It's 2018, and I'm making the Glog great again.

I'm doing well in recovering from 2015's precipitous drop in games played. I made incremental progress in 2016, and am proud to say that these trends continued in 2017.

But enough boring talk about numbers; let's see the boring numbers!

That's 78 games for 2017, up from 45 in 2016. Not too bad! Although there is the statistical caveat that 2017 included record-setting counts of both game demos, and replays of games I'd played before -- at 10 (12.8%) and 18 (23.1%), respectively.

The highlight of those was definitely Borderlands 2 and its DLCs, which have held up pretty well (for the most part; more on this later). Ōkami's new HD update (still in-progress) has been quite pleasant, too -- it has the same flaws as the original, but with beauty and lightheartedness that really make up for them. And Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was a joy to revisit; its storytelling is still fun and riveting, more than a decade later.

In contrast, the remasters of BioShock 2 and especially Infinite weren't nearly as good the second time 'round. I think because their plots and environments relied heavily on the "wow" factor of seeing them for the first time; absent that, there isn't much memorable substance.

Similarly, revisiting Diablo III (still in-progress) and the remasters of Darksiders and Majora's Mask reminded me more of what those games lack, than what they had originally gotten right. Time hasn't been friendly to Majora, in particular.

Let's look at more numbers! Counting up IGDB metadata on "game type" e.g. expansions and downloadable content:

Last year I played a record high number of DLCs, at 15 (19.2%) -- the majority (9 of them) thanks to Borderlands 2. Past replaying the main four story packs, this was my first time with the five "Headhunter" DLCs, which were, uh, mixed. Wattle Gobbler was a fun excuse to revisit Mr. Torgue, and Son of Crawmerax was very pretty, but the rest felt generally janky and missable.

Three more DLCs came from Phoenix Wright: one real one with a fun story, and two that were absolutely asinine. I'm going to be much more wary of Capcom's DLC menu, next time.

And the other three DLCs were also replays, via BioShock. It wasn't quite so obvious back in 2011, but the ending of Minerva's Den really does feel like a seminal step toward today's "Walking Simulator" genre (which makes sense, since its developers went on to create Gone Home). As for both episodes of Burial at Sea... like BioShock Infinite itself, stripped of its first-time "wow" moments, it just wasn't very impactful.

More numbers: what platforms did I play on? Actually -- since I know PC dominates every year; what other platforms did I play on?

Eight years later, I've finally put Bowser's Inside Story to rest, formally retiring my DS backlog. And Breath of the Wild is certainly the death knell for my Wii U.

I made a pretty big dent in my 3DS backlog, too -- one more to go, maybe two if someone talks me into playing Samus Returns.

My PS4 activity has certainly declined, ... since there was only one new Uncharted game last year. But I'm not done with it yet, at least not until I can try out Horizon and The Last Guardian.

The Switch is a new entry, via Super Mario Odyssey. Other than a probable replay of Zelda, it's hard to guess how much activity this might see in the future. (Metroid, please?)

Now for something I haven't really tracked before: how much did I actually like what I played?

Well, the Awesome count is on the low side - at 6 (7.7%) - with Breath of the Wild being the standout of the year. But plenty of Goods, at 26 (33.3%). That's, uh... that's good. 👍

Those Good games ended up including a lot of memorable, if imperfect, experiences:

• Rebel Galaxy captured a sense of freedom that can only come from truckin' around space,
• Oxenfree told a thrilling virtual-campfire sci-fi story,
• Pitfall Planet really charmed my co-op partner and I, and we barely killed each other at all!,
• Child of Light reminded me just how fun turn-based RPGs can be,
• Tales from the Borderlands was a hilarious romp through Pandora's twisted world,
• and as above, Ōkami HD is more gorgeous than ever.

While I still rated them positively, I'm let down by last year's trajectory for Zachtronics games. Infinifactory was great, ... up until the last few levels became way too much. And both Shenzhen I/O and Opus Magnum (still in-progress) - while fun - felt like steps backwards.

There was plenty of Meh to go around in 2017, which isn't generally worth mentioning -- but Ori and the Blind Forest was definitely a disappointment. Chalk another one up to excessive internet fervor.

Oh yeah, and Yooka-Laylee happened. Just a shame, that one.

