Imagine - what if - after 2011's Saints Row: The Third, Volition had not pushed the franchise even further into zany crazy-pants town -- if instead, they'd kept doing the "San Andreas successor" thing, following a hyperviolent crime boss's rise to power.

Now imagine that their next try didn't just reboot its location, story, and characters; it re-iterated virtually all of the last game's features and activities, re-implemented the same loose aiming and floaty driving, and ended up being basically... the same game again.

You don't have to imagine hard: it's Saints Row (2022), the story of a new "boss" in a new city. You make friends with some gung-ho personalities, make enemies with three rival gangs, shoot your way through over-the-top heists and chases and rescues, earn money by running drugs and falling in front of cars (Insurance Fraud), claim criminal enterprises, grow territory, and collect outfits.

Y'know, just like in Saints Row 3.

After a few introductory missions establishing the cast, which could just as well have been cut, the reboot turns into that same crime-boss ascent story with the same structure and minigames we've seen before. It'd be a respectable "clone" of The Third, if it was from a different developer ... and wasn't more than ten years later.

What's strange is that Volition did embrace their wackier side, after SR3, in its alien-Matrix super-powered sequel and a spinoff in literal Hell. Then Agents of Mayhem, though not as bombastic as I'd have liked, built new strength-and-weakness mechanics around its superhero team premise. The Saints Row reboot, in contrast, is uncreative and unambitious; like it's not even trying to do anything Saints Row hasn't done before.

(Except pad the outer areas of the map with mostly-empty desert regions. Which suck.)

What's also strange is that Saints Row: The Third Remastered came out just before this reboot. I mean, it makes sense if Volition's business plan was to start cranking out yearly installments of the same formula, and oversaturate their own market, Assassin's Creed-style. But I digress.

Here's the upside: this Saints Row 3 re-skin isn't "bad," in pure gameplay and content terms. As a franchise addict, I happily - or at least, contentedly - sank hours and hours into the seen-this-done-that activities I've just been complaining about. Even the ultra-brief story DLCs The Heist & The Hazardous and A Song of Ice & Dust were, like Gangstas in Space and The Trouble with Clones before them, a fun-enough way to spend an hour or two.

But the reboot still isn't "as good as" Saints Row: The Third due to its technical infidelity. Frequent framerate stutters are sometimes violent enough to interfere with driving or aiming. You can see cars pop-in down any highway; I even noticed pop-out sometimes, a car next to me suddenly fading away! Occasionally reloading a gun plays the animation, but doesn't put any ammo in.

And non-critically, but very visibly, voiceover playback seems to always drift from video framerate -- resulting in subtitles and lipsync not matching audible dialog.

The in-game phone having an ad for the Murder Circus DLC is just a bitter-tasting cherry on top.

At its best, Saints Row (2022) is a more-modern re-do of Saints Rows past. But, it isn't always at its best.

Better than: Agents of Mayhem
Not as good as: Saints Row: The Third Remastered
Credit where it's due: the Mad Max-ian LARPing missions with Eli are legitimately hilarious. Play-fighting dudes in cardboard costumes is a delightful twist on normal combat.

Finally, after treading (re-treading) through the growing pains of new cast members in Apollo Justice and new three-dee technology in Dual Destinies, Spirit of Justice feels like a confident return to Ace Attorney's sweeping melodrama -- interspersed by investigative minigames and courtroom hijinks.

Kinda ironic that, back in 2017, I called out Spirit of Justice for its "safe" narrative focus and for doing "so little to build on the series' gameplay." In retrospect, maintaining a priority on Ace Attorney's storytelling strengths was definitely the right call.

Sure, these cases can be rightly accused of rejecting reasonable evidence -- several cross-examinations requiring you to "Present" a counter-intuitive item. And, following recent games' precedent, other courtroom mechanics like Apollo's Perceive - or even the new Divination Seance - don't get much use.

At least out-of-court investigations are more open to Examine-ation, and chock full of flavor text, compared to Dual Destinies.

... but my point is, what makes Spirit of Justice compelling and memorable - maybe more now, than on a tiny 3DS screen - is the same grandiose storytelling, tying up multiple cases and previous games in a wonderfully satisfying bow, that Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy and The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles did so well.

It keeps its lead characters grounded and relatable, by taking us along with them through crazy, bewildering events. It delivers heavy plot moments, made impactful by our attachments to the main cast. And it keeps things interesting with a colorful menagerie of zany supporting players.

