I mean, yeah, Splasher's paint-twisted platforming feels pretty fresh: bouncing between walls and running along ceilings to get through dangerous, sawblade-filled laboratories is exciting! Fun, even! And at least at first, doesn't feel punishing.

But it's got the narrative hooks of a Splosion Man - that is, none - which made me suspect that its "appeal" would turn out to be raw, brutal challenge. And looking ahead a bit, I can see ... yeah. I don't have the patience for that many lasers.

Glad that I tried more of it, but I'm convinced enough that the rest of the game would be "not for me."

Progress: Finished level 4.

Tembo is a better Sonic, but not by enough.

See, unlike Hell Yeah!, which landed somewhere between "reference" and "parody" -- Tembo actually channels the spirit of a Sonic game, in that it allows you to turn into a destructive ball and charge through obstacles at high speed. And it doesn't destroy you when you take damage, instead stealing just a portion of your health meter. And there are checkpoints!

Tembo makes meaningful strides toward letting you go fast, without punishing you for going "too" fast. But... it doesn't go far enough.

It's not so much the short walls, requiring a jump; or the resilient barriers, requiring multiple hits; but the surprise hazards, enemies with machetes or flame cannons or ... flame tanks? Even when Tembo forgives you for a momentum-defeating mistake, it still doesn't feel fair, because it's not your fault that the game suddenly decided that you need to stop and reverse direction.

It's also an unfortunate example of user-unfriendly PC porting, between the obviously unhelpful tutorial prompts for my Xbox gamepad:

... and some surprising crash diagnostics when I alt-tabbed away:

It's not like Tembo is bad - I mean, the PC port ain't great - it's just, well, it recognizes that "fast sidescrolling" can be improved upon but doesn't execute on many of those improvements.

Progress: Got to the first Phantom Dome before getting lost in what was apparently a ping-pong battle.

Semblance does an impressive job of explaining its mechanics without explaining them -- like the infamous opening of Super Mario Bros., it places elements in such a way that you'll learn how the game works practically by accident.

And, those mechanics are both pleasantly simple and refreshingly inventive; it put a smile on my face when I realized that environment deformation could be used to "climb" sheer walls, by denting platforms into the side.

Unfortunately...

Actually solving Semblance's puzzles is less gratifying, because of the tweaky, fiddly imprecision of that deformable environment. Like World of Goo, or so many other physics-simulation platformers, it's way too easy to "almost" solve a puzzle -- but the ground is a few pixels too high, or the laser angle is a few degrees off, so you need to reset and try it again.

There also isn't any external motivation, no promise of narrative payoff for pushing forward. As far as I can tell, the story is "purple stuff got infected by green stuff." If my only reward for fidgeting together a puzzle solution is more puzzles, well, no thanks.

I really, really like Semblance's mechanical premise. It just needed to do more to keep me interested.

Progress: Collected some glowing purple things.

At least I was prepared for them, this time, and knew to focus hard on weak spots -- or just run the hell away.

At the end of the day, though, The Frozen Wilds is still "more of the same" ... "but smaller."

And while more Horizon certainly isn't bad - I had no trouble dumping hours upon hours into The Cut's objectives and collectibles - it simply doesn't measure up to the main game's high-points.

From a level-pacing perspective, I wish The Frozen Wilds fit more "alongside" the main game than "after" it. After Zero Dawn's thrilling main narrative, this can't help but feel like a side-story.

Better than: The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna
Not as good as: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Hearts of Stone
Next time, Aloy, please don't: add even more material types to an already overstuffed crafting inventory.

Progress: 100% completion

Replaying Horizon Zero Dawn does suffer a bit from, for lack of a better term, the BioShock effect: its story is so memorable that you just can't be shocked and amazed by it a second time.

It's still a great story, though. And moreso than BioShock - certainly much moreso than BioShock Infinite - Horizon's gameplay is engaging enough to keep things interesting even inbetween story beats.

I do still have some qualms about how suddenly an enemy can evade your aim, and about how frequently their attacks can interrupt you; kinda hope that Aloy's next adventure gets clearer lock-on/seeking and maybe a "kung fu movie" combat system (enemies waiting their turn to attack).

