I've already written at some length about the NES version of the original Donkey Kong, and I won't waste space rehashing those ideas here, but suffice it to say that while I appreciate a great deal about this game, it's not one for which I'm overly reverent. It was, in my estimation at least, simply the first domino in Nintendo's long history of producing games that were ultimately much better than Donkey Kong. But still, that's a pretty important position to occupy -- making it all the weirder that Nintendo has such a spotty history when it comes to preserving this game.

For reasons unknown, the 1983 Famicom release (and 1986 NES release) excised the second stage of the arcade version, which features treadmill-like conveyor belts that can fling uncareful players off the edge of the map. Perhaps the variable player speed created by the conveyor belts caused issues on the home console. Perhaps, as Nintendo has claimed, there wasn't enough space on the cartridge for the entire game. (This claim strikes me as dubious, given that Donkey Kong Jr. boasted the same file size and had no levels cut. It was released on Famicom the same day as Donkey Kong.) Perhaps Nintendo simply wanted to make home-console gamers feel there was still a good reason to play Donkey Kong at the arcade. Who knows?

At any rate, Nintendo decided to finally make the game available in its original version with Donkey Kong: Original Edition on 3DS. Surely this would be the definitive home release, right? Well...

The good news is that stage 2 is back in the game. But unfortunately, most of the animations and interstitial scenes cut from the NES version -- such as the pre-stage image of an orangutan-looking version of DK who asks, "How high can you get?" -- are not. From watching videos of the arcade original on YouTube, it's clear that item and enemy placements are different here as well. By all appearances, this game is simply a romhack of the NES port as opposed to an earnest attempt at emulating the arcade version. Pretty disappointing!

I felt compelled to replay this after my recent playthroughs of BurgerTime and Popeye, both games that owe a lot creatively to Nintendo's first big hit. I've always felt a little underwhelmed by Donkey Kong, but it wasn't until playing those other games that I could articulate the reasons why.

For starters, what I appreciate about the gameplay in both BurgerTime and Popeye (and, to some extent, in other early platform games like Mario Bros.) is that at all times they promote the player's awareness of the entire stage. Because both the objective and the enemies are constantly changing locations in those games, you need to think several steps ahead in terms of navigating the stage. In Donkey Kong, however, it never really matters what's happening two or three platforms away from you. The game is easy enough that by the time you get where you want to go (which is almost always just "up"), even if there's an obstacle in your way, there's usually an obvious solution for dealing with it.

To be fair, this starts to change a bit as the difficulty increases. In the first stage, for example, DK eventually starts to throw two barrels in a row, which prevents you from simply leaping over them. But in the elevator stage and the final stage -- a BurgerTime-esque level in which the player must run across the locks on each platform to collapse the girdered structure DK has made into his fortress -- it's rarely necessary to look beyond the immediate sphere of the player character. These stages are a cakewalk, even in later phases of the game.

And speaking of sweets, it's worth mentioning the fact (which I discovered only today) that the NES version of Donkey Kong entirely removes the "pie factory" level that was present in the arcade release. (I'd felt like there was something amiss when I played the NES version on Switch a year and a half ago, but I couldn't put my finger on it at the time.) Being as easy as it is, the original game's best asset is its gameplay variety -- the fact that it's essentially four games in one -- and the NES version unfortunately spoils that quality.

Donkey Kong is an important game for many reasons, but I would argue its being "timeless fun" isn't one of them. The game's best qualities were eclipsed within a year of its release by games like Popeye and even Donkey Kong Jr. That's not a slam on this game so much as an affirmation that Donkey Kong was just the beginning in a long corporate trajectory, whereby Nintendo would gradually perfect its sense of what constitutes great game design. Not coincidentally, I'm hard-pressed to think of a less fun Nintendo "classic" than this one -- the game that started it all.

According to Shigeru Miyamoto, Mario and Donkey Kong were conceptualized only after Nintendo failed to secure the Popeye license for the game that would eventually become Donkey Kong. (The company apparently met with better success just a few months later.) Miyamoto's fondness for the brand is clearly evident in Popeye, an excellent game that sadly has fallen out of the public consciousness in recent years.

While from screenshots you might naturally assume that Popeye is just another Donkey Kong ripoff, it's actually a "falling objects" game that not only features DK-like stage design; it also looks, sounds, and arguably plays better than its more famous cousin. The title character here provides essentially an inversion of Mario's skill set -- Popeye can punch, but he can't jump -- and it's amazing how much that one variation, combined with great level design, can result in such a different game.

