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

There are already some big things I'm worried about from the Extinction gameplay presentation: like the balance of grinding through trash mobs versus "real" combat with ogres, and how important checkpoints will be if the ogres can kill you in one hit.

But it's also ticking some important boxes for me. The traversal mechanics are robust, and flitting around rooftops and giant ogres looks super fun (with more freshness than Assassin's Creed: Pyramids). And the ogre fights have a shade of Shadow of the Colossus to them (for which I have more optimism, re: usable controls, than I do for Colossus's upcoming remake).

On balance, Extinction looks like a pleasant surprise from the studio best known for ruining Batman: Arkham Knight on PC. Let's see how they fare with an original production.

This is not a reveal, Nintendo. You just put the words "Metroid" and "Prime" and "4" next to each other. Call me back when you're confident enough in the game's existence to show it.

Maybe I'm the only person on Earth who played Beyond Good & Evil and didn't like it. Over a decade later, all I can say is that it was profoundly un-memorable; the story wasn't noteworthy and the gameplay was very routine.

(I do remember that Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time came out around the same time, and that game was super frickin' sweet.)

So it's doubly mystifying to me how the no-gameplay prequel trailer is driving so much hype. Is it because the monkey says "motherfucker?" It certainly can't be because of the hackneyed and Michael Bay-esque police chase.

Maybe if I could borrow Playtonic's time machine, I could go back to 2004, play BG&E again, and try to understand why the game became so beloved. For now, I don't remember the game as anything but wholly unremarkable.