I have been pleased with myself – positively giddy, in fact – after finishing Battlefront II and Geist earlier this week.

Since I have some unexpected time off work, I decided to go for three, and started flipping through games to decide what was next up.

My criteria were this:

1) No RPGs. I can’t take 40 hours of grinding experience while some spiky-haired amnesiac comes to terms with his destiny.

2) No shooters. I would really love to see the end of Ikaruga or R-Type Final one of these days. This isn’t likely because I am horrible bad no good at all when it comes to shooters, and in fact it would be lovely if game publishers would just produce priced down versions of their shooters that include the first two end of level bosses and about the first half of level three, because that is about where I stop playing every shooter I own.

3) Something I can talk about without feeling too sheepish. For example… I own and have actually finished “Disney’s The Little Mermaid” for the NES. This is likely my only public acknowledgment of this fact. I am not calling it a major achievement. I have also finished “Let’s Meow Meow” and… let’s just stop right there. I think you may get my point.

4) It had to be a game that, while it may not have been the greatest commercial success, it was at least a critical success, one of those titles that reviewers always bring up when they want to feel a little superior. In short, a community experience as well as an entertainment experience.

With those in mind, I threw together a quick list of games we own that met the requirements.

I came up with:

Beyond Good and Evil

Psychonauts

ICO

Shadow of the Colossus

Killer 7

Okami

…and of those, Beyond Good and Evil seemed like a pretty good pick. We have it for the Xbox, but I wasn’t sure if it would work on the 360, so I threw some search terms into google looking for an answer. (To avoid any suspense on this particular question: It doesn’t as of the Dec 2006 update)

One of the results returned was a series of articles from Destructoid.com, one of which is about Beyond Good and Evil:

Another of the articles mentioned Panzer Dragoon Orta, which should have been on the first list but failed due to the no shooters rule, and yet another article mentioned Shenmue II for the Xbox.

Shenmue II I own. Not the Xbox version, but the Dreamcast version, which is why it didn’t make the list – Dreamcast games are shelved separately and I had forgotten to look at that shelf. “Come to think of it”, I thought to myself, “I own the first Shenmue as well and can’t remember how far I’ve played it.”

I went to the Dreamcast games. I looked through them. I found:

Yes, that is my shame. Yu Suzuki’s epic, revolutionary, (insert more adjectives) re-imaging of the RPG and Adventure genres…

…still shrink-wrapped and proudly displaying its price sticker from 2002.

At this point I would like to apologize to my parents for having grown up such an unworthy son.

I pride myself in my unreasoning devotion to Sega’s line of consoles. My first console to pull me away from the world of PC games and into a life of poverty was a Genesis. I bought a Saturn in April of 1995 with Panzer Dragoon and an extra controller and blew nearly $600 on the combination and don’t think it was money poorly spent at all. I even own two Dreamcasts, because I just couldn’t WAIT for the US release and HAD to have the Japanese model a few months early…

And even with this, I’d never played Shenmue.

And now I have. And it was good. I have only one small quibble, and I pray I will be forgiven for it.

I have heard many people talk about the glories of Shenmue. They mention the plot, the characterization, the drama, the beautiful artistic style and the way it pushes the Dreamcast hardware to its limits. These things are all there.

Nobody ever

ever

EVER mentions the five hours of forklifting.

And even though I actually had a lot of fun zipping around Yokosuka harbor making my crate quotas and occasionally being waylaid by goons, after the first three hours of forklifting I couldn’t help letting just a little frustration into my heart.

Please forgive me, Yu.