Yeah, Uncharted 4 is a narrative tour-de-force, a showcase of gameplay innovations - even if some, like piton-climbing, were clearly cribbed from Ms. Croft - and an incredible visual treat.

The only thing it's "missing" is a varied collection of disparate set-piece events. Not to disparage its action sequences, which do have some very high "highs," from an auction heist to a clock-tower climb and a street chase -- but few of them have that "postcard moment" feeling; perhaps because so many of the game's environments look similar to one another (dank caves filled with dead pirates).

And maybe there could've been better maintenance of the childhood-flashback storyline; although as it is, the mansion burglary is a very effective narrative punctuation-mark.

But, even if it's not as good as I think it "could have" been, it's clear that A Thief's End is an excellently-entertaining game and an extremely satisfying end for Nate.

Which won't stop me from looking forward to whatever full-sized adventure comes next: whether that's a spin-off with Sam and Sully doing shady shit, a prequel with Young Nate getting into trouble, or a sequel that builds up a new generation of treasure hunters.

Better than: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
Not as good as: I'm hoping a hypothetical follow-up might be.
In 2017 I said Lost Legacy had "one of the best [puzzles] I can remember from any Uncharted game": but on revisiting A Thief's End, I really don't think anything can beat this game's pirate sigil puzzle.

Progress: Finished on Explorer, again.

The evil-base-defense-building genre isn't exactly novel, but it is rare, and Dungeons 2 is an encouraging example of what this kind of game can offer. If only it was less of a pain to play.

Going well beyond tower defense tactics, Dungeons 2 missions include RTS-style resource management and tech-tree growth. Actually, those mechanics are more prominent than laying traps or creating mazes; and it's a real delight to expand the Absolute Evil's power base, literally by digging out rooms or figuratively by investing in upgrades.

The "evil" premise is also mostly-well-delivered, although I'd argue that the narrator's fourth-wall-breaking sometimes tries too hard. At least his sense of humor is endearing, if imperfect.

But what holds Dungeons 2 back is confusing and seemingly broken controls. Like, it's bad enough that unit management significantly changes when you switch between "underworld" and "overworld" parts of the map -- missing drag-to-select in the underworld is a real hassle when you need to move defenders against intruders. The worst part, though, is how moving units between maps will change the camera to the destination map ... after a few seconds, stymying bulk-movement while also protracting one-by-one movement.

I'm tempted to complain about low unit limits and slow base-building, but my most recent mission suggested these might get resolved later; I finally saw a tech upgrade that'd allow more units at once, and hence more grunt workers to keep maintaining my dungeon. But that's speculative.

Much as I admire the simultaneous underworld-management and overworld-exploration elements, Dungeons 2 makes controlling those elements a frustrating chore.

Better than: ehh, I barely played Evil Genius, which is also more than 15 years old, but... yeah?
Not as good as: Overlord
Maybe, possibly, better than: Brütal Legend, but only if you ignore that game's voice cast (which is one of Brütal Legend's greatest features).

Progress: Finished campaign mission 4 / met the Nagas.

My previous writings on Uncharted 3 ranked it just below its predecessor, but this most-recent playthrough has me reconsidering.

Particularly, I'm re-thinking takes like there aren't as many standout "Uncharted" moments and pacing is kind of wacky. Yes, this round of adventuring sees Nate and his crew racking up a crazy amount of air-miles, and none of their destinations have quite the gravitas of Nepal or Shambhala...

But the other side of that coin is a considerable accumulation of "postcard moments." The burning chateau, the night-time fortress incursion, escaping a sinking ship, air-dropping into the desert, a horseback convoy chase; sure, Ubar itself isn't all that impressive, but the journey there has plenty of vivid set-pieces that make this adventure a memorable one.

And my anecdotal impression - that is, not a conclusion I've decisively measured - is that Naughty Dog (or perhaps Bluepoint) did a better job of facilitating the "Explorer" playstyle this time around. Generally speaking, Uncharted 3's combat encounters felt lighter in terms of tiresome bodycount, having fewer waves of mooks to senselessly mow down. Still enough to classify Nathan Drake as a bloodthirsty warlord, but, making positive progress.

On the other hand, I also encountered more-frequent frustrations with unclear parkour directions than in the last game. Especially in several Crash Bandicoot-esque "running towards the camera" chases which, just, come on guys -- some thrilling screenshots of Nate's "oh no" face aren't worth so many die-and-retry loops caused by invisible obstacles.

At this point in the franchise, though, trying to rank Uncharted 2 and 3 against each other is basically futile. We know that the fourth game out-classes them both.

Progress: Finished on Explorer, again.

My recent backlog-burning has been going pretty "Meh", so I'd been looking forward to playing a good game again. And Uncharted 2 delivers well-enough.

The PS4 Collection's graphical update is still looking good five years on, and Naughty Dog's banter-filled storytelling is still top-notch, even if the dissonance is hard to ignore.

