Video Game: Hitman - Blood Money

I once watched a drug lord play the cello. Apparently he hadn't heard about the massacre I had just created across his yard. So he settled into a performance of Bach's "G Major Suite." I watched him from inside a closet. He played thoughtfully, ducking and weaving his head, only occasionally looking at the waterfall outside his window. During a pause I stepped out and strangled him.

Like most of the automated individuals in Hitman: Blood Money, his routine contains a point at which I am able to slip in unnoticed, remove his life, then vanish. And if someone catches me, like a woman once did in Vegas-dropping to her knees in her pleated green skirt and crying about her children-well, that's why it's called blood money.

Jobs that look like accidents bring in more money. Backstage at the Paris Opera House, a prop German pistol was swapped with a real one and a singer was killed during rehearsals. I was watching from the back of the house with the rest of the tourists. That job paid well.

Blood Money makes longer games look meager in terms of storytelling. The cut-scenes are dramatic, with moving cameras and sly editing. The in-game levels are murderous contraptions full of virtual lives. But most satisfying is Blood Money's surprise ending. It leads to one of the best final videogame levels in years.

The bottom line: Hitman: Blood Money is a swift, sinister assassination simulation packing a criminally sweet storyline.