Not unlike Space Marine, Bodycount's promotional media did a good job of convincing me that this wasn't just going to be another rote genre entry -- that it would do its shooting so well, and combine it with enough unique, flavorful twists, that it would be set apart from FPS juggernauts like Call of Duty and Battlefield. But based on the demo, it, to be blunt, doesn't.

The controls are surprisingly complicated for how typical most of the mechanics are; one notable exception from the norm is its lean system. When you press the left trigger to aim, if you hold it all the way down, you'll be rooted in place and can lean left or right (whereas, holding it halfway will allow you to strafe as is customary). The lean can be pretty useful, but the control is baffling -- when I'm in a tense moment and I jam on the trigger, I don't want to stand still and get shot at.

Codemasters has also been hyping up Bodycount's varied color scheme, which replaces the typical grays and browns with yellows, greens, and blues. And while it's true that the game draws from a rich palette, the high-detail art direction - combined with muddy texturing, which is unfortunate - means that rather than using color for contrast effect, game elements just end up blending in with one another.

As for the destructible environment, this is no Geo-Mod -- only certain things can be destroyed. So rather than a real mechanic, it ends up feeling like a context-sensitive opportunity.

Of course the big question is, since Bodycount is a first-person shooter that goes mostly by the numbers, why is there no PC version? The demo's default aim sensitivity is down way too low, which may or may not be related. It gives me the impression that Bodycount's developers are more familiar with GoldenEye and Halo than with Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament -- because if they were PC players, they would surely know that the platform has already perfected a control scheme for this kind of game.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished the demo level

Yesterday when I mentioned that I was putting "about" as much time as I could into Human Revolution, this demo was what qualified the about. The promotional media for Space Marine has made protagonist Captain Titus out to be the ultimate badass: covered in plate armor, bristling with heavy guns, waving around a chainsaw sword, and also, uh, JETPACK. With all that pure, unadulterated kickass just bouncing around all willy-nilly, does it matter if the game is totally retarded?

Well, the demo doesn't make a great case for it. It shows two levels -- one where you fight a bunch of orcs, then a bunch of orcs, then a bunch of orcs, then some orcs, then more orcs, then wave after wave after wave of orcs. The level lasts less than half an hour, but becomes painfully repetitive almost immediately. In the second level, you get a jetpack and can dive-bomb down into orcs, so basically the same thing but a lot shorter and easier.

The high concept still sounds amazing, so I'm not ready to write it completely off just yet. But if the demo's level designs are really representative of the full game, I think I'll stick with watching it, rather than playing it.

Progress: Gave Up -- Played both of the demo levels

I've been putting about as much time as I can into Human Revolution since Monday night, and there are a bunch of things I want to talk about. Most of my thoughts regarding the game are still pretty unorganized. In a nutshell, though, I would say that I'm having fun, but there are a million little imperfections that keep it from being really great. And while I'm not all that disappointed in the game, I am (yet again) pretty disappointed in the publishing-critical complex.

Particularly, there have been several reviews for the PC version which state, quite assuringly, things like "the PC version does nearly everything right." Well, that's a lie -- I would say it's a stretch to call this PC version anything more than adequate, and even that's only in the context of today's AAA PC games being ported from console versions. Loading times are always unreasonably long -- even on my 6-core 3.7 GHz machine, where the game is installed to a SATA-3 SSD. Both myself and a buddy who have ATI graphics cards have had a huge issue trying to change video settings: once we changed the antialiasing or texture sampling at all, the game refused to run until they were turned down to the lowest possible values -- the game complains that our video hardware can't handle it, even when the settings are returned to their defaults, which were running just fine.

And perhaps most fundamentally, mouse controls in menus and other point-and-click situations (like the hacking minigame) are undeniably broken. Hovering over a button is rarely enough to put it in focus; I usually need to hover out and back on again, or click on it a first time - like a pre-click - to make the button selectable. And as a result of this focus problem, clicking on a button doesn't always click that button, which can be especially frustrating when I'm trying to hack a node, but the game ends up using one of my special items on it instead.

The depressing point about all this is, it's really no worse than, say, Mass Effect. That is: while the PC version was very clearly not well-taken care of, and the PC experience does suffer somewhat as a result, it is something that the modern-day PC gamer has become accustomed to. Publishers can say with a straight face that they paid special attention to the PC controls, but it doesn't matter, because we stopped listening to those assholes a long time ago.

Anyway -- I'm going to be complaining about nit-picky issues like this a lot more over the next few days, but the game is still basically fun. I spent my first several hours in Detroit just exploring the city and breaking into people's apartments, and now as I'm progressing in the city's missions, my challenges of finding information on this guy, or locating this gang's secret hideout, are practically already done. That's pretty cool.

Progress: Dilapidated factory

I didn't try the original Deus Ex until way too late, and as such its features and technology just didn't impress me. The choice-heavy gameplay it pioneered has become usual, and its mechanics simply couldn't measure up to modern games. But I can appreciate that, back in 2000, it would have been a pretty amazing experience.

So when I watch trailers and developer diaries for Human Revolution, and it looks so good, I really hope that it can live up to that idea of pushing the medium forward, again. I am slightly worried, though, that it will just be a barely-playable mess, the latest in Eidos's and Square-Enix's last few years of overhyped AAA garbage.