On the flip side, while I've long been "over" Uncharted's combat - I switch to the Explorer difficulty by default - the amount of it is more groan-inducing than I'd remembered. Drake's body count is just absurd, and pumping round after round into wave after wave of enemy goons becomes a distracting chore between story beats.

And while the climbing and parkouring controls mostly work well, the moments when they don't stand out. Especially since the last few areas of the game seem to have so many of those moments. Unclear map directions and misleading climbing cues may be non-critical shortcomings, but they're shortcomings just the same.

I still love how the Uncharted franchise channels the spirit of Indiana Jones-style globe-trotting adventure, but as the series has aged, I'm not sure if Among Thieves is as critical an entry as it once was. I skipped over the first game for this round of replays; next time, I might skip the second, too.

Progress: Finished on Explorer, again.

I only played Shantae and the Pirate's Curse for a few minutes; I didn't even get far enough to judge "how Metroidvania" it is. But I did see enough superficial, non-subtle similarities to Risky's Revenge - Director's Cut to tune me out pretty immediately.

Awkward hitboxes and clunky controls? Check. Jarring combination of high-definition UI and low-res pixel animations? Check.

Off-beat humor that's unfortunately not strong enough to carry the game? Check.

Shockingly obvious unpolished title screen? ... Hey, that's a new one.

I know I'm not giving Pirate's Curse many chances, and I actually appreciate the dialog humor, but come on -- spelling on the title screen should be a low bar to clear.

Progress: Beat up the ... Ammo Baron? This is a character?

I played a demo of Champions of Anteria, what feels like forever ago, and remembered it as a simple tactical RPG with a light base-building touch. I don't know how I managed to avoid seeing the Warcraft III influences. Just imagine a custom map with only hero units (you know... like Dota), and which restricts base-building to turns inbetween hero missions.

In other words, Champions of Anteria is most like a remixed real-time strategy game with an action focus. That action focus isn't very good, though. (To be fair, neither is the base-building.)

Action controls often feel broken, for one thing: heroes can have commands queued up, but will ignore those commands under circumstances which I'm still not totally clear on. They'll auto-attack if enemies come within a certain range, but that range isn't clear either, so sometimes they'll stand around while their friends are fighting just a few steps away. And pathfinding often fails because a rock, or another hero, got in the way.

But I think the bigger problem with Anteria's combat is the fundamental rock-paper-scissors design of elemental strengths and weaknesses. There are five elements, which feels like a lot, and you can only take three heroes into battle, so... even with prior knowledge of the enemy's favored elements, there will invariably be some enemies to which you lack an advantage and some which have an advantage over you.

The magnitude of these elemental advantages is so great that it completely overshadows the game's other tactical features. This de-emphasizes special attacks, except for crowd control, and emphasizes the importance of unit positioning, which -- uhh, see previous notes regarding pathfinding.

Anteria's mediocre combat could've been carried by engaging base-building or storytelling, if it had those things. But the base-building is clearly in a back-seat role, acting mostly like an over-complicated menu for preparing combat items (like health potions) and very slowly-developed hero upgrades.

And the story, despite some dry-wit charm from the narrator, isn't attention-grabbing at all. It's a fantasy world and there's some evil wizard whose face needs to get punched. Each hero receives about ten seconds of characterization, far from enough to get invested in their backstories or personalities.

Champions of Anteria isn't "bad," exactly, but none of its key features are stand-out successes either. After 2-3 hours I feel like I've seen enough of Anteria.

Better than: Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim
Not as good as: Brütal Legend, Sid Meier's Civilization V
For a more intriguing genre hybrid, see: CastleStorm

Progress: Conquered like, two new territories.

I really wanted to like Divinity: Original Sin. I really did. But this relatively-recent, highly-rated CRPG ended up losing my interest for qualities it shares with decades-old genre ancestors like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment.

At first I was into the writing and voice acting -- colorful characterization, a compelling murder-mystery hook, and a healthy amount of humor. But it didn't take very long for me to get tired of the game's over-verbosity, and then the plot took a hard turn into some deeply dry and hard-to-care-about fantasy mythology tropes. After the first couple hours, I was speed-reading the dialog and clicking through speeches just to get to the point.

The turn-based combat was ... fine, for starters, and I kinda liked being able to roll-over Action Points for a future turn. But then combat started to become difficult, and not so much due to stat boosts or new tactics. More due to the skeleton archer with poison bolts and fire bolts, who enveloped my party in a gas cloud and then made it explode! Or the enemy priest who I had no way of seeing all the way in the back, until he suddenly healed his friends and summoned more of them in the same turn.

What I mean is that combat became rife with abrupt and often deadly turns which couldn't really be recovered from -- I'd need to have approached from a certain direction, or brought certain specialized equipment, before the fight started. And the game didn't exactly warn when one or another of these situations was coming up; it seemed to assume that I'd die and retry, fleeing or reloading before preparing for another attempt.

