The point at which I stopped caring: when I went up against groups of three super-birds, each of whom could petrify a party member, or could alternately attack a character quickly enough that half of his health disappeared almost instantly. Maybe I wasn't grinding levels enough (not that this would make me more likely to grind levels). Or maybe I picked the wrong characters, or increased the wrong stats: I felt like I was building a strong, balanced party, with a powerful melee character backed up by heavy offensive magic and healing magic; but since most of the party members you can choose are melee, maybe the game was never really designed for my setup. Keeping my fragile magic users out of harm's way was generally more challenging than I'd expected.

Aside from my difficulty-related quibbles, there's disappointingly little to say about SD3. Mostly, it just feels very reminiscent of its predecessor. In theory the party-selection and character class aspects make it a deeper and more interesting game -- but after six and a half hours of not seeing anything in terms of character class, my enthusiasm for the system has been thoroughly dashed.

At any rate, special thanks to the fan translation, which is pretty fantastic.

Progress: Gave Up -- Got Shade, on some stupid volcano island

I've been, shall we say, reluctant to return to Super Meat Boy for one reason, and it's a disappointing reason. While reviews of SMB have emphasized that it is legitimately challenging, and that overcoming its challenges is an accomplishment unto itself, I must contend that this is not always the case -- while the majority of the game's levels are rewarding (even educational) in their attempts to murdelate Meat Boy, there is a non-trivial remainder of levels which are purely and simply sadistic. For instance, the boss level that I haven't bothered to finish, because it relies on me dying a lot and memorizing which parts of the stage to avoid when the boss destroys them.

Sure, I could look it up on l'internet and simply recite the required moves, but this level is symptomatic of others in the game that, well, do that Mega Man thing -- you need to die a bunch before you can determine how not to die a bunch. Super Meat Boy's die-and-retry delay isn't quite as forgiving as VVVVVV's, and the parts of the game that aren't "stupidly" difficult, are "actually" difficult; so finally overcoming a difficult jump challenge after ten tries, only to explode spontaneously, is especially discouraging.

Super Meat Boy is pretty good, but I don't think it quite lives up to its ambitions.

Better than: Limbo
Not as good as: VVVVVV
It's fairly cheap: so you might as well buy it just to see how far you get. The levels that aren't annoying are pretty goddamn fun!

Progress: Gave Up -- Hell world boss

BioShock Infinite. LA Noire. This. It's right up there. Day-zero purchase.

Zero Escape: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is a visual novel. It's arguable whether this is a genre of game, or a distinction from video games altogether. Don't be fooled by 999's point-and-click escape-the-room sequences and Cing-style puzzles -- there is virtually no video game here. If Hotel Dusk left you feeling unfulfilled narratively, 999 might restore your faith in the writing abilities of a game developer; but if Hotel Dusk left you feeling unfulfilled interactively, 999 will be even more disappointing.

999 starts with a gripping hook, and has you asking questions about the plot from the very beginning. But the first hour or so (two hours? I lost track) makes the game's intents very clear. You read a lot of exposition. You look around a room, open some cabinets, find some keys, solve some logic puzzles. You read more exposition. You read a lot more exposition. You keep reading exposition. You choose a room to go into. Look around, open, keys, puzzles. Read. Read. Read. You can see where this is going.

The plot is well-written, and fairly intricate. Actually, what makes it special is that this isn't just another story-based game with multiple endings; 999 actually requires replays in order to get the whole story. I'm not talking about some choose-your-own-adventure with some good endings and some bad ones -- 999 has one good ending, and getting it requires at least one complete playthrough to a bad ending. (Actually, I think it might require two. I got the final ending on my sixth playthrough.)

This approach would of course be completely untenable without some special concessions for replaying the story, and there are some, but I would argue that there aren't enough. Since the game is mostly text, being able to fast-forward through it is helpful; and knowing the solution to a puzzle when re-doing it cuts out a lot of the work. But you still have to start from the beginning each time, you still have to hold the fast-forward button for minutes at a time, and you still have to go through the motions of each room you've already solved.

Replaying the story does highlight choices you haven't made - or, rather, dims choices you have made - making it easier to try things you haven't tried before. It's a workable system, although I still felt compelled to consult das Internetz to get to the endings I hadn't seen yet, since some of them required making combinations of choices that are prohibitively time-consuming to get through trial and error.

And, yes, the endings are dictated by trial, and by error. The hidden facts, including the real, ultimate, final hidden fact, of 999's story are obscured by choices that are... unintuitive, at best. At the same time, I was able to (easily) see some story details in my first playthrough that became vital plot points ... in other endings. I wasn't able to act on them, and not for any reason I felt was anything other than bullshit.

