Dawnguard gives you the choice of helping the Dawnguard hunt down the lord of the vampires, or joining said vampires and gaining the powers of evil blood-drinking magic. Is that even really a choice? Who wouldn't want to be a vampire, at least for a little while?

What surprised me most about Dawnguard was that its main storyline is actually quite engrossing. Beyond just siding with vampires or vampire hunters, there is a whole thing here that dives into the backstory of the snow elves, and there are a bunch of interesting encounters to work through along the way.

There are also some side-quests, unrelated to this story, added by the DLC. And while it's not like Skyrim really needed even more quests, I'm certainly not about to complain. Also, there are crossbows, and they are pretty sweet.

Dawnguard's biggest failing is that it just doesn't fit well on the map. The three major new areas - Fort Dawnguard, Castle Volkihar, and the sprawling Forgotten Vale - are glommed onto the edges of the existing world map; scrolling to their icons in order to fast-travel doesn't always work that well. And another area, the Soul Cairn, isn't really on the map at all. Really cool place, but navigating it was a pain.

(It's also a little annoying that, if I cure my vampirism, the Volkihar won't help me anymore. Come on, guys, can't we still be friends?)

Otherwise, this is a solid addition of questing and exploration to Skyrim's already-impressive world.

Better than: Dishonored: The Brigmore Witches
Not as good as: Borderlands 2: Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep
And if I'm thinking about it: the Dawnguard campaign is really better than most of Skyrim's built-in faction storylines

So the Special Edition of Skyrim has updated graphics, and unfortunately reintroduces ages-old bugs (gee, where have I heard that before). Sure thing -- whatever.

What really drew me into this remaster was finally having an excuse to play the DLCs I bought forever ago, but never started: Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn. Thoughts on those to be enumerated separately. Along the way, though, I found myself very easily re-immersed in Skyrim's huge world, innumerable quests, and addictive skill-ups.

Last time around, I was a magic-using sneak-thief. This time, I'm an archering sneak-thief. ... yeah, really not all that different. I'm still methodically looting every house and dungeon, and I'm still gradually climbing the ranks of every organization on the map. Even though I'm re-treading a lot of the same ground from the game's original release, and even though it remains full of embarrassing Bethesda bugs, I'm still having a ton of fun with it.

I should have no problem breaking my 140-hour record from last time. (I'm already at 127.)

Better than: BioShock Remastered
Not as good as: the remastered Red Faction: Guerrilla, I guess
And obviously better than, if only technically: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Until Dawn started slowly, but promisingly; the game is basically a teenager-slaying horror film in videogame form. Occasionally cheesy, occasionally jump-scary, and occasionally ominous, Until Dawn excels at building a creepy, anxious atmosphere. In this game, you actually get to tell the bitchy cheerleader whether or not she should open the door to investigate a noise outside. (She may do it anyway, but it's still pretty immersive.)

It is at times a master class in tension building -- when a lighthearted snowball fight is bookended by carefully exploring dark passages or running from a wild animal, Until Dawn does a fantastic job of raising your heart rate, cooling it back down, and jacking it up again.

And then there are the psychoanalysis scenes. Inbetween game chapters, Peter Stormare asks you to look at ink blots and tries to very obviously manipulate you into feeling uneasy. From reading ahead about the game, I know that his character makes more sense later on, but it still feels like an unnecessary interruption to the story.

What brings Until Dawn down the most, though, is the realization that, while it does a great job of emulating a teen thriller movie -- there isn't much more to it. The characters, the setting, and story beats all draw from well-established stereotypes of slasher films. It's predictable.

The game produces a commendable amount of anxiety in spite of this, ... but in the cold light of day, it just isn't all that interesting. And so even though I know I've got plenty of story left, I'm just not that motivated to come back and see it through.

I could tell, in my relatively short time with The Last of Us Remastered, that it isn't a "bad" game; but it is bad for me. Or, I'm bad for it. Maybe both.

Naughty Dog has become quite good at writing sympathetic characters and engrossing stories; and the world of TLoU did a great job of pulling me in, at first. But the same controls and encounter designs that I hated in Uncharted are present here, and in a big way.

I'm not very good at sneaking, and I'm not very good at shooting. The Uncharted games - at least, after the first one - got me through these sequences on the strength of their Hollywood-style set pieces. I wanted to see what came next; I wanted it hard enough to continue trying to kill the ridiculous bullet-sponge mercenary in front of me.

But The Last of Us is set in a bleak, depressing world. It's magical, in its own way, but I have no particular desire to see what's beyond the next fungus monster. (I suspect that it's only more death and decay.) And so since the gameplay itself isn't compelling to me, there isn't really anything keeping me going.

I know that people will tell me that I'm an idiot for giving up on The Last of Us, and maybe, in time, enough of them will do so that I'll pick it back up. On its own, the game hasn't convinced me to return to it.

I first saw Phrase Shift pop up on the Steam store, and I thought -- you know, this looks like it would work better as a mobile game. Lo and behold, it had already been out on Google Play for some time; and yeah, it did work really well with a touchscreen.

