Mr. Torgue is here again to save the day!

Borderlands 2: The Horrible Hunger of the Ravenous Wattle Gobbler is a full-on redemption for the "Headhunter" DLCs, after T.K. Baha made such a mess of things.

One: It's got Mr. Torgue. SQUIBBLYBAMBLYMEEDLYMOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!

Two: It's short, but in the "skirt analogy" sense -- it's just long enough.

Three: There's a fair amount of pop-culture parody even in its brief (less than an hour) main quest. Some The Hunger Games stuff, there's a Swedish Chef, "Chef Gouda Remsay" ... okay, maybe not much. But it's something!

And four: You blow up a giant turkey. As is tradition.

... and then there's Grandma Flexington's sit-and-listen story quest, which is an enormous waste of time but is still funny in a subversive, masochistic kind of way.

Wattle Gobbler makes the case for short, funny additions to Borderlands 2. Here's hoping for more like this.

Better than: Borderlands 2: T.K. Baha's Bloody Harvest
Not as good as: Borderlands 2: Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage
I really wonder: how much mileage Gearbox could get out of a Mr. Torgue spinoff game?

Well, I can take back what I might have said about Sir Hammerlock having the worst Borderlands 2 DLC. T.K. Baha's Bloody Harvest is the new low point.

T.K. Baha, even as a zombie, is an incredibly uninteresting character. His voice actor sounds bored the entire time.

There are some new enemies, in the form of walking pumpkins; but most of the DLC is filled with skeletons, who we just fought a ton of in Dragon Keep.

The main quest is dull, and once that's done, T.K. gives you a sidequest to traverse the whole map a second time. Ugh.

And even though it's shockingly short, like an hour at most, it feels too long. Like 15 minutes of content was stretched over too large a map.

This makes a very poor first impression for Borderlands 2's "Headhunter" mini-DLCs.

Better than: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice: Phoenix Wright - Asinine Attorney
Not as good as: seriously, Borderlands 2: Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt
Please, please: let the next one be better.

Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep - between its irreverent Dungeons & Dragons parody, reunion of favorite characters, and really, actually well-crafted questing content - is a thankful return to form for Borderlands 2, after Sir Hammerlock's disappointing DLC.

It's not perfect, as some combat sections drag on a bit, and the ending is kind of a let-down. (Par for the course in Borderlands games, apparently.) But it's definitely the best post-game that Borderlands 2 has to offer.

Better than: Borderlands 2: Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty
Not as good as: the main game of Borderlands 2
But we're not done yet: I never played Bloody Harvest or the other Headhunter DLCs, before.

Progress: Finished the main quest, and almost all sidequests.

Okay, I found something to actually complain about: the controls. Foremost, that - despite the game's insistence on mapping some moves to motion-only - the gestures for things like throwing Cappy in a circle, or in particular directions, don't work well at all. Yes, even when using two detached Joy-Con controllers, as the loading screen continues to annoyingly recommend.

(Which, by the way, just isn't as comfortable as using the Switch's Pro Controller. The right-hand Joy-Con's analog stick is difficult to use, since pushing it requires loosing your grip on the controller itself.)

It's kind of a shame that, more than a decade after the Wii - and six years after Skyward Sword finally got some working gestures - Nintendo is still pulling shit like this. Especially when the button-mappings aren't all being used -- "X" and "Y" do the same thing! as do "A" and "B" most of the time. Just let me use buttons!

... anyway. It sounds upsetting, but in practice the controls are rarely a real problem. Only a handful of the game's 800+ power moons have given me trouble that I'd really blame on the controls.

And aside from an annoyingly-lengthy final boss fight (i.e. having to re-do the first two phases because the third kept killing me), and a few similarly-bullshit double-secret probation fights and levels; almost everything you can do in Super Mario Odyssey is really damn fun.

Dozens of hours later, I'm still enjoying running around in Odyssey's big, imaginative worlds; following scavenger hunt-style hints, or keeping my eyes peeled for anything shiny or purple. Even with a minority of collectibles left to collect, I haven't yet resorted to looking up all the answers online (though I probably will soon), because the aimless exploration is still enthralling me.

Also, playing dress-up with Mario continues to be hilarious.

It's interesting to me that this feeling - the exploration, not the outfit-collecting - is really only possible due to the world-building approach in Odyssey; other recent 3D Mario games have favored large quantities of smaller-scale levels, while this one has less, but larger ones. It's hard to say that one approach is universally better than the other, since Odyssey does lose out on, say, brief slices of ghost house, or throwback levels.

Super Mario Odyssey is an amazing journey through awesome worlds, with a ton of thrilling and entertaining things to do. It has some really unique and memorable content, and it's a blast just to run around in.

But since its critical-path story is as throwaway as Mario's ever had, I don't think it's easy to say that this deeper-but-narrower world design is a total victory over, say, 3D World's prolific level count.

