I've slaughtered bears, necromancers, vampires, and dragons. I've learned to hurl blazing fire from a distance, and to sneak silently close before slitting my enemy's throat. I've toppled governments -- both local, and regional. I've forged armor, mixed potions, and enchanted weapons with the souls of my enemies. I've sprinted over grasslands, across frozen waters, up snowy peaks; I've delved deep into the ruins of ancient civilization. I've filled my home with books, gemstones, rare artifacts, and dragon bones. I've entered into pacts with demon lords from another plane of existence. I've logged over 110 hours in the world of Skyrim; and I still have more to do.

The amount of content in this game is simply staggering. And what it does best is continually surprising the player with new quests and points of interest, seemingly out of nowhere. This is how I took over a hundred hours doing what "can" be done in about two: getting requests from NPCs, happening upon suspicious notes, stumbling into some ancient ruins, and always spiraling out into more and more quests. So I ended up running countless errands and championing dozens of other causes, instead of doing that whole save-the-world thing.

Around the 70-hour mark, I decided to stop intentionally taking new quests, and took another 20 or 30 working through most of the remainders, before finally getting back on track with the main questline. But even after spending more time with Skyrim than I have with (almost) any other game, I still have more work to do with the Thieves' Guild, an unfulfilled date with the Dark Brotherhood, and entire cities I've barely visited (actually, I never visited Falkreath at all!) -- which is all not to mention the seven more experience levels I need to get to 50, the handful of Daedra lords I have yet to meet, and the level-100 Destruction spells, which I've learned but don't have enough Magicka to cast yet!

And I dare not dream of all the content that's popping up on Steam Workshop.

I never used to understand how people got hooked on Bethesda games before, but I think I finally get it, now. They can appear boring to watch because the immense reach and density of content seamlessly integrates you into the game world, such that even tedious and commonplace activities are all part of the adventure. And by being immersed in this world, continually distracted by quests and events, it becomes surprisingly easy to overlook, and even forgive, their games' technical issues.

It should be a foregone conclusion that basically everyone already knows this by now, but: you should play Skyrim. If you want melee combat in your RPG, you should probably look into Kingdoms of Amalur instead -- otherwise, pick up your bow or your spell tome, clear out your calendar for the next few months, and fall head-first into what may be the most engrossing virtual world ever created.

Oh, and always keep a finger over the quicksave button (F5). When a boss unexpectedly kills you and the last automatic save was an hour ago, you'll be glad you did.

Better than: basically any other role-playing or open-world game
Not as good as: I'm still partial to GTA4, but all bets are off if Bethesda figures out how to put guns and cars in Tamriel
Now I want to try Oblivion: buuut I'm pretty much all RPG-ed out for a while

Progress: Level 43 Dovahkiin, Harbinger, Arch-Mage, Nightingale, Storm-Blade

Following up on a quest objective, I found myself at the opening of a cave. I heard the adventurers, as they heard me -- I crept behind a rock, and saw a human and a lizard-dude split up, looking for the source of the noise. I assumed they were hostile (most things in Skyrim are), so I opened up some lightning on the lizardman; he shot some lightning back at me, and destroyed me utterly.

Reload. This time I tried walking up to them, just to see if they were friendly. They were! As it turns out, they wanted to go into the same cave I was going to, but they wanted some help. Me, "helping" the people who had just proven that they were able to annihilate me handily. So we went into the cave, and they charged ahead of me, blowing up spiders and slicing apart viking mummies faster than I could see them. Eventually we made it to the boss, who killed us all.

Reload. I loosed arrows and magic at the boss and his minions, ran around the room trying to avoid getting smashed to bits, chugged potions to keep my bars from running out. Eventually we defeated the boss. I started collecting some loot, and noticed a word of power gleaming at the end of the room. Then the lizardman thanked me for my help, and announced that he was about to kill me for a blood sacrifice. He did so.

Reload. This time I hid in the corners, letting the boss tear down the lizardman first -- then I finished the boss off. I collected my loot, exited the dungeon, and saw some errant ruins. When I investigated, a pair of ice sprites ripped me apart.

