I actually tried to start playing this some months ago, and unfortunately I can't really muster up the interest to get back into it. The new formula I saw in the early game is really cool, having more in common with Assassin's Creed than with the first Sly Cooper -- rather than discrete stages, the medium-scale "heist" takes place in an open area which also consists of sub-objectives and collectibles. The overall structure seems pretty great, plus the game also appears to have addressed most of my mechanical complaints about its progenitor. But the controls, in particular the camera controls, are just too awkward.

Which is a shame, because in 2004 this was probably perfectly adequate. I've just completely missed the boat on this one. Sorry Sly.

Progress: Gave Up

No talent trees? Interesting. A fucking zombie meteor falling on Tristram? Awesome. A real-money player economy-- what? Just... what? I get the "players are doing this on eBay anyway" argument, but clearly it existing, and it being endorsed by and fully integrated into the game, are two very different things.

On the one hand, I could never imagine myself buying an item with real money. In a game like Diablo, using a new item is fun for maybe two seconds, tops. The fun of the game is in finding or earning the item. If you buy a Diablo item, what are you going to do with it? Bring your shiny new purchased item on a group run to one-up your friends? Go out and PvP chumps with it? Watch your character portrait hold it? Doing any of these things makes you a douchebag.

On the other hand, there are a lot of douchebags on the interweb, so selling items for real money might be a real thing for real players -- but given that item farmers will certainly drive the real-money economy directly into the ground within days of the game's release, I doubt that anyone else will have enough wastable time to get anything more than a lottery-ticket equivalent out of it.

So again, I must ask: what? If I had any interest in playing in random online games, this would have destroyed it, since it sounds, at best, like an in-game feature to empower random douchebags.

My first thoughts on booting the game up were, "Huh, arcade mode? Multiplayer achievements? Odd, for a game that appears in trailers to be inspired by Metroid." It turns out that Capsized is more like Metroid without all the parts I would consider emblematic of that franchise. No ponderous and labyrinthine world map, no permanent weapon and ability upgrades - but there is a lot of shooting at alien enemies, and some light physics-puzzling. The speed of the game makes it obvious that this is, in fact, built for multiplayer combat action.

That's nice and all, and the action isn't terrible, but the heavy combat emphasis just isn't what I expected or wanted.

Progress: Gave Up -- Got to mission 5

It's impossible to evaluate Saints Row 2 (or its predecessor) without deferring heavily to GTA: San Andreas. Although I can't give a fully qualified opinion of Volition's first attempt to ape Grand Theft Auto, the second makes it evident that they really, really enjoyed Rockstar's games; but due to their own preferences, as well as those of Rockstar Games themselves, they've ended up going in a pretty different direction than GTA4 did.

The timing is crucial: in 2004, San Andreas expanded the GTA franchise in both its storytelling and in its range of optional activities; but it would be four years until the world saw the next major step in Rockstar's franchise, during which time it was only natural for Volition to develop Saints Row to emphasize gangland politics and wanton violence. So when GTA4 hit in early 2008, I can only assume that some of the SR2 staff became very nervous, because while their sequel (which would come later that same year) pushed the silliness and violence envelopes even further, Rockstar made their sandbox into something that could be taken seriously, with believable characters, more realistic world behavior, and impactful storytelling.

It's almost certainly not what anyone (least of all Volition) was expecting, and as a result, their mechanically-inferior engine and lackluster narrative make a really poor case for Saints Row 2. But it was ultimately to their benefit that they took a distinct approach, because they ended up with a lot of the more-minor features from San Andreas that Rockstar chose to cull: territory ownership, a bevy of optional side activities, spontaneous "diversions" that give more flavor toward the normal gameplay, and a generally laissez-faire attitude toward random homicide. And it's nice to have so many fun options to choose from, although some are less fun than others, and there are some high-level design flaws like-

• the broken game economy, which asks you to gather an enormous amount of money for new cribs (which are themselves where you collect money earned from territory ownership), not that it matters since the cash you earn from late-game missions is so substantial;
• the disadvantages of randomness in some activity locations and attributes, since some random choices are not as fun, or possible, as others;
• the unimpressive shooting controls, since higher-level activities often throw tons of enemies at you, and you can barely kill them as quickly as more spawn;
• the overall janky controls, which make anything that requires any sort of precision (like base-jumping onto a target) intensely difficult.

From the top level, it feels like much of the game's content is inconsequential. You can build up your income to obscene levels, but aside from buying more property, there isn't much purpose to the amount of money you'll get. You can buy or earn more weapons, but they don't generally get much more effective than the early ones. You can buy clothes, tattoos, and crib decor to increase your Style rank, which in turn increases the amount of Respect you get from doing Activities (to unlock missions), but the increase isn't very meaningful -- and although there are a bunch of Activities to choose from, you really only need to find two or three you really enjoy, to earn enough Respect for all the missions in the game.

