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.

This preview really threatens to bring back the incredible feeling of using Star Fox 64's awesome vehicles and upgrades for the first time.

I'd given up all hope of another Four Swords. Really. I didn't believe it would happen again.

As for three swords, hey -- I'll settle for it.

The last Transformers game I played failed to impress me. It was okay, I guess. Actually, now that I'm looking back, I very specifically said that I preferred Vanquish's brand of high-octane robotic action.

So if the guys who made Vanquish want to make a crazy fighting transforming robot game of their own, then, yeah. I could get pretty interested in that.

And when did Halo start having Republic Commando-style team-coordination tactics? Maybe I've missed more of this series than I thought.

During the first couple minutes of this crazy footage, all I could think about was how frustrating playing as Nathan Drake usually is, i.e., that the guy playing the shootout couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. Of course, when your core gameplay is suboptimal to control and poorly balanced, the natural thing to do is add whole-new mechanics like driving a truck through a hilly village. I shudder to think of the probable instantaneous mission-failures when hitting a pedestrian, or when not presciently making the correct turn down a blind dirt alley.

But it's all moot anyway. I'm buying and playing this for the Sully-Drake banter. Naughty Dog could replace the gameplay sequences with a bunch of God of War quick-time events and I'd still suffer through it.

As surprising as it was to see anything about The Last Guardian, let alone that it still resembles what was shown six years ago, let further alone that there's a formal release date (which, you know, I'll still reserve some doubt for); what astonishes me the most about this trailer is that, between the weird visual effects and visibly-awkward controls, it legitimately looks like the same kind of game that Ueda-san was making in 2001.

Fallout 3 and New Vegas failed to tickle my fancy -- maybe because I'd played Skyrim first, and was spoiled by character animations that didn't look completely fucking retarded. But this world-building, personal-customization, electrical-wiring stuff? Now they've got me interested.

Other than neglecting the Glog, what have I been doing since January? Not a whole lot of note (at least not yet). But inbetween a regrettable World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor relapse and being surprisingly unengaged by The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D, I did manage to sink a good number of hours into GTAV, again.

As I told a buddy who asked if it was worth buying and playing again on PC, in a word, "yes." And in some more words: Whereas the old-gen version of the game was massively enjoyable in spite of insane loading times, a shitty framerate, and a disappointing display resolution; this time around, there are no sacrifices to make. (Well, as long as you have the VRAM for high-quality textures.) This is the version of Grand Theft Auto that was meant to be, not just since the original release of Five, but since Four tried to make the GTA world feel like a real, tactile thing.

That having been said, in my second go-around I was bothered more by the lackluster story pace than I expected to be. The set pieces are fantastic, of course, but there is a great and persistent sense that the spaces inbetween them were cut to shreds and left mostly aside in the garbage bin. While Michael, Trevor, and Franklin are all fun characters, their development arcs simply aren't built as well as Nico's. Comparable to Luis's, if I'm thinking critically about it.

Beyond and after the main storyline, though, it certainly feels great to tackle odd jobs for crazy strangers while driving through the city so fast that oncoming traffic literally never knows what hit it.

Progress: 79.7%