Tried it again, got to the evac point, tried walling myself inbetween the rocks and a constant stream of napalm strikes but it just wasn't enough. The final area is just too big and full of enemies for one player, which is pretty irritating since the rest of the mission up to that point (~20 minutes depending on how thorough you are with side-objectives) is absolutely doable solo, and asking your friends to shell out $5 for a single mission isn't very cool.

I digress, though. Magicka: Vietnam is worth buying only if you feel like you owe Arrowhead and Paradox more money for Magicka. By itself, it simply isn't worth it.

Better than: that other DLC pack that just came out
Not as good as: a real expansion, or real improvements to the game
But: it's still Magicka, so there's that, at least

Progress: Gave Up -- Died at the end, again

Dwarfs!? isn't the first game to try to make Dwarf Fortress into something playable, and it certainly won't be the last. For its part, Dwarfs does a fair job of it -- the production values are obviously low, and its mechanics are relatively simple, but the package is basically fun. At least, it can be fun, in the right circumstances.

Unfortunately, Dwarfs is (deliberately) designed not to emphasize planning and construction, but instead to challenge your reactivity to dangers like water, lava, and enemies. It is possible to micro-manage your dwarves in such a way that they judiciously go after valuable minerals, and to tackle potential threats in an organized manner, but ordering dwarves to move in a particular way (and avoid particular things) costs money; way more money that you earn in the normal course of play. The in-game guide somewhat correctly compares it to Lemmings, in the sense that you mostly leave the dwarves to their own devices, intervening when and as necessary. This whac-a-mole approach to tunnel digging just isn't what I wanted out of it.

If Dwarfs is updated in the future to lean more toward my tastes (which it might be?), then I'll definitely take another look, because the game is otherwise well put-together and very approachable.

Progress: Gave Up -- Played the tutorial and a few demo rounds

Despite some gorgeous portal and gel effects, the Source engine is (still) showing its age in a few particular ways, like fire and explosions. The single-player story's pacing isn't perfect: each of the game's three acts start strong, but peter out as they proceed. And loading screens seem unduly long and frequent. But this is the worst I can say for Portal 2. It's a triumph that exceeds the brilliance of the first game, and - with new mechanics and a new co-op mode - greatly expands the concept's potential. I look forward to even more from the Portal franchise.

Better than: Portal
Not as good as: Braid, mechanically (though Portal is much funnier)
Stephen Merchant: congratulations on outperforming GLaDOS

Progress: Finished single-player and co-op

In evaluating Portal 2, it's easy to separate the game into its two modes - single-player and co-op - and, simply enough, both are great. Just in distinct ways.

Portal was a grand experiment, short and sweet, expertly exploring its sole puzzle gimmick in clever ways, while garnishing the narrative with Strangelove-ian black comedy. Portal 2's co-op mode inherits all of that, but feels similarly experimental and wild. The two-player campaign is brief, and, as with Portal, uses GLaDOS to enhance its strange, unique flavor; but with its impeccable puzzle/level design, and some ingenious innovations (I'd primarily cite holding Tab to see your teammate's perspective in real-time), is fantastically entertaining, while showing amazing potential for even more. It's a fair bet that Portal 3 will push the multiplayer envelope even further, using the groundwork that's been set here.

While Portal 2's co-op is evocative of its predecessor's spunk and spirit, the single-player campaign is an overall evolution of the first game's promise. I'll be honest -- in my short visits with Half Life and HL2, I was unimpressed by Valve's infamous in-game storytelling. Frankly, the story wasn't interesting enough, and the telling didn't feel like it was driving my experience. But Portal 2 takes Portal's antagonistic narration and expository ambience, and runs with it -- runs with it hard. I'm not completely on-board with the pacing so far - Stephen Merchant's delightful sidekickery is depressingly absent in the first few chapters, and I haven't even met JK Simmons yet - but the pre-existing rapport between GLaDOS and Chell really expands the story's potential, and GLaDOS exploits it, hilariously, at every turn. The witty voice-overs, the detailed setting, and the jarring in-game events conspire beautifully to really sell the story.

Of course, this is all not to mention the game's new mechanical gimmicks: vortices, light bridges, bouncy and hyperspeed paint, and perhaps more that I haven't encountered yet. Portal challenged the limits of its formula, and Portal 2 shows that there's always more to add.

The single-player is a near-perfection of the original game, and the co-op is a two-player experience that will invoke the same feelings you had playing Portal for the first time. Also, your co-op robot can high-five your partner robot. Or hug him. Or fight him! They're robots. Awesome.

Progress: Single-player: chapter 5, Co-op: finished

It's more Magicka, with more guns! And I would say that this is the end of the story, but to be truthful I'm actually overselling it. The Vietnam "expansion" adds a total of two Challenges to the game, one of which is just another wave-based survival arena. The other is the Vietnam mission, where your goal is to shoot some goblin-cong, destroy ammo caches, rescue POWs, and ultimately defend an extraction point until a rescue chopper rolls in. It isn't integrated into the game's campaign mode, and other than a paragraph-long introduction from Vlad, isn't narrated or at all embellished with Magicka's game-industry satire. I mean, not counting the fact that this is a Vietnam expansion.

