Sure, Job Simulator fits firmly in the realm of first-round, relatively-light VR games; years from now, when virtual experiences have become several iterations more complex, it's unlikely that anyone will remember it.

But the genius of Job Simulator is that it's hit upon the most entertaining part of current VR technology, which is simulated throwing. Although it's dressed up in a variety of ways, and the sense of humor helps to sell it, all of the most fun parts of Job Simulator are when you're using the Vive controllers to pick up an object and then toss it -- into a trash can, at a non-player character, or just anywhere in the virtual room.

It's a highly enjoyable application of VR, and has me seriously considering the purchase of hundreds of dollars of equipment just to play it whenever I want.

Pokémon Picross allows you to assemble a party of pocket monsters and take them across a map made up of picross puzzles. It's more than a little absurd.

The Pokémon aspect of the game means that you can use abilities to simplify a puzzle, like adding hints or slowing the game clock. ... Since my personal interest is in solving the puzzles, not shortcutting or cheating them, this has absolutely no value to me. There is a whole world of party management, like in a real Pokémon game, that I never got close to touching because all it would do is dilute the effect of the puzzles.

But I don't care at all about that shortcoming relative to Pokémon Picross's economic problem. It's a free-to-play game, and there is a clear paywall around where I stopped, such that there's no realistic way for me to make progress without buying more "picrites" (in-game currency) for real money. Earning picrites for free is not only slow, but would require me to grindily re-play puzzles I've already solved, which is pretty damned stupid.

I barely even got a chance to get frustrated by the game's energy mechanic, which actually limits the number of tiles I can mark over time. That is, as you consume energy by solving puzzles, you'll reach a point where you have to wait for energy to re-accumulate before solving the next one.

It's entirely possible that, if I were to pay to unlock more levels and un-limit my energy, there could be a thrillingly-competent picross game in here (the game map certainly looks large enough for it). But in terms of overall design, the game assumes that I'm not interested in solving puzzles, which is very distasteful and off-putting.

Better than: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Not as good as: My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess
Nevermind the stupid control scheme: Which forces you to use either the stylus or face buttons, and doesn't allow you to switch without going to the options menu.

Progress: Got to the end of Area 04

Aside from the fact that you have to sit through Miitomo to gain enough internet-points to unlock it - and aside from the excruciatingly slow introductory tutorial - My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess (or henceforth, "Picrozelda") is an astoundingly solid entry in Picross.

For one thing, it has an impressive number of puzzles, and they ramp up in complexity pretty rapidly. The 45 normal puzzles get up to 20x15 in size, which is more than Picross e managed.

What's that? "Normal?" Yuuuup: There are another 45 "Mega Picross" puzzles, which add a whole new mechanic to the game. In these puzzles, two adjacent rows or columns will sometimes have a grouped clue, indicating e.g. that there is a contiguous group of 5 blocks spanning two columns.

At first, this mechanic felt a little wacky (not unlike the quirks of SquareCells), but Picrozelda ramps up the complexity of this system gradually enough that you can learn its ins and outs -- what hints can be divined from what information, gradually and comprehensively. It works. And it's pretty cool.

There is even a third kind of puzzle, deemed "Micross," which is a bunch of 10x10 ("micro"-sized) puzzles grouped together to form one large image. The novelty wears off fast, but hey, more puzzles.

Beyond all that, what I really consider my favorite part of Picrozelda is that it has a versatile set of hint and correction options. I was able to configure it such that I could make wrong marks if I wanted, since my stylus fingers slip all the time. And there are more options in here for additional hints if you don't feel up for some real adult picross just yet. Rather than assuming everyone will play the same way, having the options feels very sophisticated.

Picrozelda is an admirable and satisfying entry in the ever-growing collection of Jupiter-developed Picross games.

Better than: Picross e, SquareCells
Not as good as: Paint it Back
Also much better than: Pokémon Picross, but stay tuned for that.

Playing the first Uncharted again on PS4 - more poignantly, playing it again after Drake's second and third outings - it's really hard to ignore its flaws. The sloppy gunplay, and that there's so much of it, with wave after wave of faceless militia inconveniently interrupting the storytelling--

Oh, did I already complain about this? Huh.

Yeah, it's still just bad. (Here's hoping for that film adaptation.)

Progress: Somewhere in the stupid jungle. Who can tell.

Hyper Light Drifer is pretty challenging. Part of that challenge is from some good old-fashioned action game design: Learning enemy attack patterns, dodging and striking judiciously, and being paranoid about your surroundings. With a few exceptions so far, I haven't been terribly inconvenienced by death, so I'm feeling encouraged to try failed encounters again (and again, and again) to truly figure them out.

Unfortunately, another part of the game's challenge is that the controls simply don't feel responsive enough. I have to assume that this is at least slightly due to the somewhat-bullshitty GameMaker engine underpinning it; but whatever the reason, Hyper Light Drifter demands an amount of precision that the controls feel inadequate for. Trying to pull off a chained multi-dash is ... infuriating.

That aside, I am having fun exploring the game world, slowly making my way toward bosses - which I've yet to fight - and finding hidden pickups for ability upgrades. It's a fairly hands-off, unguided experience, feeling more like the NES Zelda than any of its more narratively-iterative sequels. (While there seems to be a story in Hyper Light Drifter, with shades of post-apocalypse, cyberpunk, and Ghibli inspiration, I still have no clue what's really going on.)

