Hitman 2

"All my life's an endless stream of cigarettes and magazines," Paul Simon once sang. Times change and almost nobody smokes cigarettes anymore and it's getting near impossible to find print magazines.  

All of my post-retirement life is an endless stream of music, Netflix, books, comics, internet, and daily walks on the Beltline (weather permitting).  And video games, although I haven't been playing any since beating Far Cry 3 back in mid-February.  Which reminds me - happy March, y'all!

I haven't been playing, that is, until yesterday when I started Hitman 2.  Alert readers may recall that I played Hitman (2016) between last December 29 and January 27 of this year, and that it was part of a bundle of games that I purchased at extreme discount last Thanksgiving.  So far I've played Far Cry 3, Far Cry: New Dawn and Hitman (2016) from that bundle, and even after I get around to completing Hitman 2, there are still a couple more games left in the bundle.   As the total cost for all the games was about that of one new, first-run game, it would be an understatement to say that I've been getting my money's worth out of that purchase.

The Hitman games are part of what's called the stealth genre - the goal is to complete an assassination contract as quietly as possible, without being detected and with as little collateral damage as possible.  Unlike some other games, where you just charge Leeroy Jenkins-style into a situation with guns blazing, Hitman rewards you for not shooting.  In fact, most assassinations are completed without a gun at all, but silently, by hand, by poison, or by setting up "accidents" wherein the victim might, say, electrocute themselves when they answer a telephone call.  And every contract can be completed by a variety of means, so you play each mission multiple times, with different methods and different outcomes each time.  

After each mission, the game then "scores" your performance on a scale of one star to five, and awards points for not killing innocents, for not being detected, etc.  The most points, the "perfect score," is rewarded when you're not detected, no bodies are found, and no one other than the victim is even aware that an assassination just occurred.

One aspect that I enjoy about video games is the problem solving - figuring out how to complete an at-first seemingly impossible task. In the Hitman games, these puzzles are particularly rewarding to solve, first because they're often particularly daunting at first and second because the solutions usually don't involve something that's physically impossible in real life (for instance, in the Assassin's Creed games, you wind up climbing two-story walls like Spiderman or something).  Your character in Hitman has no superpowers or supernatural abilities, other than a cold-blooded resolve to complete the mission and the patience to wait until conditions are optimal for success.  

Video games, contrary to the opinion of some, do not cause violent behavior.  If anything, when playing Hitman, you're practicing patience more than anything else.