To its credit, Retro/Grade does a really good job of not looking like a rhythm game. Even though the game is clearly described as a "rhythm game," even though it can be played with a guitar controller, the visual appearance of a shoot-em-up is just way too convincing to not believe.

Until you start playing it, and then it's crystal clear that Retro/Grade is really, purely, a rhythm game.

It could be worse; the mechanics are at least more nuanced than a bog-standard Guitar Hero-alike, with some notes shots you have to avoid, and some things that involve holding or multiple presses. And the time-rewind feature makes it eminently more playable than other rhythm games that just can't understand the idea of making a mistake. But at its heart, it's still just another rhythm game, running you through the paces of following a button-pressing script as it's laid out in front of you.

The visual bombast also gets in the way of the gameplay way too easily, making it difficult to tell the difference between real game elements and meaningless explosions. But it's hard to get legitimately upset about the game attempting to make itself more interesting, as ineffective as it ultimately is.

Progress: Finished the tutorial level.

Lyne is a fairly straightforward puzzle game - you, uh, draw lines - but for me the biggest puzzle is why I should care. It's one of those puzzle games that, while relatively well-designed, is neither "tight" enough (meaning that each puzzle has a strict, informed solution) nor exciting enough (it's all very placid and relaxed) to really hold up against other puzzlers. Early puzzles are staggeringly simple, and at a certain point they just become fiddly; while the game does a good job of introducing elements gradually, it doesn't do well at all at helping you learn nuanced solving techniques.

Maybe I'm being too hard on it, because Lyne's puzzle style is just hard for me to see in my head, as I've done in other puzzle games. Maybe it's just me. But, Lyne isn't really providing me with any incentive to stay interested.

Progress: Finished sets A and B, 16/25 in set C.

Explore the Dungeon may be a totally different kind of game than Hey Ice King, but it ends up feeling extremely similar, because of how depressingly bad it is.

I should say up-front that I barely put any time into Explore the Dungeon; I only completed the introductory quest and went through about five levels of the titular dungeon. But the game I've played so far, and the apparent scope of what's left, has really just demolished my confidence in WayForward. Like their previous attempt at an Adventure Time game, this installment has some solid writing and voice acting that do the cartoon right, but is otherwise poorly designed and generally underdone. In fact, I would say that the primary difference between the two games is the balance between good writing and bad gameplay; Explore the Dungeon just has much less of the former, and much more of the latter.

So there's a dungeon, right? Each level has enemies, treasures, and some occasional maze-solving. It's ... well, it's very bare. Enemies aren't hard to fight, nor are they very frequent, such that they're barely even distractions during your journey through a given dungeon level. You have an attack and a special move (after a meter is charged up), and you can use sub-weapons that appear every once in a while. There are block and dodge moves, but the controls for these are pretty terrible. The "treasures" aren't, like, thematically-appropriate Adventure Time items; they're small piles of gold, that are just used as currency for stat upgrades.

You'll need to descend into the dungeon to collect treasures to improve your character, but in a fascinatingly poor twist, the game strips you of all your treasure every time you re-enter the dungeon. So you can't make incremental progress towards an upgrade; if you don't have enough treasure for it before you leave the dungeon, you'll lose everything. And since you can't see how much treasure an upgrade costs until you're outside the dungeon, ... it's just really stupid.

There are eight playable characters, four of which are unlocked from the start. Each character has a slightly different permutation of maximum health and strength, different special moves, and a unique trait, although none of this is adequately explained by the game itself. All that I got out of the tutorial was that Marceline (the vampire queen) can float over holes in the floor. For that matter, the tutorial didn't even go over button mappings, assuming that I would randomly guess which button is the "attack button," et cetera.

Princess Bubblegum gives you quests that involve exploring around in the dungeon, and allegedly she gives you side quests as well, although I didn't get to see any of these. Otherwise, you just crawl the dungeon and kill things. I guess the dungeon atmosphere changes after certain numbers of levels, in the style of Diablo, Torchlight, Spelunky, et al, but I really had no interest in progressing far enough to bear witness to these. (I guess there are supposed to be bosses, too. So if you can stomach enough of the tedium in the regular dungeon levels to get that far, then, there's that.)

I hate to bitch about the graphics, but man, Explore the Dungeon just has a really bad sense of style. The introductory cutscene is drawn to look like an NES game, with thick, blocky lines that simply look uncharacteristic of the cartoon. (Even DS art could look much better than this.) The gameplay itself suffers from being so far zoomed-out that all on-screen elements, including characters, just look like mushy piles of pixels. And the 3D effect is misused, with floating, semi-transparent dialog boxes sometimes seeming to float inbetween other in-game objects.

