It doesn't really feel new, or deep. But Shadow Complex is fun in a way that modern games rarely pull off: despite some fairly complex technology, it's easy to understand, and delivers rapid-fire entertainment. Shadow Complex isn't the "next step" in Metroidvania-style games - it's just the existing, well-polished formula with a 2.5-D facelift, set in an alternate universe (ours, this time), with a dense, never-a-dull-moment layout.

The story, which is allegedly based on some Orson Scott Card political intrigue - I can't read so I wouldn't know - is pretty weak. Scant cutscenes help explain your objectives, and the voice acting, especially in in-game flavor scenes, is excellent; but the plot, a conspiracy to overthrow the American government, just seems out of place and unnecessary. The main character doesn't seem to care at all about it, and frankly neither do I.

Being Unreal-based, the game looks great ... most of the time. Some effects just don't look right, and cutscenes in general show just how much Chair had to trim down the engine, with jerky movement and some ugly slowdown. On the flip side, the way the flashlight brightens up dark vents and caves is really impressive. And the underwater scenes, well, those are fuckin' gorgeous.

The difficulty is something I take issue with, due to a few design quirks. Playing on Medium, or Normal or whatever it's called, I do pretty well most of the time - but getting shot hurts like a bitch, and save points don't fully refill your health! Instead, the save rooms have a bunch of health pickups, that disappear once you've used them. I've also noticed that the save rooms have an irritating tendency to be placed right next to dangerous areas.

The pacing seems off, just slightly. I got grenades and a climbing pack in the first few minutes of the game, but it was like two hours before I got another upgrade to my core abilities. This is probably a side-effect of how freakin' huge the map appears to be.

As for the faux-3D aiming - like the graphics, it works great most of the time. The times when it doesn't - as you try to aim at a dude right in front of you, but the semi-auto-aim is instead pointing you at a guy in the background hiding behind a box - are frustrating, and it happens often enough that you'll notice. But, not so often that it feels irrevocably broken. Like I said, most of the time it's fine.

Shadow Complex isn't revolutionary, but it is a very fine implementation of a classic formula. Also, it's $15, which seems ridiculous.

Progress: 31% map, 25% items, Level 9

What misery. This is almost (almost) as bad as Shadow of Destiny. But several times the length. So, maybe it's worse, in a way.

Skipping the inane sidequests, the main challenges seem to be achievable in about 20-30 minutes each. They're getting longer, though. Not because they're more involved (unless you consider walking involvement). There are no cars allowed on the island - despite the fact that you drove one from the airport? - so you must jog the agonizing distances between the Flower, Sun, and Rain hotel, and everything else on the island. Joy.

Of course, this isn't bad enough. There are linear games, and then there are sequential games. In FSR you must talk to the NPCs and visit the relevant locations in precisely the right order; there is literally no other way to do it. I got stuck in the middle of Day 10 because I got all the way to the Diner, but the guy I was supposed to talk to wasn't there, because I didn't have a conversation with a maid back at the hotel. Is this still a video game?

But it seems that FSR does know how bad it is. Characters semi-frequently break the fourth wall by talking candidly about the game, sometimes in regard to how contrived it seems, as if it's ironic and funny. (It isn't.)

At this point I'm pushing onward out of morbid curiosity. What horror will the game wreak upon me next?

Progress: Day 12

Trine recently went on sale, fulfilling my requirements for a purchase. Doing the whole co-op setup is kind of a pain - three Xbox 360 controllers and a Windows adapter for them, plus finding out that the Windows 7 RC doesn't support multiple monitors! Also there were some issues with Steam Cloud game saves yesterday, so we accidentally erased a few levels of progress figuring that one out.

It's way fun, though. Although the means are somewhat different, Trine encourages the same kind of co-competitiveness that Four Swords Adventures thrived on; death is a fairly trivial thing in co-op Trine (everyone resurrects at a checkpoint), so I have no reservations about throwing my teammates into fatal danger. As the Wizard, moving blocks around and dropping them on people is fucking awesome.

