Last week ninjas, this week samurais. We are really on a roll here.

Onimusha Blade Warriors is exactly the game its name suggests, even if the word "Onimusha" means nothing to you. It contains great volumes of metaphysical hooey masquerading as Japanese medieval history. It is brimming with swordplay. It is soaked in ridiculousness about "honour." It features evil bad guys who look like crocodiles. Much of its action takes place on and in buildings with paper walls. That sort of thing.

If "Onimusha" really does mean nothing to you, here is some background. A few years back, Capcom, the game-software powerhouse behind the Resident Evil series, decided it would be a good idea to take the RE formula and broaden its appeal. (Resident Evil games consist of clever puzzly adventures intermixed with spooky jolts and many cruelly generous slatherings of gore.)

So after a little time in the production bunker, Onimusha: Warlords was born in early 2001. Its look and feel owed a huge debt to RE, but the mood was decidedly different. You still steered your hero awkwardly down hallways and through courtyards, and you still hunted for clues that would help you solve puzzles and open locked doors, but the creeping dread was gone. You were a samurai warrior, full of confidence and skill. Your sword was strong and sharp. You moved like the wind. The evil bad guys themselves were no longer rotting zombies but a tidier and more-appealing sort of demon. When they attacked, you felt not sick panic but the excitement of rising to a challenge.

Onimusha was a big fat hit. A sequel was released promptly. Another is in the works as we speak. So you probably be interested to hear that Blade Warriors, the game we are concerned with today, is actually the first Onimusha game to come with a play style of its own. It is not at all like Resident Evil. It offers no grand adventure. It contains no puzzles. It is a slashy fighting game with clanging swords and a lot of jumping. It is loud and fast and dumb and easy to learn. It is a really super excellent way to waste your leisure hours.

The idea is that there are all these samurais who are all cheering for civility and politeness, and on the other team there are all these evil demons who are against civility and politeness. They cannot get along and neither can they agree to disagree, so they must fight each other with knives. You begin by choosing to be a samurai or a demon, and then off you go to battle.

The fighting owes a big debt to Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. It is essentially a 2D exercise, with you fighting your enemies on a set of narrow paths or sidewalks or roof-ledges. Imagine three sidewalks side-by-side and you'll get the picture. You can fight on your current sidewalk or leap to another, and the evil guys can do the same. On an individual sidewalk, however, you cannot step to the side or go around anybody; you must stand and swing your sword.

This reduces the complicated business of swordplay to a furious bit of button-pounding. If you can press the "attack" button quickly enough, you will win. If you cannot, you will lose. It is wicked jolly fun to push the "attack" button, though, so you will spend many hours practicing, going over the same fights over and over until you master them.

It is a good thing the freshness lasts, because Blade Warriors is a very quick dip. Playing the whole "Story" mode through from beginning to end will take you no more than 15 minutes. You will want to do this many times, because each run promises something useful, whether it is an unlockable character or a new playfield or simply the experience itself (which makes your samurai tougher and fiercer and more useful when you dig him out for the multi-player swordfights).

It is a little funny, this repetition. Ancient Japan needs rescuing, so you rescue it, and suddenly it needs rescuing all over again. Apparently your rescues are half-assed and incompetent. Then again, you are the only samurai in town, so who else are the citizens going to call?