I didn't play this one very much, because it kind of threw me for a loop. Banjo-Kazooie's traditional elements - from music notes to jiggies - are all here. But the setting is completely different: Gruntilda is merely an opponent in a challenge set up by the Lord of Games, and the gameplay focus is on difficult-to-categorize vehicle construction and driving elements. With amazingly poor handling.

I'm tempted to call Nuts & Bolts the "toybox" to Grand Theft Auto's "sandbox," but I really don't know enough about the hard goals of the game to say. At the same time, the game's eerie combination of familiar platforming and bizarre vehicles are somehow uncompelling; so I may never find out what the point of the game really is.

Progress: Gave Up -- Tried the demo, got confused

Anyone who knows anything about long-term projects will tell you that, when a project takes substantially longer than was planned - say, ten years - the problem is probably with its scope. In software and games this is easily attributed to "feature creep," where an unclear initial scope, or boneheaded attempts to add to it later in development, create a tangled mess of goal features that are often impossible to achieve. Too Human is a perfect example of what can go wrong in such a project, and why most of the time, overscoped games never make it to commercial release.

Every aspect of the game is a disgusting hybrid of utterly incompatible influences. The plot is inspired by Norse mythology - except the gods are actually people, no, they're cybernetically enhanced people, and demons are actually demon robots? But if you think that they're substituting mythology with technology, hold on to your hat: there is a cyberspace world, parallel to the real world, which for some reason has more grass and trees and life than the real world. And magical witches. There is something deeply unsettling about geared-up commandos teleporting between a glowing techno-castle and a lush forest. Throw in a romantic subplot and you've got a story not even Uwe Boll would love.

The game itself is, of course, an action RPG. Except, it controls like a two-axis shooter. Even if you don't have a gun, the right stick controls your melee weapon. But it has character classes, and attributes and talent trees! And equipment, which drops randomly, Diablo-style. Naturally the cyberpunk-meets-high-fantasy-meets-Odin setting makes for equippable weapons along the lines of rifles, laser swords, and grenade launchers. Oh, and when you die, a cybernetic valkyrie takes you back to a spawn point.

Despite the potential depth of such a varied system, it is optimized for speed: you can play without having the slightest clue of what's going on. Which is good, because if I really had to worry about all this shit, I wouldn't even have finished the demo.

Too Human is the Spruce Goose of modern video games. It tries too much, and in so doing, fails at its ultimate goal. There's nothing here to enjoy, short of a few cheap thrills - if you haven't played a better dungeon-crawling Action RPG already. At the same time, I am quite glad it exists, because it is a textbook (if there were such textbooks) case of what to avoid in the course of producing a game.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished the demo

Legendary did not fare well in reviewing circles, and it's not hard to see why. The weapons are depressingly common; the conspiracy-theory plot is really no different from most first-person shooters out today; and the game's "legendary" monsters are, effectively, beefed-up enemy NPCs that don't actually change up the FPS formula. In other words, it does virtually nothing to distinguish itself.

At the same time though - at least as far as I saw in the demo - the core FPS elements that it therefore relies on, are actually implemented fairly well. You expect shooters to get a little awkward when you're fighting, say, a minotaur that takes several dozen shotgun shells to down, but a combination of (somewhat) effective environmental cover and an easy healing system make it feel like it should feel: a difficult boss encounter.

I don't have high hopes, but I'll gladly give the full game a whirl - for a few bucks - when I've got the time. On a PC, anyway; the controls definitely felt like they'd work better with a mouse.

Progress: Finished the Xbox 360 demo

I didn't much care for the Afro Samurai anime, but as I watched it I got the impression that it would make a super-cool video game. As it turns out, it made a repetitive, uninteresting video game.

The time-slowing focus moves are cool, and satisfyingly bloody. But grinding through enemies with normal moves - which you have to do to build up enough power to slow time - is incredibly dull and chorelike. And while the absence of a HUD complements the (beautiful) art style very well, it makes determining when you can or cannot use these powers unnecessarily confusing. Furthermore, though Sammy J. does his best to spice up the dialog, the plot is bland; and the way it's relayed to the player (proceeding along a linear path to kill dudes) is mechanical and boring.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished the demo

I give props to Red Alert 3 for bridging the gap between the quirkiness of Red Alert and the sensibilities of the rest of the RTS genre - and for bringing some new and cool gameplay elements to the table, like the co-commander. But I still feel like there's something wrong with it. Maybe it's the intense micromanagement necessary to make the most of the game's unique units; maybe it's the feeling of familiarity in general combat situations that are diluted to pure numbers games. Maybe it's the fact that I don't like strategy games. Hmm.

Progress: Gave Up -- Played the Ally demo campaign mission

What a completely retarded game.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished the demo

I was perhaps unreasonably excited when I first heard about Wheelman. As a big fan of the Grand Theft Auto series, one of my favorite portions of the games is just tooling around on the streets, jacking sports cars and ramping them off overpasses, or driving trucks headlong into oncoming motorcycles. So an open-world game that's just about driving like a maniac was an exciting proposition. But I'm glad I gave Wheelman a try before I bought it - because what I found was that the driving wasn't really satisfying at all.

