Viewtiful Joe 2 is the last video game sequel you will have to read about this year. Like many of its peers it is short on novelty and long on squeezing fresh retail dollars out of last year's work. It is endlessly familiar. We know its rhythms and its subtleties the moment we first lay hands on it. It is firm in its refusal to surprise. Yet somehow, despite all that, its charms are irresistable. Give it ten minutes, and it will demand entire weekends, and you will provide them without complaint. It will bring a pain to your wrists and a smile to your face. It will keep you up at night. Your bedmate will wonder where you have gone and what all the fuss is about.

A lot of video games do this. The highest praise a game reviewer can offer is to say a new title is "addictive." Accordingly, it is every game producer's life's work to turn his or her audience into slavering junkies. That can't-stop-playing-the-game, can't-stop-thinking-about-the-game-when-you're-not-playing mental state is highly prized and highly elusive. If you are one of a few masters of the art (Miyamoto, Mizguchi, Naka...) you can pull it off nearly every time you get involved with a new title. But if you are a regular workaday producer and you stumble onto it, you hang on tight and try not to move too much, lest you break the spell.

This is what the new game is all about. The original Viewtiful Joe, which came out a little more than a year ago, was an audacious exercise in retro self-discipline, one that denied itself every luxury of modern design. It was an old-school, side-scrolling, 2D beat-em-up game. It was fiendishly difficult. It involved running to the right, and punching evil robots in the face, and occasionally it involved running to the left. Did it contain elaborate cinematic cutscenes? No. Expansive level design? No. Storytelling? No. Good-looking characters? No. It was monk-like. It allowed itself nothing, but produced sweet intoxicating addictive delights.

Viewtiful Joe 2 is just the same. It is still 2D, and it still offers nothing in the way of story or characters or even choices. Like the original it plunks you into the middle of the screen, and puts your destination on the right, and fills the gap with evil space robots. To get through a level is a simple matter: you must smash all the robots, including one who is holding a key, and then you must use that key to unlock the destination. Occasionally you must use your superpowers to (a) speed up or (b) slow down time, depending on whether you want to hit the current evil robot with (a) a frenzy of punches, or (b) a stylish single uppercut that looks like something out of The Matrix, only 2D.

There are puzzles to solve and hidden treasures to find, and cheeseburgers to restore our health and little floating coins to enhance our powers. Everything a circa-1986 video gamer could have asked for is here. And somehow, despite everything we have seen since 1986, despite the arrival of enormous budgets and star power and hyperpowered graphics chips, it is still enough.

The star of the game is a guy named Joe, who becomes a superhero with a pink cape and an oversized helmet. His girlfriend Silvia, who was the kidnapped damsel in distress a year ago, now has a giant helmet of her own, and is happy to join Joe's fight against the evil space robots. As we play, we can switch between the two, depending on whose superpowers will do the most good. Many puzzles hinge on this twist. Solving them is satisfying. Trying to solve them will extend your evenings long past Conan's bedtime.

Many games in the current crop of sequels feel tired or bored or phoned in. Viewtiful Joe 2 offers fewer innovations than any of them, but somehow it exudes only freshness and excitement and delight. That makes sense, in a way. The original put itself in a tight box and forbade itself every modern luxury. The new one is in a tighter box still, forbidding itself even the freedom to stray from its predecessor's formula. The result is a revelation. All those people who can't wait for the next generation of consoles should give this thing a weekend and see if they still feel the same way.