Exapunks has me falling in love with Zachtronics all over again.

SpaceChem was one of my all-time favorites; and Infinifactory and TIS-100 were worthy, if somewhat experimental, follow-ups. But Shenzhen I/O was ultimately unsatisfying, and Opus Magnum was a disappointment. In my book, Zachtronics games were declining in the quality of their puzzles, and failing in their attempts to build compelling narratives.

This resulted in me taking entirely too long to start Exapunks, which might now be my new favorite programming game.

Exapunks takes the best features of TIS-100 (like a simple but versatile instruction set) and SHENZEN I/O (varied and "cool" devices/contexts) while discarding their biggest annoyances (respectively, limited instruction space and too-simple puzzles). Then it adds some radical new features of its own, chief among them the REPL instruction, which is just enough like fork() that I could fill an entire post geeking out about it. I won't, but I could.

Narratively, it learns from Opus Magnum's underwhelming storytelling, using a healthy variety of mechanics - ambient text, voice-overed cutscenes, and scene-setting background in the PDF manual - to weave its tale. Its characters actually have a little mystery to them, a little intrigue, which makes me curious to discover more about them. And the dulled-neon cyberpunk dystopia theme is definitely a winner.

Exapunks has a really fucking annoying "solitaire" minigame, just like Shenzhen I/O did. But I won a round of it and could happily live the rest of my life without playing it again.

I don't yet know where its story will take me, but I'm looking forward to it almost as much as I'm looking forward to optimally solving new distributed-computing puzzles.

Progress: Emerson's Guide

Based on its low price, you might guess that Roombo: First Blood (great title, by the way) is a one-note joke of a game. And you'd be pretty much right.

I love this premise -- that you have the stealth attributes of a robot vacuum cleaner, and sneak around the house to brutally neutralize burglars, then clean up the evidence! There's an admirable variety of traps you can "hack" (like ceiling fans and refrigerators) to damage the burglars, and by vacuuming up their blood, you build a power/rage meter for a ramming attack.

The controls aren't as smooth as I'd like - it's easy to get stuck in a corner or on furniture ... like a real robot vacuum, I guess - and the UI could use some work to indicate where multiple burglars are rummaging around. But for the most part, the gameplay works well.

The problem is that there's only one map.

The game has multiple "levels" but they're all in the same house; later ones just have more burglars. I was pretty bored by level 3.

Seriously, what a great idea for a stealth action game. I'd be thrilled if these developers got to make more content for it: like more maps, more burglar types, more Roombo models or abilities... As it is, I got my fill in 15 minutes.

Progress: Unlocked Level 4

Mars Power Industries Deluxe doesn't really scale up from mobile to desktop very well.

For one thing, in a literal sense, the graphics are distractingly zoomed-in and imprecise. The game's "cute" aesthetic looks like it was designed for small screens where edges would look sharper. It doesn't help that a minimalist UI gives you little to look at except the weirdly-blurry artifacts of scaling and rotating sprites.

But that's a pretty minor problem. What's more damning is that the puzzle gameplay just isn't very engaging. I don't think that's necessarily because of its intentionally chilled-out rules; being able to easily undo your moves, and the lack of a failure/game-over indication, actually feel pretty good.

It's more that the setting and ambience of the game don't do anything to pull me in. Start with the title: we're on Mars, and we route power. Right? Well, I would have looked forward to new puzzle rules about electricity, or terraforming, or something building on that basic premise.

Instead... new puzzle rules are totally arbitrary and disconnected from reality. Spikes that raise and lower based on the turn order? Shifting rows and columns of the map around? It only takes a few puzzles before the "Mars" and "Power" illusions fade, and it becomes obvious that this is a generic tile-based puzzle game with some thin branding.

Also, the music is overly mellow. Not just relaxing, but ... boring.

This is the kind of game that could occupy a few minutes of your time while you're waiting for something else to happen. But as a desktop experience that would take full focus? Nah.

Progress: Finished the demo.

Maybe Chrono Trigger is the reason I'm not big on "replay value."

Chrono Trigger is at its best when you're working through it for the first time, or at least for the first time in a few years. Story beats are dramatic and fresh, era changes are a surprising change of scenery, scrounging for items fleshes out each era's world, and the difficulty curve is just enough to keep the moment-to-moment gameplay interesting. In New Game+, these strengths all fall apart as the plot is familiar and combat becomes trivial, ... but that's okay, because one-shotting enemies is still kinda fun.

It's in subsequent New Game+ runs, for the sake of collecting endings, that the grindy monotony really sets in. The new-ish Auto-battle mode is a mercy for releasing me from 'A'-mashing during the tedious, brain-dead battles. If only there was an Auto option for story dialog, too.