Popeye's relative absence from discussions of Nintendo's formative years is especially remarkable given the company's confidence in the game at the time. As one of three launch titles for the Famicom (alongside Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr.), Popeye was effectively a brand ambassador for the very concept of home gaming. Even today, I would play the heck out of this on Switch -- and I bet a lot of other people would, too -- if Nintendo were to iron out the licensing issues and make it available for the first time in almost 40 years.

BurgerTime is a game you can't help but love, no matter how badly it's beating you. The AI can feel absolutely fiendish at times, but the game ultimately plays by its own rules. It's just easy to get distracted, whether by the necessity of planning your movements three steps in advance or the utter hilarity of being chased by anthropomorphic hot dogs, pickles, and eggs. (They even have official names, which naturally are Mr. Hot Dog, Mr. Pickle, and Mr. Egg.)

In some ways this is essentially a less freeform Dig Dug, but with the enemies of Pac-Man. Instead of fighting back with tiny rocks or turning your enemies into ghosts, however, you're dropping Guinness World Record-sized buns and patties on evil eggs and hot dogs. These items have a satisfying heft and bounce, and the fact that they drop only one platform at a time is what makes the game such a challenge. No matter what its influences, its dual commitments to pure goofiness and intelligent, fair play make BurgerTime very much its own thing -- and a game well worth revisiting.

It's telling that the two brands featured in 2008's Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe both were subject to major reboots in the years that immediately followed the game's release: Mortal Kombat with 2011's Mortal Kombat (often referred to unofficially as Mortal Kombat 9), and DC the same year with its "New 52" relaunch, under which the publisher canceled all of its ongoing comic series, jettisoned decades of in-universe continuity, and launched 52 new series all at issue #1.

These were at once narrative and economic gestures, attempts to streamline years worth of storytelling for hoped-for new audiences in a way that fundamentally altered the ways in which stories would be told within those universes -- along with the ways in which those narratives would be disseminated to consumers -- for years to come. For DC, that meant taking the first steps in embracing the comics industry's inevitable digital future. For the developers of Mortal Kombat, that meant publishing increasingly slick games with flashy downloadable bonus characters that screamed "corporate synergy."

Now, I'm not arguing this game is why these franchises deemed it necessary to reboot. Certainly, both had coughed up their share of dubious content since the early 1990s. Rather, MK vs. DC is a symptom of, at minimum, the perception of rot at the core of each of these brands in the late aughts: a rot that made rebranding necessary if these brands were to endure.

The game's script, by Jimmy Palmiotti, comes at the end of a decidedly "corporate" phase in the writer's career: it was immediately preceded by his work, in 2007, on comic book versions of Friday the 13th and The Hills Have Eyes. But whereas his Friday the 13th comic (while fairly by-the-numbers) at least evinced some meta-awareness of the brand, MK vs. DC plays its silliness ineffectually straight. Most encounters in the story begin with some random character slowly approaching another from behind and saying something like "Hi, I'm Catwoman," to which the other replies, "You DARE to enter my domain?!" Then one or both of them shouts, literally, "FIGHT!"

What inevitably follows may well be the aesthetic nadir of dial-a-combo fighting gameplay. It's mostly functional on a technical level, but it's so chunky and predictable that by the player's second fight, it's already the least interesting aspect of the game. This extends to the game's match-ending "fatality" moves (or "heroic brutalities," as they're called for the DC superheroes), which are conspicuously less gruesome than typical Mortal Kombat fare owing to MK vs. DC's "Teen" rating.

The game's lack of commitment to either DC's rich characterization or Mortal Kombat's uncompromising violence is especially striking given that, with their respective reboots just a few years later, each brand would become more like the other. Mortal Kombat 2011 went full superhero sci-fi, with an "aliens invade a major metropolis" plot that predated Marvel's The Avengers by a year; DC's "New 52" went full nineties grimdark for many of its new series (with the Joker graphically slicing off his own face by the publishing initiative's second week, for example).

By 2013 the brands had become virtually indistinguishable, at least in the video game world, with alternating releases (and frequent cross-promotional guest appearances) in the fighting-game genre. DC's sixty-issue adaptation of the game Injustice: Gods Among Us, about a violent Superman gone mad, was a critical and financial hit, paving the way for yet darker comics from the publisher and even to R-rated animated adaptations (not to mention 2021's live-action, R-rated The Suicide Squad). Meanwhile, the 2021 film Mortal Kombat wore its influence from superhero team-up films more proudly than ever in franchise history.

