Arkham Asylum isn't perfect. The game hits its peak too early - the last few boss fights, though not "bad" per se, aren't quite as good as the first ones. And not to say that backtracking is a pain, but returning to old haunts in the game's final segments feels flat, compared to the tense excitement of exploring them for the first time.

But that's really the worst I can say. This is a great game; more than just having solid mechanics and playability, it really benefits from the fact that you're skulking around and fighting goons as Batman, and that you run foul of his genuinely psychotic cast of supervillains. Arkham Asylum makes you feel like Batman. And that is fucking awesome.

The reviews I'd seen online generally maintained that the game has a shitty ending, which I wouldn't necessarily agree with it. It is a bit odd, sure - after defeating a mutated Joker (who de-mutates, of course), Batman flies back to Gotham, listening to a radio dispatch about Two-Face robbing a bank. Then after the credits, you see Killer Croc's hand reaching up out of the Gotham river, and grabbing a container of the game's Bane-on-steroids 'Titan' serum. So it might be setting up two sequels? But anyway, it feels just like what would happen in a comic book, and I thought it was plenty adequate to close the story without getting all melodramatic.

Solving all the Riddler's challenges was a blast - each area has a bunch of trophies, audio recordings, riddles and other stuff littered around. Once you get an area's map, it's a simple joy to just follow the clues and tool around. It really gives Arkham Island legs even after all the baddies are gone and the story is over.

There's also a Challenge Mode, where you play out scenes from the game's fighting and stealth segments a la carte. These sound like fun (especially the stealth ones, since there are so many different ways for these to play out); but I've had my fill of Batman for now, so maybe I'll come back for these another time.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a fantastic game, and you should play it.

Progress: 84%, finished story (on normal) and riddles

Sam & Max looked pretty good, but the demos I've tried of later Telltale episodics show definite signs of improvement. So, long story short, I've already bought Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People and just need the time of day to get around to it.

Progress: Gave Up

Tales of Hearts came out in Japan almost a year ago, and the most recent hint of a North American release is from months before that. There's been word zero about this since last year, which is kind of a bad sign. Shame, since I definitely liked how the game system set-up looks.

Progress: Gave Up

My interest in Tunnel Rats was seeing how terrible it would inevitably be, not necessarily experiencing it for myself. Luckily GameSpot and IGN describe the horrors of Tunnel Rats in sufficiently excruciating detail.

Reading about tunnel snakes "...who have, for all practical purposes, forged an unholy alliance with the Viet Cong" really made my day.

Progress: Gave Up

Speaking of finding out more about Knights in the Nightmare - this gameplay video shows perhaps too much of the game, or more precisely, how utterly terrifying it apparently becomes. Look at all the dodging, item collecting, attack making, timing, numbers, explosions, what the fuck?

It appears to demand more expertise in schmup-style reactivity than in RPG number-crunching, which is definitely not how I'd prefer it to lean. Ehhhhh I've lost interest.

Progress: Gave Up

Black Sigil's reviews have been, in a word, bad. To the point where it sounds like traipsing through the game, even with no expectation of fun - just to witness the sheer rip-off-itude at work - sounds like it could be painful. Consider that Metacritic's sole user review includes the compliment "Mine havent froze yet and im up 6-7 hours of gameplay." (emphasis mine)

Progress: Gave Up

Based on the obtuse explanations of CIMA I'd been reading since its release (in 2003), I thought it was a tactical RPG with a puzzle twist. In fact, it's a puzzle game with an action twist. Also, it's terrible.

The plot is that you're protecting a bunch of hapless civilians from the CIMA, which are either aliens, or monsters, or an organization of alien monsters, or, actually I don't really know. But they terrify the people, and it's your job to keep them safe. By helping them to dungeon exits. This game is nothing but escort missions. Amazing.

The game starts on a train passing through the countryside. Luckily there aren't any CIMA out here-- wait! It's a CIMA portal! Fiddlesticks. So a portal transports you into the alien dungeon world. The CIMA apparently control spacetime and, well, frankly I don't understand what the point of resisting them is. Oh! It's because the CIMA feed on hope, and so to foster that hope in their victims, they always create an opportunity for escape. Yeah, that seems ... right.

The dungeons themselves are isometric puzzles. Your character, and another one that follows you, can attack. The civilians can't; you just order them around, between safe spots, toward the exit. Meanwhile you have to hit switches and defeat enemies and stuff, to clear routes for the civvies.

Presumably the gameplay gets a little more complicated later in the game, but I really don't care about that, for two reasons.

1) The pathfinding is retarded. If you order the civilians to walk from one area to another, and if they can't go in a straight line, they will get stuck. Your partner will get stuck behind things, too. Wow.

