat, and save your game. The game is saved by using the toilet. Inbetween ranked assassin matches, Travis will crash in his room, take a call from the UAA (United Association of Assassins?), deposit a requisite entrance fee into a secret account via ATM, and then head to the match site. But how do you make the money to cover that fee? That's where it gets interesting.

Everything starts with an odd job, from the local employment center. These tasks cover everything from mowing lawns to picking up litter, to finding stray cats. They use quirky gameplay gimmicks and some remote-waggling to make the game feel lighter. After doing one of these and earning a bit of scratch, you open up assassination missions, which are timed, paid jobs to flat-out kill people (which is where your real money comes from).

Scattered around town are also Free Mode missions, where you fight until you kill everyone or you suffer a hit, whichever comes first. These are super-hard until you get used to them, at which point they're only mostly hard (especially when they have guns!). Santa Destroy also features a gym where Travis can up his stats by training, a lab where a friend of his works on new and more powerful Beam Katanas, a fashionable but useless clothing store, and a Japanese bar with a drunken Russian martial arts master, among other attractions.

As more things open up in the town, it becomes more fun to run around in; but in the early game, it's about as exciting as untoasted bread. You do get to ride around in the Schpeltiger, but until you get the hang of taking rocket-powered sharp turns, this isn't very fun either. Run-over pedestrians don't do anything except make a cool noise, you absolutely can't run into cars - you bounce off - and the physics in general are pretty sketchy. There are hidden items scattered around town too, but you can't even start getting those until after a couple ranked matches.

I mentioned the music before, but it bears mentioning again. The music is awesome. The sound effects? Awesome. Voice overs? Awesome. Graphical style? Awesome. Graphical quality? Mostly alright... the town, especially when you're speeding through in the rocket bike, can look pretty awful at times. But that's why you speed through it on a rocket bike. The faux-pixelated interface elements and icons that mark important locations (again, think Contact) are super cool. And it comes to a head in a minigame that you can play during the Rank 4 match, a vertical-scrolling space shooter complete with 3D models and chiptune-esque music.

The narrative is reminiscent of Killer7's, in that it's mostly quiet until the final moments of the game, but in a very different way. The game's ending battle(s) serve to make fun not just of the game's story, and not just of Star Wars, but of the game industry as a whole. And the "real" ending caps off with a fight that may have been the most intense I've ever had in any video game. And there's a New Game + mode!

All in all, from presentation to theme to gameplay, No More Heroes is a remarkable package. There are some rough spots in the overworld mechanics, and less intrepid gamers may be inclined to leave the game early. But rest assured - if you've been waiting for a game to really knock you off your feet, this is it.

Progress: Rank 1 (Mild), will return for more stuff later

Take the edgy design of Killer7, then add free-roaming controls and a lightsaber, and you've got most of what I've played of No More Heroes. The combat is, thus far, not hard, but very fun. Motion-controlled finishing moves and the High/Low attack dynamic make the fights really interesting. But mostly, it's just ultra-fast-paced, stupefyingly violent, and awesome.

I take a little issue with the camera, because while its orientation has changed since Killer7 - it's a third-person over the shoulder style view - the level design has not. Running down narrow corridors gets a bit irritating when the camera gets twisted around to watch my back instead of my front. Just a bit, though.

A lot of care has been given to the game's style, including Travis's pad (there's a pet cat), the save system (use the toilet), how you charge the batteries of the beam saber (by jerking it off), and especially the special moves, which are too damn cool, even the ones that don't do a lot. The screen goes dark, Travis yells something intimidating, and all of a sudden you're seeing a totally different sort of carnage than you've ever seen before.

So far all I've done is kill the (previously) 10th-ranked assassin after wrecking up his mansion, so I still haven't touched the game's overworld or its badass bike.

Also: the soundtrack is incredible. There are perhaps too few games that really pump you up with the music, but No More Heroes is definitely one of them.

Progress: 10th ranked assassin

I decided to give God Hand another shot, and this time I appear to be stumbling in the right direction. Like I mentioned before, the game has little in the way of explanation for ... well, pretty much everything. So the story is still fairly nonsensical (which isn't helped by awkward voice-over translations). But I'm getting more of a feel for how the game is played.

As it turns out, the level-up meter that goes up when you land hits, and down when you get hit, is not your level - it's the enemies' level. So as you do well, the game becomes more difficult, and as you get hit, it becomes less difficult. In theory, anyway. It's not an especially effective system, but it makes things interesting.

Something that is important to get the hang of is the technique/shop system, because the moves you start out with are super-weak. Keeping up with more and tougher enemies requires you to buy new and more powerful moves. You earn money, conveniently enough, by beating guys up; and you get huge bonuses for minigames, which, so far, have included a rigged boxing match and the Street Fighter-style challenge of beating the shit out of a minivan.

It's pretty quirky, but I'm not sure what else I can say about it at this point. Except that the music really needs to be switched up, because I get tired of it quick (unlike another pretty quirky game).

