I'm super-glad that Steam posted a free demo of World of Goo, because the past several days of rave reviews were quickly driving me toward a purchase which, in retrospect, I probably would have regretted.

Honestly, I feel bad for not liking World of Goo more than I do. The presentation is more impressive than an independent game has a right to be, and the gameplay concept is very cool. But in practice, I didn't have much fun with it at all - more often than not, it just frustrated the hell out of me. The basic idea of the game is to build structures with your goo by dragging balls of it next to each other, but since the physics is super-elastic, already-constructed goo is constantly swaying around, and trying to get a sensible structure going is like- well, it's like trying to build a house that's alive and has Parkinson's.

Getting goo to attach correctly is also an unnecessary challenge, from picking it up - and trying to avoid picking up other goo in the same spot, since all the free goo is moving all the time - to placing it, as the placement options are chosen automatically based on your cursor's proximity to nearby goo nodes, and this often results in a choice which doesn't make any goddamn sense. (This isn't the only problem with the interface either: interface elements toward the edge of the screen, e.g. the Menu button, inevitably invoke auto-scrolling when you try to actually move the cursor to them.)

The level design, from what I saw, was pretty good; but the challenge of the game is less of a traditional think-it-out puzzle, and more of a real-time "tweak it until it works" puzzle, which is not something I really care for. There are definitely some good ideas at work in World of Goo - the bonus level where you compete in a global tower-building contest is a stroke of genius - but there are also several very important areas left to polish. It's certainly better than your average Flash game, but I'm not convinced that I should part with money for it.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished demo (World 1)

Look familiar?

The fact that this game looks identical to Metroid Prime's morph ball mode may not be a good thing for the developers, if Retro Studios is keen on pursuing their pseudo-IP - but it does seem like a good thing for me, because I thought the morph ball mode segments were awesome, and this is basically an entire game made out of it.

BioShock does some really remarkable things. The storytelling, that I've brought up before. The gameplay is also very tight and approachable - yet complex enough to keep combat interesting. Something I don't think I've mentioned is how it makes the presentation relevant; lighting and sound are used throughout the game for not just graphical flair, and not just ambience, but for dynamic, emergent gameplay. Figuring out where a Splicer is hiding by the echo and direction of voices or footsteps is almost as exhilirating as seeing one revealed in an adjacent room by an ominous shadow.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that, in the final levels, BioShock does lose some of its stride. The story outpaces the maps - whole series of rooms are optional, to the point where the map feels wasted, and the rooms relevant to the story are few and unengaging. The first 75% of the game heavily encourages and rewards exploration, but in the last several areas I was really just doing it out of habit and general curiosity.

By this point enemies have also become difficult enough, and ammo pickups plentiful enough, that the resource management balance begins to break; throughout the last third of the game, I almost invariably had full cash, full ammunition, or both. Granted, I never turned down an opportunity to find hidden items - nor to hack a vendor for reduced prices - but while I did it before to gain an edge on the game's resources, finally it had become, like exploring the optional rooms, habitual and unnecessary. I even turned the difficulty up to Hard, but even wasting more ammo on Splicers and more health packs on myself, I had no trouble replenishing my resources almost instantly.

But please allow me to clarify: the last parts of the game are not bad. For any other game, they would be good, possibly even great. And there are some surprises yet to be had in the architecture and scattered diary recordings of these final levels. But, they are not quite up to the standard set by BioShock's earlier content.

So, the endgame is a bit underwhelming compared to what preceded it, which is kind of a shame. On the other hand, the game that preceded it was incredible, ground-breaking, and fantastically fun. It's also not what I would call a short game. Notwithstanding the vaguely unsatisfying ending, BioShock is a marvel of a game, an inspiring experience, destined to become a classic - and since it now retails/downloads for $20 you would be a fool not to play it.

Progress: Finished on Medium/Hard

Yes!

Part of my Orange Box was of course 2004's hit shooter Half-Life 2, following the ongoing saga of Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist with a crowbar, and his struggle to defeat pandimensional invaders. I have never been a particular fan of shooters (with rare exceptions), and Half-Life 2, though clearly a champion of its genre and somewhat enjoyable to boot, has helped me reason out why this might be: personality.

There's no question about HL2's production values, the solidity of its shooter mechanics, or the subtle genius of its level design. Even the story is interesting. But that's just it - it's interesting, not exactly what I would call compelling. Though it has all the trappings of a good story, with the historied villain, the elderly mentor, the powerful governing body, and the stench of conspiracy, none of the players have much personality. Said villain is an utterly transparent puppet. Said mentor is unsurprisingly full of answers. Friendly NPCs show concern toward their plights, but are not dynamic or exceptionally interactive. Unfriendly NPCs are brutish and unintelligent. Environments are square, sparsely populated, and almost monochromatic.

