The "reactive narration" is neat, and the presentation in general - the polished art style and offbeat soundtrack - is fairly impressive. As for the gameplay, it seems competent enough, but even in the 10(?)-minute demo it started to feel button-mashy and repetitive. There are some interesting touches to the pure action gameplay, specifically a few level-ups and some equippable weapons and attributes, but that's about it. Not to mention, given the amount of experience and story completion I saw in the demo, it also doesn't seem like there's much content in here at all.

It's a neat experiment, but I really don't feel compelled to see any more of it.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished the demo on Xbox Live

I really should be playing this more. Every time I'm in the Forsaken Kingdom, I have a pretty fun time of it: the combat still hasn't gotten any more sophisticated, but the world is consistently fascinating, and its environmental puzzle-solving is usually great, right up there with Legend of Zelda and Prince of Persia (although I frequently curse the imprecise jumping). Boss battles are pretty well-done, too, with Zelda-style weak points that are actually a bit of a challenge to figure out.

Like I mentioned last time, the biggest issue with Majin isn't in its real-time gameplay, but in its big-picture objective. From the beginning the plot is basically vacant, with nothing of substance other than the question of what happened to the kingdom. As I'm proceeding through the ruins, more of the backstory is revealing itself - largely from the amnesiac Majin remembering bits and pieces of what forsook the kingdom in the first place - which would be a fine approach, if the mystery could be adequately and consistently strung along; but it simply isn't. Consider what 2008's Prince of Persia would have been like without the frequent banter between the Prince and Elika: a wondrous world, filled with questions, but absent of answers.

So I really want to finish Majin while my fluctuating interest is still with it. Which shouldn't be a problem, based on my progress so far -- two of the four-or-five major milestones in around 5-6 hours.

Progress: Defeated B'alam

As I've just written, SpaceChem can attribute its greatness largely to the depth and variety of its content. The DLC expansion 63 Corvi serves as a prequel set of missions, which revolve around a new "Quantum Tunnel" puzzle piece: atoms can't be directly transported from the input side of the reactor to the output, so you must use the quantum tunnel to teleport atoms one by one. This mechanic is used simply at first, but later puzzles combine it with arranging and bonding compounds, making SpaceChem's original challenges more complex.

It's a neat gimmick, but doesn't really have the depth that the core campaign's puzzles were able to go to. Plus the final boss-battle stage is pretty dull, and the expansion's "story" doesn't really have any meat to it.

This is more SpaceChem, which is cool, but in the shadow of the main game's content it falls a little short.

Better than: Magicka: Vietnam
Not as good as: Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness - Episode Two
For a free prize from the Steam Summer Sale, pretty cool: but for money, given you already own SpaceChem (which includes ResearchNet), you could really take it or leave it

Progress: Finished Collapsar

I've mentioned how SpaceChem's challenging, engaging mechanics (and great soundtrack) overcome its humble production values, but that isn't the reason I spent so much time in it. SpaceChem's story mode has 49 missions - plus a few optional ones - distributed among three types: Research (single-reactor puzzles about micro-managing chemical compositions), Production (multi-reactor puzzles which add resource management and general complexity), and Defense (boss battles! which toss in some sensitivity to timing and real-time interaction). Maybe 49 doesn't sound like a big number, but when you consider that many of the later missions have several parts and can take a few hours each, there's a lot to do. Both the variety of content, and the sheer amount of it, is intensely impressive.

And then there's also ResearchNet, which is regularly updated with new designer- and user-generated puzzles. These even use some base mechanics that aren't included in the campaign missions, like Fission.

This is a greatly entertaining and challenging puzzle game, and the content-to-dollars ratio is simply amazing. Get it!

Better than: Planet Puzzle League
Not as good as: Portal 2, if only because of JK Simmons
Optimizing solutions is also pretty satisfying: especially when I can make my friends' scores look bad.

Progress: Finished all the campaign levels

Something that baffled me for some time - and which, ultimately, I remembered had also baffled me in the free demo last year - was the controller lag. Even though my hardware should be more than enough to kick the shit out of this game, not even medium settings were low enough to make the driving controls real-time. It's not (just) a matter of incredibly poor performance, but of the game reacting terribly to it -- when GTA4 lags, I can still coordinate my input to the on-screen action. Just Cause 2 just keeps running right along without me.

So it's extra-disappointing that, even addressing the lag by turning my settings all the way down, the controls just plain suck. There's no aim/zoom control, getting two objects grappled is a chore, clambering around on vehicles never works the way I expect, and the running speed barely seems faster than walking. Not to mention, the default button mappings are routinely the opposite of what I would expect from any other open-world game.

I'd be really upset if the control issues ruined an otherwise fun-to-play game, but the content simply isn't here. GTA4 is filled with traffic and pedestrians, and has excellently-scripted missions; Red Faction: Guerrilla has emergent AI-on-AI behavior, and madcap destruction; The Saboteur has robust stealth mechanics and lets you blow up some Nazis. Just Cause 2 does none of these things!, or at least, doesn't do any of them as well as other games do. What I've seen of Panau so far is visually pretty, but not interactively interesting at all. And though I'd like to try and see more of it, the ham-fisted story missions and linear path for unlocking items are completely blocking my way.

There are no cheats, and even the extra DLC I bought is locked by story progress, or is prohibitively expensive in in-game money. So I'd have to grind through tedious intro missions, tolerating awful shooting controls and continually roll-diving out of enemy fire, just to get to the parts that might be fun. And I won't.

I absolutely don't understand this.