Eventually, and with some judicious quick-saving, I made it through. (Also, a dragon started attacking me after that last part.) And aside from one time when I got stuck in the terrain and couldn't evade my foes, it never felt frustrating or tiring. I just wanted to try again, to prove that I was better than the viking mummy boss, and the lizardman, and the dragon. To earn my spoils, even though I ended up selling most of them. And to mark another dungeon on my map as "cleared."

What makes Skyrim amazing - in spite of its fairly messy controls, and its depressing technical issues - is the incredible breadth and quality of its content (well, not counting the voice acting). More than just being an open world to explore, Skyrim offers a new adventure at every turn -- where the path between where you are and where you're going is always full of unexpected diversions and mysteries.

Forgiving the game's tech is damn hard, sometimes. But surprisingly, not impossible.

Progress: Finally made it to Winterhold

I would like the idea of a hacking-simulator game -- even when the superficially-realistic mechanics are in most cases simplified to the point of "crack" and "decrypt" commands. There's something magical about playing a game whose only input is a text console, and not having to imagine caves, or ogres, or whatever. It's a computer, and my enemies are other computers. It's perfect.

But I lost patience with Hacker Evolution pretty quickly, and not because of its shallow reflection of real server tools, or even because of its just-adequate-for-an-indie lack of polish. It's because, although the game promises an extensive hardware upgrade path - faster CPUs for better decryption, stronger firewalls for better trace blocking, etc. - the economy doesn't support it. Your trace level (think: inverse health points) carries over from mission to mission, and you'll need to spend most of your money just bribing your traces down in order to continue on. I made the mistake of saving up for a high-powered CPU to make sure my hacks outran the traces, but just the passive trace hits from pinging and logging into servers add up to an unavoidable nuisance.

I'm more than willing to try out its sequel, in the hopes that this balance has been tweaked to be more favorable to "character" growth. But with the trace-level-stick practically mashing the hardware-upgrade-carrot into oblivion, I don't really see the point.

Progress: Gave Up -- Got to level 2?

The tower defense segments are clearly unfinished, and the assassin recruit system, while improved from Brotherhood, could still use some work to really polish it up. But Revelations gets what props I give it, mainly because it finally iterates on what I would consider the really important part of Assassin's Creed -- that is, assassination, by way of infiltrating Templar lairs. And it actually culls a lot of the garbage that's accumulated in the franchise, like the retarded Subject 16 puzzles.

Of course, nothing can fix how ridiculous the series storyline is -- except perhaps the real-life passage of 2012, which will hopefully force a reboot after this year's quintilogy conclusion. But Revelations also comes out looking relatively good here, because it does such a fantastic job of utterly ignoring the plot. The vast majority of the campaign focuses on Ezio's story, which is of limited interest but is at least inoffensive. The Desmond content accumulates to about ten minutes, and the Altair flashbacks - although they sometimes awkwardly squish his backstory into exaggerated melodrama - are mercifully brief.

There's still plenty to improve on, like the overcrowded controller map, some missions which fail instantly when you're detected, and generally terrible writing. But this is the most promising sequel to Assassin's Creed yet.

Better than: any previous Assassin's Creed game
Not as good as: Batman: Arkham City
Please, please Ubisoft: finish the series this year, and then make it something better for the next one

Progress: Complete

Requires Origin? That's unfortunate. Admittedly, I haven't had any personal experience with EA's new-ish game marketplace/platform -- because of all the people I know who have dealt with it, none of them have had anything nice, or even tolerable to say about it. Battlefield 3's PC version UI is a well-documented clusterfuck. And Star Wars: The Old Republic, apparently, requires registration and authentication on Origin even though the game itself has no presence on or functional link with it.

