The Smash Bros. 3DS demo has impressed me with its playability, and its in-game performance is pretty damned admirable. But more than that, playing it has reinforced my decision to skip the portable version, and just hold out for Super Smash Bros. for Wii U.

As smooth and basically fun as fighting on this small screen is, it's still small. I miss the big-screen spectacle and bombast. I miss room-filling arenas, and bodies being hurled out of the TV. I'm missing a console version, pure and simple.

I'm also a little bit worried about my circle pad. It doesn't take many smash attacks to realize that this hardware was clearly not designed to be jerked around. A real joystick should feel considerably less worrisome.

... one last thing. The title. Really? We're just, gonna, glom the platform name onto the series label now? At least it distinguishes the "for Nintendo 3DS" version from the "for Wii U" version, I guess -- at the cost of making any future Virtual Console releases of legacy Smash versions even more awkward. (Not like anyone's still paying attention to Virtual Console anyway, right?)

Progress: Played each of the demo's five characters.

It can't really be a good thing that, more than once during my brief attempt at The 39 Steps, I considered reading the book instead.*

My experiences in the "visual novel" genre have been pretty diverse, ranging from a detective-style literary investigation, to riddle- and puzzle-filled interactive adventures, to a meta-narrative that plays with the idea of a story itself. But The 39 Steps isn't much like any of those -- disappointingly, it's most like ... a book. The story is totally linear, with no semblance of choice, except in the very minor cases of choosing to read a supplemental note or skip it. And there isn't any significant interactivity to it, either; the closest it comes to being a "game" is in some poorly-advised gesture-based quick-time-events.

Even as a click-through movie (which I guess would make it a slideshow), The 39 Steps is of an overall low quality. Most scenes aren't animated at all, or only in the barest of senses. The visual styles are all over the place, haphazardly switching between painted realism, pop art, and ... mock-propagandistic motion comic? And the voice acting is bad. Not the worst I've ever heard, but just bad; especially in a scene I played where two characters spoke to one another, but their voice actors didn't seem to be aware of each other at all.

There are some slightly-redeeming qualities here, such as the occasionally immersive environments and sound effects; an early point in the story really evoked the sense of walking along a rainy London street. But these victories are too inconsistent and infrequent to save the whole experience.

The plot seems like it might be interesting on its own, but not worth slogging through this slow, uninspired presentation for.

(* I did end up reading the Wikipedia summary, although it unfortunately isn't very well-written.)

Progress: Finished the first four "events" (chapters).

Sudoku, Picross, Boggle. Those seem like the most direct ingredients of Lexica, where the crossword-like (but hint-less) playing field must be filled with pre-supplied letters to form words. It's a clever idea, but it isn't really maintaining my interest.

My problem with Lexica is that it doesn't have much lexicographic direction (like crossword hints), nor does it have logically-complete constraints (like Picross); just the meticulous examination of available letters. Ultimately the game plays more like a syllabic Sudoku than anything else, trying to complete short words or word fragments based on vowel and consonant combinations. This seems like it would work better with pen and paper - taking notes on combinatorial options - but regardless of that, it's pretty tedious.

And even the largest game board is only six by six letters, which keeps it feasible, but means that the potential payoff for completing a word stays pretty low. At least Picross 3D had some low-detail animated imagery for solved puzzles. Lexica has all the production value of an in-flight magazine.

It's a cool concept, and I enjoyed doing a few puzzles, but I can't imagine sticking around for all 288 of them.

Progress: Finished 18 Easy puzzles.

Toki Tori 2+ isn't just a fun puzzle-adventure, it also has a bunch of content-enhancing collectibles and achievements, that encourage even more exploration of its mystical, magical game world.

Yeah, I consulted some video and text guides to collect the final wings and stuff. So what? Still fun.

Progress: Got all the collectible things.

Toki Tori 2 (including its enhanced "+" version) stretches the definition of "sequel." It could be called an open-world Toki Tori, or a puzzle-centric Super Metroid, or even a side-scrolling Myst, but none of those would quite do the game justice. Toki Tori 2 takes the basic structure of a platform-puzzle game and flips it on its head: instead of a collection of discrete stages, all the game's puzzles are represented in one continuous, interconnected world map.

