... like I was just saying, Aria of Sorrow's introduction of collectible soul-powers, its variety of equippable weapons and fighting techniques, and its modern setting are all refreshing and exciting changes to the Castlevania norm.

Back when I first played it in the GBA Double Pack, I'd already finished Dawn of Sorrow, so Aria couldn't help but pale in comparison. Now that I've blissfully forgotten the details of the sequel -- I can really appreciate how strong this game is on its own.

Even if some aspects of its storytelling and user interface feel a bit outdated, the foundations that would become "Igavania" - the same principles which eventually made Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night so compelling - are all accounted for, and already working well.

No joke: I said that in Bloodstained,

It almost always feels like you're accomplishing something, even if only in small increments, toward the ultimate goal of overpowering evil. Bloodstained is at its best when it's giving you plenty of opportunities for continuous improvement.

And that's just as true all the way back in Aria of Sorrow; true enough for me to enjoy late-game grinds for experience and gear and souls, completing the game's checklists, and overpowering myself enough to turn the final bosses into total chumps.

It's a great formula, and its execution here is quite good, in spite of the GBA's limited horsepower (and number of buttons). Now, a couple decades and multiple sequels in this game's future, I could lament that some quality-of-life annoyances - like hidden progression requirements, and inconvenient fast-travel locations - still haven't seen much improvement.

But I love IGA's castle-crawling adventures all the same, and even after a dozen hours in this one, I still want more.

Better than: Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance
Not as good as: well, the next one, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow
... so, it's a good thing: the Castlevania Dominus Collection is finally here, and I can play that again too!

Progress: Killed Chaos, 100% map, 100% souls.

Castlevania Advance Collection is a faithful re-packaging of the GBA Castlevanias -- as is M2's way, it emulates the original games and wraps them with minimal modern conveniences. These are essentially the same games I played 20 years ago, for better and for worse.

(Though being able to play them on large backlit screens and with a more ergonomic gamepad is quite nice.)

Circle of the Moon was, in its day, a pretty impressive first try at bite-sizing Symphony of the Night's nascent Metroidvania formula. But its movement and combat mechanics haven't aged well; Nathan Graves feels frustratingly stiff and unresponsive to control, especially with this map's surprising abundance of pits to get knocked back and fall into.

The "Dual Set-up System" gameplay gimmick is more confusing than engaging, and the story is too threadbare to keep things interesting. So... while revisiting Circle of the Moon unlocked some fun memories of juggling my GBA, a flashlight, and GameFAQs printouts, I don't feel like I'm missing much by setting this one back down.

And then there's Harmony of Dissonance: Juste Belmont is more satisfying to control than Nathan was, but the gameplay mechanics available to him are comparatively plain. It just feels dull. And the distinctly poor audio quality of the soundtrack doesn't help.

Trivia time! While Circle of the Moon's soundtrack has that "classic Castlevania" feeling, it wasn't composed by Michiru Yamane, who followed IGA all the way to Bloodstained.

But Harmony of Dissonance was composed by Yamane, so that game's decision to "... sacrifice the music and focus more on the visual side of the game" (interview source) is, in retrospect, a real shame.

Of course, it shouldn't be surprising that Aria of Sorrow is what makes this collection worthwhile. It finally ditches the ancient sub-weapons, replaced by (a ton of) new soul abilities; it makes collectible equipment interesting, with weapon varieties that actually change how you play; it's got a story that, while still light, twists the usual Belmont-clan plot in a fascinating way...

But I'm getting ahead of myself, 'cause Aria of Sorrow really merits a post of its own.

NieR: Automata is unusual, quirky, and intriguing - weird, in good ways - but not consistently. Its moments of riveting mystery and exciting surprise are sparse, with boring drugery filling the space between.

The hack-and-slash-plus-bullet-hell combat action is bewildering at first, but then once you've made some sense of the controls and complexity, ... it's still bewildering, due to wonky camera movement, unpredictable lock-on targeting, and outright visual noise.