It sounds trite to say that Steam availability is a deal-maker or -breaker; they have their own DRM, and Gunpei knows that the Steam client software isn't perfect (take its download manager -- please!). But if I'm paying anything close to full-price for a PC game, I want to know that the DRM won't infect the rest of my system, and that I can re-download said game, as I please, in effective perpituity. Valve is a stable entity, and has earned my trust: I have no reason not to believe that they will allow me to continue playing Steam-purchased software, even if Steam ceases to exist. EA, on the other hand, has never faltered at an opportunity to screw its customers, and so I have little confidence in the return on any money I might give to their download service.

Which is a really roundabout way of saying, if it isn't on Steam, I'll probably just wait for it to be a $5 download from Amazon.

My absolute first impression was not favorable -- the Kingdoms of Amalur demo requires you to have, and sign in with, an EA account. I imagine this is vital for (among EA's other marketing purposes) the advertised item unlocks, particularly those that'll apply to Mass Effect 3, but even in today's era of always-online fuck-you DRM, it's still typical to allow an Offline/No-Signin mode. Kind of a letdown, here.

Anyway, the next surprise waiting for me was the game's overall aesthetic. The trailers I've watched looked a bit exaggerated, maybe, but the game itself looks cartoonish. Actually, it seems deliberately styled to resemble World of Warcraft, and the nerdy gnomes in the starting area certainly don't dissuade that comparison.

The quests I saw in the demo were also highly reminiscent of WoW, or more specifically, of my earlier experiences with WoW -- before the game became so diluted and streamlined. Listening to an NPC explain his plight, and then venturing out into the wilderness to find who/whatever he needs, before returning and picking up the next link of the quest chain; it's refreshing, although familiar at the same time. I was engaged enough during my demo time, but I do wonder if this content can continue to be interesting for more than a couple hours.

Pleasantly, there does seem to be a lot of content. The starting area was rich with lore and interactive objects, and the town immediately outside, daunting with available quests -- and then I took a look at the world map, of which this region is a relatively insignificant part. And then of course is the depth of character customization, which - between the multiple weapon and armor slots, D&D-style skill points, WoW-style talent trees, and "Fate cards" which can change your passive, class-like bonuses - is both engrossing and satisfying.

But another surprise was how unpolished some of the story content seemed. A primary NPC I spoke to early in the game, had recorded lines which sounded like they were directed contrary to how they were written -- awkward emphasis and word substitution, which didn't really make sense in context. And even in my relatively brief time with the game, I encountered a number of times where an NPC or quest marker didn't react as it was supposed to. While it's certainly playable, it's striking to me how unfinished it seems, and unless this is a pre-release build (the game comes out in a few weeks!), that doesn't really bode well.

Kingdoms of Amalur invites comparison to World of Warcraft and to Skyrim, and while it may be more personalized than the former and more technologically stable than the latter, it remains to be seen if it can match the long-term intrigue of either. I had fun with this demo, but I'll need to hear some more in-depth critiques before making a purchasing decision.

Progress: Played through the demo

Last week I opined that Assassin's Creed Brotherhood represented a further step along its predecessor's path of adding half-baked features, neglecting the core game, and generally ignoring subtlety and meaning in favor of bullet points. In that light, what's surprised me most about Assassin's Creed Revelations so far is that it actually attempts to extend the free-running and sneaking gameplay that's barely seen any refinement since the first game -- and that it succeeds.

Which isn't to say that Revelations has finally turned the franchise into something really respectable. In fact, even given that the Assassin/Templar plot has been laughable since the final moments of the first game, this one manages to reach a new low from the outset: Desmond is in a coma. While the second and third games at least made a token effort to frame the modern-day story with basic NPC dialog, this time around you're stuck, alone, in a computer-generated purgatory ("Animus Island"); you'll very-rarely overhear some conversations happening outside, but these are all weakly delivered. They do foreshadow some plot, uh, revelations, but they do it with the subtlety of a Mack truck.

The retarded little hidden-puzzle segments are gone, replaced with collectible items that unlock bonus levels on the Island. These levels are, somewhat inexplicably, first-person platform-puzzlers, like Portal but without any of the interesting parts. Desmond reminisces about his past - growing up at the Assassin training ranch - while doing these levels, but there is no other narrative involved; and the puzzles have only begun to get engaging in the third of five levels. If the challenge continues to ramp up, that may at least feel like a significant addition to the game, but so far - between having more dumb little collectibles, and the utter insignificance of these levels - it certainly doesn't seem any better than the (again, retarded) puzzles.

