My gaming in the last few weeks has been nothing if not disjointed. Since I fed the bomb to CoD2 I’ve been wandering aimlessly with no real ambition to achieve; sort of like a 40 years in the desert, but with video games.

I have been going back to a series I started a while ago with some regularity, though. I decided it was time to put some more hours into “Project .hack//”. Project .hack// is sort of a multi-media conspiracy story that weaves together a video game with several anime series to tell the story of a computer game gone wild. And not the good kind of wild with the girls and the t-shirts, but the bad kind of wild with the fires and the chaos. People who play the game fall into comas, the operating system of the game (which also runs most of the computers on earth in a subtle jab at Microsoft) is causing world wide panic, and clearly someone is trying to cover it all up.

The video game itself is split over four parts, .hack//outbreak and .hack//mutation being the first two. I talked about .hack//outbreak a few months ago and I’m sad to say I have nothing new to add about mutation except that it’s more of the same. It’s like I put in the first game and discovered a bonus level where nothing is different except the level number. That’s really too bad, because .hack// is not a very good game. It’s a stripped down RPG who’s only real innovation is the sense of a simulated MMORPG.

Find the baddy, mash the buttons, rinse and repeat.

I was going to give up on the series until I watched .hack//liminality, the anime series that accompanies the game. In each game you also get a DVD with one episode of the original anime. I never watched the first one until yesterday and suddenly I realized I was missing half of the game. The video game tells the story of what happens inside the video game and the computer network while the anime series tells the story of how people are trying to stop it in the “real” world. After watching the series last night, I’ve come to realize that .hack// is not an RPG, it’s a conspiracy mystery where some of the clues are hidden in a virtual world. In other words, in order to solve the mystery you have to play the game and find the clues.

Are they boys? Girls? Who knows!

The series hints at some very deep intricacies, but I can’t tell if it’s really that complex or whether they’re just being obscure for the sake of being obscure. So far they’ve dropped hints that the problem is somehow related to Richard Wagner’s opera “The Ring of the Nibelungen” (which makes some sense, as there were four operas in the cycle and four episodes in the video game), but since I’m not into 15 hours of epic opera I’m just going to take their word for it. In the end, my need to know the answer to all of the questions raised in the anime series may make me play the games, but I’ll do so knowing full well I’m not playing for the enjoyment of the game itself.