With how hard and fast the hype train for Phantom Pain has been running, I'm glad I finally tried out the Ground Zeroes "demo," first; saves me some consternation about whether an open-world Metal Gear Solid would finally do it for me. (It doesn't.)

Contiguous open-endedness is a big plus for me, and unlike - say - Hitman, Ground Zeroes does a lot to avoid strict and obtuse punishment for being detected; if I fuck up and get spotted, running to cover is almost always an option. But the gunplay is unsatisfying enough to make it clear that this is not the way Kojima wants you to play. And unfortunately, when you're focused on sneaking around, large open maps become easy to get completely lost in; I spent most of my playing time slowly covering the same ground, over and over, unable to find the next mission objective.

And of course, then there are the overwrought cutscenes. Ground Zeroes is not a long "game" (having only one primary mission), and the longest part of it was when I was wandering aimlessly looking for the final objective -- but the second longest part was the interminable stream of ending cinematics. Many modern action games are rightly criticized for reducing high-octane story sequences to barely-interactive quick time events, but at least that's better than just sitting and watching your playable character do a bunch of cool shit. Every time the camera panned behind Snake during the ending battle, I hoped I would be able to control it, and my hopes were dashed each time.

I can see the appeal, I guess. Metal Gear Solid feels like it's become the video game version of Tom Clancy-style military nerddom. If you're into the realistic hardware and the fantastical-but-politically-grounded plot, then, great. I'm not, and the gameplay isn't enough to carry itself for me.

Valiant Hearts really feels like it does "good enough" on all fronts. Despite occasional frustrations with pixel-hunting or unclear objectives, the adventure-style gameplay is solid and engaging. Despite the relatively generic characters, they manage to eke out some emotional moments toward the end. And despite both of the aforementioned angles, the game also manages to present powerful and educational insights into what it was like to live during - or through - World War I.

It isn't a revolutionary triumph, but Valiant Hearts accomplishes an admirable amount for what it is.

Better than: Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck's Revenge
Not as good as: Broken Age (Chapter 1, anyway)
If it helps, might be worth mentioning: That there are a handful of pseudo-runner, obstacle-dodging stages set to era-appropriate war and marching music.

Progress: Completed the story, missing some collectibles.

Arkham Knight looks gorgeous running at 60 frames per second. It's a shame that the game doesn't work at that speed.

But aside from the easy target of Arkham Knight's technical infidelity - which, by the way: I had to restart the Riddler boss fight because he got stuck in an AI loop - it's just as disappointing that the game's most lackluster sidequest is also its largest and most time-consuming. The Riddler's collectible bullshit accounts for almost half of my total playing time.

While I can admire the cleverness of many of the Riddler's puzzles, the sheer amount of them makes dealing with him more tedious and annoying than anything. Which, I guess, actually fits The Riddler's character rather well.

Progress: 100%

I'll always remember Iwata-san as an engineer-at-heart who helped bring joy to the world.

As much as I enjoy getting yelled at by Dr. Venture - and, honestly, it's way more than I expected to - The Magic Circle really failed to bring me around. It feels more than a little too "meta" when a game lampooning incomplete game design has, itself, highly linearized and stilted storytelling content. The fiction behind TMC's fictional production process has some cool mystery to it at first, but once some of its beans start to get spilled, the mystique really wears off.

The Magic Circle's gameplay mechanics are not nuanced enough to make a game out of; really, this feels like a humorous story told semi-interactively. And within the bounds of the burgeoning "walking simulator" genre, what makes or breaks this kind of storytelling is how interesting the world is. Gone Home, from its opening moment, used ambient drama and detailed world design to make you want to know what it was about. What I played of The Magic Circle reminded me more of Dear Esther, where the environment you walk around in exists purely for its own sake; to fill time inbetween scripted story beats.

That this story is a well-written satire of an absurd creative process is ... ironic? I think? But as in Matt Hazard, there's an important lesson here about how easy it is to make fun of poor development practices, versus how hard it is to execute good development practices.

Maybe I'm missing some critical information; but Steam reviews suggest that the full game is about four hours long, so if the first 10-15% of that isn't demonstrative then I would be somewhat less than impressed anyway.

Progress: About 30 minutes into the demo.

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%