And lest you think, hey, maybe the purpose of this game is to have some multiplayer fun, -- it's local only. Meaning that, with no online functionality, the 3DS version isn't multiplayer at all. Yup.

Pretty much everything about Explore the Dungeon is either incomplete, or simply insufficient. It isn't mechanically deep. It isn't narratively interesting. It isn't funny, except for a few seconds in the character introductions. And it isn't fun to play.

Better than: getting punched in the face. Because unlike getting punched, you can stop playing this game whenever you want.
Not as good as: Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why'd You Steal Our Garbage?!, if you can believe that.
At least I have: the cool-looking BMO tin that came with the collector's edition.

I expected very little out of Greed Corp going in, which might be why it impressed me so much.

It may be a turn-based strategy game with hexagonal map tiles, but Greed Corp's limited number of mechanics makes it very distinct from Civilization V. The basic premise, and brilliant twist, is that the map is unstable: mining it for resources eventually destroys it, along with any structures or units that happen to be there. Air travel and ranged attacks are both possible, but expensive. And some really tricky tactics can come into play when lowering an opponent's tiles, or causing chain reactions through critically-low tiles. There aren't very many actions you can do; but the deep interactions between them are what make Greed Corp interesting.

Ideally - at least, the way I was playing it in the tutorial stages - matches don't last very long, as the game's titular greed (mining the tiles) destroys the map in short order. This balancing act between income and map space, while trying to preserve your units and destroy your opponent's, is easy to approach but rapidly becomes tantalizingly nuanced.

Another surprising victory: while it's clear that Greed Corp was designed for touch devices - every action involves a sequence of clicks on obviously-large buttons - it still works very well with a mouse. A tad unintuitive at first, but ultimately not inconvenient at all.

Progress: Finished the tutorial.

So, I finally got around to Mirror's Edge. Only like five or six years late... not bad. Amazingly, it still looks great, due to its distinctive artistic style and scalable effects; the city is suitably imposing and awe-inspiring, and even character models are pretty well-detailed. Unfortunately, the game itself doesn't really hold up.

Ideally, Mirror's Edge functions like a first-person Prince of Persia -- running, jumping, climbing, clambering, and generally parkouring through intricately-designed obstacles and platforms. When the game can fulfill this promise, it's great fun. It proves the concept excellently.

But it all too frequently brings itself down with a few fundamental design faults:

• You're often being chased by dudes with guns. If you don't move fast enough, you die. This high-speed motivation would be great! except that there are points in a level where you'll need to choose a route to follow, and at least one of them is wrong. Choosing poorly will lead to your death. There's no way to avoid this except by chance, or by dying and trying it again.
• The first-person perspective sometimes hides vital route elements from you. There is a magic compass-key for pointing you in the right direction, but even this is sometimes not specific enough to tell the difference between feasible falls and fatal precipices. Again, the only way through this is to guess correctly, or die and retry.
• The guys with the guns sometimes stand in your way. Three shots and you're dead. Even in the first level, there are some encounters that will murdelate you, while others are perfectly survivable. Are you supposed to fight them, or avoid them? Once more... hard to tell which, until you're already dead.

The game is usually (but not always) generous with checkpoints, so it's not a totally masochistic affair. Still, it's mystifying to me how Mirror's Edge seems suited for a Sands of Time-style rewind mechanic, and instead forces you to die and try again. I would be 100% more into the game if it outright stole the rewind idea.

Also, the story and voice acting are pretty terrible. But that's hardly the point, here.

Mirror's Edge is a great idea, great enough that I can admire it even though I've only played a fraction of it. Maybe I would have been more tolerant of its bullshit back in 2009 -- it's hard to say for sure. As for 2014, well, I think I've had enough.

Better than: Tron: Evolution (PC, PS3, X360)
Not as good as: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (NGC, PC, PS2, PS3, XBOX)
Now that I've seen the hand-drawn cutscenes in motion: I don't hate them as much as the static stills led me to believe that I would. I still hate them, though. They just look bad, like a cheap cop-out. Why even bother?

Progress: Almost finished Chapter 2

I'm sorry, it fucking runs better than before? Are you shitting me?