And of course, Spirit of Justice also recognizes the value of fan service, with a tension-breaking 4th case featuring Athena and Simon. (Plus that DLC episode reuniting the old gang of Nick, Maya, Miles, and Larry.)

Considering there isn't much Ace Attorney left for Capcom to re-release - Professor Layton Versus being a Level-5 collab, and Edgeworth's investigations being ... limited - I can't help but wonder what's next. Dare I dream for some news about Athena's law career, and Apollo's Khura'in office, in an Ace Attorney 7?

Dare I hope?

Better than: as a collection, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
Not as good as: as a collection, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy
I mean, I'll rag on it: but I'd still buy a remastered Ace Attorney Investigations collection, if they made it. 'Cause I'm a sucker.

Dual Destinies was Phoenix and co's first 3D adventure - barring the Japanese release of that wacky detective crossover - and, just like I was a decade ago, I'm impressed by how well their over-the-top art style has been translated.

Ace Attorney's knack for eccentric characters carries a lot of water for this game's overall story -- like I also observed back in 2013, the early cases are underwhelming, and its "dark age of the law" plot doesn't really get rolling until quite late.

Dual Destinies also under-delivers on the "investigation" part of its gameplay formula, as a lot of scenes don't even have an Examine button -- and this lack of interactivity and flavor text makes the early cases' slow-moving narratives stand out even more.

At least newcomer Athena's "mood matrix" mechanic gets plenty of opportunities to spice up conversations and cross-examinations. The variety here is a welcome improvement on how anemically Apollo's debut used his own new trick.

(Alhough it's disappointing that Ema's forensic evidence minigames are totally absent, until the Turnabout Reclaimed DLC case.)

In the end, while I'll still heap praise upon this game's characters and overall flair ...

... the bulk of its cases aren't all that engaging, in their investigations nor in their narrative pacing.

Given that, I'm not sure whether I should expect Spirit of Justice to have aged more gracefully.

Progress: Finished Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies

... puzzles have always been important to our culture. To me, they represent the idea that the application of reason can lead us forward.

-- Byron (7)

The Talos Principle II feels like it was made for me. Not just because it's a story-driven puzzle sandbox, or because it includes first-person physics riddles, or even because it's an all-around improvement upon the first game. Talos 2 is downright targeting me with its housecat-informed philosophizing.

This sequel improves what I found wanting, and enhances what I loved, about the 2014 original: fully-voiced NPCs with memorable personalities enrich its narrative, new puzzle tools strongly distinguish it from the first game, and some new design directives - especially, numbered puzzles with accumulating complexity - were a huge help in teaching me how to apply those tools and reason through the game's challenges.

That's in contrast to The Talos Principle's later stages leaving me bitter when I felt stuck, forced to look up hints on the interweb. Talos 2 puts in the effort to carefully build its complexity, one puzzle at a time, so that you won't need hints -- you'll readily recognize twists on patterns you've solved before, and can make informed guesses about how previously-isolated tools might work together.

(... there are, in this game's "best ending" endgame challenges, some impossible-to-find scavenger hunts and a few can't-reverse-mistakes puzzles that I still needed hints on. But these frustrations are fewer and shorter-lived than last time around.)

As I noted when playing the demo, Talos 2's fresh and diverse environments are also a visual treat, evoking the serene-yet-mysterious feel of Myst or The Witness (2016). Talos 2's world isn't really that "open" - each of its 12 regions is unlocked in order, by story progress - but the spaces between puzzles feel very open to free-form exploration.

The Talos Principle II's scripted story, its philosophical backdrop, its brain-tickling puzzle gameplay, and its charming world, all feel like excellent upgrades on the last game; and despite lacking nonograms or computer programming, it really does feel perfectly tailored just for me.

Better than: The Talos Principle, The Witness (2016)
Not as good as: ... the third game might be? I guess?
More substantial, and arguably better!, than: Portal 2

Sixteen years ago, I called out Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney for its muddled story direction, especially in its final time-hopping case; and, well, this is still the same game.

Ace Attorney 4 was bold enough to propose a new lead character, with his own engaging personality, while still including Phoenix Wright in the main plot. Apollo deserves considerable credit for stepping into Phoenix's wingtips as comfortably as he does.