The kicker is that none of Chrono Trigger's alternate endings are really worth watching. They don't feel like legitimate story options as much as they feel like easter eggs, left as teasers for obsessive fans who really want to re-fight Lavos at every conceivable opportunity.

(Yes, I still went after them all for the Steam achievements. Go ahead and judge me.)

Anyway, all that has been true since I fell in love with this game in the late '90s, so it ain't exactly new. The Dimensional Vortex dungeons, meanwhile - first added in the DS version - ... are just as inconsequential and uninteresting as I'd supposed back when that was new. ("[...] your big question is probably whether the new content makes it worth playing yet again. The answer: not especially.") And the "new" ending that follows those dungeons -- well, maybe it would have meant something more if I'd played Chrono Cross, but ... I haven't.

Chrono Trigger is still an all-time classic that will be difficult for any other RPG to unseat, personally speaking. And I know that its modern incarnations include some updates that I'm taking for granted, like turning on "run" (instead of "walk") by default! But this replay has refreshed my perspective, at least a little bit; present-day RPGs like Witcher 3 may eventually replace it in my "greatest of all time" list, nostalgia pending.

Progress: Saw all the endings.

It looks like something in the vein of Factorio or Infinifactory, but my experience with Mindustry wasn't as engaging as either of those games.

Mechanically it's fine: build drills to mine ore, transport it to your base with conveyor belts, place and power gun turrets to defend against nameless aliens, invest in upgrades to reach more difficult areas and build more powerful stuff... it all makes sense, and satisfies the requirement of a gameplay loop.

But the pace of making progress couldn't keep me interested. Even in the first level, waiting for the opportunity to "launch" (finish the level) felt tedious. Things probably spice up in later levels, but I got the distinct sense that there's a huge grind to go through on my way there.

And as much as I appreciate the moxie of a PC and Android cross-platform release, for a game like this, touch controls just suck. Like, really, I think it's cool that I can load this on my phone. I just hate playing it on there.

Progress: Mined a bunch of copper and lead, then got bored.

Being a cab driver (well, rideshare driver) in a cyberpunk setting sounded like a really cool narrative hook -- listening to people describe the petty human problems endemic in a Blade Runner-esque world. But Neo Cab's demo lost me pretty quickly.

For one thing, the main character would not shut up about her best friend Savy. Like, this girl has almost nothing more to her personality or motivation than her interest in said friend. It makes the protagonist come across as a shallow and degrading caricature of a person.

That single-mindedness kind of leads into my other problem, which was that the "gameplay" of Neo Cab didn't really seem interested in my input. Many games with dialog choices (like Mass Effect) frustrate me because the response I want to pick isn't an option; but Neo Cab takes it a step further, by sometimes presenting an option that I can't select based on the main character's "emotional state" which I might or might not have any control over.

I don't think it's a bad thing for a game to tell a character's pre-determined story, infused with a deliberate personality -- and it's also not a bad thing to give the player options for pointing a character in a personalized direction. But the "you can't choose that" mechanic in Neo Cab feels like the game trying to have it both ways, and that just ain't gonna work.

What I played of the demo barely hinted at intriguing subplots with an auto-pilot company named Capra, and with Savy's backstory (which some rudimentary web searching reveals is a central plot point). But based on how much the first 20 minutes had already rubbed me the wrong way, I don't anticipate the rest of Neo Cab being any good for me.

Progress: Didn't finish the demo.

I've revisited many of my "old favorite" games, and sometimes observed age getting the better of them. But I just can't look at Chrono Trigger through that same lens. I may never be able to objectively measure it against contemporary games.

Chrono Trigger is a cornerstone of my gaming life; I don't know if I can fully describe this game because of how integral it is to the way I think about games.

I'm not blind to its imperfections -- I know that it's too easy to get lost if you don't remember the plot by heart, and battles start to feel like a grind even before New Game +. But I'm way too overwhelmed by the nostalgic art and music to get hung up on those problems.

And even though I'll never get to experience Chrono Trigger "for the first time" again, I think I'll always have the same grin on my face when I meet Robo, or storm Magus's castle, or retrieve the Epoch.

... it's a bit of a shame that the PC port didn't receive the love this game clearly deserves. And while it's gotten better, the current state of this version still isn't ideal. (Button responsiveness on the end-of-battle text still feels very fuzzy, and the rendering quality on pop-up damage numbers is surprisingly bad.) But it's good enough to enjoy the game again, and again, and again.

I could really only add that this is my first time playing a version of the game with the animated cutscenes, and they feel pretty damned superfluous. The game flows better without them.

Progress: Working on a second ending.