This menagerie of cliches and flatness may be the primary reason I'm not very "into" Half-Life 2, nor most games like it. There is a thing they do well - shooting - and Half-Life 2 does this excellently. It is impressive, especially from a technological standpoint, and it is a challenge which exercises my game-playing muscles. But it is not without precedent: it is not surprising, it is not thought-provoking. This isn't to say I won't have fun with it; but it is an implementation of a simplistic game architecture that has its limits.

Progress: Water Hazard

I've had several sit-downs with Warhammer Online since I bought it the other week, and my opinion has varied widely from session to session. What is Warhammer Online about? What makes it fun? What makes it different from World of Warcraft? And what, exactly, is wrong with it? I've spent no small amount of time trying to figure these things out.

At its core, Warhammer Online is not World of Warcraft. WoW is an epic tale about Azeroth, and revolves around the player's involvement in exploring and rescuing this world; on an atomic scale this sometimes reduces to killing rats and games of Capture the Flag, but the intent is that the player become part of the World of Warcraft. WAR, on the other hand, is about a constant and inevitable conflict between the forces of Order and Destruction for reasons no one particularly cares about anymore; and although this sometimes requires killing rats and games of Capture the Flag, it is all for the sake of War.

So it is different. And yet, at the top level - when taking the game in as a whole - it has come out much like World of Warcraft. The races are similar. The environments are similar. The classes, the enemies, the abilities, the names, the look and feel; a lot of WoW has been re-implemented in WAR. Warhammer Online's "Realm vs. Realm" system, which pits High Elves against Dark Elves, Dwarves against Orcs/Goblins, and Humans against Chaos (...evil humans), ends up a lot like the Alliance and Horde from WoW. Each faction (Order and Destruction) has counterpart classes, among the archetypes of Tank, Melee DPS, Ranged DPS, and Healer. There are Shamans. There are Hunters. Battlegrounds ("Scenarios"). Copper, Silver, Gold. Special abilities, in three different ability trees, that you can start putting points toward when you get to level 10 - okay, in WAR it's level 11. Actually "rank" 11, as levels are referred to as "ranks," which is one of the biggest visible differences between the two games.

Don't get me wrong, there is a considerable portion of WAR which is definitely unique. The RvR stuff fleshes out into some very cool game features: Public Quests, for instance, are quests that occur out in the open, that anyone can participate in even if they are not grouped together, and in which the factions can compete against one another. Public Quests, along with other faction-specific goals within a particular zone, are used to gauge which faction has more influence over that zone; zones can be effectively conquered, and in high-enough leveled zones, Keeps can be controlled by one side or another. At the top levels, capital cities can eventually be reached, breached, and looted, although I personally have yet to see this occur. There are some auto-balancing mechanisms built into the game (via assistive NPCs) that, like any given episode of a TV sitcom, brings everything back to a rough state of equilibrium over time, but meanwhile the idea of sacking a city sounds like a blast.

At the same time, WAR's PvP emphasis results in a PvE experience which leaves something to be desired. Having done nearly all the standard quests available to me throughout my race's areas - as well as a number of Public Quests through a group of friends - I am still several levels under what appears to be appropriate for the areas I subsequently enter. The lack of interesting "story" is another issue entirely - only 1/6 of the races, the Greenskins, has writing and speech that is anything close to amusing - but more solo-able content, and/or a more sensible flight path system (flight path nodes are very infrequent), are on my wish list.

At the end of the day, Warhammer Online has taken its own unique, promising ideas, and - while not necessarily diluting that promise - implemented it as a user experience extremely similar to WoW. Whether this is a marketing tactic for drawing in a userbase, or simply the result of lazy content development, is an exercise left to the reader. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and WAR flatters WoW quite a bit. Some things from Azeroth have been changed for the better, like no equipment durability, no ghost runs, and flying to allied cities early in the game. Some have been changed for the worse, such as the aforementioned infrequent flight destinations, really lame trade skills, and a barely comprehensible minimap. Regardless, these similarities work largely to the benefit of WAR, if not making it particularly persuasive as a competitor to WoW. Much of it boils down to a PvP rather than PvE emphasis.

