But come on, you save your game by taking a dump.

See, that's precisely what I mean. I don't care how lousy the driving controls are, you get to watch Travis Touchdown visit the toilet.

There's some ugly for you. Checkerboard floor. It reminds me of the mansion in the first Resident Evil.

Still, this game bleeds a fun, anarchic style. Note the pixellized S icon in front of Travis, and the retro-looking font. That kind of old-school stuff is all over the game. It's so nice to see a game that attempts to do something clever with menus and mission points and all the boring standards that have become modern game design cliches.

"Coconuts are worth more than human life!" Non-sequiturs abound in Santa Destroy.

You can really see the high-contrast shadow effect here. In No More Heroes, shadows are either pitch black or non-existent.

Standing outside the Beef Head video store. Compared to GTAIV, the city environment is an embarrassment.

There's plenty of swearing as soon as the game begins, and not just in text conversations.

Check out Travis's pad. Looks like an N64 on the shelf.

The hotel room also features his pet cat Jeane. If you select her, you get to click through one of a few animated sequences. Completely unnecessary, but I swear to you that I click on that cat every bloody time I'm back at the save house, just because.

Occasionally Jeane gets stuck on the ceiling fan:

The meat of the game is these various linear assassination missions... where you walk through a very limited environment killing people until you get to the boss. I just beat the third boss, which was the first real difficult section for me.

Before each boss, a really incredibly cool thing happens... an underutilized Wii feature that I won't spoil. But it's something that I can guarantee the other console makers are going to put into their next machines.

Combat is a blast, thanks to some well-implemented Wii Remote controls. Travis has a light sab--- beam katana, and how you hold the Remote is how he holds the beam sword. The game really only cares if you're holding it tilted up - for a high stance - or tilted down - for a low stance, but it does bother to animate the blade moving at all the points inbetween. The enemies will guard themselves high or low so naturally you have to come at them from the opposite position.

A button swings the sword, B button does a context-sensitive physical attack... either a kick to break a guard or a grab to suplex an enemy into the floor. Apparently you learn several kinds of suplex maneuvers, all performed by specific flicks of Remote and Nunchuk (following onscreen prompts). Once you get an enemy does to near-death, you can do a killing move by slicing the Remote in the random direction shown (again, onscreen prompts), which nicely duplicates the feeling of sending a katana through somebody's torso. All in all, it's not so much waggle that it will annoy you, which is nice.

Between the assassinations, you're expected to tool around town on your gigantic motorcycle and find ways to earn cash and level up. This is generally the sucky section, especially when you screw over a side quest and the game makes you drive across town again. I don't mind re-driving in Liberty City. In Santa Destroy, it's another story.

There's a lot to like in No More Heroes. There's a lot to hate, sure, but there's enough bizarre, interesting takes on Our Blessed Gaming Conventions that makes it worth the trouble. Although I wish I had started my game on the lowest difficulty. I kinda just want to experience the thing, and not have my ass handed to me over and over again.