When I started playing it, Mario Kart Wii was really hard for me to get into. I wasn't sure why at first; was it the lack of battle mode options? Was it the weird new animation for hitting a banana peel? Was it the staggering number of "Baby X" characters in the roster? I toyed with it a couple times, and mostly just watched my housemates play, until today when I broke out a Classic controller. That was when I figured it out - it was the Wii Wheel all along.

As Mario Kart iterations soldier on, the franchise has been increasingly accused of a sort of socialist gameplay welfare. Blue shells, bullet bills, the increasing quality of items as a player falls farther behind - they all conspire to bring first-placers back and last-placers forward. And with the increased powers of these items in Mario Kart Wii, this is more true than ever before. But the real effect of this becomes clearer in Mario Kart Wii's races, with twelve racers as opposed to eight: the game is just more fun when the pack is actually a pack.

It's not just for the sake of being able to catch up when you fall way behind, although that's definitely a factor. One of the biggest problems in a straight-up racing game is that everyone is miles apart. The only competitive element is at the starting line, and then keeping your steering up throughout the race. A Mario Kart race - and this is something that the Wii version emphasizes even more - is competitive from the moment it starts until the final player crosses the finish line.

Take the distance-shortening items, the twelve-person track, and the increased effects of course environments, and you've got constant action. It's pure fun, albeit sometimes frustrating due to the power of random chance. And then add the bevy of new ways to get "mini-boosts" from drifting or stunts, and a 150cc race with karts and bikes through shopping malls and volcanoes is a real hectic rush.

Something that surprised me was the amount of unlockable content. There are a ton of unlockable racers and karts, and while the racers technically come down to a matter of cosmetic preference (the unlockable Mii option is awesome too), the karts/bikes can actually have an effect on how you play the game through their performance stats.

As for the Wii Wheel - I believe that it can be useful, and in fact I've been told that all of the fastest times during the game's testing phase were done using the Wheel. It's a little like all the different control methods for Brawl, in that everyone has their preferences, but I really can't get used to the Wheel. Maybe it's because there's no weight behind it like an actual steering wheel. Maybe I have poor greater motor control in my arms. But if you can't play the game, it's miserable, so I'd say you're better off finding a control scheme you like than trying to force one upon yourself.

Progress: Still learning

As it turns out, the game's promise of ten chapters included both the prologue and epilogue - a merciful decision for which I am grateful. At a total finish time of about four hours, I would be super-surprised if the non-interactive, non-interesting cutscenes accounted for anything less than three and a half of them.

In fairness, the remaining, brief actual "gameplay" isn't exactly interesting itself (in fact, I hesitate to call it interactive, either). The game has a multitude of not-compellingly-different endings, which is a bit like saying that Nazis killed Jews in several different ways; the variety doesn't really make it any better.

And for good measure - the plot was retarded.

Progress: Ending B, 44% complete

Jesus Christ.

So, Amazon recommended this game to me after I got Indigo Prophecy, and when I looked it up it sounded like a cute little narrative-driven adventure game. It's like a murder mystery, but the twist is, you play as the victim - who gains the ability to travel through time from a supernatural post-mortem assistant.

You spend each chapter of the game being killed (because it's your destiny!), then going back in time and figuring out how to prevent your death, which involves more going back in time. But you've got a time limit - yeah, present time is passing at the same rate as past-time, so if you don't save yourself before it's too late, you're toast.

It seemed like an interesting premise, and I guarantee that a great game could be made out of it. But this game isn't it. It plays like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, and is just as bad as the worst Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books were. A huge town is filled with basically nothing. Vapid NPCs occupy your time limit with retarded one-sided conversations. Lousy voice acting accompanies badly written and/or translated dialog; none of the characters are even respectable, let alone cool.

Cutscenes can be skipped if you've played them before, but if you get a Game Over, guess what, you've got to reload, and now you can't skip the cutscenes! You can only save inbetween chapters, so if you run out of time, you have to restart and waste your life staring at the chapter's scenes all over again.

Of the game's ten chapters (+ prologue), I finished the prologue in four minutes, the first chapter in four minutes, and the second one in about half an hour, most of that half hour being cutscene. Actually, most of the four-minute ones were cutscene, too.

This game is absolute shit. Right now the only thing it's got going for it is that, on the off-chance it has a great ending, I should be able to get to it inside of a couple hours.

Progress: Chapter 3

Augh. I tried playing Devil May Cry last week, and I got two stages in before I got bored and put it down. The introductory cinematic made me feel like an idiot - Dante fires his dual-handguns at a motorcycle that was thrown at him by a chick in a leather vest - which would be fine if the gameplay was at least compelling, but it really isn't doing it for me. Totally mindless slashing and gun-firing. Today I tried stage 3, which put me up against some lava spider boss who completely destroyed me, and I really don't care enough to keep trying.