So, that was 2017. What's on the docket for 2018? Well, it doesn't look like there's a whole hell of a lot "upcoming," other than some Kickstarter games that always seem at least a year away.

Having met - and exceeded! - my goal number of games last year, I think my new goal will be to attack the bottom of my backlog: ancient games (like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic) and remasters (like Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition), and franchises that I've fallen behind on (like Dark Souls and The Witcher).

Plus my co-op partner is hungry for more Borderlands, so the Pre-Sequel is probably in my near-future.

Here's to another fruitful year of gaming!

In 2014, when I wrote that Finn and Jake's Epic Quest had "pretty much annihilated" my hopes for an open-world, wacky-zany Adventure Time game -- this is kind of what I was talking about.

At least, the info teased so far for Pirates of the Enchiridion sounds like just the thing I want. It isn't being made by WayForward. It's "An original Adventure Time story, all voiced by the show’s cast." It has pirates. BMO is playable?

Dare I get my hopes up? ... especially considering the publisher's less-than-stellar record?

When Champions' Ballad was released earlier this month, I downloaded and tried it (on Wii U) almost immediately. And abruptly ran into a small, but critical flaw in this DLC: it came out about six months too late.

Breath of the Wild was a dense, complicated game with lots of mastery to build. And I hadn't played it since March. So to call my aptitude "rusty" would be an understatement.

Champions' Ballad starts with a series of challenges using a new weapon, the One-Hit Obliterator. While wielding it, Link will die in a single hit.

There's just no fucking way that I can pull this off.

I'd need to sink significant time back into rebuilding my atrophied Zelda muscles, before I'd be comfortable tackling the challenges in this DLC. And there seems to be some critical consensus that the rewards here, on their own, wouldn't really be worth that much effort.

I'm actually more inclined to start over from scratch, and attempt the Champions' Ballad challenges more organically as part of Breath of the Wild's vast world of content. I'd been planning on - eventually - doing a fresh playthrough on Switch, anyway.

Which is a roundabout way of saying: so long, Wii U. It's been nice knowing you.

It's kind-of amazing just how up-to-date Ōkami HD feels, despite the original game's age. It still has some flaws, but is nevertheless distinctly refreshing.

Going back to what I wrote about it on PS2:

[...] intricately woven into the fabric of ancient tales. This manner of storytelling, combined with the game's infamous and extremely distinctive aesthetics, make for a really unique experience.

The Celestial Brush is a really cool gameplay mechanic - but controlling it is still a pain.

[...] a very big part of the game (I don't hesitate to say a majority of it) is in "optional" content.

This seems like an intentional choice on the part of the game's director to give the player a godlike feeling: you've got to take care of the little things, too.

[...] while combat and dungeon play isn't nearly as good as an actual Zelda, there is a lot of fun to be had in Ōkami.

A decade later, this is still how I'd sum the game up: the narrative and aesthetics are unique and breathtaking, the brush controls are fairly imperfect, the optional activities make the world feel alive, and the combat and puzzles are a little on the meh side.

And most of the time, the strengths more than make up for the shortcomings. It's all just so charming, from the beautiful art style to Issun's irreverent attitude.

Progress: Just finished the sunken ship.

Pepper's Puzzles is a humble little picross game, perhaps even humbler than Paint it Back. It pays some welcome attention toward subtle quality-of-life features, like a randomized soundtrack and a "dynamic background" to prevent the brain equivalent of burn-in.

It's also got a very-slightly quirky sense of humor, which is neat.

But what really attracted to me to Pepper's Puzzles, over some other picross games currently on Super-Steam-Sale, is its "200+" puzzles.

The Mosaic mode (like other picross games' assemble-a-bigger-picture puzzles), and the surprisingly-stressful Time Trial challenges, are nifty distractions. But I've bet on Pepper to give me plenty of hours of picture-puzzle solving, and it's looking pretty good so far.

Progress: 135/720 Classic stars, 13/184 Mosaic stars, 18/18 Time Trials stars.

Ōkami HD took quite a bit of warm-up time -- I don't mean the ridiculous 25 GB download, but the overlong non-interactive opening cutscene, and 30+ minutes of low-interactivity character introductions. It's slow to start.

