Ronin lacks the precision of its primary inspirations, Gunpoint and Mark of the Ninja. Gunpoint was able to avoid ambiguities in general by making all combat (and other interactions) instantaneous: You won, or you died; while encounters in Ronin must be split into several "turns" of action to evade and murder numerous enemies. Mark of the Ninja used highly-polished mechanics to very clearly indicate enemy awareness and action ranges; Ronin's tools for these are just not as comprehensive.

What Ronin does have, however, is a great assembly of some of the awesomest parts of those two games. Grapple through a pane of glass to "infiltrate" a building, then slash a guard up with your sword. Flit past incoming gunfire, then leap into a dude to knock him out, setting up the kill.

The demo doesn't show very many gameplay devices - just "hacking" (clicking on) computer terminals for information, and jumping-and-swording combat sessions - but it's enough. Despite not being as polished as some of its contemporaries, Ronin is damned entertaining. I'd be up for more of this.

Progress: Finished the demo.

It's a widely-believed fact that Quentin Tarantino's view of popular American culture was shaped primarily by watching older movies. It's fairly evident that Goichi "Suda51" Suda's view of popular American culture (No More Heroes, Killer7, et al) was shaped primarily by watching Quentin Tarantino movies. And I now believe that Hidetaka "Swery65" Suehiro's view of popular American culture (Deadly Premonition, D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die) was shaped primarily by playing Goichi Suda games.

It's laughably stupid, as should be expected, but past just looking stupid; D4 also plays like an idiot. The demo shows off examples of the game's "investigation" and "action" segments: The former being a poor imitation of Myst-styled adventures, with MacGuffin-y interactive objects at certain combinations of physical position and visual perspective; and the latter being arrangements of quick-time events that sit somewhere around PaRappa the Rapper's territory.

It's yet another example of a game that's essentially a dressed-up visual novel with a nonsense plot, but that aside, it feels like the mechanics were designed to be deliberately bad. A "stamina" meter goes down every time you interact with investigation objects, effectively discouraging you from examining and learning more about the game world. And the QTE action prompts are ambiguous enough that they require paying real attention, while the entertaining stuff - people acrobatically fighting each other under hectic rock music - plays out in the background.

D4 isn't quite a parody of over-shallow action games, but it's getting pretty close.

Progress: played the demo.

The concept of Letter Quest is pretty appealing: Using lexical prowess to strike down fantasy monsters and buy character and equipment upgrades. Even without any meaningful story, this arrangement of mechanics seems like a clear win. But there are a couple fundamental implementation problems that suck the fun out of this game before very long.

The first is that the letter selection - what semi-randomly-chosen letters are available for making words out of - simply isn't good enough. There are only 15 letters to work with, so the statistical likelihood of being able to spell a long word is pretty low overall. And although it's obvious that the game has gone to some effort to prevent e.g. the letters F, U, C, and K from appearing at the same time; it doesn't afford any similar algorithmic smoothing to ensuring that Q always appears with a corresponding U, or that an X can be used in anything other than "axe." I could observe the letter selection giving me more doubles of letters when a level-specific challenge required it, but it wasn't smart enough to realize that there just aren't any words with a double-H. And I found myself noticing "... I have no vowels" on more than a few occasions.

If you can't spell anything with the current selection of letters, your only recourse is to recycle the whole board, which gives the enemy a free hit. And this just becomes more likely in some special enemy- or level-specific scenarios, which make particular letters or letter combinations useless. In short, what the game really should be all about - spelling - is made artificially difficult by the random constraints of the letter pool.

Letter problems aside, Letter Quest's levels are also poorly balanced. The challenge level starts out pretty low, but enemy health and attack power scale up much more quickly than you're able to effectively counter. Upgrades seem unreasonably expensive for the amount of crystal currency you accumulate in normal play; almost as if the game wants you to buy some booster packs or something. In lieu of that option, you'll need to grind out more crystals by replaying the same stages over again. (Not that there is much diversity between stages, anyway.)

Letter Quest starts out fun, but becomes tiresome and irritating after several levels. And the tedious soundtrack doesn't help either.

Progress: Got to level 18, 39/120 stars.

In the less-than-awesome column:

• PC port fuck-up, obviously.
• Batmobile handling takes some getting used to. (I still wouldn't call it "bad.")
• A couple story beats fell flat, for me. One of the game's big reveals was telegraphed too much.
• The collect-more-stuff-to-unlock-extra-endings endings feel phoned-in.
• The Harley Quinn "story pack" (see below).

Everything else about Arkham Knight is a triumph, huge success, et cetera. Hell, even the constant crashes weren't as bad as they could have been thanks to Rocksteady's insane expertise in frequent, convenient checkpoints.

As in Arkham City, what's really praiseworthy about Rocksteady's work is that they didn't settle for making a better version of the same game; they also made a whole new game to go along with it (via the Batmobile, this time). Their loving and slavish attention to detail shows through in old and new parts alike.