Better than: Super Mario Galaxy 2
Not as good as: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
About as good as: Super Mario 3D World, albeit in different ways.

Progress: 782 moons

Despite a bit of a learning curve with the controls - maybe due to how infrequently I've used the Switch - Super Mario Odyssey has rapidly engrossed me.

Super-cool thing #1: using Cappy to mind-control things. The early game makes a point of showing you just how crazy this can get, when you control a giant dinosaur. "Capturing" enemies for their unique abilities isn't merely a Kirby-style gimmick, but almost always a requirement for navigating the level or solving a puzzle. These wacky abilities help the game feel fresh, every time you find a new thing to put Mario's hat and mustache on.

The levels are gorgeous, imaginative, and rich with activities. Preview media had me thinking that New Donk City would be a central hub, but in fact it's only one of many "kingdoms" each with dozens of Moons (which are the new Stars) to collect. You can hardly walk 20 feet without tripping over a moon, but there are also so many in hidden-away puzzles and challenge rooms, that I've yet to get even half of them in any level.

Super-cool thing #2: just roaming a level and collecting stuff. Unlike Super Mario 64, Sunshine, Galaxy and 2 which were all oriented around going in, getting a star, and leaving - or 3D World, which had traditional levels with start- and end-points - Odyssey feels more like a modern open-world game. Finding a collectible doesn't interrupt the flow of the game at all. (With a handful of scripted exceptions, such as events which change the layout of a level.)

The "kingdom" levels are connected by a menu, similar to Galaxy 2 or 3D World, and I must admit I'm still slightly nostalgic for the central hub that earlier games had. But it's hard to complain when each kingdom has so much to do. In terms of densely-packed collectibles, Odyssey delivers on the promise of "old-school collect-a-thons" way, way better than Yooka-Laylee did.

Super-cool thing #3: you can buy outfits for Mario. Not just with gold coins, but with kingdom-specific, purple currency that's only available in limited quantities -- like, New Donk City has 100 of its own coins, some of which you'll need to buy a wiseguy pinstripe suit and hat. And while these outfits occasionally come in handy in the game, like when a construction worker lets you into a building because you're dressed like his boss, they're mostly just fun for dressing up Mario and watching him run around like an idiot in his boxer shorts.

It's only mildly disappointing that some of these outfits - particularly, said boxer shorts - don't translate into the 2D sections; though most of them seem to. Oh yeah, super-cool thing #4: each level has multiple 2D sections, where (somewhat comparable to A Link Between Worlds) you'll enter a flat wall as NES-style Mario. But even these throwback sections are surprisingly creative, as they wrap around 3D corners, or flip Mario's gravity upside-down.

So far, I've encountered exactly one bug, where a few purple coins in a narrow tunnel had tricky collision detection. Everything else in the game has been working super-well. Well, with the exception of the story, which so far is about on-par with "My galaxy! My empire!"

Why am I still typing this? I'm going to go collect more moons.

Progress: 126 moons

Like I said back in 2013:

... following Sir Hammerlock into the untamed wilds to track and kill fantastic beasts, should be a blast. But this only happens in optional quests, and only a couple of times. [...] Dr. Nakayama [is] a truly (and self-admittedly) pathetic villain who, at the end, is actually terrified to fight you.

With its exceptionally-brief critical path, underwhelming final boss, sprawling and poorly-designed maps, and outright annoying enemies (the persistently-respawning giant spores!, the miniscule-weakpoint scaylions!, the face-armored savages, and their auto-healing witch doctors!), Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt is undoubtedly the weakest of Borderlands 2's story DLCs.

Mr. Torgue's campaign wasn't exceptionally creative, but it at least met the bar of the main game's "average" content. Hammerlock's campaign doesn't.

It's just not very good.

Better than: maybe Red Faction: Guerrilla - Demons of the Badlands
Not as good as: Borderlands 2: Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage, or even Enter the Dominatrix, which was like the worst Saints Row DLC.
But there's a light at the end of this tunnel: and it's a critical hit!

Progress: Bunch of sidequests left to do.

I've been percolating these changes for a while, and finally pulled the trigger: Glog pages for a specific game will now include relevant tags.

These tags are pulled (in an offline process) from IGDB.com, and cross-referenced automatically by Hugo when the Glog is rebuilt.

So with minimal maintenance, I can collate, say, all Puzzle games or games in the Borderlands franchise.

I'm pretty excited about this -- if only because it'll make it easier for me to find comparable games when filling out my "Better than" and "Not as good as" lines.

Ori has some strong segments, but they're buried underneath a few too many poor design decisions around difficulty and pacing.

Some parts of this game are really quite good. Multiple sections are really creative, like a Lost Woods-style part that rewrites the map, or a gravity-bending area that has you falling through a room in different directions! Pretty cool stuff.

