Toward the end, Sands of Time's gameplay and scenario design shows its age poorly:

• As fights become lengthier and lengthier, you're more likely to run into issues with the rewind timer being reset. In the elevator encounter near the end, I had a handful of rage-inducing moments where I could only rewind back to a point that was already too late to avoid death.
• And in the final sequences, no longer having the Dagger of Time makes parkouring around surprisingly frustrating. The game spends hours getting you used to undoing your mistakes; and in its final hour, makes you resort to traditional checkpoints, instead.

But, all that considered, it's still quite good for a 14-year-old game. Its peers, like Enter the Matrix or Tales of Symphonia, would be lucky to have held up so well.

Hell, Sands of Time still has some things to teach modern games, particularly that the ability to rewind and try again is really, really satisfying. But I guess everyone is into "rogue-like" permadeath now, so... sigh.

Better than: Assassin's Creed II, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
Not as good as: Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Just a reminder, Ubisoft: We haven't seen the Prince since Forgotten Sands in 2010.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is one of those games that sticks out prominently in my memory. Although I've had a rough time with some of those recently -- the Prince has weathered time fairly well, if not entirely unscathed.

Starting the game on my PC, the first issue I encountered was that everything looked like one big blur. I guess that sometime in the past decade or so, the GPU technique that these guys used for fog has become deprecated or broken; with fog turned on in graphics options, it is impossible to see a goddamn thing. Turned it off. I can see!

Second issue: my Xbox 360 controller doesn't work. Sands of Time has "Gamepad" options, but here is where I remember: it was released well before the Xbox 360 existed. Had to map all of the buttons manually. Slightly annoying, but now we're off!

The Prince starts telling his tale, and ... oh, there are no subtitles. There is no option for subtitles. That's unfortunate.

Aaaand now we're in the game proper! Huzzah!... well, the controls and camera movement suck a little bit, don't they? The Prince can't just start running, he needs to wind-up his speed first, which is somewhat irritating. The camera can get pretty spastic when going through some doorways or rounding certain corners. And the timing necessary for pulling off wall-jumping seems more punishing than it should be.

And, okay, fights are a bit dull. Generally speaking, the game uses a quantity-over-quality strategy of throwing enemies at you. (A flaw that I remember the sequel attempted to address.) And the battle music gets repetitive quite fast.

All that aside -- this is still a great game. The story is well-told (and well-acted!), the parkour gameplay is fun, and the environments are beautiful and memorable.

What I'm finding really incredible about re-treading Azad is that I still recognize practically all of the game's levels when I see them; this game made a strong impression on me, circa 2003-2004, and that impression is holding up.

Progress: 62%

Burial at Sea - Episode 2 does a much, much better job of delivering a coherent gameplay experience than the first episode did. It's still not as good, mechanically, as BioShock proper: "hacking" is still dumbed-down, there's really only one good plasmid, side-quests are surprisingly lacking (so many empty rooms!), and enemy encounters aren't varied enough to hold up a full-length game. But it works.

Unfortunately, just as in BioShock Infinite, the main attraction here is the story -- and that story leans heavily on shocking revelations about the links between Rapture and Columbia. Revelations which are no longer shocking in a second playthrough.

Burial at Sea still feels like a fitting narrative epilogue to BioShock Infinite; but I don't think there's any reason to play it more than once.

Better than: BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea - Episode 1
Not as good as: BioShock Infinite
As for Irrational Games: now "Ghost Story Games," well... we'll see.

Burial at Sea - Episode 1 still suffers from an easily-reproducible, game-breaking bug -- one which happens to highlight the folly of infrequent autosaves. Granted, Irrational Games only really had three months to fix it before being effectively shut down. But it only feels more biting, four years later.

That aside, Burial at Sea's first episode remains a short, sloppy, and mediocre story, married to a very poor gameplay direction (restricting my ammo doesn't make the shitty stealth any better!). It would be outright bad if not for the ending, which isn't that satisfying by itself, but does add a little flavor to BioShock Infinite's conclusion.

One more to go.

Better than: BioShock 2: Minerva's Den Remastered ... though that's still a maybe.
Not as good as: BioShock Infinite
I'm still quite proud: of my "dog of a DLC" quip from my first playthrough.

InfiniPicross's puzzles don't "look like" anything; they're randomly generated. To me, this isn't a weakness at all. The puzzles could look like Rorschach tests or traffic accidents for all I care; I just want to fill them out.

If all I had to do for the rest of my life was solve nonograms, InfiniPicross could facilitate that pretty well. But I do occasionally have to eat, sleep, and watch television. So the game's promise of "infinite" puzzles wasn't really what impressed me.

It was the fact that I generated a 99 x 50 puzzle - obliterating the 40 x 30 size record from Paint it Back - and took over three hours to solve it.

Even if I never start the game up again, that solve alone feels well worth InfiniPicross's paltry asking price.

Better than: Pokémon Picross
Not as good as: Paint it Back, just because I do like a scripted "campaign" of puzzles to solve.
It can generate up to 99 x 99: but I think I'll need a bigger monitor (and probably a full day) to pull that off.