I've been "playing" Hollow Knight for about three months now. In truth I was only actively playing it for a few weeks back in July -- and while those few weeks were quite good, since then I've lacked the courage to come back to it.

Hollow Knight is both difficult and frustrating, but not in the same way as Ori and the Blind Forest. Ori was frustrating to play due to slippery controls and poor checkpointing (... often a consequence of manually placing those checkpoints), and those frustrating fundamentals made it difficult to progress in the game.

Hollow Knight, on the other hand, has difficult action gameplay - a pure challenge of defeating enemies while avoiding their attacks - and as that difficulty ramps up, I start to get frustrated at my lack of progress.

Does that make sense? The difference is subtle, but important: in Ori, the (I would say) flaws in its gameplay made it hard for me to truly enjoy the bigger picture; while in Hollow Knight, my lack of skill results in me being unable to see the bigger picture.

For the most part, my failings in Hollow Knight are my own fault. (Though I will levy some criticism at the long distances between save points and a few boss fights.) While the Knight does gather stronger equipment and more powerful abilities through map exploration, this game places a much heavier emphasis on skill building than, say, Bloodstained. Just having more health isn't enough to withstand later enemies' attacks; I need to get better at dodging and blocking them.

And what I'm afraid of is that I may already have hit the ceiling of my skills. The amount of deaths I'm racking up in The Hive, not just in its boss fight but on my way to the boss, is intimidatingly large. These giant angry bees are no joke.

Yet I still "want" to try again, because the world of Hollow Knight is gorgeous and awe-inspiring to explore. I'm not all that motivated by the story - I think it's a little too cryptic, in that I haven't found a reason to care about the dreamers or whatever - but to me, the reward for getting better at this game is being able to discover more of its crazy-stylish map and uncover more of its slyly-hidden secrets.

I just hope I can git gud enough to see the rest of it.

Progress: stuck in the Hive.

CD Projekt has a good track record for fixing up the "good old games" it sells on GOG, so when I saw The Saboteur released there, I got excited that maybe they'd fixed the mixed-resolution map issue I whined about back in 2012. As it turns out, they ... kind-of fixed it ... by locking the setting at 720p.

The game's overall technical (in-)fidelity is pretty much how I remember it, cutscene-warping and crashing and all. To be fair, I've played plenty worse - and to The Saboteur's credit, it performs pretty smoothly in highly explosive scenarios - it's just a little disappointing that no one's yet been able to polish this rough gem of a game.

Killing Nazis is still fun. Dynamiting Nazis is still way fun. And while Sean Devlin's story isn't about to win any awards, it holds up better after ten years than I would have expected. Compared to Red Faction: Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered, The Saboteur's characters are downright relatable.

What probably hurts the game the most, today, is its lack of fast travel. I'd completely forgotten that "no fast travel" was even a thing -- and somehow had a false memory that I would unlock fast travel after some story mission or another. Nope. Not only is it impossible to get from one end of the map to the other without driving there; your ability to call a car doesn't work out in the French countryside.

The game's rushed ending and lack of post-game story had already made the remaining freeplay targets (remaining Nazis to blow up) a weak proposition; without fast travel, I'm definitely not going to bother.

But while the main story lasts, and while Sean is discovering new city districts to explode Nazis in, it's an exciting ride that still feels worthwhile today.

Better than: Red Faction: Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered
Not as good as: Middle-earth: Shadow of War
I'd argue, on balance, about as good as: Marvel's Spider-Man

Progress: Killed Dierker yet again.

Mark of the Ninja: Remastered taught me that I've been spoiled by the last 5-6 years of video games.

What I remembered from my original Ninja-ing was all awesome -- largely because of how great the game was at clearly telegraphing enemy line of sight, hearing ranges, alert status, light cones... et cetera. It was such a breath of fresh air from Hitman-style stealth games, where if you don't know what path to take through a level, you have to try, die, and try again until you find it.

What I hadn't remembered was that Mark of the Ninja's mechanical sophistication takes a little while to develop. Your ninja doesn't gain access to gadgets like smoke bombs, or abilities like the trap-sensing Farsight, until several missions in. And in the meantime, I felt like I was underequipped.

I was kind-of down on the game in those early missions. It's not like they took very long to get through, and sneaking up behind dudes to slit their throats was still fun, but the whole time I was thinking: why can't I distract my enemies with noisemakers, or dangle their corpses from lampposts? (Because I hadn't unlocked those abilities yet.)

Maybe it wasn't the past several years of video games that spoiled me -- maybe it was just Mark of the Ninja's later missions. Huh.

Better than: Shank, Shank 2
Not as good as: when I played it the first time.
And the Special Edition bonus level: even remastered, is still pretty "Meh."