There is no in-game HUD, and there aren't any tutorials; the game takes a Super Mario Bros. approach to instruction, teaching the player its controls and mechanics by introducing them in isolated contexts with forced challenges. How to climb a ledge? -- whistle to attract a crab in a box! How to get across a chasm? -- stomp to make a frog belch out a floating bubble! Even the goal of the game is left initially ambiguous, which - although I still have a complaint about, below - drives the player to explore the map just for explorations' sake.

And the game is absolutely beautiful to behold. Its art style is magnificently friendly and evocative of bright, colorful cartoons. Its graphical fidelity is some of the best in the business, featuring high-resolution imagery, fluid animation, and eye-catching lighting and water effects. Not to mention, the sound design is also top-notch, especially its effective ambient sound -- when sitting idle, birds will chirp, and creatures will growl and squeak, not just as background noise but as actual in-game elements.

The sum of these parts - a free-flowing world, the absence of intrusive UI, and gorgeous graphics - makes Toki Tori 2 an incredibly immersive and engaging experience. It doesn't even feel like a video game, although it certainly is one, with concrete puzzle mechanics and clever level design. Even its most difficult puzzle scenarios feel less like like "puzzles" and more like integrated components of a larger, living game world.

All that being said, there are some points where I would say that Toki Tori 2 errs a little too much on the side of "simple" design. I think the game would be a lot better served if it had:

• A clearer indication of how to fast-travel, since backtracking (and re-solving puzzles) is unreasonable until discovering this.
• A clear pointer to the game's first major goal, from the beginning. The rest of the game's critical path is clear after this point, so not illuminating the first part just seems awkward.
• A rewind feature - like the first Toki Tori had - to soften the blow of screwing up a late step in a complex puzzle.
• An integrated hint system, since the game's structure (and lack of named landmarks) makes it very difficult to find help for a specific puzzle.

But these occasionally-confusing shortcomings are insignificant in the face of the fresh and fascinating world that Toki Tori 2 pulls off. It's challenging, creative, fun, and refreshing. It's an experience unlike anything I've played before.

Better than: Toki Tori (2008), Trine 2
Not as good as: for lack of a better comparison, Super Mario Galaxy 2
Focusing on an amazing aesthetic was definitely a good decision: since some puzzles require extended staring contests with the screen.

Progress: Found the five frogs, collecting the last few golden wings.

Snapshot makes a great first impression. Its core mechanic is an interesting one: photographing special objects will "capture" them into a camera, and these photos can be placed back on top of the level to put said objects in new positions. Photograph a block to get it out of the way, then place it next to a cliff to help jump up. Photograph a door in an unreachable location, so it can be moved to a reachable one. Photograph an elephant to move it under a platform, so as to trampoline-jump on its back (as per standard elephant procedure). There are a ton of cool quirks here, from surfaces that restrict photography and must be disabled, to objects that must be observed from the right "angle" - moving the camera perspective - to capture.

But toward the end of the game's first chapter, its difficulty pacing and mechanical balance start to go awry. It rapidly develops a wicked slant toward execution, rather than deduction. Snapshot becomes pretty much the inverse of Offspring Fling -- figuring out the puzzles isn't too hard, but perfectly placing objects and timing jumps becomes the game's real challenge.

Yeah, I am playing the "too hard" card. But more than Snapshot's difficulty, its lack of mercy has turned me off of it. It's far too easy to lose progress (by e.g. dropping something down a pit) just from placing an object incorrectly. Levels become large enough that having to retry, whether from death or from an item getting stuck in the wrong place, is a serious inconvenience. The game does a poor job of opening multiple playable levels at once; to put a point on this, I'm stuck in a single frustrating stage, and the rest of the game is blocked behind it. I would gladly try to build up my skills on other levels before revisiting this one... but I can't.

Snapshot was really inventive and fun, for the first chapter. But now that I'm stuck in a level that's just too hard for me, I can't help but resent the rest of the game for it.

Better than: Depict1, up until I hit the wall
Not as good as: Offspring Fling!
At least: the graphics and soundtrack are pretty good.

Progress: Stuck in part 2 of Chapter 2, Level 1 "Rolling Snow"

It recently occurred to me that I must be getting close to ten-or-so years since my first "glog post." And I was sort of right, in the sense that it is close -- but actually getting further away, now. My first post turned 10 years old on January 7th, 2014.

