It came free with my new graphics card, so that was the first sign that something would probably go horribly wrong.

Actually, I guess the first sign was three years ago, when Uwe Boll got involved. And the second sign was when the game came out, and Atari was being a dick about nobody liking it. So the third was the game being free, and the fourth was when it failed to start up, moments after installation, because of a bullshit SecuROM error.

The fifth sign was when the game told me to press X to blink. Yeah, as you might expect of any good cliched adventure game, the story begins with you waking up after being knocked unconscious, and since your vision is all blurry, you need to blink to clear it up. Not just once. Continually. This eventually goes away, minutes later, but I'm pretty sure a "blink" button is something that would never get past any halfway-decent QA department.

The sixth sign was at the precise moment the blink feature became obsolete, when the game's first-person perspective shifted to third. The third-person controls are somewhat like Resident Evil, e.g. you go forward/back with W/S, and turn with A and D. The mouse does nothing here. This is where the game starts screaming "BUY A GAMEPAD, FUCKHEAD!"

Thankfully, you can hit Tab to switch back to first-person. But the seventh sign that the game is absolute shit comes when you do, well, anything - this act of doing anything switches the perspective back to third-person automatically. I was basically spamming the Tab key most of the time. And, following up on the fuckhead problem, the game's eighth sign is when it told me to press Print Screen (yeah, that one!) to jump onto a ledge.

All of this happened in the first chapter. Well, actually that last one was in the first few seconds of chapter 2. So to be fair, there are only seven reasons for you to stop playing in the first chapter alone. As for reasons to continue playing, there might be one, in a part where I had to pull some rapelling maneuvers in an elevator shaft. For that brief sequence, maybe a minute or so, AITD resembled a real game.

What a load of shit.

Progress: Gave Up -- Figuring out how to uninstall SecuROM

Amazon kept recommending it to me, so I saw a free demo on Steam and took a shot at it; and I'm glad I did. Not because the game is good, because it isn't - it's awful. But Rayne is hot. So when she leaps onto a femme vampire in a bustier and sinks her teeth into the chick's neck ... anyway, I'm glad I tried it.

A full purchase is out of the question. BloodRayne 2 (and I haven't played the first one, but I can assume that it has the same features, or less) tries to merge several gameplay concepts, but is pretty terrible at all of them. It has environmental acrobatics a'la Prince of Persia, but the controls for these are stupid, and half the time don't even go in the direction you're trying for. It has shooting, but you can't really aim, which makes that a bit difficult. It has hand-to-hand fighting, which is totally brainless because she has swords and just cuts everything in pieces.

The gore factor is kinda neat, in that you can slice up your enemies and their limbs fall into huge puddles of blood and so forth. But other than that, and the tits, there are no redeeming factors here.

Progress: Gave Up -- Played the demo

As soon as I started GTA3, I could see a big distinction between it and its followers. The first hint to it is in the game's approach to storytelling: GTA3 begins with a minutes-long premise-setting prologue cinema, but afterward there is not much in the way of exposition. My protagonist has (at least so far) zero lines. And the mafiosos who are giving me jobs seem content to sum up their orders in blunt one- or two-liners.

This air of simplicity extends to the gameplay, as well - GTA3's feature set is fairly small when compared to its sequels. There is a lack of variety in the in-game radio stations; there aren't a ton of concurrent mission sources; there isn't a lot for me to do with the money I'm earning. There's also some evidence of the lack of refinement from incremental development, in the uncooperative camera and the ease with which vehicles explode. But the core gameplay, stealing fast cars and using them to barrel down city streets and mow down pedestrians, is already fairly solid.

GTA3 is a relatively limited package, but I'm quite enjoying it so far. Plus, I can listen to "Take it to the Limit" on the radio. Sweet.

Progress: Goon (204)

Part of Sam & Max Season One, Abe Lincoln Must Die! is an episode available for free as a teaser of sorts for the series. So, being a fan of free things, I was obliged to give it a playthrough. It's been quite a while since I've played a point-and-click adventure game, and so the most immediate frustration I had with Sam & Max was its actual challenge, in that it required me to think. More than once, I put the game down for a significant period in order to recollect my thoughts. But as it functions like a puzzle, I was quite self-motivated to piece it together.

In that regard, it plays out remarkably similarly to Hit the Road. At once, this may strike you as anti-progressive - sans the 3D graphics, this is pretty much a game from 1993. But the other side of this coin is the nostalgia inherent in such a game, and its venerated, tried-and-true gameplay mechanics. It may not be as exhilirating as modern games, but it is a brain-tickler, and the writing is damn good; honestly, the best comedy I have seen in any game. And there's something to be said for the slow-paced relaxation factor of it, too.

Abe Lincoln Must Die!, while not the most "engaging" game I've played, has definitely succeeded in making me want to play more of the episodic series.

Progress: Complete

I was planning on waiting to buy BioShock until I got a better graphics card - my current one runs the demo like shit. But Steam had to go and have another sale. For $15, I can't say no.

Now I'll just be sitting on it until I can actually play it decently.

