A few hours in, AC Rogue's protagonist Shay picks up a saucy new catchphrase: "I make my own luck." And he keeps. On. Saying it. Dude won't shut up about how he's manifesting his own destiny, like he's a Saturday morning cartoon character or something.

... So, that aside. I came into Rogue expecting more of the same buckle-swashing from Black Flag, and was pleasantly surprised -- although not at first. Rogue's first hour or two contains some of the worst mission design in any modern game, some guy telling you to sail to some place, so that another guy there can tell you to sail to another place. But it does pick up, and in addition to a wide open sea and plenty of destinations, there are the expected story-driven stalking and assassin-ing and et cetera-ing.

Rogue, iteratively, adds some refreshing new (and old) twists to the Black Flag formula. In-city enemy strongholds are back, waiting to be infiltrated and overthrown. A new aspect of Eagle Vision allows Shay to track hidden assassins, and uh, counter-assassin them. Uh... grenade launcher, which works like the bombs from Revelations, but with launching.

There is even a good story in Shay, although the game does a pretty shoddy job of telling it. Whereas Edward Kenway was a selfish antihero who often succeeded despite himself, Shay is a real idealist, who just wants to do right by the world -- and whose idealism, unfortunately (and somewhat transparently), makes him vulnerable. But this sentiment comes through haphazardly in the game's storytelling, as if swaths of character-building dialog were cut from the game before it was released. Shay consequently comes across in cutscenes as more emotionally volatile than he really seems like he should be.

Of course, this is really just more of the same for the Creed. And that sentiment, in general, is what brings Rogue down the most; the weight of the franchise's legacy is becoming very obviously cumbersome. Climbing towers to "synchronize" the map is boring and tired. The glowing collectibles strewn over rooftops and tree branches are bothersome distractions. The naval warfare time-management minigame is unspeakably dull.

And I mean, come on. The network television-caliber modern-day plot is so, goddamned, convoluted and stupid. What makes it worse is that Ubisoft continues to waste text and voice acting on skippable backstory bits, for dozens of utterly disposable characters. I wouldn't be put out in the least if a future Assassin's Creed tells you that it was all a dream, or some matrix-within-a-matrix inception shit.

Progress: 45%

In case there was any uncertainty about the kind of game that TIS-100 is: I've started replaying SpaceChem so that I can feel smart again.

Progress: Alkonost - No Thanks Necessary

Even more so than playing Super Smash Bros. again, this musically-splendid trailer really makes me want to revisit FF7. Where that remake at, guys?

Infinifactory is more than just SpaceChem in 3D -- it also has gravity.

I mean, it's not fair to call Infinifactory more of the same from Zachtronics. It's a remarkably polished approach to three-dimensional time-based assembly-line puzzles, and even has some pleasant lore-building in the form of Half-Life-style ambient scenes.

But at the same time, it's impossible to deny Infinifactory's pedigree ... and that's a very good thing. Unlike so many other physics-based puzzle games, it doesn't feel like a total crapshoot of pixel-twitch aiming and realtime actions; this is visibly and repeatably deterministic, just like a puzzle game is supposed to be.

I can't wait to come back to this guy when I have more time. Maybe after I finally give up on TIS-100.

Progress: Resource Site 526.81

It's no surprise that Zachtronics is capable of making a puzzle game that makes me question my own intelligence. I spent hours staring at empty playfields in SpaceChem trying to conquer that game's pantheon of puzzles. TIS-100, though. Man.

It doesn't help that TIS-100 subverts so many of my mental models for problem solving. SpaceChem could get a little wacky because of how it played with the concept of concurrency management in programming -- but TIS-100 feels like working on a broken computer. Having such a limited number of registers on each CPU, and a limited variety of instructions for dealing with them, is still difficult for me to wrap my head around.

Beyond that, though, this is just an especially challenging game. TIS wastes little time ramping up its implicit concepts - forcing you into understanding techniques to propagate signals, store temporary data, and nest loops - and throwing down really astonishingly complex problems. At least, complex in its world of limited instructions and registers.

I love figuring out how to accomplish simple logical tasks in TIS, almost as much as I love posting better optimization scores than my Steam friends. But I also hate looking at a problem set that would be so simple to solve with a real CPU, only to realize how much work it will be to re-learn in the TIS language.

It's a paradox.

Progress: Repaired 17 nodes

Back in the StarCraft and Brood War days, the backstory barely intruded into the game at all, and it's hard not to miss that here. The narrative between missions in [Heart of the Swarm], more often than not, feels like wasteful filler.

