By nature I'm a pretty laid back guy. I try not to sweat the small stuff and don't let much rile me. Yoda and Ghandi are my idols. I dig Zen philosophies. But sometimes, maybe stuck in traffic, or standing in the wrong line at the grocery store, the beast within awakens and I just want to kick some ass. And by kick some ass, I mean really KICK SOME ASS, I mean really, really, really KICK SOME ASS - not weak smacking or punching or goofy grunting grappling. No sloppy fisticuffs here. I'm talking limbs flying, bones shattering, heads rolling.

I envision cold steel and warm blood.

I envision a gridlocked highway littered with bloody chunks.

I envision the slow-as-molasses check writer at the front of the line in a disemboweled heap, their guts painting the supermarket red, white and grue.

GWARLLL! AWWWAWWAWW! Swipe! Slash! Pulverize! Kill! Die you motherfu-

Okay, calm down. Calm down. Zen remember? Calm down.

Team Ninja's gore soaked brawler NINJA GAIDEN 2 is all about kicking ass. It is a punishing little bitch of a game that delights in making players suffer, a true blood boiler if there ever was one. For this laid-back-pent-up guy it serves as something of an antidote, a viciously vicarious blast of cathartic release. It's not perfect, but it is brilliant, and it easily ranks somewhere in my top ten games of all time.

NINJA GAIDEN 2 (no clever subtitle) is basically the same game as the first NINJA GAIDEN. There are a few cool tweaks, but not much has changed. In any other circumstance this would be a horrible thing, but with the NG series it is actually a plus. You see, as I stated earlier NG2 is all about kicking ass and only kicking ass. The first game in the series did such a stellar job with this single minded conceit that I feared the developers would try to make NG2 "better" by adding in unnecessary, sequel-killing elements. I'm happy to report that Team Ninja and their rock star posturing leader Tomonobu Itagaki did nothing of the sort. They simply took the game play mechanic of the first title and polished the sucker to near perfection.

Story wise NG2 is about a bunch of monstrous fiends trying to resurrect a bigger, more monstrous fiend. There is a little subplot about warring ninja clans and a curvaceous government agent gets involved, but the plot is nothing but an excuse for ninja action star extraordinaire Ryu Hayabusa to get buck wild on the demon hordes. I usually demand more from my games - story can either make or break a title - but the combat is so strong here that I am able to shrug it off and get lost in the deep, combo-based strategy.

What I love about the NINJA GAIDEN games is that though the game play is comprised of seemingly mindless button mashing, mindlessly mashing those buttons while get you killed quicker than you can say "Shit" or "Damn" or "Fuck" (and believe me, while playing NG2 you will scream all of these words repeatedly). NG2, like the original, approaches combat as if it were a fighting game. Combos are important. Blocking matters. Technique and skill are critical to survival. You can't waltz through levels frantically pressing the same two buttons over and over again, rather you have to learn as many combos (each weapon in the game features over sixty of them) as your brain can hold and then use them with ninja-like precision. If you never block you will die - defense is just as important as offense. Like a true Ninja Master, NG2 is all about balance and harmony. Attack. Block. Attack. Block. The combat flows like poetry, like haikus written in blood.

Speaking of blood, we can't talk about NG2 without discussing the copious amounts of red stuff splashing about. While the combat is as fast and brutal as ever, Team Ninja has ramped up the gore factor considerably. Most next-gen games (I guess it's time we start calling next-gen games, now-gen games) are graphically stunning. NG2 is no exception, but while textures are smooth and the character models look good, the developers have soaked the graphic rendering prowess of the XBOX 360 (sorry PS3ers and Wiis, this bad boy is a 360 exclusive) in buckets and buckets of blood. I don't think there is a bloodier game in existence. When Ryu slashes with his Dragon Sword, or goes crazy with his Vigoorian Flail (think nunchakus with sharp blades), or whumps enemies with his Lunar (a mean bow staff), their bodies come apart in a shower of red. Limbs are severed. Decapitations abound.

And the messy deaths are plentiful. Enemies don't just attack, they rush Ryu en masse and after each balletic battle the blood soaked field or ancient demon temple or high rise building grounds destroyed in the carnage are literally littered with gore and strewn with eviscerated corpses. One of the cooler tweaks to the combat system allows baddies to continue attacking Ryu even after he has hacked off an arm or a leg. Should a limbless enemy lose a second appendage, look out! Unable to fight, but still clinging to life, NG2's tenacious foes will blow themselves up and try to take down Ryu suicide bomber style!

Herein lays NG2's greatest strength (or weakness depending upon your opinion). It is unmercifully hard. Personally, I find the challenge exhilarating. Most games, I breeze through. The NINJA GAIDEN series (yes, the first one was difficult as well) tries to break you. It's not enough to be pummeled by thirty enemy ninjas at once - NG2 takes things up a notch. As the fallen enemies push aside their agile, breathing clansmen and rush you (two down, twenty-eight to go) to blow themselves up, dragon fiends blast fireballs from the air, and giant mech-orga beasties lumber through the ninja hordes in an effort to crush the pudding out of you. Pure bliss.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention the werewolves. They're fast and evil, but not super hard until you start killing them - at which point they begin to pick up the corpses and limbs of their fallen wolf brothers and hurl them at you. Awesome.

Wussies will be happy to learn that the game has an easier mode, but that's all I will say about that (NINJA GAIDEN on easy? Pathetic).

I do have a few gripes. In every other NG2 review, critics attack the in-game camera. I agree to a point. Yes, the camera can be aggravating. Finding Ryu stuck off screen while fighting a particularly nasty fiend is frustrating. There were at least two separate occasions where the camera essentially cheated me out of a victory. Other than that I say "Big deal." It's a free camera and you gotta take the bad along with the good. The action is so fast a fixed camera might have been even worse. As it stands, you can always use the right analog stick to swing the camera where you want it. After playing for a while I simply adapted camera movement into my fighting style. Problem solved.

There were also a couple of cheap surprises. I already mentioned exploding enemies - they elevate the game play - but exploding bosses? There is nothing more frustrating than beating a boss only to have it catch you off guard and blow you to pieces. Oh well, live and learn.

My last complaint is specific to my game play experience. When I got to the last level of the game Microsoft released an update. I installed the update only to find that it caused a particular loading screen to freeze. When I Googled the problem I found that Microsoft's latest patch was causing NG2 to freeze during certain load screens. To fix the problem I simply deleted the 360's cache and then denied the update. I figured I would play offline, beat the game and then reapply the update once Microsoft fixed things in the next day or so. I beat the game, but when I tried to go back and upload my final score to the leaderboards, no dice. Apparently after you beat the game you only have the option to upload the scores right then and there. If you finish the game offline that's that.

So, if you have a 360 NINJA GAIDEN 2 is a must own title (unless of course you're one of those wussies). It's fast, fun and quite possibly the greatest stress reliever known to man. Let it torture you a bit and the next time you're stuck in traffic or behind the most annoying person in the world at your local grocery store you may find yourself shrugging and thinking Hey, things could be worse, I could be fending off an army of blood thirsty exploding fiends.