At its best, Sly Cooper is a formulaic, moderately entertaining action/platform game with some light stealth elements. As far as mechanics, it's nothing you haven't seen before in a previous console generation, and frankly falls short of its predecessors' expert implementation. At its worst, Sly is frustrating to play, with out-of-left-field one-hit kills, annoying checkpoint placement, and ridiculously difficult minigames (that you have to play to proceed in the game's story).

Playing Sly Cooper, it's clear that Sucker Punch had some good ideas. That's why I read up on the game's sequels to see where they went with it. When I saw that my precise complaints about the game were addressed, I up and bought Sly 2 and 3 - this was weeks ago, back when I was still at 35%. Aside from being dirt cheap, I have confidence in their ability to run with the foundation laid by this game.

At the same time, with a completion time of just under 6 hours (and leaving me fairly unmotivated to collect the extra stuff I'd need for 100%), Thievius Raccoonus feels like one you can skip. If not for the minigames, I'd rank it as a solid, middle-of-the-road 5/10, but they are just too goddamn frustrating to forget.

Progress: 73%, beat final boss

Based on my surprisingly good experience with the original Halo, giving the sequel a whirl seemed obvious enough. Of course I had my doubts even before I started - Wikipedia told me that Halo 2 rides its progenitor's coattails in a big way. So I wasn't really expecting much in the way of pleasant surprises this time around.

Something else I didn't expect was just how upsetting the humanisation of the Covenant would be. Watching the opening cinematic unfold, I felt not unlike when I first sat down to watch The Matrix Reloaded. Suddenly all the mystery of this class of people was gone; replaced by hackneyed pseudo-intellectual science fiction. I was happy enough killing mindless aliens. Giving them evidence of reasonable intelligence? What the hell.

Of course, as with the first game, I would be more than willing to forget about flimsy writing and presentation in return for a solid gameplay experience. But the "pimping out" of Halo's control scheme for the sequel is half-baked. Dual-wielding? Fine, if it can be done right - but why the hell am I throwing my spare weapons all over the place? And what happened to my grenades? Left-handing a weapon is presented as a promiment feature of the game, but implemented as an afterthought. And the effect of recoil has increased by an order of magnitude. Making a hectic firefight is one thing, but artificially increasing the intensity of battle by requiring constant aim adjustment is sloppy and annoying.

And what's with this Games for Windows Live shit? Microsoft tells me to sign up for the Vista equivalent of Xbox Live even if all I want to do is play the game offline by myself. It even has those goddamn sounds and interface effects, complete with colored Xbox button icons on the screen. And here I was, all this time, thinking that my computer wasn't an Xbox.

Sure, my list of grievances is somewhat short when itemized, and rightfully so: I only played the first half hour of the game. But when the core gameplay formula has been tampered with so seriously, I have no interest in trying to get over my other issues. No sale.

Progress: Gave Up

The gameplay is hideous, with more than its fair share of illogical decision trees and obfuscated progression, and yet Birdman still manages to be the easiest game I've played in recent memory. The writing isn't good enough to be called half-assed; I'd say eighth-assed, at most, with by far the best material in the game being a handful of clips pulled directly from the TV show. Characters that are new to the game (e.g. not from the show) are even poorly animated. The unlockable extras are few, and mostly copies or emulations of the show's DVD extras anyway.

The fifth case is the only part of the game that even closely resembles something fun. While the other cases have a cumulative "fun" length totalling somewhere in the 10-20 second range, case 5 has one, maybe even two whole minutes' worth. So that's the only reason I'm bumping my rating up to a 2.

At $20, this game is a complete and total scam. Do yourself a favor and buy a DVD volume of the TV show instead (which is not only cheaper, but also infinitely more entertaining). And if you, like me, already own all the DVDs, buying this game is a mistake. Sigh.

Progress: Complete

I didn't expect the gameplay to be up to the calibur of Ace Attorney, but I did expect the writing and presentation to be up to Harvey Birdman's. It isn't.

Jesus Christ but it isn't.

Progress: Middle of case 3

There is a point, a little over halfway through the game, where it - all of a sudden - becomes difficult. One or two levels seem to stretch on forever with near-infinite repetition of identical rooms and corridors. And the characterization is pretty weak (yeah, it gets worse). But this isn't enough to detract from the game's simple pleasures of anti-alien violence, bolstered by a mostly-great difficulty curve, addictive action-driven plot, and mood-setting music.

Halo succeeds in being fun in spite of its flaws; the game is greater than the sum of its parts. I could generously compare it to its contemporary Metroid Prime - while Prime has a longer story and a different approach to action (less fighting, more figuring out), Halo has a similar feel of immersion to it, and that's quite good. The environments in Halo won't blow anyone away, but the game is instead driven by the player's actions and resourcefulness in dire combat situations.

Which is one reason why the latter half of the game is a slight disappointment - hordes of enemies, sometimes literally endless, often force you to run through areas instead of strategically cleaning them out. But like I said; it is nevertheless an exciting and even fulfilling game. I may even play the sequel when I can get around to it.

Progress: Finished on Normal