But the success of SR2's less-meaningful, more-immediate formula is that this frivolity doesn't really matter. You're supposed to move quickly from one diversion to the next, alternately dicking around with Activities, executing random violence on the populace, customizing your character, and taking financial ownership of the city. It's about the journey rather than the destination, and even though each part of the journey is mechanically underwhelming, the variety and malleability help the game impart a great sense of freedom.

Similarly, the story isn't really any good, and in fact if you pay attention to it there are really only two major characters: Johnny Gat, a recurring Saint honcho who is an incredibly violent sociopath, and you, the player, who eventually becomes a real villain. While San Andreas and the GTA4/EFLC stories are about reformed or reluctant criminals, who try to only hurt people who deserve it, the story of the Third Street Saints is overtly and unapologetically about taking over a city. That their enemies are typically other villains, seems like a coincidence; these are bad people.

And yet, as with the game's mechanics, this fact is almost completely irrelevant to enjoying the game. For the most part, the storytelling serves the missions' gameplay, rather than the other way around; and toward the end, when the narrative does become (slightly) more prevalent, it's still totally forgettable. While SR2 may be "about" a gang's rise to power by eliminating its competition, it's really about screwing around in a free-roaming city and causing ridiculous trouble everywhere.

Finally, I've got to mention bugs. Although I was generally able to ignore, or at least quickly forget about, bugs during my Saints Row 2 experience, they cannot be discounted entirely -- especially those unique to the PC port, which are not great.

In particular, after some friends watched me play and observed that the game seemed pretty fast, I bothered clocking it and discovered that my game was running at 118% because the game speed isn't locked, and assumes that your PC has the same clock rate as the Xbox 360 (there is a simple fan-made fix for this). Granted it seems to use some legacy faculty in Windows XP to overcome this, it's still a dumbfounding issue to have in a released software product. Not to mention the many progress-blocking bugs that a PC player is likely, or even guaranteed, to encounter in normal play.

Even beside the issues of the shoddy PC port, though, the core game itself is more technically flawed than the already-unsteady RenderWare-powered GTAs that inspired it. AI and pathfinding are easy targets, as the GPS routing is very occasionally unhelpful, your teammates frequently get stuck in the environment, and if you're standing between a friend and an enemy, it can go pretty poorly.

But thanks to its emphases on instant gratification and simple fun, rather than deeper meaning and gravitas, Saints Row 2 prevents its technical hangups from devastating the experience. Just as you get irritated with something that just won't work right, you can move on to something else and conveniently forget all about it.

SR2 is a mixed bag, with some very fun activities tempered by a shallow story and mediocre mechanics. But as a preview of SR3, it's served me well; while I don't expect the storytelling to improve at all, the engine must, based on what Volition was able to do in the newer Red Faction games. And if I can couple this game's violent playground activities with some sensible physics, I would be very, very pleased with it.

Better than: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, if you ignore the story completely
Not as good as: Grand Theft Auto IV, in any sense
Not necessarily a must-play for GTA fanatics: but bodes well for Saints Row: The Third, which might be

Progress: 77%, finished all 56 missions

Unlike SpaceChem - which egged me on with continually-fresh mechanics, rich puzzle content, and genuinely satisfying difficulty - there's really nothing pulling me back into Rush. And being so short, it's not like I'm missing much by completely losing interest.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished all the Easy and Medium stages

Now I feel kind of stupid. Many of the complaints I just lodged against Saints Row (X360) appear to have persisted in the sequel. The driving seems to be tweaked a little, but is still a lot closer to GTA3-style handling; there's still no lock-on aim, although there is a much-appreciated control for zooming and aiming more precisely. But! there is an auto-save, thankfully. And, though the physics are clearly still behind GTA4's, a generally-applied level or two of graphical and animation polish makes the experience much more palatable.

Of course, earning Respect is still required to unlock story missions. But this time, I can also earn Respect - though I haven't paid attention to exactly how much - from doing crazy driving stunts, which is, well, pretty cool.

The initial narrative is also a lot more engaging, taking place in the tumultuous aftermath of the first game's conclusion -- rather than simply taking out rival gangs to carve your own territory, this time, you need to restore it to its former glory, and confront old enemies. (Granted, the result is basically the same.)

Of course, the PC port isn't perfect; for one thing, in a somewhat-ironic twist, all the control tips are given with keyboard keys, even though I'm using a 360 controller. Good thing I played the first game already, and that almost all the controls are identical, or I would have no fucking clue how to play this. I've also heard reports that the PC version runs extremely poorly on some setups, which I absolutely believe given related personal experience, but fortunately it seems to do just fine on my PC.

Anyway, it hasn't pissed me off yet, so it's already doing better than its predecessor.

Progress: 3%

I'm not ashamed to say that the preview media for Saints Row: The Third has me unreasonably excited, such that I'm suddenly compelled to catch up with the five-year-old franchise. And, honestly, in spite of the stilted and doughy character animation (that is, graphical symptoms of games early in the Xbox 360's life) and largely uninspired voice acting, I am legitimately interested in finding out more about their personalities and backstories. But, in its meticulous love letter to the PS2-era Grand Theft Autos, Saints Row has made a few typos that I just can't get past.