And once you get the (very poorly-named) "Bash" ability, which allows you to ping-pong between obstacles and projectiles, you'll be executing jump-chains that would make Mario jealous.

Anyway, the "good news" about Ori is that - in addition to being quite pretty - some of its platforming ideas are really impressive.

But - and here's the other shoe, dropping - its platforming "fundamentals" are very suspect. Jump targets tend to be inappropriately small compared to your jumping momentum. Enemies frequently appear by surprise, with very narrow windows to avoid their attack. Their respawn behavior can be inscrutable, sometimes returning after a few seconds, other times seeming to require walking half a world away.

The controls will betray you in unexpected ways -- most notably, the "Kuro's Feather" gliding ability is sometimes deactivated by another move, even while holding its button down, which you won't discover until you've already fallen to your death. (And that gravity-bending section? It insists on making you use "left" to go right, and "right" to go left, when you're upside-down.)

Even the pretty aesthetics can work against you, as dangerous obstacles can blend in with innocuous surfaces. Or, rarely, art in the foreground will cover up the action, making it impossible for you to see what's trying to kill you!

What makes these quirks more than just minor annoyances is the overall punitive design attitude in Ori. Rooms absolutely filled with spikes; enemies that do surprisingly high damage; and most notably, as I mentioned last time, the fact that your - manually-placed! - save points can run out. (And then there are the late-game proliferation of platforms which forbid save points.)

Taken as a whole, the game not only wants you to fail, but wants you to repeatedly fail whole sequences of gameplay until you get the whole thing right. It requires the repetition of rote platforming just for the sake of reaching a single "hard part."

There is a workaround, but... well. You can soften the blow of surprisingly high damage, and avoid running out of save points, by taking time off to explore the map and look for power-ups. You know, the "Metroidvania" part of this Blind Forest. But therein lies a core disappointment of Ori: it doesn't have a good sense of exploration.

With a small number of exceptions, there's never a reason to revisit an area unless you're trying to collect upgrades. There's no opportunity to organically discover something you missed -- just a choice between following the story, or roaming the map. It ends up feeling like less of a Metroidvania, and more of a level-based platformer that allows you to teleport between levels.

Also, I lowered the difficulty to Easy about halfway through, which sort-of helped; all this did was reduce enemy damage and health. And they still felt pretty tough, to me.

It's hardly worth noting at this point, but the story is just dumb, by the end. It attempts to build sympathetic, impactful characters, but fails in these attempts by being trite, or sometimes simply illogical.

The parts of Ori that are good, are pretty good! And the quality of its audiovisual presentation can't really be downplayed. Which is why it feels like such a betrayal for the gameplay to be so cruel, and generally un-fun.

Ultimately, I'm not sure if I'd call it worthwhile.

Better than: Teslagrad
Not as good as: Dust: An Elysian Tail
Hey they're making a sequel!: call me when there's a "Very Easy" mode.

Progress: Finished on Easy, 85% completion.

In short, Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage would be a firm "meh" if not for Mr. Torgue himself.

Where Captain Scarlett offered "more of the same" Borderlands 2-style content, Mr. Torgue offers less. The whole campaign smacks heavily of asset reuse, from overly-familiar landscapes (brown!) and enemies (bandits!), to quests that revisit an area multiple times, to sidequests that simply ask you to repeat a task but "harder."

Gameplay-wise, the only thing that Mr. Torgue really excels at is churning-out high-level quests. But they're no more creative or interesting than the repetitive wave-after-wave-of-bandits arenas from the main game.

What makes this DLC remarkable is purely down to the character of Mr. Torgue. He is the best.

And his running commentary throughout the campaign makes it worth playing.

Better than: Saints Row: The Third - Genkibowl VII
Not as good as: Borderlands 2: Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty
...but Mr. Torgue: is still my favorite character.

Progress: Finished the campaign, some sidequests.

Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty is essentially more-of-the-same for the Borderlands 2 player, and that's pretty great.

My only real point against it is that there isn't all that much content. Not that it's "short," but in the shadow of the main game's overflowing glut of side-missions, it's just "not long."

Back in 2013, I wrote:

In an industry filled with cop-out DLCs that do nothing but grift more money from loyal customers, this pack makes the case for meaningfully extending the game experience, with both an amusing story and a solid collection of additional quests.

... and it's somewhat disappointing that - for the industry at large - this still feels very true. Captain Scarlett remains a stand-out example of DLC done right.

Better than: Saints Row: The Third - Genkibowl VII (or any of the other Saints Row DLCs)
Not as good as: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Dawnguard (or Dragonborn)
We're coming for you next, Mr. Torgue: OH YEEEEAAHHHHHH!!

Progress: Finished everything except Hyperius.