I'm playing a new game on Xbox (or as my friends have affectionately labeled it, my no sex box) called Shenmue II. I highly recommend it.

This is the kind of game that only comes out every once in a while, and it's not for everyone, but I always end up obsessing over it. It's a full and complete world. You emerge from a ship with a note telling you to seek out a person in Hong Kong, and that's basically all you know. You start to wander around, and you can converse with every single character you see, every old woman on the street to every child. You can make money arm wrestling, or gambling, you can get a job moving crates or running a gambling operation. You get a hotel room and have to pay to stay the night. You can wander the streets and buy trinkets from vendors. It's amazing, and I've only played a few hours.

There's a plot, but it meanders, and you can spend as much time as you like just exploring new parts of the city. Right now I'm wandering around looking for martial arts experts to help me figure out the four tenets of some martial arts philosophy to allow me to meet with a Master, who I was referred to by the note I got upon arriving off the ship. This kind of thing is fascinating for me, it's the same reason that I'm very excited about the advent of massively multiplayer online games that don't involve hacking and slashing. It's a dumbed down simplified version of the cyberspace envisioned by Gibson and Stephenson, but it gets better all the time. Exploring and interacting with a real virtual world is tremendously interesting for me.

I'm surprised that it works so well on a console, I enjoy console gaming, but there are lots of game types that never translate well. First person shooters just don't work, because they require a mouse, and I really don't enjoy sports games, and I'm kind of tired of the "military person tracks down dangerous alien threat" genre. Anyway, I've gotten off track, but the game is incredibly innovative, and if you've got an Xbox, I recommend picking it up.