Toward the end, playing through Majora's Mask 3D felt like I was just going through the motions. And sure, I didn't need to check all the checkboxes and collect all the collectibles, but ... well, I'll get to that in a minute.

It's especially evident in the shadow of Breath of the Wild, but Majora's Mask feels more like a precursor to open-world design, than like a real sandbox. It's not really "open" in the current sense of the term; it's more like a sequence of, do the first dungeon, then some things that unlock after that, then the second dungeon, then some things after that, et cetera.

Both the main storyline, and the bulk of the game's sidequests, are gated by a fairly static sequence of items. You can't roam the world and do whatever activities you find; first you have to climb the equipment ladder. And that means doing the dungeons, and events around the dungeons, in an enforced order.

But it isn't just the lock-step sequence of dungeons and sidequests that makes Majora's Mask feel so antiquated. Many sidequests - and even some errands necessary for the main story - are time-sensitive within Termina's three-day span. If you happen to have the necessary items, at the right place, but not at the right time, you might never know that there's an event there at all.

Like going back to Metroid and finding that there was no in-game map, the lack of discoverability (even with new hints!) around Termina's various events is a humbling, surprising disappointment.

But if you decided not to care about optional events and sidequests - i.e. if you were only to progress through the main quest - you'd find that there isn't much to Majora's Mask. There are only four dungeons, all of them fairly brief (though two of them are pretty creative). And the critical-path content between dungeons tends to be laborious, like Skyward Sword's tedium but without that game's explicit guidance.

Majora's Mask 3D is a commendable upgrade from the N64 original, both in its graphics and its user-friendliness -- the save system and time controls are way better, now. But the things that made Majora's Mask so memorable for me - the richly complex sidequests - are brought low by the game's now-archaic world design.

Better than: Darksiders: Warmastered Edition
Not as good as: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D
Hard to say: how it compares to Skyward Sword, which I'm not interested in playing again.

Progress: Completed the Bomber's Notebook.

I've tried, and failed, to really sink into Majora's Mask 3D multiple times over the past two and a half years. I think it's fair to say that the game's opening hasn't aged very well:

• Narratively, it's weird and fairly un-charming;
• Before you've picked up some key items (like the bow), it's extremely linear;
• And the main quest sometimes stumbles over obtuse "adventure game logic" scenarios.

... but once I finally powered myself through the first few in-game days, these issues began to clear up. The plot's disparate elements feel more relevant as you free each Guardian giant, and the game's sidequest-heavy design comes to the fore once the map actually opens up.

As for that last bit; well, there's an in-game hint system, now.

Majora's Mask doesn't really command the same regard that it did back in 2000, especially in light of Breath of the Wild's fresh and powerful take on an open Zelda world. But the adventure is still fun.

And, more than anything else, I'm looking forward to filling up my Bomber's Notebook again.

Progress: Completed 2 temples.

Silicon Zeroes, in the same vein as Human Resource Machine, is like a Zachtronics programming metaphor that's pretty thin on the "metaphor." It's set in 1960s Silicon Valley. You use adders and memory to perform math and logic. It's pretty straightforward.

The facade that distinguishes it from straight-up programming is that you develop algorithms using a visual node graph -- similar to how Shenzhen I/O visualized connecting inputs and outputs. (Except that Silicon Zeroes doesn't make you micromanage the connection lines.)

It's got a charming aesthetic, and there are optimization goals for each puzzle.

What more is there to say? Of course I'm going to buy and play this, someday.

Progress: Finished the demo.

Considering that Cat Quest is a mobile game, it offers quite a lot of content: multiple hours of simplified hack-and-slash gameplay, treasure chests with adorable loot, dozens of quests, and a metric buttload of cat puns.

The story gets a bit groan-worthy toward the end. But that wasn't the reason I was playing this game, anyway. I played it for the cat puns.

So many cat puns.

It's refreshing that Cat Quest doesn't have any in-app purchases or other trite monetization bullshit. (Although there is a quest that explicitly references another game, which itself is ad-supported.) It's a game that you buy and then play.

For what it is, Cat Quest is a satisfying - and sometimes even challenging - action RPG. Although your mileage may vary based on your investment in cat puns.

Better than: Swords & Soldiers, Uncharted: Fortune Hunter (in other words: the few other mobile action games I've played)
Not as good as: Child of Light, Ittle Dew (in other words: a deeper RPG)
The game hints at a sequel or expansion, with dogs: I hope it's a good boy.

Progress: Level 100, completed all the things

Cat Quest finally came out on Android, and now my phone's battery is dead.

Despite how proud I am of this post's title, mobile isn't a "perfect" fit for Cat Quest's combat: avoiding attacks (by moving away from them) is harder than with a mouse or controller, and so combat is more spammy and chaotic than when I played on PC.

But given the simple nature of the game, having it in my pocket is pretty ideal. I can play it while I'm waiting for important things to happen.

(With the aforementioned deleterious effect to my phone battery.)

What's impressed me most is that Cat Quest is signposting a lot more content than I expected. The map is surprisingly big! There are a ton more equipment types than I though there'd be. I walked by a dungeon that says I should be level 40.

Neat.

Progress: Level 18

When Darksiders was more recent, it compared fairly well to Twilight Princess -- and favorably, even, to Skyward Sword.

But games have moved on, and even Zelda has moved on, in the years since.

And so while Darksiders: Warmastered Edition is certainly an admirable graphical improvement over the original, the gameplay mechanics have aged poorly. I'm no more excited about hacking through dozens of garbage enemies today than I was in 2010.