But knowing what to expect, this time around, helped me focus on what the game does well: building an awe-inspiring world, digging into deeply-intriguing backstory, and keeping tension high with dangerous robots.

Ironically, going into Horizon's sidequests with lowered expectations helped me get more out of them -- not as interesting character moments, but as checkboxes on my completion chart, and excuses to explore more of the richly-detailed world.

It was also helpful to know I should invest in inventory upgrades as soon as possible, to mitigate Horizon's laborious mess of crafting-material management.

But I digress. Horizon Zero Dawn is still a triumph of game-making, and, not like I needed an excuse to re-play it, but this PC re-release is gorgeous.

Better than: Ghost of Tsushima
Not as good as: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (agh, still waiting for that new-gen update)
The PC version: has, unfortunately, set my visual and performance expectations for Forbidden West pretty high.

Progress: 100% completion

Yeah -- it was Claptastic Voyage, when Borderlands last took us inside a party member's "mindscape." Surprisingly, Psycho Krieg and the Fantastic Fustercluck makes several of the same mistakes.

Its aesthetically-imaginative level designs look neat, but enemy behaviors and arena layouts are no different from what we've seen before. (I could only think of one truly-new enemy, the rocket-riding psycho, which is a fun idea but not interesting to fight.)

By focusing the story on one character, and not a very compelling one at that, it neglects two of the franchise's typical narrative strengths: wacky tertiary characters and comedic character interactions. (Krieg's "sane" inner-voice straight-manning himself just isn't enough to carry the tale.)

And, though less-so than Bounty of Blood, Fantastic Fustercluck similarly tries a little too hard for some "serious" story beats. Krieg's heartache over Maya is borderline creepy, and his tragic origin story turns out to be a familiar psychotic-break trope.

This DLC also has a shockingly difficult final boss battle, considering how easy the rest of its encounters were. (Though unlike in Claptastic Voyage, we did actually finish this one.) Here's a combat design suggestion: when character options heavily feature "Kill Skills," buffing the player after each kill, you probably shouldn't make a boss fight that has nothing to kill.

Fantastic Fustercluck has a couple of cool ideas, particularly the segments in which you're chasing - and being chased by - a psychedelic train called Locomobius. And, I mean, the core Borderlands shoot-and-loot gameplay still works just fine -- nothing wrong with that.

But it never really capitalizes on its ideas; including Locomobius, which just ends in a boss fight where you shoot at the train a bunch.

Better than: Borderlands 3: Bounty of Blood - A Fistful of Redemption, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel - Claptastic Voyage
Not as good as: Borderlands 2: Sir Hammerlock vs. the Son of Crawmerax, Borderlands 3: Guns, Love and Tentacles - The Marriage of Wainwright & Hammerlock
Krieg's tragic science-experiment backstory: feels like it might have meant to hint at a broader "origins of the psychos" plot point; I'm not really sure why this DLC dug itself in so deep, there.

Years after trying the demo, my thoughts on Ronin are largely unchanged: it channels the same cool-factors as Gunpoint and Mark of the Ninja, but its attempts to be more tactical than the former suffer from imprecision relative to the latter.

Those messy imprecisions unfortunately run head-first into the game's second enemy type -- a dude with swords who insta-kills you at close-range. The rules of engagement for this enemy are ambiguous at best, so dying again, and again, and again, while trying to figure them out... becomes real tedious real fast.

At least those die-and-retry loops are somewhat small, with mid-level checkpoints (unlike, say, Deadbolt). But that's not enough. I don't feel like the game is giving me the tools to learn and improve; just more chances to guess at a sequence of moves that'll happen to work.

Progress: Killed the old man.

Danger Crew, a turn-based RPG themed around computer programming and tech culture, is a cute idea -- and not much more.

It's neat that an attack called curl steals (GETs) an item from the enemy; and it's fun that NPC dialog lampoons tropes like "everyone has a startup," and "interviews are a nightmare."

But the facade is generally thin, and the game underneath it is fairly rote.