The narrative and aesthetic convergence of DC and Mortal Kombat may not have taken place fully in 2008, but their crossover fighting game clearly set the wheels in motion. That being said, I can't help but wonder at alternative histories. What different kinds of narratives might we have experienced from either brand if they had never met? To crib from The Dark Knight's lexicon, perhaps the dark and violent stories produced for us by these franchises aren't the ones we most needed; but, for as long as we continue to indulge in them, they're the ones we most certainly deserve.

The first time I played The Legend of Zelda was in 2003, as part of The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition for the Nintendo GameCube. The disc came as a bonus for re-upping my subscription to the magazine Nintendo Power, and it included four of the five mainline games in the series released to that point (excluding only A Link to the Past). Playing the original NES game, for the teenage version of myself, was a joyless experience, a perceived chore undertaken out of a felt obligation to experience the first entry in what was already, less than twenty years after its inception, a storied franchise.

Intent on completing the game as quickly as possible, I printed an FAQ with explicit instructions on how to reach every point of interest in the game's overworld. Perhaps I had internalized the words of the old man who bequeathes Link his sword in the game's opening minutes: "It's dangerous to go alone!" So intimidated was I by the prospect of facing this game with only my own wits (and reflexes) that I had prejudged it to be impossible without the guidance of those who went before. Perhaps inevitably, I abandoned this attempted playthrough after only a couple of hours. I had psyched myself out of experiencing what later games would underscore as the franchise's most elemental strength: the joy of exploration.

Playing the game again in 2021, this time via the Nintendo Switch's official NES emulator, I approached it as I had learned to approach 2017's Breath of the Wild: as a sandbox dotted with treasures, each one locked behind a puzzle. I swept back and forth across the game's overworld looking for them, impressed with the world's expansiveness but also its coherence. Here, fully formed, were the topographical features of so many games in the series that followed: twisting forests, rife with monsters; crags, cliffs, and rockslides to the north; beaches and deserts, bleached white by the sun.

Unwittingly, I completed the first three dungeons out of sequence. When I discovered this, I was even more impressed with the game for its flexibility: truly, this was an adventure of my own making. In fact, I discovered most of the dungeons without looking for them. More than once, I made it deep inside before discovering that I was missing an important item likely to be found in another dungeon; I would need to leave and restart the dungeon later, when I had the proper tools. The first few times this happened, I didn't mind. But as situations like these became more frequent, I finally turned to an online guide simply to tell me which previously discovered dungeon I was meant to clear next.

By about the sixth dungeon, the fundamental experience of the game had changed. Having initially explored the map on my own but with the Internet now serving as my compass, the game had become primarily a dungeon crawler. The overworld went by in a blur as I raced from one dungeon to the next, with occasional detours to explode a rock or burn a tree or buy potions from an old woman. These were secrets I never would have uncovered on my own, and so I didn't mind using the guide to find them. The dungeons, at least, I was able to finish unaided. Did I clear them optimally? Definitely not. In some cases I had to retread my steps multiple times in search of a hidden doorway or a particular item I was missing. But even so, the self-contained nature of the dungeons made each one conquerable in no more than 30 to 40 minutes. That is, until the final dungeon.

At this point, though, it's worth mentioning that at about this point in my playthrough, I came across Backloggd user chump's insightful review of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Chump writes that the Zelda franchise, by and large, "isn't a dungeon crawler, it's an overworld crawler. Don't get me wrong, Zelda dungeons can be fun or even highlights of the game, but the focus has been on the overworld since the very beginning of the series."

This sentiment gave me pause. If it were true, and given that I'd made the conscious decision to stop experiencing The Legend of Zelda as an overworld crawler and instead as a dungeon crawler, then either I was playing the game incorrectly or I was fundamentally misapprehending the game that I was playing. Was I simply approaching the game with the same cynicism that I had as a teenager -- except that, for whatever reason, I was enjoying myself this time?

It seemed worth taking a step back to consider the essential nature of these concepts. I thought of arguably the original dungeon crawler: Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop game that in its earliest incarnations actively eschewed so-called "roleplaying" in favor of clearing out monsters from dungeons and hoarding their loot.