Progress: found some triangles?

It would be easy to describe Aviary Attorney as Phoenix Wright with birds, instead. But it's not just an investigation-and-trial game about bird law -- Aviary Attorney's unique aesthetic incorporates the setting of revolutionary France, and animal puns, into an imaginative and greatly amusing tale. It's smart, funny, and almost entirely logical, despite ... birds.

The downside is that it's pretty short. You should be able to get to one of the game's three endings in about 3 hours. And the other two endings are worth seeing, but don't add much to that running length.

Aviary Attorney is super-fun while it lasts.

Better than: Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth
Not as good as: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies (or any other full-length Phoenix Wright adventure)
I would happily give these guys more money: For more Ace Attorney clones.

Well-- actually, what I expected based on the campaign was a little joke game with some satirical nods to sandboxes like Skyrim and GTA 5. But that expectation faded once Bear Simulator's campaign updates indicated that the developer was trying to ... make a real game, I guess.

And the result is, aside from being fairly un-funny, just a poor game in general. Even disregarding its graphical infidelities (distracting pop-in and jagged terrain, for example), the game's mechanics and stats are poorly explained, and trying to do something as simple as bear-swipe a duck is bafflingly frustrating.

Bear Simulator could have settled for being a mild exploration-based game, at least, but the map's nooks and crannies tend to be unsatisfyingly empty. I felt like a chump after I scaled a hill and crossed a river using a makeshift log bridge, then found absolutely nothing on the other side.

I don't regret burning a few dollars on the campaign for my own amusement. But - based on the brief time I spent with it so far - I believe I would regret trying to extract more amusement from the finished product.

Progress: Killed by a bat.

Circling back after Arkham City and Knight, there are some parts of Batman: Arkham Asylum that show their age a little. Some maneuvering and takedown tactics don't exist yet, and the combat controls aren't quite as solid as they became in the sequels.

But it's still a damned fine game today, and I'd say it still does two things better than its followers did: having a really moody, self-contained storyline; and not spraying an absurd amount of The Riddler's bullshit all over the map.

Yeah, it holds up pretty well.

The Wolf Among Us succeeds due to the strength of its overall story, and especially of its titular character -- despite the specter of Telltale's continual writing blunders.

It's the same shit I'll complain about all day re: Mass Effect: dialog choices that don't say what they sounded like, choices that don't match the tone of the conversation (a'la L.A. Noire), and scenarios that just don't have the choice you really wanted to pick. These issues cut deep in a game that's completely story-driven.

(There's also the irritatingly-unnecessary pairing of "Next time on..." and "Previously on..." teaser/recap scenes, which - when playing the game's episodes in sequence - are a waste of time at best, and can at worst spoil an upcoming story reveal. These cinematics simply shouldn't exist.)

But, the good news about Wolf is that these gaffes are actually fairly rare. And I think the situation is helped quite a bit by the strong and engaging characterization of Fables. With a few notable exceptions, this story's personalities shine in both the words they're saying and the voice actors saying them. And it's pleasantly fitting that Bigby Wolf himself is an exceptionally strong and enthralling character.

It's easier to buy limited dialog options, and understand the subtext of what they mean, when the game's cast is so clearly articulated and consistently developed.

The majority of the game's "meat" is taken up by dialog, but a relatively-close second is the quick-time action, which is ... okay. If you don't play a lot of Telltale games, the symbolic meaning of the prompts (like where to move the mouse, or when to press vs. hold a button) has a slight learning curve. But it becomes inoffensive rather quickly, and there are some scenes where it actually feels satisfying to dodge and strike with the right timing.

It feels weird saying this, but it's a shame that there weren't a couple more point-and-click investigation scenes. While these feel like a chore in some other adventure games, they work incredibly well here, since Bigby is actually acting as a detective and uncovering clues to further the case.

The Wolf Among Us is still not what I'd call a top-tier story-driven game, but it's easily better than most of its contemporaries. The premise is legitimately interesting, the characterization is usually great, and it overall fits its interactive and scripted content together quite well.

Better than: other Telltale games
Not as good as: the Ace Attorney games
But as long as I'm listing minor gripes: the "will remember this" prompts are just ... pointless distractions. I could lose those.

For the first 20 minutes or so, all I wanted to do was ignore Murdered: Soul Suspect's incredibly ham-fisted narration. But I couldn't! The game's introduction, at least, is painfully cutscene-heavy, and written with all the elegance and subtlety of an Ancient Psychic Tandem War Elephant. Yes, let's jump-cut between a bunch of three-second flashbacks in the protagonist's life that happen to directly establish his personality and his relevant relationships to other characters. And then add some more non-interactive bits that literally reiterate the game's plot, and mandatory dialog sessions that serve as nothing more than a dressed-up text tutorial.

The game's sense of storytelling is an ironic interpretation of the "show, don't tell" principle. Just because the rigorously-methodical writing is "shown" in a cutscene doesn't ... ugh. It's not good.

Oh, but then the gameplay actually started. And I felt like I wasn't missing much. Walking around looking for clue signposts, hiding from demons (Solid Snake-style), and collecting collectibles that you have no reason to care about.

Murdered doesn't just lean heavily on its poorly-told story, it has thoroughly underwhelming game mechanics to boot. I can give it the benefit of the doubt and believe that, as the story proceeds, it might become less painful to sit through. But the game itself is mundane almost as soon as it starts.

Progress: Didn't even make it to the 4th floor.