2) There are 14 of these douchebags, and ordering them individually just doesn't fucking work. The selection menu allows you to either select ALL of them, or one at a time, based on miniature icons of their heads, many of which look quite similar. And most of them are disabled at any given time, because of a fucking stupid 'group' organization mechanism that doesn't make any sense to me.

So you order these idiots to walk to the next safe spot, while you attend to repelling monsters (read: pressing the A button over and over). Some of them get caught behind a wall. You go back to get them, but ordering them individually is almost impossible. And the act of moving to them screws up the route again. And they walk incredibly slow.

It's neat, I guess, that the game doesn't really resemble anything else out there. But that doesn't really excuse the fact that the core mechanics are mediocre to begin with, and the control issues make it unplayable. I guess there's a reason this game faded into total obscurity.

Progress: Gave Up -- Didn't finish first dungeon

Last time I neglected to mention my only significant complaint about the game, which was the second-string voice acting. Despite Mark Hamill, Kevin Conroy, and the other main characters delivering absolutely stunning performances, the asylum guards' lines really failed to move me. The writing was mostly trite, and the fact that only three actors voiced all the guards (one of whom is that guy who's in everything) was pretty distracting.

Now, though, the guards don't really come up very often, so the point is effectively moot. Instead, I get to creep up on the Joker's goons and, rather than instantly knock them all on their asses, listen to them tell crazy misanthropic stories. The last one I heard was about a guy who killed his sister because the Joker told him to - but he "didn't really like her anyway." Another thug said the Joker ordered him to kill his sister, too, but he didn't have a sister, so he just killed "the first bitch he saw."

I struggle to come up with adequate praise for Arkham Asylum's pacing. The entire game is checkpoint-based, and no one room or sequence is ever terribly long - not to mention, there's almost always plenty of leeway to recover from a mistake before Batman will die - so repetition is a non-issue. And though the game flow does have portions of high- and low-action, e.g. some detective work inbetween fights, it never really cools off; there's always a persistent tension, a palpable drive to the next goal.

It's hard to put the game down, not just because it's fun, but because it has that carrot-on-a-string quality of always making me want to see what's next.

Progress: 26%

The overall theme of Overlord is one of the best I've seen in a video game, ever. The game creates an absolute farce of common fantasy tropes: Halflings are wicked little drunken miscreants; Elves are lazy emo assholes who piss and moan about the loss of their magic forest; a virtuous little woman I rescued from a dungeon wishes me luck on my evil quests. Oh, also, I subjugated some maidens from the village of Spree, so now there are a bunch of half-naked chicks in my throne room. It's good to be the overlord!

As much as I love the ideas of the game, though, I'm still having a spot of trouble with the mechanics. Overlord really needs a map: the overworld areas are sprawling and difficult to navigate - the teleport locations don't appear to follow any pattern - and some dungeons are scarily labyrinthine. Some of the level design in these areas is pretty good, but often I feel like there are corridors just for the sake of making me get lost.

The minion controls have something of a learning curve, although I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. Blue minions can resurrect fallen minions; but only if they're placed nearby on a Guard Marker, which I had trouble figuring out for a while. It would be immensely helpful if something in the game clearly illustrated their effective range - since there's a small window of time for them to revive minion bodies, if they're too far away, I won't really notice until it's too late.

Also, while the minion pathfinding is excellent - I'm really impressed by some of the routes they're able to figure out - it's not always clear when they'll pathfind or when, instead, they'll follow you to their doom. I have no problem with my store of summonable minions, but if my entire fighting force dies at once, it can put me in a real pickle.

Progress: In the sewers of Heaven's Peak

Yeah, this is pretty awesome.

Something that surprised me in the full game, that I didn't expect based on the demo, is the exploration aspect. The game's environments are so heavily detailed and, well, great looking, that I'm always stopping to look around. Also the Riddler has a ton of little puzzle-like challenges all throughout the game, so keeping an eye out for those is a ton of fun. Topping off the game's map is Arkham Island itself, which isn't purely a hub, per se, but does function as a central, well-traveled part of the game. I still have a lot to explore on the island, and I can't wait to get to it.

Another thing I didn't anticipate in Arkham Asylum is the depth of the upgrade system. Batman gains experience for killer combos, stealth kills, and other cool stuff, and when he levels up, you can spend an upgrade point to enhance an ability - or activate an entirely new one. Early in the game I picked up an explosive foam device; now with an upgrade, I can lay the foam down in a room, and it'll detonate automatically when someone walks by it. Sweet.

With the exploration and the Riddler's puzzles, I'm playing the full game in a slower and more deliberate way than the demo, which I like. But one of the really impressive design accomplishments of Arkham Asylum is that you can basically play it as fast or as slow as you want. For a game that incorporates action, stealth, and puzzle elements, it's surprisingly malleable.

Progress: 11%