There's a new magick in the form of an aerial napalm strike, which is awesome, but since the Vietnam mission is a challenge instead of a story mission, your other magicks (meteor storm, lightning, et al) are all unavailable. Magic in general is harder to use, since all the enemies have guns, and, like the annoying bow-and-arrow assholes in the main campaign, keep interrupting your shit all the time. That said, the gun selection that you can use - from the main game's M60 and other automatics, to bolt-action and burst rifles, and an RPG launcher - does put an interesting twist on the core gameplay.

It is more Magicka, but not very much more. It's easy to say that $5 is a rip-off for what amounts to a single mission. On the other hand, and this is a two-fingered hand, 1) the main game was already really cheap and 2) it's still only five bucks.

Progress: Died at the end (too many mortars!)

I play a lot of bad games. Why isn't important -- I know a lot about them. Bad video games are almost always developed with the following two requirements:

1) Cheap as hell to develop; and
2) Needs exactly one reason for anyone to be interested in buying it.

Basing a game on an existing franchise gets you halfway to both of these, by exploiting existing lore and assets, and by exploiting an existing fanbase. But usually, a bad video game needs to push this formula further by cutting development corners, while also doing something to pique the interest of that fanbase.

In rare cases, this could be a single facet of the gameplay that actually works well. More frequently, it's creating some original story within the franchise, given a very loose definition of the word "original." But, in the case of a movie tie-in, this hook is simply the fact that it is associated with a film that is coming out at the same time; a film that has its own massive marketing machine, which the game can piggyback onto. Thus, the movie tie-in game has absolutely no reason to apply any effort beyond being playable, and purchasable.

By those standards, Tron: Evolution lives up to its expectations.

Evolution is written as a prequel to Legacy, despite a completely nonsensical timeline between the films and the game. In theory, this gave Evolution some liberty to explore new plot points, foreign to the films; but in practice, it makes the same mistakes as the Star Wars prequel trilogy, where all it tries to do is explain the events leading up to Legacy. The game's protagonist is a program named Anon, and true to his namesake, he has no voice or personality -- all he does is follow Olivia Wilde around. Evolution's plot covers the same backstory that, in Legacy, The Dude explains in about three minutes.

The front-heavy cutscenes, while intensely uninteresting from a narrative perspective, could at least have afforded to be flashy and vivid. But the lavish production values of the film simply weren't applied to the game. Cutscene events are flat and dull, and the character models of Quorra, Flynn, et al appear barely reminiscent of their actors. This is the first game in a long time where I ended up skipping many of the cutscenes outright.

This dismal storytelling could be forgiven if the gameplay was good, but I struggle to describe Evolution's formula as anything more than inadequate. There are three kinds of gameplay mechanics: Prince of Persia-style platforming, button-mashy combat, and vehicle segments; and each one is, on the whole, not good.

The platforming is somewhat reminiscent of Prince of Persia 2008, in that Anon does a lot of leaping across large gaps, and running between parallel walls; a primary difference being that Evolution's controls are shoddy. The control scheme actually borrows more from Assassin's Creed: you hold the right trigger to run, and most acrobatic moves are triggered simply by running at something. Of course, this means that they're frequently triggered by accident, or alternately, that they fail to occur because of a glitch in the level collision. The camera also does its best to kill you by sometimes moving itself automatically, causing your perfectly-lined-up jump to end up going in completely the wrong direction. The coup de grace to all this is that the platforming level design is endlessly repetitive, since, unlike Prince of Persia, there is no effort to distinguish one area of the game from another. Every platforming segment looks and plays the same.

As for combat, Anon can throw his identity disc as a projectile weapon, has a short-range melee punch, and can mix in some special attacks with different powers depending on the currently-equipped disc type. Fighting is also somewhat acrobatic, as you can blend running and jumping with disc-throwing and other moves. There are glimpses of a cool combat engine here, but as with the platforming, the controls and camera simply aren't good enough to support it. And Evolution's combat segments are even more repetitive than the platforming is: inbetween platform segments, you'll run into a room (sometimes populated by civilian programs, which will immediately flee), then a wave of bad guys will come out, and once you kill them, another wave, and then another, and usually a fourth wave before you can finally move on to the next part of the platform-combat-platform-combat pattern.

I also want to rant quickly about an obvious design flaw in the combat: when most enemies also have discs to throw at you (note: discs are homing), and these discs can do heavy damage to you, and the dodging/evasion control simply doesn't allow you to move in the way that you'd like (such as, toward something that can heal you), some encounters can become extremely frustrating. You can go from full health to dead in a split second simply because all of the enemies threw their discs at you at once. Then you get to start the fight again from the first wave!

Finally, the vehicle segments were clearly included only to put a bullet point on the back of the box. The light-cycle levels can't help but disappoint you, as, rather than engage in a TRON-style grid battle, you're just trying to race along a linear track and avoid obstacles at high speed. Faring only marginally better are the tank levels, where you hop into an extremely slow tank, and fire on enemies (mostly, other tanks) until they die. It's nice that these levels break up the absolute tedium of the alternating platforming and combat segments, but they are themselves astonishingly boring.