The game is architected such that, in single play, you can get through every level with each character, though some tasks are much harder playing as one or another. The real challenge comes when you try to get all the extras in the level - experience pickups and treasure chests, that expand each character's set of abilities. Now I can conjure platforms, the Thief can shoot fire arrows, and the Warrior can pick up and throw blocks! Neat.

So far I've played through the non-demo portions of the game exclusively in co-op, although I'd love to try it by myself sometime just to see how solo play goes.

Progress: Bramblestoke Village

A charming afternoon diversion. Ben There, Dan That! is more than just a quaint little adventure game in the vein of old Lucasarts point-and-clicks, it's also custom tailored to please and amuse anyone who's played them. An item in the shape of Max's head, constant references to Monkey Island, even the graphical style seems to emulate the classics. But rather than seeming a rip-off, BTDT is brimming with clever (yet accessible) puzzling and humorous dialog of its own.

A fun way to kill a few hours, and a real treat for any fan of the old Lucasarts stuff.

Progress: Complete

Darkest of Days is a great concept with a middling execution. You're a soldier in Custer's army, kidnapped through time by a mysterious (benevolent?) agency trying to protect the timeline from some other mysterious (sinister?) entity. Cool: you get to shoot people in various time periods. Cooler: you get to bring other eras' weapons.

That said, mowing down the confederate army with an automatic machine gun wasn't really as satisfying as I thought it would be. The shooting is competent, at least - but, as with Legendary, that just doesn't seem like enough.

Darkest of Days does have one of the coolest characters I've seen in a shooter, your Texan handler who curses like a... well, like a Texan. (His video description of the game's weaponry is probably more fun than the game itself.) So if you're okay with it being Yet Another Shooter, it does at least have a flavor of its own. And maybe a plot? Who knows. I'll just keep watching that video, instead.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished the demo

After my first play session with Prototype, I would have glogged (but didn't - busy week) about how underwhelming the whole experience is: how the story is disposible tripe, how the "web of intrigue" is a jumbled mess of not-intriguing sound bites, how combat feels unengaging and empty, how the city is repetitive and without personality. My initial impressions were, shall we say, bad.

My second session, however, changed my opinion a little. All the above complaints still stand - the story is dull, basic fighting sucks, and the city is uninspired. The missions aren't terribly interesting either. But! this second session also saw me gliding across entire city blocks, hijacking a tank, and jump-kicking a helicopter.

Prototype is light on compelling gameplay - even the experience-gaining and upgrade system seems barely sufficient - but the game is great at delivering wow moments, and these at least appear to ramp up over time. Hopefully, it'll get better than just balancing out the game's other lackluster traits.

Progress: In the Web

This sucks.

Goichi Suda is a director who I've come to admire - Killer7, beneath its quirky veneer, had really unique and fun elements. No More Heroes was a treat, despite a few rough spots. Flower, Sun, and Rain was one of his earlier works for the PS2, previously exclusive to Japan; and while Killer7 mixed some solid game mechanics with absurd scenarios, FSR is almost 100% nonsense.

The top-level description of FSR is a Groundhog Day-esque mystery adventure, which is an awesome enough concept. The game's main character, Sumio Mondo, is called to Lospass Island to find something (he's a "searcher" by trade); he quickly comes to learn that this something is a bomb, planted by a terrorist, which will blow up a plane shortly after takeoff later that day. And the next day, and the day after. The plane explodes every day, presumably until you unravel the mystery.

Promising, right?

Unfortunately, the game proper barely has anything to do with the plane disaster. On day one, Sumio woke up to a call from the hotel manager, drank a coffee, and found himself locked in his room; I had to solve a puzzle (regarding cameras) to unlock the door, at which point the plane exploded and the day ended. On day two, Sumio woke up to another call from the hotel manager, drank another coffee, went out into the hall, and was blocked by a laundry cart. I went up to the roof, talked to another man in the hotel, solved a puzzle about soccer formations, and then the plane exploded, ending the day.

