Very much like the Edgeworth duology, the Great Ace Attorney games culminate with an extremely solid, even-handed finale that fully satisfies and stands among the best examples of Shu Takumi's work, but certain elements from earlier in the sub-series continue to linger in ways that just barely prevent the overall package from reaching the stratospheric heights that it would otherwise be capable of achieving.

As with AAI2, there are no cases in GAA2 that I would describe as "bad." One of them relies too much on overly familiar locations and characters for my tastes, but the greatest strength of both AAI2 and GAA2 is consistency.

At least one element of that consistency however, leaves me with an axe to grind. "Great Deductions" still suck. They are bloated, cumbersome, childish hidden object content that continuously butchers its own pace. At their best, they are thrilling, exciting, and kinetic sequences, propelled by infectious momentum, almost like a musical number. There is great potential in this system, if only they could be more liberal with their formula, give other characters a chance to shine, and stop buzzkilling every other sentence dead in its tracks. Toward the end of the game some of this potential finally begins to actualize, but it's too little, too late. These serve as the climax of every investigation segment. It's not a trivial matter.

It's easy for me to forgive this though when the presentation is so lovingly done. As much as I think this is an overused and unhelpfully simplistic argument in a game's favor, the locations of GAA are unarguably "cozy." Any 3D awkwardness from when Dual Destinies first made the jump has been eradicated, and I can even say that I now prefer this style over the spritework of the original trilogy. I enjoyed my entire time with the GAA duology immensely. It is a well crafted, expertly realized, lovely experience... but nothing ever gets me as high anymore as Bridge to the Turnabout did.

Colossal Cave is an interfacial quality-of-life overhaul of one of the most important games ever made, 47 years after its originsl release, and it's a pretty good update. It is however, not a complete reimagining, as some people surely wanted.

The first, most enormous, most obvious, and most necessary quality-of-life feature is that it isn't text-based. The player has free, traditionally modern WASD style movement in a fully rendered three dimensional world, and good god, what a relief it is. Colossal Cave Adventure always involved a lot of backtracking. The player's inventory is very limited, and figuring out how to get their treasures back to their home base and remembering where they left certain objects is part of the design. In the original, this meant reading room descriptions over and over to even figure out where you were, and then typing commands over and over to get home like you were playing Typing of the Dead. It is about a billion times less exhausting for a human brain to just visually recognize a space and the hold a button in a direction in which they intend to move. This alone makes this the version one ahould play if they want to actually enjoy this historically essential video game.

Aside from this, Colossal Cave features auto-mapping, a far more generous time limit (of you opt for it) a UI that condenses player actions down to a Look Mode and a Use Mode, and allows you to keep playing with a score reduction if you happen to die, for example to a lategame dwarf attack that simply rolls a die to decide if you live.

Judging Colossal Cave against a modern landscape of competitors is bluntly unfair. Colossal Cave is not a new video game. It is an infinitely more palattable resurrection of an ancient one. In that role, it performs just fine, and I had a genuinely good time with it.

Oubliette has, either in 1977 or after its many years of subsequent updates: (clears throat, unfurls ancient scroll that rolls along the floor and out into the next room)

-First-person vector graphical dungeon crawling
-Procedural generation
-Online multiplayer in a persistent world
-Permadeath, if not for the fact other players can resurrect you
-15 playable races
-15 playable classes
-Enormous labyrinthine areas, including the city/castle.
-A more-robust-than-usual-at-the-time equipment system
-A full suite of trap mechanics that Wizardry directly stole
-A full suite of original (at least in name) magic spells
-A unique character progression system
-"Hireling" artificial companion characters
-A long list of combat actions such as "hide" and "parry"
-A long list of usable items, something not to take for granted
-BBS style chatroom bulletin boards in every tavern
-An in-game casino with blackjack and other minigames, roughly five years before Wizardry would even INSPIRE Dragon Quest, a series that wouldn't adopt this until its third entry.

That list is absolute absurdity. It is psychotic. It should be all of the evidence anyone needs before starting to think that Oubliette is one of the greatest, most important games of all time. Of course, nobody says this, because they have not heard of Oubliette, and if they had, they'd probably only say it until the played it. Oubliette, much more even than its direct predecessor Moria or its other forbears in dnd and Orthanc, is fucking impossible. This is because unlike those previous games, Oubliette is designed with large parties in mind. It is not meant to be played solo, and getting five or so people to stare at this thing with you for hours on end as you fumble blindly around the city trying in vain to find SOME kind of weapon shop, is a fool's errand.

I respect Oubliette immensely. It is, for its time, one of the most impressive video games I have ever heard of... at least, on paper. The simple truth is that almost nothing in any of the PLATO RPGs is "balanced" or "designed," and it's quite unlikely for a modern player to actually have a great, satisfying experience with it. I do not actually want to play any more of Oubliette than what I did here tonight. Nonetheless, its maker has my sincere admiration.