To more fully investigate my previous assertion that Uncharted 2 bests its sequel in terms of pure majesty - and to take advantage of a free weekend - I played through Among Thieves again, and a funny thing happened. While my trip through Uncharted 3 left me thinking back to giant Tibetan valley puzzles and train-fighting, this time through Uncharted 2, my mind wandered to burning chateaus, horseback chases, floating shanty-towns and sinking ships.

I guess that's a core strength of the narrative and design direction of the Uncharted franchise -- its high points are so strong that they can, in the long term, completely eradicate the memory of the low points. With the controller in my hand, I spend most of my effort looking for hand-holds and cover points, and yelling in futility at wave after wave of shotgun troopers; but looking back, I recall gorgeous scenery, enthralling action sequences, and hilarious banter. One might consider that what I remember is less like a video game and more like an eight-hour movie.

In retrospect, maybe my "a step forward and a step back" evaluation of Uncharted 3 wasn't totally fair and accurate. But I might have to play it again to be sure.

Incidentally, around chapter 19 I lost my patience with bullet-sponge shock troops, and dialed the difficulty all the way down. Shooting a guy in the head ten times and then exploding spontaneously just isn't fun.

Progress: Finished again (on Very Easy)

What caught me off-guard about Half-Minute Hero was just how repetitive it became. Sure, there are some side-quests and branching paths, but the game plays out identically in any case -- following NPC instructions, grinding enough to buy items and level up, then going to the boss fight. Really the only mechanic of substance is managing the 30 second time limit and purchasing time resets, which can be fairly frustrating since there's such a small margin for error.

It isn't necessarily bad, but definitely seems more suited for bite-sized play sessions, rather than sitting down and spending real time with. Which makes the original (PSP) iteration sound more sensible, but I have to wonder, where is the iOS/Android version? Or even a web/Facebook version? This game architecture seems perfect for on-the-go play, a few minutes at a time.

Progress: Gave Up -- Finished the first ten or so stages

More gripes: I really, really wish that enemy cities could be razed by damaging them, rather than having to attack with ground units capable of invasion. It's immensely disappointing that, after investing technology and military funding into naval and air units, I can bombard a city with artillery and battleships and bombers and nuclear missiles until the heat death of the universe, but the city will still be able to bounce right back in a few turns. (At least nuke radiation cripples the city's nearby economy.)

Edit: apparently it is possible to nuke (most) cities into oblivion, given that it requires more than one nuke.

I'm also a little upset with the "Quick" game pace, which allegedly just compresses the game's turns, allowing the same amount of activity in less time -- but having won a science victory in Standard pace, and then being unable to finish the necessary research for it in Quick - despite more than adequate science investment - I'm pretty sure that's a lie.

Unfortunately one of the trade-offs for having a lot of options is that, inevitably, not all of them can be winners. I guess it's all a part of the learning experience.

Edit again: apparently this was because I didn't have enough cities. I didn't realize until a game or two later that, while stats such as happiness and culture become more difficult to build with more cities, science only scales upward. I'm learning so much!

Progress: Won a Warlord (Easy) campaign, failed a Prince (Standard)

I haven't played a turn-based strategy game since Heroes of Might and Magic III (1999), and I haven't played a Civilization game since the Super Nintendo version (1994). But what can I say? An intriguing demo plus a devastating Steam sale has led me into 40+ hours of Civ 5 over the past several evenings, and it's been a pretty fun ride so far.

What keeps a day-long Civ 5 campaign interesting, and what keeps me coming back the next day, is the sheer volume of variables in developing a civilization. The top-level victory conditions - military, diplomacy, technology, culture - are a gross over-simplification of general play options: as I've been learning over the past several campaigns, a robust play style against non-retarded AI needs to incorporate all aspects of war, and trade, and research, and internal investment. And just when you think it can be boiled down to tactics of picking particular buildings and units and strategic timings, you learn how important it can be to micro-manage each city's work, and each rival civilization's trade resources and relationships.

It's an incredibly deep game, and incredibly accessible too, thanks to the easy to use interface and Advisor tutorial messages. It can be slow at the start (even at the "Quick" game speed), but once the technological pace ramps up and rival civs start going wild, the game maintains a stable, engaging pace.

But I have to gripe a bit about balance issues and luck. Taken on their own, the potential differences in starting conditions - perks of your leader and neighboring leaders, resources available near your starting location, and the inscrutable personalities of AI opponents - aren't drastic enough that I would call them unfair; but in concert, they can be really dangerous.