The combat mechanics aren't really special: your HP is "battery charge," you attack with "scripts," and items can buff attributes like offense or defense or accuracy. Nor is the top-down overworld remarkable, just more of the same grid-based navigation that RPGs have done for the past 35 or 40 years.

And that'd be fine if the game's writing was more distinctive, but... too many opportunities for immersive flavor text get squandered (pro tip: computer code doesn't use literal wires):

And mission dialogs just read like an excuse to make you walk the map and do battles (another pro tip: don't put an ongoing meeting "on hold" while waiting for the new guy to finish his office tour):

... granted, poorly-planned meetings are actually kinda realistic.

I like the idea! But the execution isn't deep or thorough enough. Danger Crew feels like nothing more than a stripped-down RPG with some Wired articles pasted on top.

Progress: Level 6, didn't start the meeting yet.

For the most part, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles - the localized collection of two games, Adventures and Resolve, which I thought would never leave Japan - is exactly what an Ace Attorney veteran expects.

From its outlandish, boisterous characters...

To the protagonist's fish-out-of-water attitude and haphazard trial technique.

Even the awkwardness in its PC port, like nonsense keybindings, and this baffling dependency/codec error:

... is, well, within expectations for Capcom.

Great Ace Attorney may take place in a different era, and a different hemisphere, but friends of Phoenix and Maya will get along with Ryunosuke and Susato just fine.

Like Phoenix's (and Apollo's) stories, this one is both fun and dramatic -- building up an enchanting cast of characters, like the absent-minded Sherl- er, Herlock Sholmes and the panicky Soseki Natsume; while simultaneously uncovering a deep backstory riddled with intrigue and pathos.

The pacing of some cases is a bit "off," especially when the first game ends with major plot questions unanswered, and the second game then flashes back to add more questions on top. And, some earlier cases can feel quite slow -- lots of dialog to click through.

But ultimately, when the final cases bring everything together, Ryunosuke's tale is a thoroughly entertaining and satisfying one.

The gameplay is, well, it does the job. Investigating scenes, and picking apart testimonies, work the same as ever; evidence can be rotated and poked at in 3D, like in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, although this game's (era-appropriate) scene investigation tools are less varied.

Great Ace Attorney reuses the multi-witness mechanic from Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, but - as in its predecessor - this doesn't really change the flow of witness testimony.

And while Great Ace Attorney also adds a "Dance of Deduction" mechanic (logically deducing the scene with Sholmes) as well as a "Jury Summation Examination" mechanic (interviewing jurors to flip their rulings), they are - in practice - exactly like examining evidence and pressing witnesses. At least the Sholmes segments include some over-the-top choreography and finger-snapping.

(The first game also includes some content that's suggestive of a 3DS-specific stereoscopy feature; in this 2021 re-release, the game asks you to cross your eyes while looking at two images.)

So, at its worst, the Great Ace Attorney duology doesn't innovate on its franchise's "visual novel with detective elements" foundation. And can move a bit slowly.

But these characters are enjoyable, and this story is fulfilling -- from its grandest aristocratic scandal to its tiniest pun. This collection is worthy of the name Ace Attorney.

Better than: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice
Not as good as: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies
Thanks for the translation Capcom, now: how about that Ace Attorney 4-6 remaster?

While Saints Row: The Third Remastered was a pleasant reminder of Volition's madcap sandbox formula, replaying its DLCs was a more sobering trip back in time; the DLC standards of yester-decade were pretty insubstantial.

Genkibowl VII's new activities are fine, but there aren't many of them, and most aren't sufficiently distinct from the core game's side-missions. (Skyblazing, at least, feels pretty fresh.)

Gangstas in Space is a funny, but short, mini-story -- its sense of humor dulled by some frustrating die-and-retry checkpointing.

... and the same goes for The Trouble with Clones, whose humor feels like more of a reach. The Saints Flow super-power mission was neat ten years ago, but now just makes me want to replay Saints Row IV.

At full running lengths of 1-2 hours apiece, these content packs all feel insubstantial and easy to miss. At least they're no longer an additional charge, I guess.