(As a side note-- at least on the PC version, when you enter one of these bonus levels, the game closes and then reopens in the level; finishing the bonus level again exits, and reopens the main game. I can think of no rational explanation for this, save my assumption that the bonus levels were done by a development studio completely independent of the core game, and that they could not be integrated into the main framework in time for launch. I wonder how well this works in the console versions?)

With that said, Revelations is deadly-focused on Ezio's adventures in Constantinople, and while his story still isn't very interesting, it is at least making a better effort than last time. Where Brotherhood was content to recycle AC2's characters, Revelations introduces new ones, granted that there aren't very many so far. What's particularly notable is that when you take over an area - in a mechanic that is at first identical to the last game's Borgia Towers, but I'll explain more in a bit - you can assign a recruited assassin to be in charge of it, and some missions proceed to open up involving this random character. Since the game's real story missions weren't very well-written to begin with, these optional missions with interchangeable characters have no problem coming up to their par.

Constantinople feels less dense with activities than Rome was, but at the same time, these activities feel more involved and meaningful. The city still begins as mostly taken over by Templars; you'll have to infiltrate a stronghold and take out a Templar captain, then light a signal fire, to clear the rest of the Templar agents out. But unlike the miniscule tower areas in Brotherhood, the strongholds in Revelations are of such a size (and possessing enough enemies) that you'll actually need to use subtlety mechanics like sneaking, blending, and distraction to make it to the captain. Frequently (and this is true both of missions and of stronghold infiltration), you'll also need to really make use of Eagle Vision to tail and identify the target. Not to oversell it, but this genuinely feels like a return to form for Assassin's Creed.

Once the Templars are gone, the area becomes property of the Assassins, and you can take care of guild business there (e.g. send recruits out on missions). But if Ezio becomes notorious, from killing dudes, buying property, or being spotted in restricted areas - keeping in mind that you'll be fully notorious immediately after taking a stronghold from the Templars - an Assassin stronghold may become contested, and you'll have to go defend it. The defense itself is handled in a poorly-implemented tower defense minigame, which is pretty dumb, but the fact that there is a need for defense is pretty cool.

I've managed to come a long way without mentioning the Hookblade, which is a welcome addition to Ezio's toolset. While I could take or leave its combat moves, it extends acrobatic reach even further by allowing Ezio to pull himself up far-off ledges, and can also hook onto some ziplines scattered around the city. Yeah, ziplines.

I still have complaints about these games, most significantly that the story is god-awful and the core missions aren't very fun. But I feel like Revelations is finally making some real progress.

Progress: Sequence 4

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is an iterative step along the path set forth by Assassin's Creed 2. It makes minimal improvements to the existing game formula, largely adding half-cocked new features instead; it tosses away some unneeded cruft, like subtlety, and pacing; and it continues the franchise's descent into vapid, absurd storytelling.

First, the good points. While I felt that AC2's refinements on the first game's insufficient combat system were, well, still insufficient, Brotherhood's combat just feels better. Mechanically, I think it is barely any different, but it seems like enemies simply move and attack quicker this time around. My biggest complaint about the previous games' combat was waiting around for enemies to strike and expose themselves, and this time, there is virtually no waiting. So that's a significant gain.

Although I was sated by the second game's impromptu empire-building mechanic - renovating the Villa Auditore and building up a ridiculous cash income - the shallowness, and ultimate lack of utility, of it was off-putting. The Brotherhood version may not be any more useful, but it is at least more involved; now Ezio can purchase property all throughout the city, opening shops and buying landmarks to the point of literally owning Rome.

