Sitting somewhere between Minecraft: Java Edition and Don't Starve, crafting-and-adventuring-survival-game Crashlands is impressive in many respects. The premise is immediately engaging thanks to some humorous writing; the early game strikes a comfortable balance between tutorials and discovered gameplay; it has cross-platform cloud saves, so you can play it on damn near anything; and the game itself is pretty fun, or at least it starts out that way.

But there are two things that made me tire of Crashlands after just a couple of hours:

(1) Combat is boring. There isn't much in the way of tactics: at least as far as I played, none of the secondary weapon options were nearly as important as just continuing to hit something with your main weapon. And although enemies often telegraph their attacks, there are no dodges or parries. You can try to walk away from an enemy's attack, and then re-engage it, but doing this with a mouse is fidgety and tedious.

Ultimately, combat comes down to who has the bigger offense and defense stats. Which forms a poor combo with my second complaint:

(2) The overwhelming influence of randomness on equipment strength. All of your weapons and armor pieces are crafted, but at the time of crafting, they're granted randomly-selected attributes of randomly-determined quality. Sometimes you'll get exceptionally lucky and make an "Excellent" piece of armor that makes combat a cinch. Other times you'll get an "Acceptable" item that hardly offers any resistance or bonus effects.

If you made an item that turned out to be shitty, you can salvage it and get some of the materials back; but it won't be enough to make another one, so you'll need to get back out there and grind more materials before you can try crafting it again.

The shallow combat means that your primary goal is crafting good items -- and the randomness of crafting turns the game primarily into a grind for materials.

It's a shame, because the premise and presentation of Crashlands is really compelling; but after only a couple hours, its gameplay just became too dull for me.

Better than: Don't Starve
Not as good as: Factorio
Comparable with: Terraria, sans multiplayer

Regency Solitaire isn't what I expected, in a few different ways.

For one thing, it isn't quite the solitaire ruleset that I'm familiar with (which is Klondike, I guess). Rather than playing cards from piles or from the deck onto multiple "foundations," cards from the piles are played onto the deck; effectively replacing four persistent foundations with one, volatile one. This simplification makes the game easy to jump into, but also reduces the number of possible plays at any given time, making it pretty easy to get stuck.

(Of note is that you cannot recycle the deck; once you've run through it, the round is over.)

Also, you play as a noble daughter attempting to court with a rich lord. Not only is this Jane Eyre-esque plot ... bizarre, for a video game, it has nothing to do with the game itself. The protagonist isn't some ace card player on a quest to prove herself a solitaire champion; the game sessions and storytelling simply take detached turns, one after the other. Imagine if Kratos played checkers inbetween cutscenes of Greek gods being disemboweled.

Regency Solitaire also has power-ups, unlocked by upgrades that you purchase with gold from clearing piles of cards. These power-ups reveal hidden cards on the board, clear arbitrary cards, allow you to play wildcards... Oh, and there are also lock cards, and key cards, and some special lock cards that unlock when you play a certain number of face cards. Yeah, there's plenty of wacky shit in here.

But while said wacky shit can occasionally get you out of a jam, by and large the game is still heavily reliant on luck. Which pile should you play from to reveal a crucial card, and which one will leave you stuck? Will using a power-up now help you, or remove a card you should have played? Will you find another play before the deck runs out and the round ends? Well, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Regency Solitaire is weird in a bunch of ways, and to a degree I admire its mechanical creativity. But even aside from my total lack of interest in its Victorian romance story -- I really don't enjoy my success or failure being decided by random chance.

Beglitched makes a pretty good, if confusing, first impression. I liked its fish-out-of-water introduction, which explains some, but not all, of the in-game mechanics; figuring out how the game really works is part of the puzzle.

In a sense, it apes the Miyamoto magic of Super Mario Bros. -- it teaches you how to play by making you ask questions and try things, rather than telling you what you should be doing. I used observation and deduction to determine what the maze symbols meant, and what the puzzle matches were doing. And that sense of discovery helped reinforce those lessons in my head.

Unfortunately, underneath its charming design, engaging puzzles, and cyber-cute aesthetic, Beglitched has a real mean streak; a few stages in, the game becomes utterly unforgiving. When you run out of health, or fail a mission, the maze that you're in resets completely. Health-restoring items are rare, and some missions (like the one I'm in now, for example) can be failed instantly with very little warning.