This incremental progress toward the real point of the game would at least be not-terrible if A) the puzzle solving added depth to the story, or B) the puzzles themselves were fun. Unfortunately, the puzzle themes have nothing to do with anything (soccer?), and even calling them "puzzles" is a bit misleading, as the answer to every one of them is a number. Some are math-based, like figuring out how many cubes will fit into a bigger cube. Some are reading-based - not Da Vinci Code reading, more like Encyclopaeda Britannica reading - requiring you to pore through a lengthy and flavorless in-game Guidebook for the answer. The rest of the puzzles are abstract riddles, like Professor Layton's goddamned matchsticks.

There are side-puzzles, too, in case you aren't having enough fun with each day's main riddle. The depressing thing is that figuring out these side-puzzles is the only variety in an otherwise mundane day - most of it is spent walking from one point to another, engaging NPCs in insipid dialog, until finally being told what you need to solve the main puzzle.

With utterly antiquated graphics (textures feature unreadable text!), downright irritating sound effects, and a glut of completely irrelevant abstract-art cinematics - I get the feeling this was a showcase for Full-Motion Video on the PS2 - Flower, Sun, and Rain has basically nothing going for it. The game certainly has a unique style, but with no substance to speak of, it's... well, insubstantial.

I continue to play it, because it's short, and from where I'm at, there's really nowhere to go but up.

Progress: Day 3

As Capcom is wont to do with its endless franchises, this iteration of Mega Man Zero is an evolutionary step forward, tweaking the base mechanics of the game to be more fun, approachable, rewarding, or whatever. New rules for cyber-elves, new suit upgrades, et cetera. And of course the already nonsensical story keeps compounding upon itself into an indecipherable, robotic soap opera. Otherwise it's generally the same.

I found the previous games satisfying, despite some rather unforgiving difficulty. So what's keeping me from giving MMZ3 more of a chance? It is still utterly ignorant of the concept of checkpoints. Sorry Zero, but if you're going to make me replay an entire level when I die at the boss, I just don't have the patience for you anymore. Especially when I can't really expect anything I haven't already seen in your old work.

Aside: MadWorld lacked checkpoints too, but I only died at a boss once in that game. In MMZ3, death is likely.

Progress: Gave Up -- Almost beat one of the first missions

Just played the PC demo, and as much hype as there is surrounding Arkham Asylum, I was still impressed. The story and cinematics are fucking cool - the flowing combat engine is a blast - and the stealth gameplay is surprisingly robust, even though I am still terrible at stealth games. With solid mechanics like these, the rest of the game (which includes boss fights with a whole crew of classic Batman supervillains) can't help but be awesome.

Later on, I watched a buddy play the demo on a 360. The demos are the same, but he did a bunch of stuff totally different from how I did it. That's one of the coolest things about the combat and stealth engines; there are so many possibilities, I'm really not worried about them getting old.

Progress: Finished the PC demo

It's difficult to describe just how good Chinatown Wars is - you really have to play it to believe it. By GTA standards, it's a good game, sitting at the same table as its console brethren; what it lacks in driving finesse it more than makes up for with unique features. By handheld game standards, Chinatown Wars is better than it has a right to be, and sets an impossibly high bar for anyone else ambitious enough to try open-world on the DS.

I finished the main missions and did a little tooling around on the side (drug dealing, vigilante and ambulance missions, et cetera) in just under 10 gameplay hours. Which may seem low compared to other GTAs, but the missions in general feel much more concentrated here. The game is brilliantly designed for on-the-go play: all the bullshit of driving long distances, or protracted hunting and protection scenarios, is filtered out, distilling the missions into pure fun. It feels very potent, and satisfying.

Naturally, there are a ton of extras in Chinatown Wars beyond the main storyline, like taking out security cameras, acquiring property, and rampages and so on. I'm not planning on going for 100% completion, but these extras are way more attainable and immediately gratifying than some of the more obtuse collectibles in other GTAs.

Metacritic currently says Chinatown Wars is the highest rated DS game, even boasting no marks below 80/100, and I think that's entirely justified. Unfortunately the game may not get the recognition it deserves until the PSP port - which is really too bad, because the touch-screen stuff in this one puts even some Nintendo implementations to shame.

Progress: 63.52%, finished main story