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

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.