While it's impressive how some of Saints Row's features showed a glimpse of what was to come in GTA4, and in some ways cleaned up some of San Andreas's rougher features, the driving controls and handling feel slightly worse than in GTA3. The aiming is certainly much worse, with no zoom and no lock-on -- you aim what the camera is pointed at, and so you have to perpetually balance the mobility of the camera with the aiming sensitivity. So while shooting at long-range can be difficult because the target is tough to center on, close-range can be just as difficult because there's so much relative movement.

What makes the antiquated controls more frustrating is that, unlike the story-driven mission sequences in GTA, in Saints Row you have to earn Respect to unlock the story missions -- where Respect is earned by doing tedious side-missions that, in a GTA, I'd typically do only once (if at all). There's nothing going for these missions except the gameplay, which, as I've mentioned, is more than a little out of style.

Finally, while I was wrapping up a side-mission earlier - driving a drug dealer back to his home after a deal - the game crashed my Xbox. Now, as shameful as this is, it isn't all that rare or difficult, especially in a sandbox game. But what makes it a hard pill to swallow here, is that Saints Row predates the kind of auto-saving checkpoints that I've become intimately dependent on. Unless I'm as careful as possible and frequently run back to home base to save, a crash means a considerable amount of lost progress.

So when I turned my Xbox off after the crash, I had two options: either go back into Saints Row, load my last save, and tolerate more tedious side missions to get back to the point where I could slog through the sloppy controls to progress the story; or, I could go to the game's Wikipedia page and just read what happens. If this was 2006, I might be more inclined to go with the first choice, but, time makes fools of us all.

Progress: Gave Up -- 3%

About halfway through, I finally figured it out -- I'd been misled by the fact that the game took place almost entirely outdoors, but Majin's main inspiration is really the block-pushing, switch-pulling dungeons of the Zelda series. While Majin's four overworld regions are all connected - much like PoP 2008's overworld - each one has a distinct theme and story, and a new magic power for the Majin. The powers, in turn, are used in puzzle-solving and in fighting the region's end boss (in addition to being useful in ordinary battles).

The boss battles are actually pretty exceptional, although the final boss is a bit of a button-mashing endurance match. In fact, the combat in general got quite a bit more interesting from the second power (lightning) onward -- not just because of the magic powers, but also from increased enemy variety and, oddly, new combination attacks from leveling up. The odd part is that later experience levels, while no more difficult to get than earlier ones, seem to bring new moves with greater frequency.

And that's symbolic of the game's biggest flaw, moreso than the loose controls and the uneven graphical polish: the first half just doesn't have enough stuff in it. There are so few abilities, so few enemies to fight, so few puzzle types to solve, and so few interesting story facets; everything comes together as the game marches on, but the first six hours are comparatively vacant. And the whole game is only about 12 hours in total (maybe as much as 15 if you go back for all the hidden collectibles), so even by the end it's hard to forget about its early moments.

I sincerely hope that Game Republic would consider a sequel, because I think having a second chance at this formula, and the opportunity to pack more stuff into it, could come up with something seriously rivalling the genre heavyweights like Zelda. But the fact that you can buy Majin new for $13 makes me think that there might not be a whole lot of confidence left in this idea.

Better than: Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
Not as good as: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii)
Could maybe be remarketed as: Of Mice and Men: The Video Game, what with the Majin tripping over himself every few seconds.

Progress: Beat the final boss

Coming off of SpaceChem, I can't help but notice a few similarities in Rush -- well, one similarity, in that the puzzle conceit is getting objects from a source tile to a destination tile (while avoiding collisions). Rush quickly differentiates itself, though, in its own nuances and greatly reduced complexity. There are no chemical bonds or fusion reactions here, but you will have to run rolling blocks into walls to get them moving in the right direction, and throw in some stop-sign tiles to keep intersecting paths from becoming jammed up.

While the basic mechanics are pretty fun, it's a little aggravating that much of the game's increased difficulty comes in the form of timing issues -- that is, although some puzzles may have a few apparent "solutions," some won't work correctly because the level's pre-set pace causes some unpredictable collision. So it's sometimes impossible to see if the solution will work without trying it first. Given the simplicity of the movement tiles you can place, this makes some of the puzzles feel more like guesswork, moving the intersections around until the timing is right.

Regardless, much of the puzzling is still fun, and it's all wrapped in a very slick presentation. Granted it's also a little short - each of the Easy/Medium/Hard difficulties has just 20 puzzles, and I've worked through all the Easy and Medium levels in about two hours - but for the price tag ($5), the low amount of content doesn't seem too bad.

Progress: Finished all the Easy and Medium stages

As I was discussing with a co-worker recently, Terraria is effectively defined by its multiplayer -- while Minecraft: Java Edition can function adequately (even preferentially) as a solo creative tool, Terraria is all about working together with your friends, and/or showing off your in-game accomplishments to them.

So with my pals having already moved on, so too have I lost interest in this. But while it lasted, and for the price tag, it was a good bit of fun.

Progress: Gave Up