Just when you thought it was safe to put on your reading glasses again, I return with a flash and bang worthy of Houdini. “But Lewis,” you cry, “where were you? We missed our semi-regular dose of belligerence and debauchery! It did us good to know that there are people more bombastic and deluded that us.” Well, the reason for my absence is probably not what you are thinking – I wasn’t, for example, taken hostage by a gang of Playmates and forced to be their love slave or called to defend the free world from evil foreigners with Armani suits and unpleasant goatees. Nor had I gone undercover, infiltrating a secret government conspiracy, risking life and limb to bring the truth to the people. No, the real reason I’ve been absent from the headlines of Gamer Andy is that I bought Ninja Gaiden Black, and it’s been consuming my soul. That and the whole thing about wanting to pass my finals.

See, NG is hard. I know there’s already been all sorts of stuff written about its difficulty, but it bears repeating: Ninja Gaiden is harder than a pedophile at a playground. (Ok, that was really gross. My apologies.) The thing is, the game is also very rewarding. Certain stretches seem downright impossible – the first couple times you fight Alma, for example. She straight up destroys you. I don’t care how composed or Buddha like you think yourself to be, after she pounds your face in for the eleventh straight time, you’ll start to question your sanity. But then you figure out how to avoid her pillar tosses and weird pink levitation thingy, and then you learn how to stun her after she does that big kick, and suddenly Ninja Gaiden is the greatest game in history. The sections of intense, controller-smashing, rip-your-hair-out, there-is-no-God difficulty suddenly give way to sublime satisfaction. I can’t remember a game that has a better carrot-and-stick system. Unlike most of the other games I play, I get a serious sense of satisfaction from beating playing Ninja Gaiden well. Getting a spade or knife kill in Counter-Strike or Day of Defeat comes close, though.

This feeling of achievement I have isn’t just from the sometimes insane difficulty level of the game. For evidence of games that are too hard (at least, to me) to be fun, see Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive (it took me four hours to beat the level where you have to knock everyone out; I can’t even get past the first couple guards on the next one) or Brothers In Arms: Earned In Blood (I can’t clear Baupte of those damn German tanks). NG, while undeniably hard, is also fair. Once start to get good, you can go for a long time without an enemy even touching at you. In the right hands, Ryu becomes an unstoppable engine of destruction. Fiends fall before him like wheat before a scythe, and it’s damn fun, likely because the game used to be so hard, and now you’re whipping its ass.

Ninja Gaiden rewards skill and patience while mercilessly punishing button-mashers. When I play Desperados I just feel like I’m matching my masochism against the developer’s sadism. I’m can’t quite put my finger on the actual difference between them, but the discrepancies are acutely tangible when I play either. Looking back on my experience with great art, it becomes apparent that this rule is generally applicable here as well.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, I’m a pretty big fan of the Bard. Call me a nerd stewing in poindextrose if you like, but I sincerely enjoy studying Shakespeare in more or less any capacity. Classroom or bedroom, on the big screen or on stage, I love the stories of Puck, Othello, Mercutio or Sir Toby Belch. But it’s not like I have a really easy time understanding it. Weird pronunciations, colloquial or slang expressions, and strange abbreviations abound, and more often than not I’m mystified if I try to read Shakespeare without an annotated version. Yet I find that as I struggle to comprehend his writings, my appreciation for his work only deepens. Perhaps this stems from my passion for puns and wit and the written word, or maybe it’s just a testament to the universality and quality of Shakespeare’s writing. Whatever the reason, I don’t have a very easy time understanding the Bard, but I also find it extremely rewarding to try. Again, I can still think of books that are way over my head, and no matter how much I work it I likely won’t appreciate what they’ve got to say. I’m currently slogging through The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and I think I’ll have to take a few more philosophy classes to really understand most of it. It doesn’t help that he seem to forgets to make new paragraphs for pages at a time. Still, certain works seem to fall right into the intellectual sweet spot for me, where the struggle to understand is perfectly balanced with a juicy pun or a poetic turn of phrase.

But, totally unlike most of the girls Andy has dated, it’s not easy – just like Ninja Gaiden. Sometimes it feels like work to read Shakespeare, and sometimes it feels like work to play Ninja Gaiden. (I’m almost certainly committing academic heresy by comparing William Shakespeare with Tomonobu Itagaki, but that’s a risk I’m willing to run. If my body, replete with dunce cap very thoroughly bolted to my skull, is found in a dumpster near Harvard a few weeks from now, you’ll know why.) Yet I find both of them more rewarding than reading Rex Stout or playing Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (the game). Don’t get me wrong – Ninja Gaiden or Julius Caesar can be very frustrating, and the world needs it’s Nero Wolfe mysteries and Jerry Bruckheimer-produced films – sometimes you just don’t feel like working so hard at something that’s supposed to be leisurely, and that’s fine. But if you’re willing to put in the extra effort, certain works of art and certain videogames (not that those two terms are mutually exclusive) provide experiences that are, perhaps, the epitome of their respective mediums.