- Reddit user Asmius

For my part, I didn't notice a dramatic improvement in visual fidelity or performance; but the visible results, and the interweb's consensus, are undeniable: Watch Dogs on PC actually shipped with its early-tease graphical capabilities, requiring only a humble patch to enable them. (This makes the 14 GB digital download quite a bit easier to believe.)

As for why these effects ended up disabled, there are a number of fan theories, all boiling down to standard managerial bullshit -- the performance gain over stock settings makes it pretty clear, that dialing down the visuals was a near-last-minute decision. The sad part is that we'll never know the truth; any official response to the debacle will be from Ubisoft PR, any technical explanation will be pointlessly uninformed, and any policy explanation will be totally untrustworthy. But there are two ancillary aspects of this fiasco that I find interesting.

The first is that it paints a sharply-contrasting portrait to Rockstar, and Grand Theft Auto IV's PC version: although this, too, was much maligned in its day for poor performance, it scales to today's hardware fantastically well. Hell, it generally looks better than Watch Dogs on the same rig, despite being more than five years its senior. Of course, there's still time for Watch Dogs to have this level of quality officially patched in... but given Ubisoft's track record of anemic post-release support, this doesn't seem realistic.

The second is that, even with blindingly great graphics, Watch Dogs is still generally incomplete and hobbled. The driving still stinks. The side-missions are still dull. The emergent sandbox gameplay still isn't enticing. The soundtrack is still ... baffling.

Ubisoft's ability to continually disappoint me is equally as undeniable as their ability to frequently rope me in with tightly-crafted campaign gameplay (well, mostly). This shit-storm is really just the latest proof that, when it comes to Ubisoft games, expectations need to be tempered.

Not quite a year ago, I was all about Mercenary Kings. Simple but enjoyable running-and-gunning was the glue holding together a compelling game of weapon and equipment upgrades. And it still is! The full version of the game adds more missions, which include more enemy types, which drop more raw materials, which can be used to craft more upgrades. Things that make the early access version's arsenal look tame in comparison.

But the thrill of it, the moment, as it is, has gone. Now I'm struggling to keep up with the missions' difficulty level, and having forgotten almost everything about my equipment, there is an added challenge in just trying to remember what plugs into what. It feels like I've already wrung out all the enjoyment that I can ... even though I don't fully believe this is true. And as a result I just can't get into it in the way that I had last year.

I'm sure I'll come back to this again, but for now I'm content with the mercenary-ing I've already done.

Progress: Finished one of the full-version missions.

This one was a bit of a surprise for me. While Watch Dogs excelled in its main missions and fell flat in its optional extras, Far Cry 3 feels like the reverse -- the only fun I really had was ignoring what the game told me to do.

At its best, FC3 revels in some of the same mechanical strengths as its standalone expansion, Blood Dragon. Capping fools in the dome is great fun, as is sprinting up to their throats with a knife. And in theory, crawling the map for upgrades and emergent adventure is a blast. In practice, unfortunately, the open world just isn't very inviting -- the frequency of random enemies and killer animals, and the infrequency of automatic saves, makes it all too easy to lose significant progress. A hopeless death that undid 20 minutes of my upgrades left me pretty sour.

Some of the controls are terrible, particularly driving, which is borderline unplayable. The menus were clearly an afterthought on PC, with a number of functions being unintuitively bound to double-clicking (a clear holdover from a highlight-then-select controller-oriented interface). And there are some distressing graphical problems, especially considering my rig's relative horsepower -- significant slowdown due to excessive foliage, and noticeable pop-in on the horizon. In short, it's a PC treatment that makes AC4 and Watch Dogs look well-done in comparison.

But for me, the nail in Far Cry 3's coffin is that the story isn't interesting at all. Not just dumb - the plot's Poe-ish attempt at satire is fairly well documented - but I have no sense of curiosity about it. What I've done so far isn't memorable, and I have no interest in seeing what happens next. Blood Dragon's over-the-top narrative was hilarious enough to drive the game along; here, that motivation is completely lacking.

I've got way too many games in my backlog to be spending my time giving Far Cry more chances to impress me.

Progress: Gave up in Chapter 2

One of the coolest surprises in Super Mario 3D World was Captain Toad, short puzzle-platform sequences that used clever 3D design and thoughtful GamePad controls to implement a fresh mini-game experience. You had better believe that I will be all over this spinoff game.

Finally! It seems like the last-gen version of GTA V came out forever ago. Can't wait to see it run at full-tilt ... and mod down the LSPD's omniscience, just a bit.