It's a shame that his Perceive ability gets so little use, and new assistant Trucy doesn't bring any new gameplay into the courtroom either. At least Ema is back with some forensic science minigames, I guess.

What Trucy does contribute, if not gameplay twists, is ... precociousness.

That's this game's saving grace, that despite its awkwardly-paced story and missed mechanical opportunities - and an annoying number of leap-of-logic evidence puzzles in the final case - it does pull off enough of that Ace Attorney humor, and style, to stay charming all the way through.

This may be a relatively weak entry in the Ace Attorney franchise, but clicking through its narrative is still satisfying and worthwhile.

Progress: Finished Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney

Calling the two newest Uncharted games a "Legacy Collection" feels a bit strange; then again, Uncharted 4 is eight years old, now. (Oof.)

It's not too surprising that Uncharted 4 holds up great -- it was a "shining jewel in the franchise" at launch, and not many Indiana Jones-styled adventure games have bothered trying to unseat it since.

(The PC implementation is just fine, although I did crash once or twice over its dozen-plus hours, and some complex scenes - like the jungley and oceany and rainy islands - had pretty inconsistent framerates.)

And Lost Legacy, despite being a smaller outing with a less-epic story, has held up great as well. Sure, it still left me wanting more free-roaming activities, and wanting more narrative stakes for its characters; but Chloe and Nadine's adventure is satisfying enough on its own.

Of course, I continue playing these games on the "Explorer" - easiest - difficulty, because I'm so incredibly uninterested in dying and retrying a gunfight with wave after wave of disposable goons. But I appreciate that there are gunfights, and not just instant-fail pure-stealth sneak sequences, even if that's more what a "real" archaeologist might do.

More than anything, replaying these games (especially Uncharted 4's nostalgia-heavy intro) makes me yearn for remakes of Drake's El Dorado, Shambhala, and Iram adventures. But those legacy entries are likely in need of thorough redevelopment, by now.

Dave the Diver is like like a teppanyaki chain restaurant: it can appear hackneyed and silly, and it's not the best-tasting meal you'll ever have, but the energetic showmanship and variety of food sure keep it interesting.

Dave gets a lot of nautical mileage out of introducing new features, environments, and even gameplay at a pretty high frequency. I don't just mean its WarioWare-like microgames for harpooning fish and preparing dishes, either -- there are entire upgrade trees, resource management systems, stealth-action interludes, and other novel mechanics suddenly appearing every couple hours.

Most of these ideas would be pretty mediocre on their own - whether because the UI for managing fish hatcheries isn't very intuitive, or because a bullet-hell boss fight is kinda frustrating - but they never outstay their welcome, because Dave the Diver's always got something new just around the corner. (Plus, boss battle checkpoints are mercifully generous.)

And it continuously delivers those ideas with such enthusiasm, with such consistently fun charm, that it's hard not to crack a smile at this goofy fuckin' game.

That promise of delightful novelty is what kept me going for one more round one more dive, despite various rough edges in one system or another, through Dave the Diver's impressively lengthy story -- easily 20 or 30 hours of fishing and sushi-preparing and mystery-solving and world-saving. I can't stress this enough: mermaids are one of the less surprising parts of Dave's story.

Unfortunately, once the main narrative is over, it's hard to stay motivated for any secondary objectives Dave might have left. Collecting more MarinCa and sourcing more picky customers' ingredients does start to feel samey after the story-driven gimmicks have dried up.

Up 'til then, though, Dave does a commendable job of keeping it fresh.

Better than: Animal Crossing: Wild World
Not as good as: Battle Chef Brigade
Alternate summary: "Like Grand Theft Auto with its irreverence and disparate minigames, but instead of stealing cars, you catch fish."

Today the Glog turns 20 years old. Or really, my first posted review turns 20, that post having lived through multiple iterations of web-based complaints about videogames. The precise birthdate of "Glog" may be lost to time.

My writing style has certainly changed since 2004, as has my taste in games; heck, games themselves are pretty different these days. Back in my day, every Final Fantasy installment was a huge event, and you'd spend years looking forward to the next, new epic adventure--

Oh, what's that? Square was already churning out spinoffs and MMO timesinks by 2004? Hm.

Compared to the preceding 20 years - starting in the mid-80s with a great crash and somehow ending with consoles on the internet - recent game industry history seems much less volatile. Games sure are bigger than they were, in your web browser and on your mobile phone, reaching so many people and costing so much to make, it'd make those 20th-century game devs' eyes water.