This stings not only because of the randomized peril of level layouts and enemy movements, but because it consequently encourages you to avoid puzzle battles, and to sneak around them instead. In other words, the "fun" part of the game is too risky.

Which would be bad enough, even if I hadn't just run out of patience trying and retrying this Catnet level. Get to the end, some dumb cat takes my health away, have to start all over -- no, thanks.

Better than: Pony Island
Not as good as: Human Resource Machine
Sorry, Glitch Witch: you're gonna have to solve your own mystery.

Progress: Gave up in Catnet

Sorry to say, I was right when I guessed that Red Dead Redemption would be "better remembered than played." I got an itch to revisit it recently, and I don't know that I'll be following through on John Marston's story a second time.

Some parts of the game have aged well enough, like the beautiful environment and overall "feel" of the world. (Granted, up-scaling the game on current hardware helps this a bit.) Most of it just feels a little old: movement controls, cinematic direction, and voice acting aren't quite up to par with Rockstar's latest.

It's the quest pacing, though, that has really failed to grab me. (And, looking back at my posts from 2011, I had mixed feelings on that topic even then.) Part of it is because there is so much space between major beats; it takes significant time to get from one quest to the next. And part of it is also because the main plot just ... doesn't have the gravitas that I really want, from a modern game.

It certainly doesn't help that I already know John Marston's past and inevitable future. The intrigue of his story is no longer mysterious to me.

Well, here's hoping that the upcoming sequel will modernize "Grand Theft Horse" enough to recapture my interest.

Epistory has a story, told gradually as you explore the world, initally mysterious and progressively steeped in metaphors. This didn't really do anything for me.

What I did like is that it's a game about typing that isn't totally stupid. As opposed to some games which feel more dictated by random letter selection than by real spelling or typing ability, Epistory is an evolution of a "teaches typing" game that actually revolves around and tests your typing skill.

Occasionally, there are bugs that interfere with typing, which is pretty infuriating. And sometimes exploring the world, looking for the next thing to do, can be tedious. But the majority of the time, Epistory asks you to type quickly and strategically -- and accomplishing its trials feels genuinely satisfying.

Perhaps the most brilliant part of Epistory is its "adaptive difficulty." (At least, as far as I could tell.) I consider myself to be a fairly good typist, and the game had no problem providing me with adequate challenges; a few of its later encounters even took me a few tries to overcome.

Epistory's enchanting graphical style is also worth calling out. Watching virtual paper fold itself into terrain and features is a visual delight.

Although Epistory ultimately doesn't have that much going for it - it's a pretty-looking typing game - it's extremely well-executed, and one of very few games that allows you to brag about your words-per-minute score.

Better than: Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey, The Typing of the Dead: Overkill
Not as good as: if Letter Quest was less dice-roll-driven, or if there was a not-on-rails Typing of the Dead alternative.
Arguably competitive with: furiously typing out a caffeine-powered document

Controls that infuriatingly refuse precision. Platforming gauntlets that demand perfection, and force repetitive retry after retry. Hidden abilities that are necessary to proceed in the game (apparently the cloaking ability can also reflect light beams? what the fuck?). Yooka-Laylee has all the hallmarks of a game that doesn't respect your time.

Games could get away with this in bygone eras, because there weren't many other games to play. What else were you going to do -- go play outside? But in an age where everyone's Steam library has an insufferable backlog, developers must realize that there is no shortage of competition, and people won't just keep suffering through your awkward, tedious game.

Yooka-Laylee isn't all bad. But even at its best, exploring its worlds and solving its puzzles just feels ... stale. If you've played 3D character platformers before, Yooka-Laylee doesn't really offer anything new or interesting.

I think it's pretty telling that Playtonic didn't notice its own game's glaring, archaic issues until three weeks after release (April 11 -> May 2). As much as I would like to believe in time travel -- I've come to the simpler and sadder conclusion that Playtonic's designers played and replayed the old Banjo games so thoroughly, that they merely lost perspective of the industry's last fifteen years.