On the first page of the original Dungeons & Dragons three-volume boxed set (published in 1974), creator Gary Gygax claims that while "it is relatively simple to set up a fantasy campaign," the bulk of the campaign referee's preparation will necessarily be devoted to "laying out the maps of his 'dungeons' and upper terrain." The game's initial rulebooks and supplements, even the ones purportedly devoted to fleshing out alternative campaign settings, are mostly concerned with the ways game organizers (called Dungeon Masters, starting with D&D's second supplement in 1975) might draw out the gameplay and/or make the players' goals more difficult to achieve. The books advocate for nefarious labyrinths escapable only through false walls; doors that lock behind the players until a certain number of enemies have been defeated; traps that send players to the beginning of the dungeon, effectively resetting their progress. In other words, the aim of the Dungeon Master essentially was to troll the other players.

Had The Legend of Zelda released a decade earlier, its later dungeons would have made Gygax and his collaborators proud. Even once you've obtained a map, the final dungeon is truly aggravating. Upon the game's release in 1986, it would have been completable only by means of graph paper, pencil, and a whole lot of patience. This was the one dungeon for which I followed an online guide, and even so it was by far the longest and most difficult to complete. The number of underhanded traps and overpowered enemies the player must surmount simply to advance from one room to the next is absolutely punishing. It's pure dungeon-crawling, in keeping with the design philosophy established by Original D&D.

In that sense, I think it's fair to characterize The Legend of Zelda as at least equal parts dungeon and overworld crawler -- if not skewing toward the former, especially in the late game. Perhaps that became less true for the franchise over time, but part of apprehending this first game is to understand that its oft-labeled "obtuseness" emerges from a philosophy shared by game designers and players alike, one in which testing boundaries (the game's, the player's) is intrinsic to the very idea of "play."

Yes, it's dangerous to go alone. But Zelda has never encouraged going it alone, not really. It has always understood its relationship with the player in terms of its relationships with other players, as part of a network that, for decades now, has helped its constituents come to grips with this exhilarating, mysterious, challenging game and its myriad descendants. Community is Zelda's strength, not its secret shame. The Legend of Zelda does not tell the player much, not explicitly, but its most famous line is followed immediately by the game's endorsement of this truth:

"It's dangerous to go alone! Take this."

Several days ago I had a sudden, conflicted whim. On the one hand, I was overwhelmed by a long-suppressed appetite for Fire Emblem's particular brand of tactics gameplay; on the other, I wanted to play a game in said franchise that was new to me but without feeling bad about potentially not sticking with it for the long term. For the first time, I was in tune with the Venn diagram of appetitive desire that has kept Fire Emblem Heroes in business for nearly five years.

In retrospect, it's surprising this didn't happen sooner. I'm an easy mark for free-to-play mobile games when they're branded with Stuff I Already Like™, and I've burned more money at the altars of games like Marvel Future Fight and Pokémon Shuffle than I'm willing to admit. Considering that Fire Emblem is one of my favorite video game franchises (despite the fact that Awakening is the only entry I've sunk a truly substantial amount of time into), you would think I'd have been a day-one player.

But the combination of free-to-play mechanics and Fire Emblem gameplay has always seemed contradictory to me. I'm the type of FE player who plans battles meticulously and leaves combat animations on, in order to amplify the role-playing experience. Battles are long, hard-won affairs that follow their own emotional arcs, many of them of my own making. The unique appeal of the franchise, for me, is feeling like an actual military tactician who charts out a battle plan, then watches with equal measure of pride and horror as my friends and loved ones attempt to execute it. The stakes could not be higher.

The absence of permanent death, critical hits, and other chaotic-neutral gameplay elements certainly is one factor impeding that sense while playing Fire Emblem Heroes, but even more than that it's the amount of content to complete each day. There are the main story levels and their side missions, which together appear to number in the hundreds, but which the game also discourages you from playing in favor of 24-hour Special Maps and the Training Tower. There are limited-time events such as Hall of Forms (in which you control pre-built characters) and Mjölnir's Strike (a tower-defense mode). There's asynchronous PvP in Aether Raids as well as the Coliseum. The latter area includes modes like Arena, Arena Assault, Allegiance Battles, and Resonant Battles; I'm unable to meaningfully distinguish between any of them. There's a FarmVille-esque social hub where your characters congregate, and in which you harvest crops and cook recipes.

Most of these modes refresh each day. Many are also the primary destination for farming a particular resource that's necessary for character-building. Speaking of which, did I mention there are nearly 800 characters in Fire Emblem Heroes? Sure, some of them are the same character in different outfits, but they still count as different units when it comes to battle. You can have multiple copies of the same hero (at multiple different star levels), which you can merge into a single copy for better stats. And because apparently this game wasn't already enough like Pokémon, you have to be careful of sacrificing a copy with good internal values (IVs) in order to build the character optimally. Each character also has seven skill slots, which can be individually leveled and/or swapped by sacrificing a different character with access to the desired skill. An optimally built Brave Lucina, for example, would require sacrificing five or six other characters with access to the skills that best complement her base stats. The system itself is legible, but as you can probably already tell, it's... a lot.