When enemies and bullets and lightning are filling the screen, well, the good news is that fights never get impossibly difficult -- because you can slash through, or dodge to evade, all of it. The bad news is that hectic fights have so much going on, including stuff you can't see, that they become functionally equivalent to button-mashing; big encounters end up feeling tedious, rather than exciting.

And the story is, I mean, I don't want to oversell it; if you've seen end-stage-humanity sci-fi anime like Evangelion (or Zone of the Enders), Automata's themes will feel familiar and its twists won't exactly be jaw-dropping. Its storytelling is still interesting, though! Convoluted as the plot is.

Except to get to the next story beat, you have to run through a bland abandoned factory, or the bland ruins of a city, or bland desert wasteland -- sometimes wandering haplessly through maze-like levels (like that factory) since the map is completely unhelpful with pathfinding. Frequently, the game will force you to backtrack through areas you've seen before (like that goddamn factory) and will even disable fast travel to make you walk through old areas again.

(Don't get me started on Automata's sidequests, which tease opportunities to meet colorful characters and uncover deep lore, but take even more slow and tedious backtracking to get there.)

And then, after about ten hours and a climactic boss fight and rolling credits, the game isn't really over! NieR: Automata asks you to play it again, purportedly to continue the story and keep pursuing its unanswered questions.

But given the first playthrough already felt like a chore, I can't bring myself to sit through "the same story ... [where] most of the events will be similar" (according to this Route B walkthrough). Better to just read it all online and move on to better games.

NieR: Automata isn't bad, but its highlights - a fascinating narrative and unique mechanics - are weighed down by dull environments and uninteresting gameplay.

The soundtrack is pretty rad, though.

Better than: Transformers: Devastation
Not as good as: Sine Mora
Might be better: as an anime series. Oh, there is an anime series?

Progress: Forced myself to complete Route A.

Stormgate's game-mode ambitions are pretty grand - narrative campaigns and ranked competitive and PvE co-op missions - its ex-Blizzard creators evidently aiming to make The Next Blizzard-Style RTS themselves. And while it's certainly normal for Early Access games to feel unfinished, well, Stormgate's got plenty of work left to do.

What I find funny is the game's apparent lack of ambition in faction designs. The Infernal Host grow drones into Giger-esque structures just like the Zerg; the Celestial Armada have glowing power networks and robotic, aloof moods just like the Protoss; heck, the Vanguard's worker units quip "In the rear with the beer" in un-subtle homage to the Terran SCV's "In the rear with the gear" line.

Sure, designing new themes and mechanics in the RTS space can be risky, but to so clearly ape a genre legend risks disappearing in its shadow. Like they say, you come at the king -- you best not miss.

Given I couldn't get into Baldur's Gate or Divinity: Original Sin - I was years late in both cases, but, still - I was initially skeptical of Baldur's Gate 3, even despite the "universal acclaim." Now, after dozens of hours of magic missiles and reckless attacks, chatting up goblins and demigods and livestock, searching abandoned temples and haunted houses and random corpses for quest clues -- after I realized, more than 30 hours deep, I was still in the game's first act; I couldn't be more glad I was wrong.

There are, I have to say, some parts of this game I still don't care for. Things I'd call legacy genre baggage, like an overabundance of options with unclear consequences; from the character creator's enormous menus and lengthy list of abilities at level 1, through to mid-level upgrade selections and sub-selections -- just as an example, I reset and re-leveled my barbarian after using a feat to unlock heavy armor, then finding out that heavy armor disables raging.

And of course I have to complain about narrative dice rolls, which can hide interesting content just 'cause of bad luck. You'd better believe I'm save-scumming just like I did in Disco Elysium. (Heck, sometimes just to get a better combat outcome, too.)

But! Those gripes are easy to get over because of how enthralling Baldur's Gate 3 is, in its storytelling and worldbuilding.