Last game, for instance, I got screwed by ending up with borders near an incredibly hostile Montezuma. He managed to claim Egypt's capital, and even expanded overseas, before setting his sights on me and dumping wave after wave of soldier onto my civilization; so while several other civilizations hated the Incans, I was the only one with the economy to fight back -- for roughly two thousand years. Meanwhile, Korea was safe on the other side of the planet, and managed to research nuclear bombs and space shuttles almost completely unhindered. It was pretty frustrating, and I wish... well, honestly I wish I knew a better way to deal with the situation, because I feel like I might have been able to work around it with some crafty diplomacy or targeted technological development.

The other thing that irritates me about Civ 5 is the bugs, which - despite the game being almost two years old, now - are frequent and blatant. They seem to mostly center around unit animations: aircraft sometimes circle a target for way too long after an attack; the viewport sometimes scrolls itself away from other players' actions during their turns; and sometimes, clicking on a decision button during a unit animation causes the UI to get stuck, such that I'll have to open and close some menus before I can do anything else.

Those problems aside though, I'm having quite a bit of fun with Civ 5. It isn't fast enough to call "exciting," but its depth is pretty staggering, and each campaign has a lot to offer in terms of options and challenges. I've learned a lot about the game's mechanics and tactics in the past few days, and I look forward to learning at least a little more.

Progress: Won a Warlord (Easy) campaign, failed a Prince (Standard)

To me, this preview is pretty much an apology for the mechanical stagnance and misfires of the past three years of Assassin's Creed. Expectations: raised.

QUBE's first-person platform-puzzling and sterile white chambers beg comparison to Portal, but the game as a whole falls well short of Valve's franchise. QUBE is shorter than the first Portal, has (a few) more glitches, and is completely lacking in narrative or other story elements. But it does include some cool puzzles, and has a classy presentation. If you actually like puzzles, there is definitely something of value in here.

For its brevity and simplicity, QUBE's full price of $15 doesn't really seem correct. Fortunately the Steam Summer Sale price is a lot more palatable.

Better than: Ilomilo
Not as good as: Portal
Seriously, the similarities to Portal: are impossible to ignore.

Progress: Complete

It's clearly derived from Portal, it has no plot or storytelling whatsoever, it has one of the least sophisticated menus of any game this century, and it seems to be pretty dramatically short. But to wholly dismiss QUBE on these demerits would be slightly unfair, because its puzzles are (after the first few) genuinely clever and mentally challenging. QUBE's pacing is also legitimately good, as new mechanics and twists are introduced quickly enough to keep puzzles interesting, but not so quickly that they ever seem insurmountable.

The soundtrack is pretty neat, too.

Progress: Sector 5

I'd always intended to come back to this game by myself, to collect bonus medals and unlock new stuff. But the not-so-silver lining of New SMB Wii is that, although it's constructed on the same foundation that's historically made Mario a single-player joyride - complete with warp shortcuts and a special world - its levels are simply too loose and spread-out to enjoy solo. Without other players getting in your way, it's actually a pretty light experience.

So, yeah, lost interest. May we meet again in another game, World 9.

Progress: Beat Bowser (Co-op)

Here's the thing about DKC Returns -- it's too hard. To be clear, it's almost exactly as hard as the Donkey Kong Country games for SNES were, and in fact Returns follows the formula of its '90s forebears pretty closely. I remember those games fondly, spending entire days replaying the same level (usually involving mine carts) to proceed further into the jungle. But now we live in an era of tweets. Without reasonable checkpointing, DKC Returns feels intensely behind the times.

I've played co-op on a few occasions, and it's a genuinely fun game, the baffling remote-shaking control notwithstanding. There's just no way I have the patience to try and retry and re-re-re-re-retry a difficult level because there are a dozen instant-death moments between the start and the halfway point, and then another dozen from there to the end.

The Super Guide isn't a solution either, at least, it doesn't feel like one; as a mostly timing- and reflex-driven game, being "shown" what to do is rarely helpful, and skipping levels removes all sense of accomplishment, which is really the whole point of this kind of game.

DKC Returns isn't bad, and in fact should be a real delight to a dedicated-enough player. Maybe I'm just gettin' too old for this shit.

Progress: Gave Up -- Got up to the third world or so

As long as I'm removing old games from my backlog -- I really don't think I have the time for this guy. Yeah, I feel a little bad about it. Oh well.

Progress: Gave Up