I solved enough of the puzzles in Infinifactory's last level to look ahead to the game's ending -- or, what I thought was the ending. Apparently it really just unlocked the second half of the game.

I mean, I'm not going to complain about more puzzles, so long as they continue to present new and interesting challenges. But I am starting to feel a bit worn out. More so than in SpaceChem and TIS-100, Infinifactory's solutions require a considerable amount of work to implement -- due to having to manage moving parts and equipment in 3D space.

And as the puzzles become more complex, a surprising challenge has emerged: being able to move the avatar around the puzzle, and reach equipment you need to manipulate. I'd much rather that the avatar had no collision physics, so I could more easily debug my increasingly tightly-packed machinery.

Also, I was really hoping to close the book on this and move ahead to Shenzhen I/O. Oh, Zachtronics, you spoil me so.

Progress: Resource Site 902.42

BioShock Infinite still managed to feel good, in the end. But not as good as it felt the first time.

Infinite's value as a game is based almost completely around the strength of its shocking ending; so, knowing what was coming ahead of time dulled it a little. And this time around, I wasn't quite as anxious to forgive the game's first half being so unengaging and uninteresting.

Still, the narrative power of BioShock Infinite is hard to overstate, even with the benefit of hindsight. I hope Ken Levine feels proud of the story he was able to tell.

Better than: BioShock 2 Remastered, even though Infinite's gameplay mechanics are definitely not as good.
Not as good as: maybe Wolfenstein: The New Order (I'm waffling between the two).
Almost done with the BioShock reunion tour: Just got to go back to Rapture yet again

Talk about rose-colored glasses; even moreso than my recent attempt to replay Red Dead Redemption, embarking upon Booker's journey through BioShock Infinite a second time is humbling.

The first half of the game isn't any good. It's practically bad.

Infinite's gameplay mechanics hardly need to be called out, but I'll call them out anyway:

• Randomized equipment upgrades are almost never useful;
• All of the vigors are criminally useless;
• Paying to upgrade vigors is futile, since you'll need to spend money on weapon upgrades if you actually want to kill anything;
• Redundant weapons, like the Machine Gun versus the Repeater, feel like a cruel joke;
• Replacing the hacking minigames with a lockpick item is borderline insulting;
• You can only carry two weapons!?;
• You can't save manually!;
• There's no in-game map,
• And the bulk of its sidequests require you to backtrack through entire levels.

Basically, in every way that might lead to deep, intricate, thoughtful gameplay, BioShock Infinite fails to deliver. In this, the year of our Comstock 2017, Dishonored and Wolfenstein: The New Order seem like sensible, unpretentious bitch-slaps to Infinite.

The star of BioShock Infinite is, and was always going to be, its story. And all the necessary conveyances are there from the start: audio recordings, ambient chatter, menacing voice-overs, evocative environments, banter between Booker and Elizabeth. But even here, the first half of the game somehow manages to trip over itself, by focusing on the predictably-shallow racist and classist story of Comstock versus Daisy Fitzroy. This is a plot that's interesting for 30 minutes; not for six hours.

So it's a damn good thing that the game's narrative starts to turn around, and focus on Elizabeth's sci-fi powers, around the halfway point. Because up to then, it's almost completely forgettable.

Progress: Finished the business in Comstock House.

Minerva's Den Remastered is a ... nice freebie, I guess; but beneath its modernized appearance, the game itself is a bit scatterbrained, and overall unimpressive.

The first of its three levels feels like an experiment in non-linear design, which mostly failed. The new laser weapon is underwhelming, and the focus on flying robot buddies fails to address their annoyances (when they block your path, or block your bullets). The pacing is obviously and somewhat deliberately broken, in its attempt to accelerate the delivery of the same arsenal that BioShock 2 accumulated over a much longer game.

Oh-- I've already written all this, haven't I.

Well, yeah. It's like I said in 2011, then. Pretty "meh."

Uninteresting sidenote: In this post-Dear Esther world, the walking-through-narrative-voiceovers ending sequence of Minerva's Den clearly sets the stage for what we now call a Walking Simulator.

Better than: Asinine Attorney
Not as good as: BioShock 2 Remastered
The best part: feeling free to move on to BioShock Infinite

Seven years later, the remaster doesn't really change my final thoughts on BioShock 2. The early game - relying as it does on "Big Daddy" mechanics to pull you in - is perhaps weaker than before, since video games have moved on somewhat. But ultimately, BioShock's sequel both thrives and suffers for its narrative attachment to the original.

The theme and plot of BioShock 2 succeed in drawing from the well that Andrew Ryan and "Would You Kindly" had already established; but fail to make an impression that really feels unique.

What BioShock really needed wasn't an additional story about Rapture in the 1960s, but something more ambitious. I guess Ken Levine knew that all along.

All that said, BioShock 2 is certainly a fun and entertaining game; and while it sure would have been nice for the remaster to fix the game's console-first UI (and its reluctance to autosave), the modern visual treatment holds up just fine.

Better than: the un-remastered BioShock 2
Not as good as: BioShock Remastered, BioShock Infinite
Next up: hey cool, they even remastered Minerva's Den