The game opens strong with grandiose cinematics and a straight-into-the-deep-end intro scene -- and rapidly starts weaving in compelling characters, particularly the sparkling personalities who join your party. Then as events progress, plot mysteries deepening and companions' backstories accumulating, NPCs and sidequests are all-the-while tossing out more and more plot threads to pull on.

There's so much writing in this game's conversations, scripted scenes, and notes, not to mention ambient storytelling in the environment; the world feels alive, and huge to boot. And it blends dire, epic themes like the main storyline with fun and silly shit like bribing entrepreneurial ogres.

Plus, as a role-playing sandbox, there are tons of opportunities for your own choices to impact that world and its stories. Often with even more significance than my choice to give Gale magic gloves which increase armor "when unarmored."

The world of Baldur's Gate 3 is so, so full of content to explore and lore to find, and I can't wait for my bumbling party of wackos to discover more of it.

Progress: Exploring the Shadow-Cursed Lands.

If "The Defenestration Trilogy" wasn't clear-enough branding, Tactical Breach Wizards - based on the free demo - is very up-front with its tone: magic-wielding special-ops soldiers trade irreverent banter, then knock down doors and blast baddies. (Yes, often out a window.) Like Gunpoint, this game's narrative elements are unflinchingly sarcastic and irreverent, and I love it.

But the tactical gameplay ... I dunno, I'm not "feeling" it. Even though it completely avoids the unpredictable dice-roll fuck-ups that I often associate with tactical games - "high-hit-percent missed-shot bullshit" as I lamented in Shadowrun: Dragonfall - because all actions are totally deterministic, and you can even rewind turns to try a different approach.

Really, Tactical Breach Wizards combat is more like a chess puzzle, asking you to figure out the right moves to stay alive and kill the bad dudes. And I guess that "figure out" part is what I'm not feeling: staring at the map to plan out each move is kinda boring. (Rewind-ability means I could just try stuff, too, but I'm not stoked on the idea of retrying moves over and over again.)

As much as I like the game's personality, its fully-predictable game mechanics are ironically too dull to hold my interest.

I don't tend to go for Open World Survival Craft games -- not since the halcyon days of Minecraft and Terraria. I haven't given half a thought to Pokémon in forever, either. And I usually avoid games in Early Access, so, how did Palworld get its hooks in me?

Playing with a friend helped, but this isn't one of those ... "so janky it's funny" or mock-with-your-friends kinds of games. In fact, Early Access or not, Palworld's mechanics and its overall game loop work pretty well! And I think what makes Palworld's loop especially engaging is that it's not just another surival crafting routine.

Your captured Poké- Pals can work in your base and run infrastructure, like an automation game, and they do so based on Pal-specific abilities. A rock-breaking Pal can work a mining quarry, collecting raw ore; a fire-breathing Pal can run a furnace, smelting that ore into ingots; and then you can craft those ingots into more powerful armor and swords and guns and so on.

So you put Pals to work in your base, and to keep them fed you need more infrastructure - run by more Pals who plant seeds, water and harvest crops - and support structures that'll keep them rested and healthy. The touchpoints between hunting and catching Pals, and automating (well, Pal-o-mating) your base, turn Palworld into a surprisingly effective combat-survival infrastructure-scaling hybrid game.

And it provides a ton of open-ended freedom in how you play, whether you want to hyper-optimize your Pal workflows or go out and farm materials yourself, approaching objectives and powering up however you see fit. ... for a while.

Palworld's upgrade grind does eventually get very grindy, the experience point thresholds ramping up and Palsphere capture chances dwindling down so much that gameplay can start to feel like a chore -- even when you configure your private server (like my buddy and I did) to soften those numbers up. And the recent Sakurajima update worryingly adds even grindier endgame components like oil and "plasteel", that all but require you to leave the game idle as Pals are laboring away.

My buddy and I are done catching 'em all for now, but I could see myself coming back to Palworld after Early Access if it makes that endgame content less toilsome. And assuming it smooths out some quality-of-life issues, like covering more of the map with fast travel, making it easier to transport materials between bases, and improving pathfinding for Pals getting to their workstations.