One last item of contention, and this is actually a big one, is that WAR is, technologically, downright ominous - and not in a good way. The unreliable networking framework used in the game results in a sometimes hideous gameplay experience: enemies, allies, and pets pop in and out like magic, health bars are not always necessarily accurate, ability timings are a crap shoot and sometimes, from the middle of a friendly town, you might get attacked by an NPC in a cave on the other side of the map. The game is fairly buggy, which is to be expected, not that that's any excuse - the worrying thing is that the networking engine appears built to perform poorly, and I wouldn't be surprised if reliable network performance is more than a few months of patch-work away.

I do intend to keep playing Warhammer Online for now, if for no other reason than to find out what the mounts in this game are like. And I do enjoy the unique features it brings to the table. WAR is good; but I'm not really sure if it's good enough.

Progress: Level 12 Squig Herder

Everything about BioShock is still awesome. I'm gaining a bit on the difficulty curve - my cash and ammo assets are consistently near topped off, and even difficult enemies (or hordes of enemies) are pretty easy when I can unload round after round at them - but the challenge is still enough to keep things interesting. The immersive narrative goes on as the personalities of the major players unravel, although it still doesn't distract from the main action of the game. And the environments are so intriguing, so engrossing, that even backtracking through Arcadia to collect some items was fun. 1950s radio music never sounded so cool.

Progress: Fort Frolic

I've been reading interesting stuff, and watching cool footage, for Lock's Quest since a while back: a two-phase action/strategy game where you first build defenses, and then take part in the battle. Following 5th Cell's Drawn to Life, I was understandably apprehensive toward Lock's Quest; but after trying the downloadable Nintendo Channel demo - despite the intro battle dragging on long enough that I didn't even finish it - I'm pretty much sold. The art is still meh, the sounds are still dull, and the story is still boring, but this time, the gameplay is genuinely intriguing.

EDIT, years later - it's hard for me to get excited about tower defense, anymore. And I have no confidence in this game's non-gameplay elements. No longer anticipating.

Progress: Gave Up -- Played first four days of the demo

Toward the end, the last dozen or so puzzles did get pretty challenging. But when Gemsweeper gets difficult, it can also become pretty bothersome, for a few reasons:

• In complicated puzzles, it is easy to become lost within a particular row or column, as the interface does not have a good way of indicating which segment you're currently hovering on (Picross does)
• In large puzzles, the numbers at the side become so small that they are difficult to read, and the rows/columns so narrow that it is difficult to tell which one you are in (Picross has a zoom feature)
• Making a single mistake will nearly halve the possible score you can get from a puzzle, even though the score is mostly meaningless (Picross does not have scores!)

I don't want to harp on about how Gemsweeper and Picross compare, but my point is that the former lacks the kind of sophisticated interface polish that the latter benefits greatly from. Even when the last puzzles became sufficiently challenging, I had a hard time relaxing and becoming comfortable with the game's UI.

Previously, I wrote off the game's Bonus levels, which also make up the "Arcade" mode. These are not picture puzzles, but are actually an arcade interpretation of the nonogram concept; clearing a row or column brings another in from outside the screen, and the game continues for some time or until a goal score is met. Early in the game this mode felt trivial and irrelevant - but later, when the arcade grid grew (up to a maximum size of 10x10), the concept actually began to shine. It bridges the gap between the challenge of a large puzzle and the rapid pace of a smaller one. It's no Tetris Attack, but it is certainly an interesting idea, and could probably benefit from some sort of multiplayer mode.

Progress: Complete

I still really like the concept of Hitman. Stealth assassination - sneaking around and cleverly dispatching your foes, using AI and the environment to your advantage - is one of the holy grails of gaming, and Silent Assassin makes an admirable effort. But it just doesn't come together right.

Though there is always more than one route to taking out your target, each route tends to be extremely exacting in its requirements: doing just the right thing, in just the right place, at just the right time. It's not luck, because doing it correctly is 100% repeatable if you know how, but you're liable to die a handful of times in the course of learning the specific movements you have to carry out. This doesn't just make the game tedious and frustrating, but also ruins the immersion factor, which is a shame given the loftiness of Hitman's ambience. Granted, you can turn the game's difficulty down enough to fudge your way through almost any mistake with pure firepower, but this has the same duet of problems - the gameplay becomes tired and boring, and being practically invincible destroys any chance of becoming engaged in the game world.

From what I've seen of the follow-ups, Contracts and Blood Money, not much changes as the series marches forward, which is kind of disappointing; I guess there are series fans who prefer the reiteration, but I think it's a shame the gameplay never evolved into something more.

Progress: Gave Up -- Somewhere in St. Petersburg