Given my recent positive impressions of Hitman (2016), is it possible that I missed some fun assassination-puzzle gameplay in 2012's Hitman: Absolution?

Well let me put it this way: when you re-load a checkpoint, previously-killed goons respawn (reference 1, reference 2).

So, no. If Hitman: Absolution won't allow me to retry just my last move - instead resetting all of my stealth clean-up, which makes me wonder if I'm supposed to shoot my way through? - then I don't think I've missed much.

Progress: Gave up as soon as I was detected, and found out about this checkpoint garbage.

Ages ago, I bounced off of the older Hitman games due to sheer difficulty. So it's great that Hitman (2016) has added user interface conveniences that help you stay hidden; mostly-generous autosaves to simplify recovering from a mistake; and plentiful hints (eavesdropping and otherwise) which reveal potential assassination solutions.

And I gotta say, interpreting each mission as a puzzle - sneakily impersonating wait staff to observe the target, carefully laying out the pieces of a death trap, and finally watching those pieces come together - can be pretty damn satisfying. Particularly because of how elaborate Hitman's levels are, with so many moving parts to take advantage of.

That said, the game is pretty up-front about wanting you to replay each mission multiple times to attempt different approaches and methods. I admire the variety of possibilities, but not quite enough to go back through a level all over again.

Also, the story is ... well, it's mysterious but not in a good way. Bare-bones conspiracy porn stuff, like, hey there's a shadowy figure pulling strings, hey there's a secret society or something. It's a bland excuse for gravelly voice-overs and well-animated cutscenes.

But I got more excited about Hitman's gameplay than I expected to, so that's pretty cool. I might even have done more missions, if I hadn't run out of free/demo ones.

Now I'm at least a little curious about how IO Interactive's upcoming James Bond game might turn out.

Progress: Finished the Sapienza mission.

A high school friend of mine was way into real-time strategy games, and Rise of Nations was one of the few I actually enjoyed myself (along with StarCraft).

Fast forward a decade-and-change, and the Extended Edition is a potent shot of nostalgia. There's still a lot of joy to be had in managing your nation's resource incomes, researching your way through the ages of humanity, and upgrading infrastructure into the modern era -- especially when this results in out-teching your opponent and slaughtering their hoplites with machine guns.

Of course, even if RoN was ahead of its time for 2003, strategy games have come a ways since then. This user interface is considerably more meticulous than a modern Civ, with most parts of the "tech tree" only accessible from part-specific buildings; and convenience functions like "find an idle worker" are hidden in obscure hot-keys.

Not to mention, the unit pathfinding is kind-of terrible, frequently taking an absurd route or getting stuck in the city. (It's easy to forget how bad RTS pathfinding used to be, back before super-parallelized CPUs and PhD-level AI theses.)

If you're up for a bunch of micro-management, including repeated attempts to move units to the right places, Rise of Nations might still be a solid diversion. As for me, though, I lost the patience for unit-level micro-management some years ago.

Progress: Finished a tutorial campaign mission.

It'd be reductive to call Uncharted: The Lost Legacy the "girl version" of a Nathan Drake game, just as it'd be reductive to call it a bite-sized Uncharted. Chloe and Nadine are strongly-written characters with engrossing personalities; their adventure's parkour-ing and puzzle-solving easily measure up to Drake's best; and this installment's experiments (chiefly the free-roam Western Ghats chapter) are overall successful.

... but the fact remains that Lost Legacy is a short installment of Uncharted. Chloe and Nadine get a little character development, but not as much as you'd expect in a longer tale. The villain doesn't get built up enough to be truly intimidating. The sandbox experiment is held back by the lack of narrative value in its optional content.

And while there are some great set-pieces - wide-open vistas in the Western Ghats, climbing a huge Shiva statue, ... a remaster of Uncharted 2's train chase - it still feels like about half-a-game's worth of memorable moments, because this is about half of a full game's running length.

Lost Legacy is well-polished enough to be very enjoyable on its own; don't dismiss it as a side-story or tech demo. But Naughty Dog itself has proven that a full-length adventure can be even more fulfilling.

Better than: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
Not as good as: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Hearts of Stone
And not as good as its other full-length siblings: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves or Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, let alone Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

Progress: Finished on Explorer, with none of the optional collectibles.

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.