The narrative is intriguing, and compelling, in the same way that a good book or a surprisingly good movie is. But as in Professor Layton, it's striking how entirely divorced the storytelling is from a real sense of interaction. Just as it's remarkable how the room-solving occupies such a miniscule part of the game's running time. And while the puzzles are inoffensive - not bad, in so many words - they also have little to offer that makes them feel unique, or special.

Summarily, the story is well-written (although imperfect -- even, spoilers, the writer's answers fall back on several deus ex machinas) and takes impressive advantage of the multiple playthrough mechanic, while everything else about the game is somewhere between insubstantial and nonexistent.

It's impossible to say that 999 pushes the medium forward, just as it's unfair to say that it pushes the medium backward; because it really isn't a video game. It's a picture book that's very slightly non-linear. If you like good stories, that's worth something.

Better than: Shadow of Destiny
Not as good as: Hotel Dusk (not as fun, anyway)
Yeah, the plot holes bother me: but I figure by next week I'll have forgotten about them, and just remember the cool stuff.

Progress: Got all 6 endings

I've been making strides recently to reduce my backlog -- and Seiken Densetsu 3 (now colloquially recognized as Trials of Mana) is the last SNES game on my list! So it's a matter of some consequence, although the game itself is, while certainly not bad, failing to blow my mind so far.

The character selection aspect is neat, in that it tailors the beginning (and, so I've read, ending) of the game to one of six personalized stories; and, I guess, the later-game play mechanics might be different between magic users and the straight melee characters. But more generally, SD3 feels like a slightly fixed-up version of Secret of Mana, sharing most of its good points as well as its bad ones. The real-time combat is fun, but still feels a little buggy; even early fights aren't necessarily easy, forcing a reliance on items until magic gets involved (luckily, the item limit is a lot higher). Although, I think only one of the game's six characters - of which you pick three - gets healing magic, which makes me wonder if even the heightened item limit would be enough for a party without her.

And since I specifically mentioned using a walkthrough in the last game, I should specifically mention that I am again referring to a guide with some frequency. Not unlike some adventure games which have frustrated me, making progress in SD3's story seems like it would be routinely impossible without some outside help. So I was supposed to sleep in this inn to trigger a cutscene? And I was supposed to talk to this character, then check this save statue, in order to open a hidden door? Whatever, Square.

Anyway, it's fun, narratively interesting (by SNES standards at least), and moving at a pretty good pace. Plus I'm a thief or a ninja or something. So that's cool.

Progress: Just got Gnome

It starts out super-easy, but the levels - or at least, the optional collectibles - quickly ramp up the challenge. A few of the later levels in chapter 1 had me scratching my head for 10+ minutes trying to figure out a path.

There's a surprising amount of content, too, with four chapters of 12 levels each. And, minigames, apparently.

Progress: Chapter 2

Hahahaha!

Wanted isn't all bad: the sliding-to-cover mechanic is a neat feature, as are the bullet acrobatics you can pull off, and its take on quick-time events -- the game goes into super-slow-mo, and you have to shoot down airborne bullets, plus the dudes who fired them. Plus, the story generally moves at a fast pace, with most levels lasting only a few minutes (except the last level, which seems longer than the rest of the game put together).

But if you play the free demo, you'll see all of these mechanics at their best, which is still not that great. In execution, all of Wanted's cool tricks rely on good level design and event scripting, which the game has almost none of. There are a few sequences where you have to slide from cover to cover around a room, taking out flunkies and ultimately reaching the boss, but that's about as sophisticated as it ever gets.

Take all that, and throw in some dubious graphics - the characters' running animations are surprisingly awkward, and cutscenes are artifacted like a low-quality Youtube video - a story that's as stupid as it is terrible, and aiming sensitivity that never seems quite good enough. Wanted has some cool ideas, but is nevertheless a great bad game, right up there with Eat Lead and Jurassic: The Hunted.

Better than: Terminator Salvation
Not as good as: Bionic Commando
Not quite as funny as: Rogue Warrior

Progress: Finished on Assassin (normal)

The story is unspeakably slow, the combat ranges from tedious to frustrating - fighting with a limited moveset and no backup simply isn't fun - and the out-of-combat gameplay (character building, item management, etc.) is just poorly conceived.

In so many words, it's no good. If you're a Kingdom Hearts nut, and can put up with the grind, there's almost certainly some lore in here for you -- for me, there's nothing.

