.Hack Infection (PS 2)

Just when I thought I had seen everything in gaming, those wacky people of the Rising Sun go and create .Hack Infection.

Real on-line games have never really been popular in Japan: losing face publicly is humiliating in Japanese culture, and you will publicly fail in MMOGs a lot. Therefore the Bandai games designers came up with a brilliant idea: they made the world’s first single-player massively-multiplayer game.

In .Hack Infection, you have virtual friends, you play a virtual game that takes place in virtual world, and your virtual character has a virtual character in the game world. I can only admire the creativity of the designers and their guts to pitch this idea, and the publisher who picked it up.

The story of the .Hack Infection in a nutshell goes something like this: Having sold 20 million copies, the World, a new on-line game made by a huge corporation, has become the world’s most popular game. You play a Japanese youngster, and you have just started playing the game with your friend who is a veteran, having played the game since the beginning.

On your very first adventure you get attacked by a monster that is clearly buggy and cannot be damaged. It takes out your friend in combat, but back in the real world, your friend falls into coma and is rushed into hospital. No-one is never able to explain what happened. Any messages you post on the Internet boards of the game enquiring what is going on get deleted. You must then play the game to reveal the mystery. You must balance your time between playing the World and while keeping your friendships in the real world via email going strong so you have allies in the game itself. Without spoiling rest of the story, it contains hackers, evil mega-corporation and cyber-technology galore –all good things in life then.

You check your emails, customise your screen background, select the music you play in your CD etc. on your ‘desktop’, and once you log onto the World you can check the message boards of the game for hints and tips as well as story information and just good-old-fashioned spamming, trolling, fan-boyism and elitist whinging –just like real MMOG then.

Game is full of weird, wacky and wonderful characters who play the World with you: little Japanse girl under the nick-name Mistral who is obsessed by collecting all the items in the game (though she is so young that sleeping times restrict her gaming), insecure teenager who plays the game to boost her confidence, European Samurai buff, and even an alter-ego of one of the designers of the game who plays to view how people react to the game he has created, and many, many more. You must bribe them with items in the game, give them hints on cooking and dating in email, and generally build up a strong base of supporters so you are able to solve the mystery of your friend's coma.

Technically, the game is very competent: the AI of your friends is excellent, story is a fine mix of cyberpunk and fantasy, and the graphics, while not exceptional, serves its purpose. Most importantly though, you find yourself shouting at the virtual players behind their characters as they argue with you, leave you to go on a date just as you are in the toughest combat of your life, and constantly moan because you don’t give them enough stuff, just as if they were real people. I never thought this could be pulled off, but I am enjoying .Hack Infection a lot.