Then of course I had to tweak the settings, because the default camera controls are just wacky, and the default volume for NPCs' cartoony chattering noises is ... too much. Like getting yelled at by adults from Peanuts.

But once it became playable, the charm I remember from the original game started to come back. Talking to quaint townsfolk about their problems; using the celestial brush to solve simple puzzles; Issun's impotent rage and Amaterasu's adorable dog noises. Largely down to its visual style, Ōkami is just fun to watch; and this HD iteration preserves that quality quite excellently.

The combat gameplay is somewhat milquetoast, which is basically how I remember it being before. So, hopefully that part of the game doesn't start showing its age too poorly. But I'm looking forward to rediscovering Ōkami's Japan, and unraveling its mystical adventure once again.

Progress: Just left Kamiki Village.

I just wasn't having any fun playing Shantae: Risky's Revenge.

For one thing, it's a pretty bad Metroidvania. Not in quite the same way as Ori and the Blind Forest, which felt more like a linear adventure with optional exploration; Risky's Revenge does include some meaningful backtracking, to discover routes that were previously locked or unreachable.

But the world map sucks, with whole sections that are uncharted, and frustratingly-placed teleporters. (They're rarely any better than walking.) Aside from how annoying it is just to open the map; actually getting from place to place, navigating the same mazes and fighting the same enemies over again, is surprisingly irritating for how tiny the game's world is.

It seems like Wayforward was trying to lean harder on Shantae's platforming and action chops than on exploration -- but the action isn't really any good, either. The collision on her ponytail attack is irritatingly narrow, and her magic abilities - despite consuming valuable portions of a magic bar - aren't any more effective. Trying to hit a tiny, flying enemy can be a real struggle in patience.

Throw in the aforementioned problems with control responsiveness and respawning - oh, plus some fairly blasé animal transformation abilities - and it's difficult for me to find anything enjoyable in here.

The game's world has a little charm, thanks to a cute art style and virt's mostly-great soundtrack. But that isn't really enough to make up for the general malaise of an uninteresting plot - collect the three things, from the three people, to save the whatever - and the thoroughly mediocre moment-to-moment gameplay.

Progress: turned into an elephant.

Bowser's Inside Story has some good fundamentals, but its pacing is a mess, and balancing problems can unexpectedly flip its combat from "fun" to "frustrating."

Let's start with some praise: as ever, the Mario RPG combination of platforming, turn-based battles, and real-time action is a good idea. When it works, it works great.

This formula feels at its best when Bowser is playable. His combat moves are fresh, and his ass-kicking ability is a blast to wield. Hands-down, my favorite moment in the game was when Bowser turned Godzilla-huge and started fighting a castle.

Like, literally punching a castle. Friggin' cool.

And playing as the Mario bros. can be pretty fun, too. Like I said, when it works.

Bowser's Inside Story gets marks off, though, for how often it doesn't work. And this is largely (though not entirely) a function of the game's bafflingly-bad pacing and level design.

In its first half or so, the story alternates focus between the Bros and Bowser. Early Bowser content is actually pretty fun -- watching him react to a rival villain, and seeing events from his boisterous perspective, is amusing for a while. But while he's out doing his dragon-turtle thing, Mario and Luigi are stuck in his mauve, labyrinthine interior, traversing bland levels and fighting repetitive enemies. The "inside" parts of Bowser's Inside Story are by far the least interesting.

Around the story's halfway point, a magical thing happens: Mario and Luigi are able to wander the open world. (By using warp pipes inside Bowser ... that warp to outside Bowser. It's weird.) All the outside areas that Bowser had covered, with suspiciously-foreshadowed Mario- and Luigi-sized blocks and paths, become re-explorable at your own pace.

It's kind of a shame that, as a result, walking the "open" world feels like re-treading old ground. There's approximately one new area that the Bros get to discover; the rest has little to offer, except bizarre combinations of old and new enemies. (Also, wow is the world map bad at showing how to travel between areas.)

This whole time, it's hard to care about the over-arching plot. Fawful is a boring villain, with a clichéd plot. The narrative never feels surprising or engaging, and the only sense of variety it seems to have is non-sequitur out-of-left-field directives. Suddenly we need to climb this tower? or talk to a doctor? or collect three macguffins? The whole thing has roughly the attention span of a preschool kids' cartoon.