Having to turn off V-sync just to get through that mission sequence left a sour taste in my mouth -- but I'll be continuing on anyway, to collect more Riddler trophies (and hit up the Harley Quinn mini-campaign).

EDIT: So I just finished the Harley Quinn extra episode. In like, 20 minutes. This isn't extra content as much as it is a brief advertisement for the real game -- not worth the effort, and certainly not worth shelling out extra money for. Pretty baffling disappointment.

Better than: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham City
Not as good as: It will be in a few months. I hope.
Dear Rocksteady: Consider self-publishing. Toss your other production and technical liabilities aside. You can do it, guys.

Progress: 96%, missing some riddles

I am 26 hours into Arkham Knight. It says I'm 93% done -- which is probably a bit of an overestimate, given the amount of bullshit that the Riddler always leaves around in these games. I beileve that I'm up to, if not the ultimate, the penultimate story mission right now. And I've been there for a half-hour or so, because this level has crashed my PC four times in a row.

Let's step back a bit. The Batmobile was a big gamble, and a big win: Not to spoil too much, but Arkham Knight takes Black Flag's "stealth boating" idea and makes it legitimately good. Batmobile-specific mechanics, and puzzles, and boss fights, are consistently exhilirating. Knight doesn't sacrifice the best parts of classic Arkham, either, with plenty of high-tension beat-em-up and sneak-em-up sequences. And while the Bat's gadgets all appear familiar, they've found some surprising and awesome new uses this time around. There's a great amount of content in Gotham City; traversing and discovering objectives is a pleasure; and the story is paced remarkably well, in a marked improvement from Arkham City.

And yet! And yet. I will never be able to extoll this game's virtues to anyone else without prefacing those virtues with its technical infidelity on PC. Not today; not in the distant future, when it finally runs like a dream; certainly not last week, when I relayed this sentiment to whomever might have been in earshot. In its default state, the PC version of Arkham City looks unfinished. It has the visual quality and runtime performance of a beta-quality product -- which, let's be clear, means feature-complete but not fit for sale. Some of its problems are fixable, but at least in my observation, increase the risk of total system failure. Honestly, it feels like a catch-22: the game is either distractingly ugly, or distractingly crashy. And maybe both, depending upon the available hardware.

There is a lengthy and profound discussion to be had about the state of "AAA" multiplatform games on PC. And there is a whole spiderweb of tangential conversation around that, regarding the shared-memory architectures of game consoles, availability of development talent for proprietary APIs, and the demographics and royalty rates of platform-specific distribution sources. But for my purposes, the easily cherry-picked talking points are that:

• Rocksteady developed the PC versions of Asylum and City, each at a month's delay after the corresponding console versions. Both worked great.
• Origins, the sequel that no one asked for, was developed by whoever-was-available at WB. The PC version was delegated to a third party, a fact which was not widely known at the time. In the 11th hour, it was delayed by a few weeks. It was criticized for its instability (... in addition to uninspired game design).
• Knight, Rocksteady's "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" finale to the Arkham series, had its PC version delegated to the same fly-by-night software house as Origins.

Someone - no, a committee of production personnel - had a clear choice between a delayed, higher-quality PC version from Rocksteady; or a delayed, and/or unsatisfying PC version from anyone else. And they went with the only option that had a track record of disappointment.

The frustratingly sobering truth about Arkham Knight's technical quality is that, most of the time, it's par for the course. Although I've encountered a handful of crash-happy level sequences, they appear to be linked to specific arrangements of lighting, or physics objects; the majority of the game is runtime-stable. The framerate is regularly abominable, though not in a way that's uniquely terrible for PC versions of today's multiplats. If not for the fact that I've been encountering stability issues during a dramatic, poignant part of the game's story? I wouldn't have glogged about it at all. How's that for an indictment of modern PC games.

Arkham Knight is an incredible game, and I look forward to finishing it, whenever I'm drunk enough to suffer through the accompanying BSODs. (Really? I'm not drunk enough right now? I'm fairly drunk right now.) If Rocksteady never makes another game, I will forever remember it as a triumph of open-world, action, puzzle, and story-driven game design. And whatever happens in the coming weeks and months of patches, I will also forever remember it as the game that justified Steam refunds.

Progress: 93%

Did I really not finish Captain Toad? Huh. Just give me a ... yup ... okay. Now we're good.

As modern Mario games are wont to do, Captain Toad does a beautiful job of ramping the challenge up as it goes. But this game's difficulty scale is, uh, skewed downward somewhat. Most of the first two "books" of levels were exceptionally breezy, and by the third's end, there were just a handful of levels that I would call "hard." Nevertheless, for a bite-sized Mario spinoff, the final count of satisfyingly-complex levels was pretty respectable.