(Also, before I turned down the difficulty setting, the game's chance-to-hit calculations felt like a cruel lie. I swear that I missed more than half of my "80%" shots. What kind of XCOM shit is that?)

Out-of-combat gameplay wasn't exactly a walk in the park, either. Character prep in this game is work. There were so many ability types to research, so many situational pros or cons to each weapon, so many magic scrolls and grenades and other items to stock up on; oh, and of course, each party member has their own separate inventory so I needed to manage each character's items one by one.

Some of my favorite modern RPGs, like Skyrim or Witcher 3, are clear mechanical simplifications of their predecessors -- fewer skill and ability nuances, smaller lists of character options, even blunter storytelling. And while it's charmingly cynical to say that these games are "dumbed down," they nevertheless delivered the content I wanted in accessible and convenient packages.

Divinity: Original Sin definitely had some content I wanted: the list of side-quests looked huge! and there were so many map areas I'd yet to reveal. There was just too much "filler" in the way, the pages and pages of pace-breaking exposition and reference material, the meticulous inventory management and lengthy die-and-retry loops... I guess some folks are into those aspects of classic PC RPGs, but they're not for me.

Better than: Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, Planescape: Torment - Enhanced Edition
Not as good as: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Special Edition, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
This game gives me low hopes: for other recent-ish CRPGs like Pillars of Eternity and Wasteland 2.

Progress: Solved the murder mystery, I guess.

Super Daryl Deluxe is ambitious in its attempt to combine action-platforming adventure, action-RPG combat, and cynical-teenager fantasy storytelling. It's too ambitious. It doesn't pull off any of these things.

The opening scene shows off Daryl's combat, in an obvious dream-sequence scenario where your fighting skills are already significantly upgraded. Which would be a good "hook," except that it's overwhelming and confusing -- there are five combat skills to use! and wave after wave of enemies keep spawning in just to supply more punching bags for you. This thrown-into-the-deep-end intro gives the unfortunate impression that combat is a mindless button-mashing affair.

Then comes a minutes-long, excruciatingly-slow, cringe-filled expository cutscene. The dialog is ... not the worst I've seen, but not very good. And so much of it is unnecessary filler, not to mention the bafflingly-long pauses between lines. "Brevity is the Soul of Wit" was noted four hundred years ago, but no one here seems to have gotten that memo.

Finally the "real" game is introduced, wandering the halls of a high school and doing wacky quests to further along the (admittedly, genuinely mysterious) plot. And as it lacks those pre-upgraded abilities from the intro, this mostly takes the form of a side-scrolling point-and-click adventure: go to this room, talk to this person, go to that room, pick up that thing, go back to the first room...

Mixed into this room-wandering are some platforming controls that are really quite bad. When you hold the jump button, after landing on the ground, Daryl jumps again. And the distance between platforms requires more precision than the game's art style can accurately convey.

I admire the concept, I guess. But while Super Daryl Deluxe introduced many mechanical and narrative ideas in its first hour, none of them were executed well-enough to keep me interested.

Progress: Gave up at the Gorilla Tim fight.

It's not that I don't "get" Undertale. Its off-beat sense of humor can be pretty good, and I appreciate the effort it puts into subverting RPG tropes.

But those elements are overshadowed by plodding field gameplay and sometimes-infuriating avoid-em-up combat. (Which, to be fair, is a personal distaste.) And its quirkiness and subversiveness also manifests as unpredictability, which pairs poorly with the distance between save points.

I would feel more comfortable trying all the wacky dialog options if death-by-bullet-hell was less likely or less punishing. But even setting that aside -- most of the moment-to-moment gameplay, walking through the world and solving simple riddles, is just dull.

I don't "hate" Undertale, but I do hate playing it.

Progress: Got to the waterfall.

The Deadly Tower of Monsters isn't a parody of schlocky low-budget games, at least it's not only that. It's more a parody of schlocky low-budget films, reveling in poorly-written dialog, lazy scene-setting, and low-quality special effects.

As such, it might not be as painfully anti-fun as Matt Hazard's intentionally-bad gameplay, but Deadly Tower still represents an epic self-petard-hoisting. It's a send-up of shitty content, and all of its content... is shitty.

This isn't to say that the game's problems are limited to flat characters and trope-y enemy designs. Button-mashy combat is dull even when it works, and it frequently doesn't work due to loose-feeling input and janky-ass camera movement. But mechanical shortcomings like those could have been "part of the joke" if the game's sense of humor was a strong-enough enticement to keep moving forward.

Unfortunately in-game events aren't absurd enough, or winking-at-the-camera enough, to be genuinely funny. They're just bad.

It's a shame, because in theory the game's "DVD commentary" narration is a great gimmick: an elegant way for a voice-over to explain your current objectives while simultaneously providing colorful jabs and musings. In practice, though, those jabs are woefully uninspired (like a remark about animal actors flinging their feces) and the musings are too few and far between.

Progress: Got "to" the tower, I think?