Progress: Gave Up -- Day 51

Roxas may not be all alone in his, uh, mystery quest? but Goofy and (especially) Donald are sorely missed. At least so far, Roxas only brings one Organization XIII member with him on his missions, and they absolutely refuse to heal Roxas, with magic or otherwise. Add to that a relatively small max HP, and a bizarre equipment/ability/level/item system that severely restricts the sum of Roxas's powers (as an addendum to this explanation, "level-up" takes up a grid space, just as "one potion" does), and the game seems a little more punishing than it has to be.

There's time for it to improve, of course, but after my experience with Kingdom Hearts II my confidence is a bit lacking. Unfortunately the combat mechanics aren't the only things I'm worried about -- almost everything about the game's pacing has me concerned. It took me a dozen missions or so until I could buy or synthesize items, given I'd already accumulated nearly 10,000 munny and had nothing to do with it. And although the premise of a deeper look inside Organization XIII sounds interesting, thus far the game has made them out to be the most boring secret society ever conceived. Everyone just sits on a couch and complains all day.

My optimism hasn't completely run out yet, but it's certainly being wavered.

Progress: Day 26

Despite its flaws, Alpha Protocol left me with a generally good feeling. Well, maybe I should say, neglecting its flaws. As I'll go on to describe, some of the game's issues border on criminal. But it's a broad and ambitious production, and a good deal of that ambition manages to shine through its many imperfections.

What should a sequel address, if such a thing were possible? Well:

• Bugs. Yeah. One of the early Moscow missions, I repeated twice, because it looked like the mission had forced me to pass an objective. It turned out that the objective's placement on the map was just wrong. Still, not a great bug.
• More freedom! If not a full-blown GTA-style sandbox, then at least allow me to fully explore a mission - checkpoints invariably block off the previous part of the level - and give me more opportunities to approach and converse with NPCs inbetween missions.
• Shooting. Who thought it was okay to make all your shots miss without some skill points invested? Gauging attack power, recoil, ammo capacity, and so on based on EXP level is fine -- but making my initial accuracy shitty, and keeping it shitty unless I invest in it, isn't okay.
• Melee. Basically, the controls don't work well, and even when they do, it's just mashing the 'E' key. The melee system is begging for some added depth.
• Stealth. There are a bunch of cool abilities for sneaking around, but the game is curiously missing many mechanics that are core to stealth games, like vision cones, and more varied distraction items.
• Dialog -- attention to detail. There's a lot of detail to cover in Alpha Protocol, which is why I can't help but respect the amount of attention it got. But it deserves more. It deserves Blizzard-level attention.
• Boss fights that aren't retarded. Encounters that use and test the same mechanics that the rest of the game does. Not some mile-long health bar bullshit, or chain guns that can shoot through my cover.
• Diverse AI. Dossier information that you obtain throughout the game describes each enemy force - Russian mob, CIA, mercenaries, et al - in different ways, in terms of their tactics and weaknesses. But I never noticed any of these differences in the game.
• A menu interface that isn't completely fucking broken. Every time I double-clicked on a menu item, I felt like I was taking my life into my own hands.

Alpha Protocol's most significant shortcomings aren't related to traditional bugs, so much as they are to the unfulfilled potential of its dynamic story and choice mechanics. And it isn't that these ideals are completely unrealized. But there's room for improvement, and glimpses of something that could really blow BioWare away.

What really sets Alpha Protocol's choice system apart from others is that it doesn't follow the stereotype of good-and-bad: being friendly doesn't put a halo over your head, and being an asshole doesn't disfigure your face. The various options available - professionalism, prying, bluffing, goading, douchebaggery - can lead to different results, but they're just that: different. The game never tries to make you believe that there's a "wrong" way to handle a conversation, nor a "right" way.

It helps that part of Thorton's modus operandi is supposed to be manipulation; but by preventing dialog choices from being a liability in your game's progress (and by making the results of your dialog wheel choices mostly intuitive), the choices become a real game mechanic, rather than a silly minigame or a frivolous scoring method.

It's impossible to deny that the game could have used some additional work. If you (for whatever reason) have high expectations going into Alpha Protocol, you're going to be disappointed. But once you get past that - as with any other overhyped new IP - you just might find that it's actually fun to play -- potentially, depending on your play style.

As I've mentioned, my gameplay experience relied on a stealth and pistol-sniping approach; basically, Splinter Cell, plus terminal hacking and lock-picking. (The hacking minigames in Alpha Protocol are pretty neat.) Due to the aforementioned shortfalls in gun accuracy and melee, I'm not so confident that other strategies would be as effective. But I couldn't say for sure. Who knows? Maybe I'll pick a new character sheet, and try it again sometime.

Better than: I'd expected
Not as good as: Mass Effect 2
Basically as good as: Mass Effect

Progress: Complete