That's not to say you can, or should, try to create optimal endgame builds for all of the game's characters. That's one of the game's strengths, actually: any character can be viable for practically any game mode. The uphill progression battle is just more uphill for some characters than others. If you don't already have access to a favorite, though, the process of selecting which characters to focus on is daunting. It's comparatively easy to look at the roster of a game like Marvel Future Fight and say, "Okay, Iron Man is probably a better character to invest in than, say, Karnak." (Occasionally you would be wrong, but you would at least be right in principle.) Much of my time spent "playing" Fire Emblem Heroes was actually spent consulting wikis to determine which characters were most worth upgrading.

Luckily, the characters I was able to access are among the best in the game. I was able to freely select a 5-star Brave Edelgard, and I pulled a Fallen Corrin (Female) and Ninja Corrin from random selectors. The latter apparently is considered the game's absolute best character by many in the FEH community. I acquired her on my first and only attempt at her selector, and I pulled plenty of other 5-star characters using free premium currency (which the game dumps on you by the bucketful), so I have nothing negative to say about the gacha rates. Your mileage may vary?

Together, these three characters veritably deleted my enemies with minimal resistance. For a few days, this was fun. But as I discovered increasingly more game modes lurking in the game's submenus each day, I began to feel dismayed: I'd wanted a casual Fire Emblem experience that would be rewarding to play casually, not a game that required several hours of commitment each day!

At first, I met the sheer volume of daily content by turning off my beloved combat animations. When that wasn't enough to work through all the game modes in less than several hours, I began to play levels at a faster, almost reckless pace. But still, there were just too many modes to play and too many characters to comb through, research, and upgrade. It may not demand real-world cash for the player to be successful, but Fire Emblem Heroes demands the player's time in spades.

In my last few sessions with Fire Emblem Heroes, it became clear that whatever itch this game may initially have scratched, it wasn't doing that anymore. The charming characters and colorful artwork became increasingly difficult to discern. All I could see ahead was hours and hours of senseless grind.

To be fair, I suppose, the game doesn't put a gun to your head and demand that you play every single mode, every single day. It doesn't require that you build characters to their optimal or maximum potential. But that's how I've traditionally approached free-to-play games (and I've played a lot of them): I'm all in or I'm all out. Perhaps Fire Emblem Heroes ultimately will prove the exception, and I'll return to it in the future just to play the story mode. In fact, I rather hope that's the case; that's why I'm marking this game "Shelved" rather than "Abandoned." For me, returning to this game simply for the story would clearly mark the progress I've been trying to make in terms of my relationship with free-to-play games: namely, to either stop playing them altogether or to stop playing them as intended by the developers.

After years of hopping from one free-to-play game to another, I'm exhausted by the infinite treadmill they represent. Fire Emblem Heroes, an obviously compromised version of a preexisting game franchise that I already loved, threw this into greater relief than the likes of Marvel Future Fight or this year's Marvel Future Revolution, both games that I played arguably to excess before ultimately quitting them. Becoming more active on Backloggd in recent weeks has helped as well. There's a satisfying conclusiveness to "completing" games, to formulating finished thoughts about finished cultural productions, and to engaging with others' responses to those cultural productions, that I've missed while lost amid the dark forest of free-to-play.

Thank you for being a part of my recovery.

Luke kills more Sand People on his way to Mos Eisley in this game than Anakin did when he specifically set out to commit genocide against them in Episode II.

With that said, Apprentice of the Force is both more playable and more tedious than I had expected. You play through the Original Trilogy solely as Luke (thus skipping over any part of the films in which he didn't play a role), and there's an impressive smoothness to his movement and basic lightsaber attacks, even if some of his special moves simply don't work half the time.

There are other things this game handles well, like the MIDI arrangements of a surprising number of classic John Williams pieces. The endless levels in which you murder dozens of Tusken Raiders, Wampas, and giant bees? Perhaps less so.

• waits 5 minutes in a lobby, gets stuck playing Oddball
• goes pistol only when it becomes obvious it's still better than the assault rifle
• gets teabagged after dying for the first time
• gets rocketed from part of the map that looks inaccessible
• spawns into the path of someone's melee

Yep, it's Halo all right.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

UPDATE (11/18):

In all seriousness, though, the more I play Halo Infinite the more I like it and the more obviously polished it seems. I'll get to that in a bit. But first, not that anyone asked for it: an exegesis of my original review.