Has it really been... huh, yeah, almost three years. And as for Legacy of the Void, or at least its "Whispers of Oblivion" mini-campaign preview, it looks like more of the same.

Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm turned Zeratul into a complete MacGuffin, appearing out of thin air to tease Raynor about the xel'naga or the hybrid threat, and - contrary to the other characters' flat personalities - never presenting any personality at all. If Legacy of the Void is to be his campaign, I dread a story that isn't just embarrassing, but outright dull.

But that probably won't stop me from playing it. Even though the mini-campaign's three missions didn't diverge very much from established StarCraft campaign mechanics (going so far as to combine a small base-building mission with an infiltrate-the-laboratory mission). It's still good fun. And if I can take out narrative enemies by massing Void Rays like an asshole, then, hell yeah.

Progress: Finished the Whispers of Oblivion prologue.

This has been "in the works" (barely) for a while, but I've finally transitioned the Glog to a fully static site. I'm now using the Hugo site generator, with a personal modification of the Greyshade theme, to render and serve Glog pages completely statically.

Why the move away from WordPress? Well, aside from the ever-present risk of shitty PHP exploits, I just got sick of running software upgrades on the site, and its plugins, that required me to re-apply Glog customizations. Now I can write a post in my text editor, hit a button to publish it online, and never have to worry about the site again until I decide that I want to.

Editing my Hugo theme is a lot easier than screwing around with a PHP theme in WordPress, too, although it still has the same basic problem of not making it very clear what templates/functions live in the core framework vs. what lives in the theme customizations.

(I had begun a plan to write my own static site generator, instead of using something pre-baked like Hugo, but when I realized that I'd forgotten to implement list/archive pages ... I gave up. Maybe I'll try again in another two years.)

All the old content should be here, and all old posts should even be accessible at their original URLs. Paths for some game-specific post lists have changed, though, due to differences between how Hugo and WordPress make URL-safe strings.

Of course, as a fully static site, there is no longer any such thing as a comment or user account here. Even better!

There are some great things that Grey Goo does really well, like well-differentiated units, interesting mission objectives, an intense soundtrack, and an aesthetically-strong campaign, with gorgeous cinematics and believable storytelling (at least as far as I saw). Unfortunately it stumbles on some really fundamental stuff that ruins the game, even after I feel like I should "get" it.

It's not just that the basic hub-and-spoke building mechanic is unintuitive; it is, but that's not the whole story. Even after I learned that I had to keep factory F connected to hub H and attachments A1 and A2 also connected to hub H in order to build units X and Y with factory F -- maintaining that mess was a chore. Having to remember which factories can build which units is a silly problem to have, when other games will simply have different buildings for different unit types.

But even that wasn't bad enough to make me quit the game in frustration. The problem I couldn't take any more of was hub placement.

Different sizes of hub buildings can have different numbers/arrangements of other buildings connected to them, and the way in which the map allows or disallows particular connection positions is absolute fucking voodoo. There appears to be an effect from terrain height, as implied by grass density on the map?, but not all the time. And although you can rotate a hub while placing it, you can't rotate it until after a location has been picked -- so, if none of the possible rotations work out, you have to start at a new pixel-perfect location with the default rotation, and try everything all over again. I wasted minutes at a time trying to place a medium hub such that it could actually use all four of its possible connections, and still failed most of the time.

When the hardest thing about a strategy game is figuring out where and how to place the most basic structure, then the game is wrong.

Progress: Gave up in mission 3.

A well-traveled gamer might observe CastleStorm's hodge-podge of numerous mechanics and inspirations, and suspect that much of the game is undercooked. This suspicion would be pretty accurate. But to end the story there would be a disservice to what the game does right.

CastleStorm is primarily a 2D, side-scrolling real-time strategy game with three interwoven threads of gameplay. One is a Swords & Soldiers-style marching war, where units spawned by the player march up against units spawned by the enemy -- with different unit types having different strengths and weaknesses. Archers can deal considerable damage but are easy to dispatch, paladins are strong but slow, et cetera. The goal of these troops is to march into the enemy's castle, steal their flag, and take it back to the player's castle.

These units can't be controlled directly once they're spawned; but another thread to the game is temporarily spawning and controlling the "hero unit," a super-strong leader who can move and sword-swing and arrow-shoot on-demand. While the hero unit can't pick up the enemy flag, he can handily clear the way for ground troops.

The third gameplay thread - frankly, the interesting one - is siege weaponry. From the invincible turret at the front of the player's castle, various projectiles can be aimed either at enemy troops or at the enemy castle. Castle damage can cripple the enemy by destroying unit-producing facilities, or the game can be won by obliterating the enemy castle altogether.