Progress: Stage 1: Secret Warehouse Carnival

Some DigiPen students were involved in developing this game, so I felt a kind of obligation to try it out. But I have to say that I feel really lukewarm toward it. Technologically, it's pretty cool; but the gameplay isn't very fun.

Drawn to Life's claim to fame, so to speak, is the ability to draw your protagonist (among many other in-game objects) using the touchscreen as a painting tool. It sure sounds cool to have your own creation moving around - and the animation is very well done, what with angled limbs and rotating joints - but in execution, the action of the game is just held up by having to draw the stuff in it. I don't want to sit around sketching out a cool-looking hero; I just want to get to the game.

Unfortunately, this was a bad decision on my part. Because now all the stuff in my game looks like shit, because I drew it like shit. And I don't want to take the time to re-draw it because drawing is boring. It's really a vicious cycle.

At the heart of it, though, the platforming is not that great. While the drawing mechanic is pretty innovative, there's nothing creative about the game itself. Run and jump. Land on enemies. Collect coins and key items. Stand on moving platforms. It's nothing you haven't seen before.

I feel like this game would be really good for the right person: for someone who's genuinely interested in drawing. For me the action is ultimately underwhelming. I'll put a bit more time into it, but at this point I don't really see myself finishing.

Progress: Finished the third level, 100% so far

There is a lot to do in Vice City. I'm really impressed by the amount of content here. I'm also really impressed by how poorly some of it is implemented. When you've got a game that has so many options, it's inevitable that a bunch of them end up not working too well. But there is enough good in the game that playing it is still damn fun.

Progress: Wiseguy (2013), finished main missions

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished the Silver Cup, and totally lost interest

It's very clear from the title screen that Excite Truck is a first-generation Wii game; you can't even use the pointer to navigate menus, or to type your profile name on a virtual keyboard. Then it forces you to play the Tutorial mode before you're allowed to actually race. Just the same, for such a 'primitive' game, it's pretty fun.

The remarkable thing about Excite Truck is that it isn't about what you might know as Racing - getting first place is not really what counts. Each race has a goal number of stars, which are earned by performing stunts: getting air, drifting, driving through trees, crashing into other trucks, what have you. Colliding with a blunt surface or falling in deep water only ends the race very temporarily, as pressing the 2 button rapidly will put you right back in.

Placing at the end of the race is worth stars too, many of them; but stunts throughout the race can more than make up for it. There are also pickups throughout each course that will change the landscape in front of you, creating hills, valleys, and other arenas for performing off-the-cuff stunts.

So put all this together, and what does it mean? This isn't a typical racing game that balances safety with outpacing your competition. Excite Truck is all about going fast and being crazy. I don't really care if I'm in fifth place if I see an invincibility powerup and a big forest ahead of me. And if I crash, oh well. It's hectic, it's fast-paced, and it's fun, albeit shallow.

Progress: Finished the Silver Cup

I thought I was getting toward the end of the game when I found out that the city kingpin, Diaz, was behind the botched drug deal the game starts with, and I began working for him. But as it turns out, I wasn't; after taking out Diaz, I'm now able to buy businesses in Vice City, and have more, even higher-class missions. I didn't expect the game's content to be this involved, which is pretty cool.

Technologically Vice City is really a mixed bag. The physics are great, but the camera makes it hard to see if your escape route is face-to-face with a police car. The crowd-based AI is very awesome, with pedestrians investigating dead bodies or fleeing gunshots and car crashes. Aiming at and shooting these people, however, is extremely difficult with the game's control scheme. And the game world is impressively large, with laudably short load times (after the super-long one as the game boots), but until a point in the game where you can get more, which is fairly far in, there's only one save point and it can be a real pain in the ass to get to.

On the whole it's way too fun for the flaws to really get in the way. My new guilty pleasure is mowing down groups of gang members on the sidewalk.

Progress: Criminal Rating: Thug (711)

Even though I've barely touched the other half of the game (Free Mode, where it doesn't tell you when you've made a mistake!), I really need to move on from Picross. It's devilishly addictive and engrossing - since I've started playing, I daydream of tile situations and how to solve them. It's really creepy. I need to stop.

Progress: Finished Normal mode

I hadn't played much GTA until the other day when I started up Vice City, and I have to say, I have been missing out. It was easy to write the series off as a glamorization of crime and the start of a "generic sandbox game" fad, but the real beauty of Vice City (and, I assume with hope, its companions) is in its balance of freeform play and mission goals. The missions start out easy enough, but get into some pretty intense car chases and firefights, which are all the more meaningful when they take place in a bustling, AI-driven city.

One of the cooler things about Vice City, too, is its music, which really enhances the 1980s ambience; switching radio stations in the car while not paying attention to the road is a guilty pleasure. Ramming headlong into a guy on a minibike just to watch him fly is another one.

Progress: Criminal Rating: Rot (282)