I think I've been reading those "AAA Unsustainability" headlines for about 20 years, too.

Well, here's to another several decades of this silly little hundred-billion-dollar commercial art form, and of me continuing to complain about it.

Data may suggest that I've neglected the Glog over this past year:

... but that suggestion is only mostly correct. Unlike my excuse about backlog-culling in 2022, I must admit that in 2023, I simply didn't play very many games.

However! Technically, pedantically, loophole-ally, I very much did not neglect the Glog's code; what started as a weekend hacking project, revamping how I build this website, eventually turned into automated data updates with auto-correcting reference links.

Now I'm just waiting for that reference-correction case ... to actually occur ...

Anyway, I did play some games in 2023, new and otherwise:

Last year started with me wrapping up a Witcher 3 replay in Blood and Wine. Although I'd timed this replay to take advantage of the game's late 2022 tech update, Blood and Wine reminded me that:

... Witcher 3 didn't need an update to make it worth replaying. And nowhere is this more evident than Toussaint, where the Blood and Wine expansion doesn't just paint a beautiful rural-urban-hybrid landscape with the same kind of deeply enthralling content as the main game.

[...] [Blood and Wine] encapsulates all the best that Witcher 3 has to offer, in an irresistably beautiful virtual France.

Later in the year, I returned to Middle-earth in Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War. The former always felt a bit like a proof-of-concept, a prototype, for the game Monolith really had in mind -- and the new-to-me Bright Lord DLC, with its territory and army features, kinda confirmed that.

Mordor's Lord of the Hunt add-on, and War's Blade of Galadriel and Desolation of Mordor, were also more fun than I'd expected them to be. That last DLC in particular felt like a successful experiment in re-theming the base game's mechanics:

... thanks to Desolation of Mordor's other design ambition: Batman tech.

Baranor may not have elf magic, but he does have gadgets - okay, "Numenorean artifacts" - which let him grapple up walls, glide through the air, and lob explosives from afar, plus a few tricks for controlling crowds and stunning captains.

So, my replayed games in 2023 were already pretty DLC-heavy, but wait: there's more! (More DLC, I mean.)

Although I praised Outer Wilds in 2022, I didn't write about- okay, I didn't give up on its Echoes of the Eye expansion until months later.

... I've been reluctant to return because this DLC is chock-full of the exact "obtuse points" that only occasionally marred my Outer Wilds playthrough.

The confusingly-named, also-first-person, also-in-space, but wholly-unrelated The Outer Worlds came with a couple DLCs of its own: Peril on Gorgon and Murder on Eridanos. These ended up feeling like "more of the same" of the base game, for better and for worse:

Like the main game, Gorgon and Eridanos are stuffed with a large amount of content, but it's thoroughly one-note and unimaginative. [...]

Peril on Gorgon and Murder on Eridanos aren't bad, but they are bland; and if you already felt that way about the base game, then these expansions won't change your mind.

Hey, speaking of Meh games:

I played my share of underwhelming titles in 2023 -- particularly, cool ideas with flawed execution, like Return of the Obra Dinn being skewered by its unhelpful notebook; Midnight Protocol ruining its hacking strategy with random dice-rolls; A Way Out struggling to balance co-op gimmicks with storytelling; and Eternal Threads moving way too slowly as it unraveled its narrative.

Most heartbreaking, for sure, was Last Call BBS feeling more like a retrocomputing demo than a fitting farewell to Zachtronics:

The holistic experience feels like a warmly authentic celebration of the era when personal computers were fascinating toys, and not quite yet indispensable tools. But - and here's the disappointing bit - it doesn't meaningfully celebrate Zachtronics' back catalog of programming puzzle games.

[...] Some of these games are short, and some are too long and repetitive, but they're all -- well, not "simple" exactly, but shallow. Even the implementation details of the three programming games don't feel like "depth" so much as overcomplications of small ideas.

But! I also played some stand-out Awesome games in 2023, even aside from old-favorite replays. Disco Elysium was a real treat, dense with uniquely weird world-building and interactions:

Points of interest in Martinaise, and its population's personalities, are all rich with fine, meticulous, artisinal details to unravel. There's so much fascinating history, and colorful commentary!, to read through. It's like Mass Effect's Codex but with dialog choices.