It's extremely possible that I just haven't gotten to the part of the game that's "fun" yet, and so I'll be coming back to this at some point, but for now I just don't see any merit in it. Which sucks, because I actually bought it in a three pack.

Progress: Gave Up -- Mission 3

Unfortunately, what I had been dreading since the ominous introduction came true. Indigo Prophecy began as a psychological crime drama, but at some point, became wholesale science fiction. To be fair, it's reasonably good sci-fi; but it isn't the gritty, introspective story I was hoping it would be.

As the game went on, it also exposed more of its own production weaknesses. The whole "thing" about choosing what to say in dialog is that deciding what you get out of an NPC as a response is a matter of strategic choice, in trying to figure things out. But later, the story develops into something so complicated that this mechanism becomes more of a logical fallacy than a tool - choices you don't take leave certain pieces of information unexplained, but after-the-fact dialog assumes that you know it anyway. There is just too much going on for the dialog choices to keep up with.

I also grew disappointed with the story itself as it drew to a close, especially in the ending. Schlocky writing decisions made a lot of it feel trite and impersonal. Most of all, the sci-fi aspects of the story brought Indigo Prophecy crashing back down into the realm of "video game." Later scenes appear sloppily put together in order to hasten the completion of the game, at the expense of its dramatic effect.

I feel like mentioning that, while Indigo Prophecy has a lot of "choice" in it, the choices you make tend not to affect the big picture very much. Sometimes you can get an early game over, which is easy enough to recover from; and there are three distinct endings, though they don't really differ from each other too much. In fact, the significance of the bevy of choices in the game is more illusory than real. They act to give you, the player, a strong feeling that you're sincerely directing the actions of the game's characters. It's not about content, but about immersion, and it works very well.

I really admire what's been accomplished in Indigo Prophecy, and it's done a pretty good job of living up to its intents. The motion capture, for instance, is absolutely superb in crafting characters that move and behave in a believable way. The quality voice acting and dramatic music are very well-implemented. And in its earlier portions, the writing really makes it feel less like a game, and more like a traditional storytelling piece. This is a good thing.

I really hope that someday, someone can do a more complete job of it, because making a game that plays like a good TV show or movie or book - something that really draws the player into a serious world (as opposed to a caricatured one), and the emotions of its characters - is a fantastic goal, and Indigo Prophecy proves that it's possible.

Progress: Complete

From the beginning, it looked like the plot might get a little ... weird, as it developed, but I'm happy to say that I feel like I'm being eased into it real nicely. The way the game has spent time to make me feel comfortable with the characters - aside from time spent on fleshing out the game's story - is really admirable. For the most part, anyway. (There was one scene where I played the main character as a kid, in a flashback, and it was clear that the dialog writers didn't know they were writing for children, because the diction and vocabulary was the same as the adult character.)

Again, I have to say that what I dislike most about the game is the "game" part of it. The two-stick Simon game it uses in most interactive situations works really well, but there are some sequences that are just too goddamn long. It's not hard to do, just distracting, and when it lasts for a few minutes just so I can play a few notes on a guitar, I feel like I've wasted my time. Moving the characters around is also becoming a major pain, as the control stick orientation is constantly getting messed up by the cinematic moving camera.

But the story is really compelling. I'm drawn to it in a way similar to Hotel Dusk, in that I tend not to jump on whenever I have a minute; rather, on a daily basis, I'll sit down and play out a few chapters. And while I'm not sure how much I'm actually affecting the larger story based on my dialog and action choices in the game, it does lend a great deal of personality to the story, making me feel more immersed in it.

Progress: 1/28, 9:27 AM

It's been a long time since I played a Star Wars game. I saw friends play Bounty Hunter; I saw friends play Jedi Knight II; and I wasn't too upset that I passed on them myself. I'm not about to argue with the guy who says that Lucasarts lost its touch after the point-and-click adventure titles (usually, that guy is me).

But for some reason, this one feels different. I mean there's the real-motion lightsaber swinging, but that only applies in a two-player battle mode. And they say that there's so much going on logistically - AI, physics, particle engines, everything interacting intrinsically - that it's a sort of magical hyperrealism; but we've all heard that song and dance before. I don't know, maybe it's just the fact that you can kill people with spaceships, but I've got a good feeling about this one.

I happened to be able to play the original Bangai-O a while back, and it's really an amazing game - controlled on two axes (ala Robotron), Bangai-O combines goofball Japanese themes and Treasure's infamous knack for high-octane shooters. When I heard they were making a new one for the DS (with wireless multiplayer! and a level editor!) I was beside myself. But! I recently learned that Spirits has removed the second axis; you can only fire in the direction you move. It may seem like a small change, but the two-axis dynamic was a key part of the old game, and now I'm a bit wary about this new one ... but I'll still give it a look.

Progress: Gave Up

I've read preview after preview of this game, and I'm still not totally sure how it works. What I am relatively sure of is that The World Ends with You has the most complicated battle system ever. I anticipate it hotly.

Progress: Back up to Chapter 6