Relatedly, one of the bullet-point features for Brotherhood is recruiting helper assassins. These guys can be used in two ways: they can be sent away on missions, alone or in groups, to earn money and find items (they can also earn experience points and level-up from these missions); or they can be called in during the main gameplay to help out, by taking out targets you can't reach, or blitzing some guards who mean to get in your way, or even en masse by showering the area with arrows. Like the villa renovations in AC2, the experience system and the lackluster missions make this come across as a half-implemented feature, even though it can be a nifty time-waster.

But this is also a nice lead-in to one of my more philosophical problems with the game -- that it all but discards the subtle, from-the-shadows angle. Although there are campaign missions that auto-fail when Ezio is detected (which is an annoyance in its own right), in general there is no need for any sort of stealthiness. Why bother setting up a distraction for the guards, then sneaking up behind them with a hidden blade, when a head-on attack with a huge sword is more effective? Between buying up the city, flooding it with assassins, and outright assaulting the Vatican in plain sight, Brotherhood shows what amounts to an open war between the Assassins and the Templars.

Granted, slowly and methodically weaving through a crowd in the first game wasn't very fun, but the idea that the Assassins operated completely out of the public eye made the setup innately interesting. Ezio's faster-paced, devil-may-care attitude about spilling blood on the streets feels like a deliberate echo of modern action games. It feels like it's let go of what should be a key tenet of the franchise. But it's clear that Ubisoft doesn't really care about what made Altair's game a unique surprise -- it's much more intent on making this series about fast-paced action, minigames, and "community" integration.

But I digress. Back to the game -- while the map is chock-full of activities to do, almost none of them feel fun or worthwhile. Between the Borgia towers, the property purchases, Lairs of Romulus, Templars, side-missions with Courtesans, Mercenaries, and Thieves, Leonardo's war machines, Subject 16 glyphs, hidden treasures, recruit missions, shop quests; there is absolutely no risk of running out of things to do in Rome. But the majority just boil down to poorly-written side missions that exercise the same few mission types, like avoiding detection, or chasing a dude, or killing a bunch of dudes.

Hell, the recruit missions don't even involve any gameplay; you just open a menu, send them on their way, and then wait 6-20 minutes until they come back. And this is where Ubisoft's mechanical direction for the series shows most clearly, with recruit missions, shop management, and the sheer amount of navigation that must be done from the map: a lot of "gameplay" is happening from a Flash menu. It's certainly a lot easier to design and implement than real gameplay, I'll give them that. But it does little to allay concerns that this is just turning more and more into a Facebook game.

Narratively, the Rome campaign is nothing if not formulaic: Ezio is ousted from the Villa, rejoins the same three factions (Courtesans/Mercenaries/Thieves) who helped him last time, does recon with each faction on a particular target, finds the Piece of Eden and tackles the Pope. It's decidedly flat for the duration, particularly in the last two chapters, when the production team realized how close their deadline was and completely cut out sections of exposition and stage-setting. At this point the game abruptly and repeatedly jumps ahead months at a time, I guess in an effort to re-associate itself with documented history.

Meanwhile, the real-world storyline in 2012 continues to be absolutely retarded -- if Uncharted is the Indiana Jones of video games, then Assassin's Creed is the National Treasure. Attempting to retcon human history as a secret society's conspiratorial ploy to pacify the public, using ancient magical artifacts from the same alien lifeforms who of course created humanity, is as eye-rollingly lazy as ever. It hardly seems fair, when other games hire actual writers, for Assassin's Creed to get away with pointing at some event in history and saying "Templars did it."

AC2 introduced the memory-fragment glyphs, which a previous Animus tester left behind in the simulation (using computer-magic or whatever), leading to wacky puzzles that ultimately unlocked a little additional story insight. The puzzles themselves were framed with these dumb little "Hey, did you know Henry Ford was a Templar?" tidbits, attempting to flesh out the Templars' influences throughout time. And Brotherhood reiterates these sequences, but, with some frequency, features people who are still alive. George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, a number of US Supreme Court justices, and many currently-relevant corporate entities (like Coca-Cola and Kraft Foods) are named as participants in the Templars' international conspiracy. More than just lazy, this kind of thing strikes me as intentionally inflammatory, and somewhat socially irresponsible; if the parties involved became aware, I wouldn't be surprised to hear about slander claims against Ubisoft.