Fingers crossed -- we'll find out on Tuesday.

Dear Goichi Suda,

Please take my money.

Yours forever,
Mirkon

I still come back to TBOGT pretty frequently when I need a GTA fix. Recently, I realized that the extra stuff to get 100% completion was actually fairly simple (at least compared to the ridiculous amount of pigeons, stunt jumps, and other crap in the base GTA4). And, yeah, it was a relatively small amount of stuff, but the majority of it was pretty underwhelming as anything other than notches on the completion percentage.

The drug war missions were neat at first, but become intensely repetitive, since there are so few different mission types. Base-jumping was surprisingly fun, but there are far too few of those, too. The underground fighting matches got stupid once fighters started carrying weapons, and while the special club management missions are pretty cool, actually getting to them - by standing around and watching things for minutes at a time - is painfully boring.

I can't complain about the game's overall quality, given that the core campaign experience, and basic dicking around, is still so fun. Nevertheless, it's hard not to hope that GTA5 will have more meaningful and entertaining extras.

And it's a particularly interesting situation in light of Saints Row 3, given that Volition's franchise is built around those extra activities, and their third iteration looks to have a more engaging (if not serious) narrative than its predecessors.

Progress: 100%

I know, I know, late to the party again. That may go some length toward explaining my lack of interest in Psychonauts. Not unlike Brütal Legend after it, Psychonauts has a really cool theme and some stellar writing, but the gameplay just isn't compelling at all -- with its boilerplate platforming mechanics and countless collectible pickups, this really just feels like yet another Super Mario 64 knockoff. And while Banjo-Kazooie succeeded as a collect-a-thon with imaginative worlds and nonsensical items, it was also brimming with personality; Psychonauts has good characters, but the levels themselves just aren't very engaging.

And, again, maybe I would have been more tolerant of this in 2005. But I simply don't have the patience anymore to wade through tepid, unusually-lengthy platforming in order to learn more about the game's clever world.

Progress: Gave Up -- Didn't finish Basic Braining

I feel for the Humble Indie Bundle guys. It's a good thing they're humble, because most of the bundled games aren't very good -- of course I enjoyed VVVVVV, and Braid which was in the last bundle, so I already own those. And most of the others - And Yet It Moves, Crayon Physics, Cogs, Machinarium, Osmos - are games I've demo'd before, and just didn't find very interesting or good. But I threw some money in for the charity angle, and Steel Storm was a pleasant surprise.

Not that's it's great: the gameplay is simple, the campaign difficulty spikes unexpectedly, and the level design is intensely repetitive. But the bullet- and laser- and explosion-filled chaos makes for a pretty fun time, even when I'm dying as a result of it.

That being said, I don't know that I'll bother coming back to the game for Episode 2 ("Burning Retribution" proper), because even in the first episode's short campaign the primitive mechanics and lackluster level design got stale by the end.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished Episode 1

I spoke too soon -- although the first couple "zones" (Organic and Ocean) give the impression that the whole game has a fairly consistent motif, this gets quickly and violently mixed up: I won't spoil it, but later zones play with perspective, use lighting as a real mechanic, and even have some bright colors. Shadow Planet's content is some of the best out there.

That being said, there really isn't much content. Including several dies-and-retries on the final boss, and scavenging the world map for all your missed items, this campaign is maybe five hours, six at the absolute most. There's an additional "Lantern Run" mode to play, but it's some kind of multiplayer schtick? and it seems to be based on what is easily the least fun part of the campaign.

There are some distressing bugs, too, most notably, sometimes the buttons don't fucking work. I can't think of how else to describe it. Not frequently enough that I would get really upset by it, but a few times throughout my campaign, I would be mashing on a weapon hotkey for solid seconds and it simply wouldn't select. Also, and this is a little less important, the campaign completion percentage in the pause menu doesn't really seem to work at all -- even after exploring the entire map, beating the final boss, and collecting all the hidden items, mine only said 96%; and I've read elsewhere that it actually fluctuates.

The ending is a bit of a disappointment, too, given the bombastic introduction; in comparison, the final cinematic is pretty underwhelming. And although the aforementioned introduction has some wicked-epic musical accompaniment, there's nothing else like it at any other point in the game. Granted, the sound effects do a great job of setting the atmosphere on their own, but the boss battles (or at least the final one) could have used some high-energy background tunes.

Ultimately, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is imperfect and criminally short. But, during its brief lifetime, it's also some of the most fun you'll ever have with a downloadable title. Most of the time, the gameplay mechanics just work splendidly; and the whole package has such a unique flavor, that it just seems great.

Better than: Limbo
Not as good as: Braid
I wonder: what's going to happen with the main menu's Downloadable Content tab

Progress: 100%

It's pretty fun! The presentation is stupendous -- a dark art style, mostly-vacant soundtrack, and finely tuned camera movement really reinforce a sense of foreboding tension in the bowels of the Shadow Planet. It nails the feelings of isolation and exploration that most Metroid-likes shoot for, and ITSP's unique features - upgrades like a grabber claw and a buzzsaw - really differentiate it from its inspirations (unlike, say, Shadow Complex).

I do have one big concern though, in terms of game length. After a little more than an hour I'm already 32% of the way through the campaign (and have 34% of the map explored). Given the game's pace so far, I don't know if it can really blow me away in the next 2-3 hours.

Progress: 32%