(And I can't help but admire the troll move of making the third book 28 levels, over the previous books' 18, for no other reason than to screw with the player's expectations.)

Overall, Treasure Tracker is a fun, mildly exciting, but not revelatory game. What's most fascinating about it is not necessarily mechanical or technical, but the fact that it was made at all - given its small scope compared to typical Nintendo fare - and with, considering its "budget" release, such a high quality bar of level design and presentation. More than anything else, Captain Toad is a promising sign of what Nintendo can do when it scales its ideas down.

Better than: Super Mario 3D Land
Not as good as: Super Mario Galaxy
Obvious next step: a downloadable Captain Toad character in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U

Progress: 192 gems; completed the Sprixie Kingdom, Toad Brigade, and Mummy-Me bonus levels.

Valiant Hearts strikes a weird, pleasing, but weird balance between point-and-click adventures and a more casual visual novel.

With the French and German conflict as its backdrop, Valiant Hearts plots a course through famous battle sites, and immerses itself in real war history. The game doesn't shy away from the horrible realities of war - trench rot, mortar barrages, chemical attacks - and despite its cartoony appearance, paints a very powerful portrait. Each of the game's characters is forced to deal with the desperation and suffering of allies, civilians, and even enemies around them.

What's unfortunate is that these characters feel like stand-ins, placeholders. Although their backstories set the stage for some plot events, none of them show any particular personality, merely reacting to their adverse circumstances. The argument could probably be made that this shadows the shared bravado of war comrades, or the inhumanity of combat; but compared to well-known wartime characters in non-game mediums, the Valiant Hearts team just falls flat.

As for the mechanical, interactive parts of the game: Mostly, I'd have to settle on "okay." Frustratingly obtuse puzzles are rare, but so are satisfyingly deep ones. The majority of gameplay is simply hitting a button while standing in an appointed spot, or running through an obstacle course. It's not a bad game, not at all, but its scenarios lack cleverness and variety.

Valiant Hearts is moving and engaging enough to keep me going, but sometimes feels more like a museum exhibit on World War I than a discrete unit of entertainment.

Progress: Chapter 2, Douaumont Fort

Arkham Knight wastes little time establishing a big-bad, putting Bat-boots on the ground, and settling into its new gimmick, the Batmobile. And with how highly emphasized said -mobile is in the game's opening missions, I soon began to wonder ... where have the Arkham series' stealth, sneak-em-up moments gone? To go through the game's introductory sequences with nary a ventilation shaft or ceiling gargoyle is almost unheard of. What's with the lack of subtlety, Rocksteady?

It took a little bit longer for the answer to become clear. The Batmobile isn't just an ancillary automotive feature: It is the star of this show. Not just a means of combating enemy tanks and chasing thugs' cars through the streets, the Batmobile is also a legitimate means of locomotion (easily rivaling cape-flight, in terms of both speed and awesomeness) as well as a platform for gadget-based puzzle-solving. Just a few moments ago, I was using a powered winch to deform the landscape, jumping off ramps and climbing up walls to reach an objective.

I still anxiously await the moment I'll be able to sneak around a building and stealthily take down thugs from the shadows. But the Batmobile features quickly, and definitively, establish themselves as more than an also-ran; they are fully-fledged game mechanics, fun, satisfying, and substantial. There's got to be at least one vehicular boss-fight waiting in here, and I'm absolutely stoked for it.

Progress: 4%

Particulars is almost immediately reminiscent of Transcripted, in its effort to bring together laboratory science, a personal story, and traditional gameplay. The vibe is different, though -- Transcripted having a dramatically-tense narrative, and arcadey action, at the cost of resorting to pseudoscience to make it all work.

In contrast, Particulars (from what I played) tells a much mellower tale, and makes an effort to rely mechanically on - as well as educate the player in - real particle physics. That's pretty cool.

What isn't as cool is that the gameplay is incredibly shallow and unrewarding. Transcripted, aside from having little to do with science, managed to balance several engaging puzzle and action mechanics on the screen at once. Particulars is disappointingly simple in comparison, revolving almost completely around particle charges (attraction and repulsion) and compatibility (mutual annihilation). And the fidgety nature of the particles' movements frustrated me in the same way that World of Goo and other "physics" games tend to.

I lost interest in Particulars before even finishing the demo. Not because of the low-key storytelling, which I actually felt showed some intrigue after finishing a few levels; but because of the tedious, uninteresting game in the middle of it.

Progress: Didn't finish the demo.

I've been watching No Man's Sky's red-tinted spacefaring trailers for a year and a half, and this one is the first that actually tantalizes me with substantive content.

Exploration is cool and all, but flying around and looking at stuff is an incomplete design. Show me more tense action, and more in the way of goals and objectives, and I might be able to think of No Man's Sky as more than just a pretty, infinitely-generated boredomscape.