So, castle destruction is clearly an awesome thing. And when it works, it works well. But CastleStorm trips over itself a few times on the way to delivering this fine, castle-exploding experience.

Inbetween levels of the campaign, units and weapons can be upgraded (using money-points earned in the levels themselves). There are too many things to upgrade, and the game occasionally - especially in earlier levels - restricts the use of troops, or the hero, or the turret; resulting in many hard-earned upgrades going to waste. As the campaign proceeds, more troop and weapon types are unlocked, making some upgraded units obsolete. But there's no way to recover the money that's already been spent on old units.

Another between-levels activity is building the castle, which could have been a quaint nicety but instead feels like a boondoggle of a feature. Castle customization is unavoidable -- unit spawners, and gameplay bonus rooms, must be placed in the castle in order to have any effect. But the UI for selecting and placing rooms is an irritating mess. Moving rooms is the worst, since it is likely to require deleting other rooms in order to make space, only to re-create them in some new arrangement.

It's disappointing that the full-blown castle designer is required at all, since there are really only two requirements for any given castle:

• To include the rooms needed for selected units and bonuses;
• And to shield them from siege attacks by placing other rooms in front.

The option for cosmetic castle arrangement is ... neat, I guess, but using it to add a new room to a standard castle design feels like loading up Microsoft Office just to type a sentence.

And there are enough other miscellaneous aggravations about the gameplay - friendly fire damage from the turret, wonky camera zoom behavior, being unable to launch new attacks while waiting for a bomb to explode - that it's hard to be satisfied overall with CastleStorm. From concept to execution, much of the game is simply lacking in release-quality polish.

And yet! CastleStorm ultimately succeeds in being more than just the sum of its parts, thanks somewhat to the smart design of its campaign levels. Level objectives are mixed up with a healthy amount of variety, and most levels are short enough to keep the sequence of unlocking and upgrading moving along at a brisk pace. There is even a bit of humor in the campaign's storytelling, although the narrative is just barely deep enough to explain why two castles are fighting each other.

That's why, despite my misgivings toward CastleStorm, my "hey let's try this out" first sitting with the game turned into a 3+ hour journey through the entire main campaign. CastleStorm nails the addictive qualities it needs to keep going, regardless of its other annoyances.

That having been said, I don't think I will be coming back to it for the additional campaigns. At this point I feel like I have wrung all I am likely to enjoy (and then some) out of CastleStorm.

Better than: Swords & Soldiers
Not as good as: Kingdom Rush
Would seriously have enjoyed it much more: If castle room placement was replaced with a list of checkboxes.

Progress: Completed the first campaign on Normal.

Oceanhorn is certainly a Zelda clone -- there's no doubt about that. But it's not quite the clone you might assume at first glance. While Oceanhorn immediately evokes the design and aesthetics of Wind Waker, it actually plays out much more like Link's Awakening with an island-hopping twist.

The story is eerie and curious (up until the explanation-heavy ending). The mechanics are two-dimensional, plus some terrain elevation. You can equip one item at a time -- one of which allows you to jump, basically. Not to mention heart containers, a magic meter, small keys and boss keys, sword and shield, yadda yadda yadda. Oceanhorn does a really admirable job of emulating some of the best parts of a Zelda game, even if it's fairly short by comparison.

Which makes it both baffling and disappointing when Oceanhorn does something really, really wrong. Like extremely heavy auto-aim on ranged items, making it practically impossible to target the right thing in tight quarters. Or bombable walls and obstacles that have no visual indication they're bombable, other than being in a suspicious dead end. Or the great sea, on which you merely choose your island destination and play a brief on-rails shooting game to sail there.

But Oceanhorn's highest crimes are, unfortunately, technical. I suffered very frequent graphical glitches, with terrain and enemies and the protagonist disappearing altogether, requiring me to flip switches in the graphics options just to reset rendering state. The game is capable of switching so rapidly between beautiful and unplayable, it's just ... frustrating. And while there were only a couple of boss fights where the over-the-shoulder camera (as opposed to its normal isometric 3/4 view) got stuck in the map, it got stuck a lot.

Oceanhorn is a great idea, with some cool execution, tragically marred by some glaring faults. What it does well is worth playing, but not really worth suffering through the entire game for.

Better than: Evoland (particularly the Zelda-like parts of Evoland)
Not as good as: Ittle Dew
Hard to say between this and: Anodyne

Progress: Completed the story, 79% items