The glog has been through a lot of changes over these past 10.663014 years, from the long-form "review" articles I posted on my first website, to the shorter progress updates I posted on my first blog (a Perl/CGI driven flat-file news engine), to the Glog v1 (where I learned to use a database, and had multiple users! and then abandoned the site's development for years), to the current WordPress iteration.

What hasn't changed is my mission: to play a lot of games. I may not have the patience, or reflexes, I once did; I can't imagine being able to master Viewtiful Joe anymore, in my comparatively-advanced age. But perpetually building up my internal game encyclopedia continues to be one of my primary life goals.

Hey, there are worse goals to have.

What I find most interesting about Zigfrak is that, although it is a pretty fundamentally different kind of game from Drox Operative, I've become disinterested in it for some of the same reasons: menu-information overload, and oversimplified-yet-awkward combat.

To its credit, Zigfrak does a legitimately impressive job of keeping its controls simple -- not just in piloting the ship, but in docking with other spacecraft, jumping around the map, using mission items, and collecting pickups. It's clear that the developer has prioritized ease-of-control, and the gameplay is fairly accessible as a result. But at the same time, this streamlining isn't uniformly distributed throughout the game; finding my way through the menus, and examining and applying options - when they weren't automatically selected for me - was unexpectedly laborious. I never did figure out how to equip new weapons, or if there was any deeper inventory management that I needed to be doing.

Somewhat tragically, the game's simplified piloting and combat controls actually felt like a drawback once enemy ships started to show up. Compared to my recent (and very pleasant) experience with Strike Suit Zero, Zigfrak's shallow movement and braindead weapon systems felt vacant and unsatisfying. Watching ships and space debris whip around, and witnessing cavalcades of missile explosions, is at least visually interesting; but it just isn't very deep.

Zigfrak does get its game script right: the tutorial is clear without being too meticulous, and working through follow-up missions is super-easy. And it didn't take long at all for me to be thrown into some deep-space alien drama stuff, such that I'm relatively confident that Zigfrak's plot has some real meat in it. But, I'm not really interested in tolerating the overwhelming menus and dull gameplay enough to get any farther in it.

"Lukewarm," I guess, is my general feeling about Vessel. Good ideas let down by lackluster execution.

So much of it seems half-baked and unpolished: the distracting void when the player character interacts with the game's water physics; inappropriate bits of collision with seams in the game's map; janky movement and environmental hit detection, complemented by equally janky animations; and even in my brief time with it, an overall awkward pacing of puzzles and mechanics. Puzzles feel like they take too long to navigate for how simple they are to "solve," and yet the game doesn't hesitate to throw around new features - like a water gun and an upgrade system - more often than really seems necessary.

Basically -- none of my problems with Vessel are game-breaking, or unforgivable. But in aggregate, they bring the game down into mediocrity. Despite its clever high-concept, Vessel fails to do any one thing well enough to be meaningfully good.

Progress: Got to the upgrade machine.

Volt, subtitled "Battery on the Loose," reminds me - unfortunately - of World of Goo. What I hated about that game was that its puzzles demanded a level of precision that the mechanics couldn't support; that the in-game physics were too nuanced to reliably predict and control. Volt is a puzzle game revolving largely around the use of whip-like electric tethers, which can be attached to a surface, using gravity and rotational forces to swing around: the "puzzle" is in navigating to an exit, hitting switches and avoiding obstacles, using a limited number of tethers and other more minor powerups. And the density of its level hazards is at odds with the lack of mercy afforded by the tether swinging -- requiring dies and retries, and split-second precision when placing and cutting these tethers.

It's unfortunate, because Volt comes close to being one of two really cool ideas. If it was a less-precise, more action-oriented game based on using the electronic tethers to move through a level (ala Spider-Man or Bionic Commando); it could be a lot of real-time, actiony fun. Or if it had tighter, more precise controls, e.g. a way to control time or plot paths through the level before following them; then it would be a fairly unique puzzler with a cool aesthetic.

But as it is, the middle-ground that Volt occupies is too fiddly and frustrating for me to extract any enjoyment out of.

Progress: Finished level 1-9.