And I did have fun with it for a while, because hey, word games are cool. But it's hard for this game to stand in the shadow of Monkey Wrench when it has so much less content, and also feels like it is growing that content more slowly. (Phrase Shift has daily puzzles, but each puzzle is significantly smaller than one of Monkey Wrench's.)

It's certainly not a bad timewaster, and I don't regret spending $2 on it, but I've stopped bothering to check it on a daily basis.

Better than: A crossword puzzle
Not as good as: Monkey Wrench
Unfortunately, the "harder" words: actually tend to be easier, as they are longer, and include more clues.

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is a really great example of a game that could be played seriously, but is still fun in a haphazard party. Like New Super Mario Bros. Wii or 3D World, in that sense. Also there are space lasers. And space flails.

Lovers does lean a bit more toward the "hard" angle, though, which makes it more difficult to enjoy once your party - disorganized, or drunk, or both, as they may be - hits the wall. Restarting from an unexpected death is not as convenient as in Nintendo's genre experiments; and so it's harder to learn from your mistakes, since you have to re-do a lot of the level just to get to those mistakes again.

It's a very cool idea, though, and one I look forward to trying more in the future.

Other than Skyrim, this is the game I've been dumping the most hours into.

I'm over 2200 puzzles deep, now. I will watch this game die.

Monkey Wrench is far from the most interesting game I've played, or the most technically impressive, or the most inexplicably immersive. But it delivers more on the "play anytime, anywhere" mobile-gaming goal than any other I've tried.

A couple months back, Blue Ox released new puzzle packs covering their previous "daily" puzzles; so I was able to do the ones that came out before I started playing, up through June. Hopefully, after the new year, they'll release a July through December pack and then I will have played every puzzle, because this is important to me, for some ungodly reason.

One might wonder why there's another LEGO Marvel game after LEGO Marvel Super Heroes, other than "for more money." I, for example, still wonder this.

On the one hand: From the outset, LEGO Marvel's Avengers sets out to be "more" than its predecessor, with more characters, more locations, and more movie plots to tie-in to.

On the other hand: After almost two hours, I still didn't yet make it to an open-world segment. Linear missions have never been the LEGO series' strong point. And while this game doesn't literally re-tread Super Heroes' ground, it feels an awful lot like it does.

I would like to come back to Avengers eventually, if only to play the Ant-Man stage, because Ant-Man is fucking cool. But having already played through Marvel Super Heroes, this game's offerings aren't very appealing.

Technologically, BioShock Remastered holds up pretty good -- the textures are a little fuzzy, and the geometry is a little sharp, but it's a solid update to a ... yikes, really? nine year old game. (Setting aside the depressing return of the game's original launch bugs, like crazy FOV and mouse acceleration, and random crashes in the middle of Hephaestus.)

In terms of design, though, it shows that the original BioShock hasn't aged all that well. The water-pipe hacking puzzles I remember so fondly from 2008 seemed like more of a chore, this time -- granted, one that I still took up at every opportunity. The plasmid powers, once awe-inspiring and shocking (rimshot), felt more familiar and rote. The narrative's full-bodied characters and compelling twists were lackluster, not so much because I saw them coming, but because, well...

The industry has learned from BioShock, now. Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided are great examples: Combinations of interesting characters, engrossing action, and diverse mechanics are not all that rare, and they've continued to evolve in the near-decade since Andrew Ryan invited us to Rapture.

These days, BioShock Remastered is less a genre highlight, and more a reminder of what the genre once was. Though modern games still owe a debt to it, it probably isn't much longer until BioShock becomes just as burdensome to revisit as System Shock is today.

Better than: BioShock 2 (if I recall correctly)
Not as good as: if it was 2008 again.
I don't know what it is about "hacking" minigames: I am compelled to do them, even when they become boring and stupid.

The Jackbox party packs are always good at having some minigames that parties can giddily revisit, again and again. Jackbox 3 is remarkable for having, if I dare say so, no weak entries; all of these games are a hoot.

Quiplash 2 is a predicable, and still awesome, follow-up to the original "write a good joke" prompting game. Trivia Murder Party is a fun spin on a traditional trivia game, with madcap mechanics (like lopping off pinkies) that keep it from getting stale. Guesspionage is like Family Feud, but with more adversarial yelling! Fakin' It is a bit hard to understand, but really gets going once you realize that all of your friends - at least the ones you play Jackbox with - are dirty, filthy liars.

The surprise standout, though, is Tee K.O., which is not as much a game as it is an art project. After drawing whatever you want, and writing whatever slogans you want, t-shirt designs get made out of arbitrary combinations of these drawings and slogans. And then there are rounds of voting on the best combinations, but that's hardly the point. You can buy these t-shirts.

I drew a Pac-Man ghost, and wrote "Eat a bag of dicks," and now my friend owns that on a t-shirt.

We live in an age of wonder.

Better than: The Jackbox Party Pack, The Jackbox Party Pack 2
Not as good as: No, this is the legit best party game so far.
Yes, even competitive with: Cards Against Humanity