That undirected-ness finally ends when, after Mario and Luigi finish their open-ish tasks, you prepare to assault the villain's castle. And here's where the story's pace irked me the most: this, which feels like the end of the game, is roughly its 75% mark. There are quite a few hours of dungeon-crawling and boss-fighting left to go, here -- and the remaining dungeons and encounters aren't varied enough to support this running length.

It's in these moments, when it feels like an endless series of similar-looking rooms and already-learned enemies, that the combat system's problems feel most poignant.

• Learning an enemy's patterns can be a crapshoot. Some enemies have a large number of attack patterns, and what looks like Pattern 5 may end up being a surprise! Pattern 6, whose defense is totally different.
• In many cases, the timing window for a successful defense (or attack) is astonishingly small. They're just really hard to do. And it's easy to get thrown off by the subtle timing differences of an attack targeting Mario versus targeting Luigi.
• The punishment for mistakes can be severe, especially when they cascade, e.g. getting hit might cause a character to be dazed and unable to defend against following hits. A single split-second misjudgment can mean the difference between a healthy Mario and a dead Mario.
• Most of the SP-consuming special moves are unrealistically difficult to pull off, due to how crazy their button and/or touch controls are. It's almost always a better idea to just use regular attacks, instead. (Luckily, the Bros and Bowser each have at least one late-game special move that isn't a huge pain to use.)
• In one of the almost-final boss battles, there is an unavoidable attack. The boss literally calls it his "Unavoidable Attack." That just seems mean.

I keep having to go back and remind myself that, yeah -- when the game works, it works well. And the combat works more often than it doesn't. If the overall story hadn't been so vacant and disoriented, and if the game's levels hadn't been so dull and tiresome, I wouldn't have given most of those flaws a second thought.

It's the fact that Partners in Time had these same problems with story pace and overlong levels, that makes me very wary about continuing on with the Mario & Luigi series. My playing time in this installment was on par with internet measurements, which estimate almost twice as long for the next installment, Dream Team.

I really would like more of the Mario RPG gameplay formula, even with the combat annoyances this series may have. But I'm not willing to slog through this caliber of storytelling for that many hours.

Better than: Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time (Yeah, I know I said "Good" on that one, but ... hell, that was more than a decade ago.)
Not as good as: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, at least in terms of story and world-building.
I wonder: if Super Mario RPG has aged well at all.

Opus Magnum feels a bit like it carved a chunk out of SpaceChem, added one or two new ideas, and spent most of its development cycle trying to look pretty. (Like Shenzhen I/O did to TIS-100 before it.)

Where SpaceChem had chemical elements, Opus Magnum has alchemical elements. And where SpaceChem used traveling waldos to move atoms around, Opus Magnum uses arms, which can rotate or extend. (... But can also travel a path.) At least so far, there is no equivalent to SpaceChem's complex multi-factory problems. And the input/output sequence is locked, so there's no room for cleverly processing multiple jobs simultaneously; only one output at a time is allowed.

The gameplay focuses on different aspects of automation than SpaceChem did - at least to me, Opus Magnum feels more about micro-optimizations - but overall it seems simpler than its predecessor, which is a disappointment.

Also mildly disappointing is that the game's soundtrack frequently stutters and glitches. This really seems like the kind of thing that would have been ironed out in early access. EDIT: This appears to be a common problem in current Unity games.

The storytelling in Opus Magnum is a mechanical step forward for Zachtronics, if not a narrative one: there's actually a protagonist, with a name and a face. So where Shenzhen's emails or Infinifactory's NPC chatter felt like I was receiving flavorful directions, Opus Magnum really feels like it's telling me the story of Anataeus.

... That said, all the characters' dialog (including this protagonist's) is stiffly robotic, and their personalities are all pretty flat. The quality of the writing seems about on-par with SpaceChem's.

I will give some props to the built-in minigame, Sigmar's Garden, which is way less frustratingly obtuse than Shenzhen's solitaire game. It's still not all that engaging, but at least I don't actively hate it.

I'm definitely having fun with Opus Magnum, but I hope that later puzzles will find some more interesting high-level challenges for me.

Progress: almost done with Chapter II.