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

San Andreas alternates between being really impressive and annoying the piss out of me.

The new Gang Warfare system is pretty cool: color-coded regions on the map show what gang runs them, and I can go to a rival gang's turf and start a war by shooting up some of their homies. This starts a wave-based Gang War encounter, and if I win, the turf becomes my gang's. But this really walks the line with regard to the dying penalty in the game: I can buy body armor and guns to better my chances, but there's a great chance of me dying anyway, and since none of the gang war's "progress" is saved I will have effectively wasted my money. You can bring gang members with you, too, but they're trigger-happy and their kills don't count toward starting a gang war. They also get run over and die a lot.

There are in-game girlfriends, which you can cultivate relationships with by going on dates. Rockstar did a pretty good job of making this an appropriate pain in the ass.

I spent a bunch of time doing the exercise minigames at a gym, and have maxed out my muscle and stamina stats. So I can run a really nice distance, and can beat people to death with little trouble. But it's still super-easy to die, especially when the guy I'm beating to death has a friend with a TEC-9.

The city is big. In many ways, too big: the map/radar is not totally adequate for finding my way from one side of the city to the other, and missions that take me across the map are irritatingly common. I haven't even gotten to the other two islands yet!

I like San Andreas's additions to the GTA experience, but it is still weighed down by failures of the GTA3 engine. That's what gets me the most, I suppose. It would be one thing if I was playing SA straightaway after Vice City, but now every time I have trouble getting away from a two-star wanted level I can't help but think about GTA4 or Chinatown Wars instead.

Progress: Having some coffee with Denise

I reached level 80, got my Explorer achievement, and have been defeating Naxxramas on a regular basis. As for the rest of Northrend:

-Zul'Drak is a shitty troll zone full of shitty trolls.

-Crystalsong Forest is ... why is this here? It's really just an empty space for Dalaran (the new capital) to float on top of.

-Sholazar Basin is like Stranglethorn Peninsula + Un'Goro Crater. With less dinosaurs, and more rhinos.

-Storm Peaks, wintry mountains that were once the home of the titans who shaped the earth, are, well, awesome. THERE ARE ROBOT GNOMES.

-Icecrown is Mordor with snow instead of lava.

Pretty exciting, all in all. There were a bunch of quest chains that I really enjoyed, and the best part is that they were all solo, so I didn't need to wait around for a group before I dove in and hunted dragons or lived through a flashback of Arthas becoming the Lich King. Quests also make gratuitous use of the new siege vehicle mechanics, where you take control of a tank, or dragon, or what have you, and gain new movement abilities and a new bar of skill buttons. It's different from some earlier implementations where you would effectively mind control a different creature- here, your original character is basically locked in a cockpit, and until you eject you can only pull the levers on your vehicle. And the vehicles have their own health, which is usually high enough for you to run through hordes of zombies lobbing bombs and going nuts with a flamethrower.

The dungeons in Northrend are all over the place. There's Azjol-Nerub, which start to finish takes about 20 minutes (and its neighbor, Ahn'Kahet, which is painfully long and mazelike). Then there's the Nexus, which is interesting in that you can tackle it in many different orders. And the Oculus, where for most of the dungeon you ride a dragon (and command it as a siege vehicle rather than use your own character abilities). The Violet Hold is like Burning Crusade's Black Morass, but in a prison instead of a swamp. And the new Caverns of Time instance, the Culling of Stratholme, is a new, frenzied take on the level 60 instance that we'd forgotten how tired we were of. All of these (and the other) five-man dungeons have Heroic modes, which are more difficult and have better item rewards, and unlike Burning Crusade you don't have to grind for anything to attempt a dungeon in Heroic mode.

Raid encounters have been made more accessible, which is cool, but so far the available content is pretty diluted. When your faction has control of Wintergrasp (which is not as fun as it sounds - the open world PvP only really happens for 30 minutes every three hours), you have access to a boss called Archavon, in an Onyxia-like dungeon where you fight some trash and then the boss. There's also a Chamber of the Aspects (again, Onyxia-like), where you can fight a black dragon boss, and have the choice of leaving three, two, one or none of his friendly drakes alive before the encounter - the number of drakes impacting the difficulty of the fight and quality of loot. And then there's Naxxramas, a retuned version of the dungeon no one was able to do at level 60, and a fight against the crazy blue dragon Malygos, which I have yet to do myself. Each of these raids has 10- and 25-man versions (where the 25-man encounters are "Heroic"), and while the Heroic raids are statistically harder, in reality they tend to be easier if nothing else, because of the built-in assumption that your raid suffers from organizational retardation at 25.

I digress; but it says something that I was able to jump right into Lich King's raid content. It was over a year until my level 60 went into the ass of the earth in Molten Core, or learned to exploit line-of-sight mechanics in Blackwing Lair, and I only did Karazhan a few times before I got bored of the Burning Crusade. Yet even having to pick up non-guild scrubs most of the time to fill out a 10-man group, we've had no problem consistently cleaning out Naxxramas. As far as enabling more people to see the end-game, with Lich King's clear path of Heroic badges and 10-man raid content, Blizzard has finally succeeded.

Progress: Level 80

So GTA3 was about organized crime, and revenge. Vice City was about excess in a city of sin - and revenge. San Andreas? I've only just started, but so far a weighty piece of the game's theme is urban decay. And revenge.

The game opens with your avatar, Carl "CJ" Johnson, flying back to Los Santos, San Andreas on news of his mother's death, after a five-year hiatus up north. The first thing that happens to Carl is being picked up by a local cop he has a history with, and getting accused of shooting an officer. The second thing, is meeting up with his old neighbors and friends, and watching them argue because of some local rival gangs. The third thing is fleeing from a(nother) rival gang on bicycle. Then, of course, the fourth thing is taking action against the rival gangs, in the form of spraypaint.

Already, Carl has spoken more than once about staying in the city because things are "fucked up," implying that he intends to fix said things. Though I have seen more evidence thus far for destroying the city than taking it back, I maintain hope that Carl will take the high road.

Early on San Andreas started giving me a taste of its character-building component. I got a haircut, which affects my reputation with different social groups?; ordered some food, which affected my energy and my fatness; worked out on a bike, which burned fat and made me more apt in bicycle riding; and gained gang respect from the first few missions I completed. Like an RPG character, Carl has an array of personal stats that can be leveled up, resulting in new abilities, stronger attributes, and new opportunities.

The engine has thankfully been polished up a bit since Vice City, but its age still shows. Honestly though, I'm not as worried about that as I am about the urban english that racially threatens me at every turn.

Progress: Just tagged some graffiti