There's also an upgrade system that I've forgotten to mention, because it's all but irrelevant in the game itself. You level up and gain upgrade points (megabytes) from killing dudes, and you can use these at upgrade stations for ... hmm. There are dozens of upgrades available, but almost all of them are for multiplayer only. Tron: Evolution has some competitive multiplayer modes, which I absolutely don't care about, but which apparently share your character profile from the single-player mode; and you can buy new abilities and attributes using your level-up points from either. But the only upgrades that apply to the single-player at all are slightly increased health, slightly increased special-attack energy, and slightly increased rates of regeneration on both of those.

Even the soundtrack is lackluster: while Legacy's Daft Punk score is thrilling and evocative of the franchise, Evolution's soundtrack is mostly a cheap knock-off of it. The story is throwaway and the gameplay is barely playable. Granted, it is playable, which does put it ahead of many other movie tie-in games. But that's really the best I can say for it.

Better than: Jumper: Griffin's Story
Not as good as: Tron 2.0 (granted, my experience with 2.0 wasn't great either)
Most expensive part of the game: almost definitely Olivia Wilde's voice work, which is baffling because the movie's bubbly and adorable Quorra has been transformed in the game into a gruff and businesslike plot device

Progress: Finished on Normal

It did, but I've absolutely lost interest in the game by now.

Progress: Gave Up

The world is going to end, and someone needs to record its contents to prepare for its remaking. You do this with the titular Avalon Code, a book which you'll use to collect information on everything, everywhere -- and which you can also use to modify everything, by replacing key elements: for instance, turning a Stone Ogre into a Sickly Ogre, or a Copper Sword into a Fire Sword. These stupid-cool powers are integral to your quest to, uh... invading army, magic... things... well, they're integral to your quest.

Avalon Code has a really neat premise, and is astonishingly complex: not only can you level-up and effectively craft items with your magic book, but the book can also level-up, based on how much information you stuff into it. Whack a monster or an NPC with the book, it gets an entry. Inspect random pieces of minutiae in the area around you, it enhances the area's entry. Explore the landscape to find key elements, use element swapping to fix some NPC's problems, enhance the NPC's entry. Plus there's a whole combat system where you can beat shit up.

Unfortunately - especially given the intricacy of its game world - Avalon Code fails to adequately polish its selling points. Element swapping is crippled by a small swap space, so you'll have to store most elements within the pages for monsters, NPCs, and items; and then you'll have to flip through those pages to find them again later. Most of the pieces of hidden information in an area have no visual cues, ranking the fun-factor of this mechanic slightly below pixel hunting. The combat system in general is weak and uninteresting, with infinitely-respawning enemies and a very low HP count for your player character. The game too-frequently puts you in a "dungeon" that's just a corridor of sequential rooms with monsters and switches. And, bafflingly, although the game has built-in tutorial tips, many crucial controls simply aren't mentioned (although you can look them up in the magic book's Help section).

Having only put a couple of hours into this, it's already clear that Avalon Code isn't living up to its lofty ambitions. Although I really like many of its ideas, I dread the thought of slogging through hours of inconvenience to get close to them.

Progress: Gave Up -- Got thrown in prison

I want this.

Ilomilo is a perfect game for relaxing during a sick day (given I had some TV running for background audio, since Ilomilo's music can get a little tedious).

The core concept - reuniting Ilo and Milo by solving platform puzzles - is a pretty great one, as it involves not just moving blocks to get around obstacles, but using cooperative mechanics between the pair. Many of the puzzle elements require one character to activate them, while helping the other character proceed. But timing is rarely important -- Ilomilo is all about figuring the level out, and many levels are complicated enough that the solution takes several steps of working through as you go.

In addition to the satisfaction of puzzle-solving, the bonus levels (unlocked by collecting little "Safka" creatures in the regular levels) offer some pleasant thematic twists. Of the three bonus levels in each chapter, one tells the continuation of a fairy-tale sidestory; one includes an ambient cameo from another indie game mascot (like Meat Boy or a ball of goo); and one 3D-pixelizes Ilo and Milo in the style of 3D Dot Game Heroes. While the bonus levels don't change up the game formula (aside from being relatively harder than normal levels), these little flourishes help the game to feel fresh as it continues.

There are also a bunch of concept art and music collectibles, but I didn't find these rewards as interesting as simply the challenge of finding and obtaining them.

So Ilomilo is a fun game with plenty of collectibles. But it's also pretty short. The presentation is well-executed, and every level's puzzle is impressively designed, but the whole package doesn't take very long to work through. (And I couldn't maintain any interest in the Ilomilo Shuffle minigame after one play.)

Better than: The Lost Vikings (SFAM, SNES)
Not as good as: Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2
There's a DLC package with more levels: but it costs $3, which doesn't make any numeric sense

Progress: Collected everything!