But what's impressive about Palworld already is how few of those rough spots get in the way of having fun with it, and how much of its Pal-catching and base-building is there to enjoy today. And, also, that you can build your dinosaur Pal a shoulder-mounted missile launcher.

What did I say about Horizon Forbidden West last time? That it plays to the "same strengths" and hits the "same highs" as Zero Dawn? Well, yeah, though that's an awfully succinct way to describe a world I've spent over a hundred hours in.

I'd forgotten how varied this map is: from canyons and deserts to forests and beaches, icy mountain peaks and treetop villages to overgrown skyscrapers and underwater Vegas, and all of it chock-full of activities. Tribal NPCs with side-quests to chase, rebel outposts to reclaim, lore-heavy collectables to unearth, components to gather for equipment upgrades!

Forbidden West's world is so damn captivating, I really couldn't help but keep returning to wring out every last drop of it.

And the second time around, it was pretty easy for me to ignore trivial shortcomings like inventory management. (Just had to always remember to "refill from stash.")

The plot isn't as jaw-dropping as Zero Dawn's - a high bar for sure - and ultimately Far Zenith felt more like a setup for Aloy's next game. Her motley crew of allies, though, help add meaning to this journey: it's always a delight listening to Erend's struggles with technology, to Kotallo's swearings of vengeance, to Alva's manic joy for data.

As for Burning Shores, well -- like Frozen Wilds before it, this expansion is a perfectly serviceable and enjoyable addition to the main game, not much more.

Londra's story tries to embellish those rascally Zeniths with a deep-dive into one particular narcissist, but it doesn't add much substance to the space wizards we already knew. (Though his Pangea Park is a fun excuse for glib Jurassic Park references.) And new companion Seyka has an engaging personality, but is no substitute for the group of friends that came along with Aloy in the main game.

Flying on a ptero-bot mount was a thrilling, climactic upgrade in Forbidden West, unlocking free exploration of the whole map; creating a new problem in Burning Shores, whose new map would be trivialized if you could fly over it immediately. It was smart of Guerrilla Games to invent a flight block that you could later remove, so once you defeat Londra's anti-air space-magic laser, you can fly around LA's ruins too -- it's just a shame that the main game's grand capstone moment had to be undone (and then rehashed) for the expansion's sake.

I wish Burning Shores had added more off-the-beaten-path sidequests and activities. I mean, what's here is fine, a little unraveling of the Quen's org chart and some more flight recorder stories from Operation: Enduring Victory, I just ... wanted more.

Not that the "complete edition" package of Forbidden West is lacking content. Man. The hundred-plus hours I clocked uncovering this world's mysteries, solving its people's problems, upgrading my weapons to blow up robot dinosaurs, I loved all of it.

Except maybe those Gauntlet Run races. Could do without those in Horizon 3.

Progress: finished on Normal, 95.96% main game progression, 92.00% Burning Shores progression

Voxelgram was one of my favorites in 2021, so I was thrilled to see its new DLC come up for sale. No-brainer.

What was really surprising, though, was booting Voxelgram back up and seeing even more new puzzles, added for free.

Some of these fuckers - I mean that affectionately - some of these new puzzles get up to an eye-watering 15 x 15 x 15. Thousands and thousands of voxels!

Honestly, that immense scale of nonogram and all its toilsome scanning and rotating and re-scanning is asking a lot, even for a superfan like myself. So it's a good thing that another recent update added hint highlights, making it easy to find the next step in these massive grids.

I'm very satisfied with Voxelgram's DLC pack, hopefully the first of many, but moreover I'm blown away by the game's commitment to new content and features -- years after its initial release.

It was only last month that I wrote:

... there isn't much Ace Attorney left for Capcom to re-release ...

... but I'd still buy a remastered Ace Attorney Investigations collection, if they made it.

So, uh, that was an easy sale.

But I hope Capcom has some Ace Attorney 7 news soon, 'cause now they've really run out of back catalog.