Gosh, I wonder why Microsoft isn't implicated as a Templar puppet.

So the gameplay isn't evolving sensibly and the writing is some of the worst in the industry. Why do I keep playing these games? Because despite all my complaints, Assassin's Creed continues to be adequate. Though refinement on its core mechanics is slow, and it is gradually morphing into an entirely generic open-world action game, it works well enough (and adds enough new, albeit unfinished, features) to keep my attention for the few-hours' duration of its campaign.

And because I am actually, morbidly curious about where the 2012 story is going. I've already suffered through the setup; I want to hear the punchline.

Better than: Prototype
Not as good as: The Saboteur, Uncharted 2
I guess there's a multiplayer mode also: but who gives a shit about that?

Progress: Finished the campaign, and a few of the extra things

Oblivion (or, what I saw of other people playing it) didn't impress me, nor did Fallout 3. And frankly, I have less respect for Bethesda's development acumen than just about anyone else's. But the noise around Skyrim was getting way too loud for me to ignore.

Having previously been trained by no small number of overhyped, undercooked holiday releases, I found myself quickly preparing for disappointment. And at first, that's exactly what I got: although the landscapes are beautiful, close-up graphical detail and animations get fairly ugly. NPCs never hesitate to interrupt each other mid-conversation, masking dialog which may or may not be important. And, crucially, the melee controls and combat are just terrible -- clumsy movement (whether in first- or third-person), no sense of aim or range, and with frequent shield blocks, no sense of impact.

So I related my impressions to a co-worker, who had already played the game to death, and he vehemently suggested I abandon my melee trifles for spellcasting. Man, what a difference it makes -- the aiming reticle is actually useful, the awkward close-quarters movement is completely mitigated, and the spell effects are awesome to behold. Clearly, magic spells are the real point of this game; with magic, the combat is actually fun.

Once I got over that hurdle, I allowed myself to become engrossed in the world of Skyrim. And here is where Bethesda's talent for creating content really shines. The world is enormous, and although its wilderness is spacious in the way of Red Dead Redemption, the scripted dialog, town construction, and quest log are all quite humbling of Rockstar. I'm being meticulous in exploring towns, examining items, and talking to NPCs, and as a result I don't know when I'll have the time to read, let alone accomplish, all the quests they've given to me.

The graphics are still underwhelming most of the time, and the engine technology is still creaky at best -- not to mention how unpolished the game can feel at times, like when the last autosave was half an hour back. But examined at its highest level, where you have the freedom to sling fire and lightning around a huge open world filled with secrets to uncover, Skyrim is pretty damned compelling.

Progress: Slew my first dragon!

Solar 2 is a game about assimilating and/or crushing the opposition, wherein said opposition is made up of outer space shit. That is, asteroids, planets, stars, you know. At its core, the goal of the game is to keep absorbing lesser bodies until you get to black hole density, and can consume the entire universe; then the big crunch leads to a big bang, and it starts all over again. And this sandbox experience is surprisingly fun, in the same way that flOw allows you to grow from an insignificant spec into a big intergalactic-schoolyard bully.

But there are also discrete tasks to take on -- not just the game's achievements and individual challenges, but significantly, "story" missions: about a dozen for each of the Asteroid, Planet, and Star phases. The mission objectives - such as defending against alien ships, escorting a planet to a goal area, and "stealing" planets from other systems - are pretty diverse and distinctive. Not to mention the "Entity" narrator, whose wry sense of black humor keeps the game's universal scale light and goofy.

Solar 2 offers a surprising amount of gameplay for its dead-simple control scheme, and the soundtrack is pretty cool, to boot. Ten dollars seems a tad steep, but for the right price, this is quite the entertaining diversion.

Better than: Universe Sandbox Legacy
Not as good as: Super Mario Galaxy
I guess Solar 1 was on XBLIG?: looks like it might be worth a buck, if you care.

Progress: 100% story mission completion