[...] Sometimes, actually quite often, Disco Elysium's side-stories are so intriguing and enthralling that you'll forget all about its primary thread. Which makes the murder-mystery plot's twists and turns extra surprising.

And Tears of the Kingdom did an incredible job of revisiting, but also reinvigorating, its predecessor:

The Depths recapture the same feelings that made Breath of the Wild so memorable: being overwhelmed by a huge new world, and terrified by its angry inhabitants; getting taunted by its dangers as you carefully work on quests in its margins; gradually powering up and becoming more comfortable in it; and eventually overpowering it by eating its big, weird baddies for breakfast.

[...] Like last time, [quality-of-life] issues melt away in light of Tears of the Kingdom's awe-inspiring new environments, its refreshing twists on the old, and the incredible amount of stuff you can do in its even-more-massive world.

And then there's Cyberpunk 2077.

I called it Good, I enjoyed it in parts, but ultimately I couldn't ignore that it felt "very unfinished":

There are good parts: mechanics that're functional and fun, missions that tell memorable stories, character interactions that feel real and engaging. But there are also plenty of lulls, and misses, and outright mistakes. [...]

It's a shame that Cyberpunk 2077's impossible ambition prevented it from telling a complete story.

But just a couple months after that post, CD Projekt announced their "Update 2.0" patch alongside the Phantom Liberty expansion. So, yeah, we will see.

What else am I looking forward to in 2024? Well, aside from upcoming releases like Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores (on PC) and Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy, there are a bunch more 2023 releases that I still need to catch up on -- Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Baldur's Gate 3, Super Mario RPG (2023), and The Talos Principle II (whose demo I quite enjoyed), just to name a few.

At the moment, I'm quite enjoying some deep-sea fishing and sushi-ing with Dave the Diver. But Dave had better solve the "Sea People's" problems soon, 'cause my backlog is starting to grow again.

So, remember how Gone Home overcame "walking simulator" bullshit by focusing on a single, tightly-crafted story, even at the cost of its running-length? And remember how Fullbright's next game, Tacoma, delivered more interactivity and additional character development but still kept it brisk and brief?

Eternal Threads had an idea similar to Tacoma's - scrub through a timeline to learn characters' stories and uncover key secrets - plus, branching decisions like a choose-your-own-adventure; but it fumbles by spending entirely too much time on un-critical, un-interesting content.

Foremost, there's the "experiments in time travel" sci-fi meta-narrative, which forces you to sit and stare at a prologue filled with boring, inconsequential technobabble. But even in its core narrative, made up of nearly 200 individual scenes, Eternal Threads can't help but waste time in many scenes that just aren't meaningful to the plot nor to its cast. There's considerable "filler" that, even when it's well-written, didn't need to be here.

The mechanical gameplay is a bit of a slog, too. Credit where it's due: Eternal Threads has a pretty damned convenient timeline navigation interface, like a streamlined view of Elsinore's schedule notebook -- plus, here, you can seek to any event at random. But to watch a scene, after selecting it in that interface, you then need to walk your character to the scene's location. Following the timeline's order of events means you'll do lots of going upstairs, watching a bit, going downstairs, watching another bit, going back upstairs...

This is where I wish Eternal Threads had copied Tacoma's homework, and let me walk along with characters as they moved from one event to the next. With this game's scene design, even if I'm only following one character's scenes, I still need to pull up the Time Map and select the next one every time.

Okay, the game is annoyingly slow and a little clunky, so why did I keep playing it? Well, the upside is that this story is actually, legitimately good. I put the hours into Eternal Threads because I wanted to unravel the mysteries of its house, to investigate each character's personal mysteries, and to observe all of their possible outcomes.

And although the characters' presentations are imperfect - rough models, primitive lip-sync, mediocre voice acting - their writing is really well-done. The emotive exposition each has, and the way they interact with one another, really made me feel like I understood these people and their individual plights.

Though I hestitate to recommend the game, due to its pacing struggles, Eternal Threads does have a strong-enough narrative to be noteworthy. (Maybe it would've been more fun as a co-op activity, choosing branches and watching them play out with a partner.)

Better than: Dear Esther, Shadow of Destiny, Until Dawn
Not as good as: Elsinore, The Forgotten City, Gone Home, Tacoma
... one more caveat: getting the "good ending," making the branch decisions that the game wants you to make, isn't always what I would call logical or reasonable. The destination isn't as satisfying as the journey.