There are many reasons for this:

• Traffic. There's barely any. Good for speeding around the city, but bad for trying to cause trouble.
• Physics. One of the things GTA4 really excelled at was making you feel the weight of the game's vehicles, but nothing seems to have any heft in Wheelman. Everything can stop on a dime, and you barely slow down from head-on collisions with other vehicles. One motorcycle I drove into exploded when it hit me, like a gnat on my windshield.
• Destructivity. There's no shortage of piddly little distractions you can run into on the street: signs, fire hydrants, bus stops, barricades - but they all just fly up into the air, and the objects you hit can't hit other things; barricades can get stuck on your hood and stick out into traffic, but said traffic will pass right through the protrusion. Furthermore, while your car can take damage, it doesn't take enough damage: the body never deforms, and the driving performance never changes.
• Vehicles. There are sports cars and not-as-nice cars, and motorcycles. Granted I only played for a half hour or so, but I didn't see much of a variety in the vehicle department, and even the different things I did drive, didn't really feel unique from one another. Even bikes don't really perform much different from the cars.
• Oncoming traffic, and pedestrians, do way too good a job of getting out of your way. And the few times I did manage to hit a pedestrian, there was no real impact at all. Lame.
• The city. The whole map has a uniform look and feel. I couldn't pick out a really nice part of town, or a slum, or a big park or anything. Maybe that's what Barcelona is like in real life, but it doesn't really make for a memorable game world.
• This may be a PC-only problem, but the driving controls feel totally wrong, and it's because they're mapped to the keyboard. The game works well enough with binary (as opposed to analog) acceleration and turning, but it definitely feels stupid. Accelerating from a full stop always burns your tires? C'mon.

I didn't get far enough to see the game's gunplay, but I'm going to go ahead and assume it's mediocre.

Some of the issues I've listed come down to design, and some to the simple fact that Wheelman's engine is new, and relatively immature. But all of these are problems that even older GTA games have overcome. So, no, Wheelman isn't a distilled version of GTA's driving. It's just worse.

Progress: Gave Up -- Tried the first few missions

Oh yeah, I played the Steam demo of this, too. Utter garbage.

The engine is very pretty - the models move great, and blood sprays beautifully. But the game that lies underneath is totally insubstantial. Mash the attack buttons (one light, one heavy). Want to defend yourself? Good luck trying! Just keep mashing the attack buttons. Oh what's that, a weapon? Just keep mashing the attack buttons. Ah, you've learned a new combo! Just keep mashing the attack buttons.

Somehow this game managed to feel dry and boring by my second enemy, about eight seconds in. I figured in the next several scenes it would have to pick up, but, I figured wrong. What a dull (and annoying, what with the retarded character dialog) piece of trash.

Progress: Gave Up -- What a waste

When I heard that the Tom Clancy franchise would be doing a flight combat sim, I got a little excited. The only flight games I'd previously been able to get into were the Rogue Squadron series, and that was because they were dumbed down for Star Wars fans (like me!). I figured that a Tom Clancy take on the genre would be similarly simplified, and from what I saw in the demo that seems mostly true.

The story is expectedly trite, you play as part of an Air Force For Hire company that gets in the middle of some civil unrest in a country no one cares all that much about. It's just a light frosting on the real cake of the game, which is the titular High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron. Somebody finally made a fighter jet so easy to fly, you can do it from your desk while watching TV and chugging a beer.

The demo consists of two missions, an intro training flight and a mission which I assume comes from an early part of the retail game. The controls are the only thing I was really concerned about - as they directly impact how fun flying around like a jerk will be - and though they threw me for a minor loop in the training mission, after that I was able to get the hang of it pretty easily. Basically there are two control modes, one assisted by your in-flight computer, which plays from a cockpit view and is like a normal flight sim; and the other plays from a third-person view, where your pitch/roll controls take on a more movement-intensive role to compensate for the camera. It's a bit unintuitive, but this "free" mode is generally easier to fly and makes it a breeze to take in your surroundings and sortie with other airborne targets.

The mission in the demo was fun, but I found it pretty challenging, even though the demo only allows you to play on the easiest possible settings. It constantly kept me busy with enemy fighters, incoming hostile water transports, tanks, bombers - basically there was shit everywhere. I'm not quite an expert yet on evading enemy missiles, but I might give it a few more runs to see how much better I can get.

It's not something I'm on the edge of my seat for, but HAWX seems like just the thing to fill the flight sim gap in my more recent gaming activity. I might consider picking up the full game once it's less new/expensive.

Progress: Played the Steam demo

Playing The Last Remnant is a little like watching a battle in The Lord of the Rings. A party of heroes fights a big group of bad dudes and/or a small number of bigger, badder dudes. Swords swing, there's some magic, swooping camera angles, epic music. It really looks and sounds impressive. But I'm still trying to figure out how to play it.

As near as I can tell, it's a sort of compromise between SRPGs like Bahamut Lagoon and traditional Final Fantasy-style RPGs. A party is a "union," and you enter battle with up to several of these (at least in the demo, I seem to have two at all times). These unions each consist of sword wielders and magic users and so on. When you enter into battle with the enemy, they, too, are split into unions, and not necessarily the same number of unions as you (like 3+). Though unions themselves have multiple characters, each one tends to function as a single unit.

Combat is turn-based: before a phase of turns, which I guess is decided by an agility stat or something, you'll give an order to each of your unions. Orders like Attack, Use Physical Arts, etc., as well as a target enemy union for the order. Here's the thing- the possible orders are context-sensitive. If someone in your union has taken damage, an order to heal them will show up. And if someone in another friendly union has taken damage, you can give an order to go and intervene on their behalf. Orders also take into account physical battlefield placement. But you have no direct control over this, aside from telling a union to stay put or to go at a particular enemy union.

Once orders are given, they're carried out automatically. Sometimes, but not always, the screen will prompt for quick time event button presses for extra damage. Other than that you're just watching the swooping camera movement and waiting for the next turn. It's all quite exciting, but begs the question: what am I really accomplishing? The combat system is already sufficiently AI-driven that I feel like my choices don't have much of an impact on what's going on. I'm still trying to figure it out though, so maybe there are some controls I'm not hitting yet.

Progress: Gave Up -- Shambled around in the Steam demo