Anyway, having visited all five book-worlds and attained all of Yooka and Laylee's abilities (including the gameplay-trivializing ability to fly) - and still being under halfway to unlocking the final boss area (100 pagies!) - I've got no reservations against calling it quits.

Better than: Bear Simulator
Not as good as: Super Mario 3D World
With apologies to Grant Kirkhope: this game's soundtrack isn't good, either. Nostalgia doesn't make these short, repetitive melodies any better.

Progress: 48 pagies

Yooka-Laylee feels like a fifteen-year-old game with a very fresh coat of paint on it. I don't really mean that as a compliment.

The good news is that the core gameplay from Banjo-Kazooie and -Tooie is all here, and it's even been iterated on, slightly. The world-expansion mechanic serves as a reasonable excuse to revisit levels, and at least some of Yooka's reptilian moves are satisfyingly distinct from Banjo's repertoire.

The bad news is that games have come a long way since the year 2000, but Yooka-Laylee hasn't. While the controls, interface, and general tactile "feel" of Super Mario 64 was iterated on and refined through Sunshine, Galaxy/2, and 3D World; Yooka-Laylee has basically all the same mechanical problems as its N64-era forebears.

It has to be intentional, I mean -- I have to believe that the spastic camera, the squishy collision physics, and the (occasionally) unskippable dialog boxes, were done this way on purpose. Because there are only three explanations I can conceive of for blatantly irritating designs like this:

1. They're intentional;
2. Playtonic literally invented a time machine, and developed the game fifteen years ago;
3. Or none of this game's designers played any video games released after the year 2000.

I can't wholly write Yooka-Laylee off, because its core loop of exploring worlds and collecting random stuff is still rewarding and fun. It's just ... everything around this core, is stale, and kind of sucks. (Except for the writing, which is humorously self-deprecating in all the right ways.)

Progress: 18 pagies, 224 quills

I guess my prediction about Capcom embracing an episodic delivery format was overly optimistic. Still, it's nice that they're making more content for me.

Like the "Special Episode" added to Dual Destinies, this new case doesn't have anything to do with the plot or events of Spirit of Justice. In fact, with the return of Maya, Edgeworth, and Larry Butz, the banter and hijinks of this case are occasionally reminiscent of Phoenix Wright's older trials.

That aspect of the special episode is well-balanced: the returning characters feel comfortably familiar, but the case itself doesn't lean on knowledge of the DL-6 incident, or the Steel Samurai, et al. It also doesn't lean on nostalgia for its appeal, as the new characters and setting for this case are sufficiently interesting on their own.

As the franchise is wont to do, some of the biggest twists in this case are forecasted very early on -- but the devil is in the details, and working those details out during the investigation and trial is as satisfying as ever.

The only real failing here is that - like the Special Episode from Dual Destinies - it lacks the gravitas of the main game's sequelized cases, and how they progressively build up to an epic conclusion. As a self-contained case, this is about as good as you can get.

Well, that, and this extra case doesn't do much with the franchise's various evidence puzzle mechanics: Apollo is nowhere to be seen, and Athena doesn't actively participate. But as in Spirit of Justice's own cases, the story does a fair enough job making up for these shortcomings.

Better than: the shorter cases in Spirit of Justice
Not as good as: the longer cases in Spirit of Justice
Probably about the same as: Dual Destinies' "Turnabout Reclaimed" Special Episode

Apollo Justice: Asinine Attorney is slightly more ambitious than its Phoenix Wright counterpart, as it recycles art not only from Spirit of Justice, but also from Dual Destinies.

Otherwise, it's equally brief, equally silly, and equally un-funny.

Phoenix Wright: Asinine Attorney is not the real "Special Episode" DLC for Spirit of Justice. But it does cost $3.99 (and is bundled with a 3DS home menu theme).

It's terribly stupid. It's of a subpar quality even by fan-fiction standards. It's short -- 30 minutes, tops. It isn't even funny.

You can find much better, and more substantive!, additional cases for free, online.

If this episode had been included with the game, I would at least be able to write it off as a gimmicky extra. But as paid DLC, I expect something way, way better than this garbage. As it is, I feel like I was tricked into buying the 3DS theme, and this episode just came along for the ride.

Do not buy this. (Unless you want the 3DS theme.)