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

I would say that there are really two games in Mankind Divided: A city-sized cyberpunk Skyrim with apartments to break into, e-books to read, and trinkets to collect; and a conspiracy thriller story that's unfortunately and inertly squeezed between the stage-setting of Human Revolution and an inevitable threequel.

The story of DXMD isn't bad, really, but neither is it good. It's mostly insubstantial. If Deus Ex was a series of novels, this game's plot would account for three or four middle chapters of one book. While there's a terrific amount of world-building to serve the exploration and self-discovery elements of the game, in the critical path there just isn't much going on.

It's especially unfortunate that the path through the game's main story occasionally gets in the way of the fun, sandboxy parts -- passing certain points in the game might make an NPC inaccessible, or permanently cancel a sidequest. These "extra" parts of DXMD are far more enriching and surprising than the main quest, so it's a shame when they get hamstrung like this.

The gulf between the main- and side-missions in DXMD builds a sense of "journey more important than destination," and it's true that even in the main story, how you get there is way more interesting than what's there when you get it. Not only because, even more so than DXHR, this version has what seems like a gajillion different ways to complete every objective -- but also because the gameplay, simple as it can sometimes be, is genuinely pretty good. Personally, I didn't get much out of the shooting game, but I had great fun sneaking between cover points, pathfinding through air vents, and stealthily taking out guards one by one.

And I'm not ashamed to admit that I save-scummed the hell out of it, reloading a save when I was discovered or when a hacking terminal defeated me. The irritating hacking-game RNG aside, I extracted the most enjoyment out of this game by perfecting my non-lethal route through the map.

(I even got the Pacifist achievement for not killing anyone. Although there were a few people who I essentially killed by hacking security robots to turn on them; apparently the game didn't count me for those deaths.)

Even though it tells an awkward non-story that barely even cliffhangers for the next game, even though the pacing of story events can fuck up the "fun" parts, and even though it has some frustrating technical quirks like the inventory one I posted previously -- Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has a lot of fun in it, if you're into exploring finely-detailed game worlds and scouring over their lore. About 40 hours worth, of that stuff.

Better than: Deus Ex: Human Revolution, because the non-combat path actually works all the way through.
Not as good as: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, simply because Prague (dense as it is) can't match the amount of stuff Bethesda made.
Much as I love the idea of AUGMENTED BANK HEIST: The fact that the "System Rift" DLC resets your hard-specced talents - much like Missing Link, I guess - is an instant turn-off.

Monkey Wrench is a mobile puzzle game. I have no problem calling it "little" and "dumb." The fact that it's occupied dozens of hours of my time over the past several months, I've spent more money on it than any other Android app (buying new puzzles), and I'm still not done with it, is ancillary to its little-ness and dumb-ness.

Monkey Wrench's style of word-finding puzzles is just more complicated enough than a traditional word search to be interesting, and to pat myself on the back I do think that the pattern-recognition element of the game is a good way to keep the brain's gears turning.

Mostly, though, it's something to keep me occupied while I'm waiting for something else to download, or stuck in a meeting, or on the toilet. Apparently that's worth over 1250 puzzles and counting.

It took me until the 15 hour mark to actually get going on the next story mission. That is to say, I spent about 14 hours just exploring Prague: breaking into people's apartments, reading their emails, stealing all their stuff. There is so, so much to explore in this world's nooks and crannies. It scratches that Skyrim itch all over again, of scouring an open-world map and scrounging up all its garbage items.

I'm certain that most of the notes I'm reading, about Pavel joining a gang or Ivenka being deported or whatever the fuck, will never lead anywhere relevant to the main story. But the amount of attention that's paid to these trivial little side-stories is engrossing and awe-inspiring.

(I wish that the NPC voice acting was good enough to meet the same bar. Most of these throwaway actors sound like they were pulled off the streets of Montreal, and do a poor job of pretending to be Czech.)

Unfortunately, one unintended side-effect of my explore-and-collect strategy is that it ended up hitting a pretty major crash bug. Even my fully-upgraded inventory gets completely full of picked-up junk, and if I try to drop a bunch of items to make room for more pickups, it goes kaboom. That's an ... embarrassing problem to have.

Anyway, aside from said crash, Mankind Divided does considerably better than Human Revolution did in terms of performance and reliability. Yeah, the menus are still sometimes wonkier than they should be with a mouse. But otherwise pretty good.