Progress feels slow. The game world isn't that interesting. Combat is repetitive. I'd wanted to get to the horse, at least, but that's still several hours away -- and I just can't muster the interest for it.

If you loved the previous game, there's no reason not to love this remaster; the visual upgrade is pretty great. But for me, this iteration only highlights the original game's shortcomings.

Progress: Got to the Twilight Cathedral.

I reached the end of Origin's ten-hour Mass Effect: Andromeda trial in about five hours -- including probably an hour or so of reading Codex entries. And while it's hard to form a complete opinion of such an ambitious game in that time, what I've glimpsed is ... interesting.

The introductory mission is rough. Lots of jump-jet jumping, which doesn't work that great. Some getting lost in an open-ish map with linear-ish objectives. Emotionally-stilted dialog, wacky animations, flat starting characters... which, if we're being honest, Mass Effect has always had problems with.

Toward the end of the demo, though, the new approach to world design started to grow on me. It's not as enchantingly open as, say, Breath of the Wild, but what I've seen so far makes me wonder how much free-form planetary exploration I can pull off.

At the same time, there are some game systems that really feel like steps backward from Mass Effect 3. The menus and submenus are overly complicated, taking way too many clicks to do anything. The disassociation of class-specialization and abilities is messy and confusing. Opportunities for modifying your loadout are too infrequent and restrictive.

... and the "new" stuff in the Andromeda galaxy is very underwhelming, so far. There's a new hostile race, which I shoot at and it dies. There's a new forerunner promethean ancient race with ruins to explore. All of your friends are the same races you know from the Milky Way.

It's still intriguing enough that I'll get the full game, eventually. And maybe the game world will become more engrossing as the hours add up. Hopefully.

Progress: Finished the demo.

I heard on the internet, somewhere, that the Danganronpa series was kind of like a pop-anime version of Phoenix Wright. At least based on my experience with the demo for Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, this ... seems like an artful comparison.

While these franchises share the theme of solving a mystery through adventure-game choices, everything else about Danganronpa is pretty unique. And not to Danganronpa's benefit.

Some of my issues with it fall under the banner of "anime bullshit," which I guess is somewhat subjective, but...

• None of the characters' names have been localized out of Japanese, and there are so many characters that I can't keep their names straight at all.
• They're all angsty high school students, which, despite their flamboyant personalities, makes it difficult to distinguish who's who at a glance.
• The writing is verbose in weird places - like reiterating the state of the crime scene multiple times - while glossing over questions like ... how did I get here? And why is one of the students a robot?
• And while the subject matter is supposed to be serious, off-the-wall characters like a talking toy bear, and the aforementioned robot, really get in the way of that.

But regardless of the game's themes, I've got serious doubts about its gameplay systems. As in most adventure games, you have to gather clues and talk to people by clicking on them, but Danganronpa's game world is navigable in 3D from a first-person perspective -- meaning that you have to worry about the camera, for some reason.

In the trial segments, you call out a potential contradiction not by yelling "Objection!" but by shooting at floating words with a gun.

Actually, I would say the worst aspect of these segments is that they're in real-time. Not only does this prevent you from examining evidence and drawing conclusions at your own pace, but ...

The "truth bullets" (your objections) have travel time. So if you aim the right thing at the right line of text, but the text is about to disappear, you can still miss! And you'll have to wait for the entire sequence of dialog to start over before you can try again.

Oh yeah, and then there are truth-finding minigames. These aren't like Ace Attorney's gimmicks; psyche-locks, Apollo's bracelet, Athena's emotion robot -- all of these are just tools for dissecting dialog.

Danganronpa has matching puzzles.

And ... OutRun?

These are just, plain, stupid.

And then there are the technical issues. The screen is scaled to the Vita's aspect ratio. You can't save your progress except inbetween chapters. The controls are just ... bonkers.

Here's how to control the debate segments:

What?

Summarily: I was on the fence about Danganronpa's writing style and characters, but the gameplay mechanics in this demo have turned me off completely.

And, on the off-chance that this demo isn't really representative of the full games ... I'll just have to take my chances by skipping them, anyway.

I can't even remember how I ended up with Zoo Rampage. It must have been part of a bundle I bought months, or maybe years ago. But as long as I was going to boot it up for Steam trading cards, I figured I'd see what the game was actually like.

You pick an animal, and you wreck the shit out of a zoo. Like, beating up tourists, plowing through gates, demolishing food stands, knocking over portable toilets.

It's shallow as hell: the differences between animals are minimal (speed, and maybe attack range?). And the only goal is to accumulate enough "points" (think dollars worth of damage, like in Blast Corps) to unlock the next stage, of which there are only a few.

It's very stupid, and I absolutely wouldn't buy it intentionally. But considering I had no expectations of it, Zoo Rampage was ... better than I expected.

Progress: Finished the fish-collecting stage.

Five years later, Borderlands 2 still works pretty well. It's a bit slow to start - with Claptrap leading you around by the nose, weapons that feel relatively sane, and not many sidequests - but Pandora's bizarre, deadly personality is enough to keep things interesting until all of that starts to pick up.

It helps that the art style suits the game so well; it still looks good enough to be considered a modern game. With the possible exception of Unreal 3's trademark blurry-until-loaded textures.

Even as a Siren - last time, I was an Assassin - a sniper rifle still seems like the best option, since short-range combat is so dangerous. But, hey, if I have to explode bad guys' heads from a distance -- so be it.

Progress: Level 15 Siren, "A Train to Catch"