Progress: Gave Up -- Broke some dude out of a tower casino

I'm still occasionally frustrated by the shortcomings of the puzzles' tools -- and by crashing bugs, which seem to have become almost commonplace in the more complicated multi-reactor stages. But none of these issues were major enough to keep me from spending so much of my waking time in SpaceChem. Between the increasing complexity of the inputs and outputs, the new puzzle elements (which continue to be introduced throughout most of the game), and new twists like pre-fabricated reactors, this game gets difficult; the last few worlds have seen me spending multiple hours on single puzzles. And solving them feels great. Not to mention the boss stages, which are really unique and feel like incredible applications of the puzzle mechanics.

I haven't gotten very good at optimal solutions: my solutions' running times are almost always very significantly higher than the leaderboard averages. I'm not really sure how much of the difference is attributable to people crowdsourcing/copying the answers from YouTube, but I wouldn't doubt that I'm simply terrible at it. Nevertheless, given the puzzles' difficulty, I still feel pretty proud of myself just for getting this far.

The story has, well, progressed. There is an air of mystery about it yet, but it just isn't written to be very engaging. I'm really more motivated by the challenge of the puzzles than I am by the plot.

Progress: Just got to the last level

So the whole thing of Sonic Generations is supposed to be that the levels can be approached in two ways -- by Retro Sonic, which plays more like the old Genesis Sonics (from a side-scrolling perspective, with jumping, etc.), or by New-age Sonic, which plays more like Sonic Adventure (with more cinematic sequences and rail-grinding and shit). This 650 MB demo, in addition to expiring in about a week, only has one level, and only the classic Sonic version. What the what?

It does distinctly remind me of old Sonic games, and aside from a few unpolished bits, seems like a solid resurrection of Sonics past (for one level at least). But that's all I can get out of this demo. Maybe, at best, it's the same as previous Sonic games. Any other doubts that a rational person would have about a new Sonic - that the formula has been newly tarted up by stupid bullshit, that the content becomes progressively lazier as the game goes on, that an insipid but overbearing story sours the whole experience - can't be addressed, because there simply isn't enough information here.

Maybe Sonic Generations will be good, maybe it won't be. This five-minute demo is absolutely unhelpful. In that respect, it might be the worst demo I've ever played.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished the free demo

There are traditionally many reasons for me not to be interested in acclaimed video games - maybe I don't care for the genre, maybe it's too similar to games I've already played, maybe I think its developer is full of bullshit - but there were only two big ones for Half-Minute Hero. Although its premise (reducing RPG time-wasting tropes to the point of absurdity) sounded really interesting, I wasn't sure how it could stay interesting for more than a minute or so. And, I didn't/don't have a PSP. So now the game is on Xbox Live Arcade, and with a demo, which has deftly transformed my unsureness into anticipation.

My initial understanding of the game's formula wasn't entirely correct -- I thought it put a 30-second time limit on an entire RPG story, with time-pausing and -resets being a necessarily regular element. Rather, Half-Minute Hero splits the story into discrete levels, each one with its own beginning, ending, sidequests, and 30-second limitation. So instead of being a short game designed for replaying over and over, it's actually a very respectable amount of content, driven by the time limit of each level.

The creative design is really fun, too, which helps a lot. You've got to plan your moves carefully, and execute them quickly, to finish the level in time. To level up, you need to fight monsters, which since it auto-battles is more a matter of spending enough time in the wilderness to encounter them. But you also need to buy equipment to get your strength up, and even hit NPCs and other side-areas to push the level along. It really does have all the components of a typical RPG, but simplified and shortened so that they can be enjoyed at a high level in rapid fire.

It's a little tough to describe, but based on my experience in the demo, Half-Minute Hero really speaks to me without wasting my time. I want more.

Progress: Played the demo

While I'm aware that there are many programming-themed puzzle games, the few I've actually tried turn me off pretty quickly, with their thinly-veiled misunderstanding of how computer logic actually works. SpaceChem turns that problem around by theming itself around chemical processing, even though, past a few numerical inspirations, it really has nothing to do with chemistry. In fact, it has a closer relationship with parallel programming, and the very-cool problems that can arise from synchronizing asynchronous resources.

From the perspective of real programming, I do get slightly frustrated when the game's puzzles impose what I would consider unreasonable limits on my tools: like the physical space in which to move elements, and (so far) only having access to one detector node at a time. But it's from limits like these that the game gets its immense challenge. It's simple to think of how I would make the puzzles' algorithms work in a perfect world, but getting them working within the game's confines is a fun trick.

Most of SpaceChem's non-game components (specifically, the art and the story writing) speak to the one man show that is Zachtronics Industries -- adequate, though very unpolished. But the surprise is the soundtrack, which is really well-composed and sounds great.

Progress: World 4, level 5

Hamilton's Great Adventure is definitely aesthetically interesting -- the art style is pretty cool, and the audio visual polish is well above the norm for a smaller/independent project. But beyond that I can't really find anything good here.

The gameplay is mechanically promising - solving the puzzle of getting to the level's exit - but in the levels I played, it was just absurdly easy. Even the bonus level I did (for the summer sale ticket) was only challenging because the level scenery and camera perspective were always in my way. There are also some real-time action elements, but their rarity and insignificance make their inclusion more baffling than enticing.

The narrative trappings are throw-away, with a plot that's already strikingly stupid (some kind of Crystal Skull bullshit), and lazy storytelling which really doesn't help the situation at all.

Eurogamer implies that the game's difficulty could get more satisfying later on, but the early levels set the bar so low that I simply can't get excited about making progress.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished a few levels in the Amazon Jungle