And while I'm not 100% convinced of it, I strongly believe that I've already passed some "boss fight" points in the game, where I would have had to fight a big-bad if not for my formidable hacking reconnaissance. Winning with my own strategy, instead of being forced to use one I'm not interested in; Mankind Divided delivers more strongly on that than ever.

After a slightly-over-plotted introduction, Mankind Divided plops Adam Jensen into Prague -- a brighter, more Slavic spin on Human Revolution's Detroit hub. And it's as dense with detail and care as The Citadel or anything else of its ilk. I'm picking up sidequests and collectibles and flavor text all over the place.

And while the press has pretty universally panned its plot, so far I'm delighted in the color being built up by Prague's ambience, and in the conspiratorial intrigue attached to both the world and to Jensen.

I'm trying to take it stealthy and non-lethal for now. I wonder how the boss fights will work out.

Pony Island's premise is a clever twist on the kind of "hacking" adventure-slash-visual-novel game that has you investigating and uncovering secrets in a virtual computer environment. The twist is that it's the devil's computer and that he wants you to play his videogame. This actually leads to some interesting theming around both archdemons and cynical game developers.

Unfortunately, it's only got about an hour of content stretched across two or three hours of pacing. Text scrolls slowly; action scenes plod along; unpredictable deaths force tedious retries. The game rarely managed to surprise me, because of how sluggishly it unfolded itself.

And the action, such as it is, really isn't any good. The game's various mechanics consist of point-and-click pixel-hunting, a slow-paced auto-running platformer, and an automatic variant on hacking puzzles (the program counter is always moving).

Despite being a short game overall, Pony Island's neat premise wears out its welcome well before the end.

Better than: Toren
Not as good as: Analogue: A Hate Story
There are a few good tricks up Pony Island's sleeve: I hope they show up in some better games, too.

GemCraft is, mechanically, an excellently well-crafted tower defense game. And basically nothing else.

There is a plot in GemCraft, allegedly, but even if it wasn't face-palmingly generic - wizard gets screwed over by dark magic; film at 11 - the game simply doesn't make a case for its relevancy. A cartoony tower-defense game like Kingdom Rush may not feel smart, but the way it intertwines its theme with the level-to-level gameplay lends it an air of charming continuity, at least.

GemCraft has technical polish to spare, with a bevy of mechanics to explore (although none seem as effective as straightforward gem upgrades), but no charm at all to speak of. Everything in the game is intentionally flat and uninspiring, so it can get out of the way of raw, calculated tactics.

To die-hard tower defense fans, GemCraft offers expert-level mechanical design and plenty of content to master. To everyone else, though, there's practically nothing to love here. A few minutes of entertainment, at least -- but nothing that makes you wonder what might happen in the next level.

Progress: Wizard level 36, 21 fields explored

I remarked to multiple other E3-observers that I literally did not believe that Nintendo was capable of making a game like the one they just showed. I would be more inclined to believe that it was a bullshot fabrication than a real product of Nintendo EAD's traditional, tightly-scripted assembly lines.

So hearing that an open-world RPG developer is actually doing it makes a lot, lot more sense. Which is good, because now I can actually believe that this refreshingly-free-spirited adventure might really exist.

It was an unclear button prompt that pushed me to finally give up on Remember Me, but this habit is far from the game's biggest problem.

Remember Me focuses too heavily on its boring environment traversal and its repetitive combat. Fights don't take long to become very un-fun; as the camera weaves around like a maniac, combos reset when another enemy gets in the way, and enemy attacks require you to dodge over and over and over and over... the customizable combo system might be cool if encounters actually gave you the chance to fully execute a lengthy combo, but they seem determined to prevent this.

And while I wasn't wild about the one memory remix I got to do, I would have welcomed another one just to break up the monotony of running through slums and dodging "leaper" attacks. At least it would have been more narratively interesting than a voice on a radio shoving story beats down my throat.

Remember Me makes surprisingly poor use of the tools it has for keeping the player engaged. Even given the lack of polish in each of its design components, the haphazardly-assembled experience ends up feeling like less than the sum of its parts.

Better than: Jumper: Griffin's Story
Not as good as: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (NGC, PC, PS2, PS3, XBOX), Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Still can't get over: The nonsense vocabulary. Sensen. Remembrane. Comfortress. Errorist. It all just sounds so... stupid.

Progress: Didn't finish Episode 3.