I think the snark I felt on Day 1 of Halo Infinite's beta week probably arose out of something I'd sort of repressed: that I've always found the Halo series somewhat alienating, somewhat opaque. Maybe it goes back to high school, when my friends with Xboxes couldn't stop raving about Halo. I joined in for a few of their LAN parties, where my latent GoldenEye prowess at least gave me a fighting chance, but I never really "got" it. The shooting felt good for a console game (I was more of an Allied Assault and, later, original Call of Duty guy), but the washed-out aesthetic rubbed me the wrong way and the Gregorian chants made me snicker.

It wasn't until 2008 that I owned a Microsoft console, and even then, neither Halo 2 nor Halo 3 held my interest for very long. (To date, I have only finished one Halo campaign: the first one, and that was in 2020.) The only game in the series I ever really connected with was Halo: Reach, which I played to fill the hours of one of the loneliest years of my life. Reach was the first Halo confident enough to shake up the series' formula, and to lean into its sillier side by featuring its wackiest, dumbest game modes just as prominently as Team Slayer.

Most of my time in Reach was spent playing Grifball, a "sport" in which one player attempts to suicide-bomb the opposing team's goal while everyone else gives chase with giant hammers. Sure, modes like this technically had existed in Halo 3, as user-created custom games -- but in Reach, they had the full weight of developer Bungie's resources behind them. For the first time, it felt like Halo saw through its own pretentiousness to create the kind of multiplayer experience my high-school friends had raved about a decade earlier.

I think it's safe to say that Halo Infinite is the most comfortable Halo since Reach, and I mean that as both compliment and critique. On the one hand, handling Halo's signature arsenal and piloting Ghosts has maybe never felt better; the presentation is slick beyond belief, every audiovisual aesthetic smoothed to the gaming equivalent of glass. The maps available so far aim for different swathes of the color palette, from a desert marketplace to a neon-glowy nightclub district to what resemble paintball arenas evoking the primary-color blockiness of Halo 3.

But on the other hand, what's missing out of the gate is official support for all the game modes that made Reach a more singular experience. And not only can you forget about playing Grifball, Hockey, Headhunter, or Race, among others -- you won't even find an official playlist for free-for-all Slayer. The lack of variety in game modes disappointingly betrays the obvious efforts developer 343 has undertaken to both improve and diversify Infinite's visuals since its disastrous showing at E3 2020.

Although it will probably be patched sooner than later, it's worth considering the multiplayer's abysmal progression system as effectively an extension of 343's overconfidence in launching with, for lack of a better term, "lowest-common-denominator Halo." The game rewards a flat 100 XP per match played, no matter the length, no matter whether you win or lose, no matter whether you're the top player or the worst of the lot. You might get a few hundred more XP on occasion if you manage to, say, rack up five kills with some non-optimal weapon.

What's egregious here isn't that it takes forever to get enough XP to unlock a single cosmetic that looks like it wasn't designed by an AI. What's egregious is that you could play the best game of your life in Halo Infinite, and you'll be rewarded the same as you would for getting absolutely stomped. This is particularly frustrating for players of average skill, like me. The fact is that I don't have the same twitch reflexes as when I played Reach a decade ago (let alone OG Halo a decade before that). Simply put, I'm not as good at competitive shooters as I used to be. Getting rewarded a little extra for performing well is critical to my engagement with games like this, in which I'm almost certain to be dominated by teenagers and by people who have been playing Halo games more consistently for the past twenty years.

On my second night with the game, I wiped out the opposing team in Oddball with five or six successive swings of that weird little skull, a remarkable feat for a Halo player as untalented as myself. It felt amazing, but it felt almost as bad a few minutes later when Infinite rewarded me the same as if I'd spent the entire match AFK. (You can already start to see players using this as a strategy to farm XP, by the way. The number of AFK players I've been saddled with, especially in Ranked, is nothing short of alarming.)

Needless to say, games can have meaningful progression systems that are also monetized; Apex Legends kept me on the hook for over two and a half years. Even the novelty of a shiny new Halo only lasts for so long. What's more, "new Halo" is not a sustainable identity for this (or any future) game in the series. 343 will need to inject more personality into Infinite and fundamentally rethink its progression systems for me to still be playing it in a few weeks' time.

Rage Runner is one of the hardest games I've ever played. It's the kind of game where you might die hundreds of times on a single level, since each one requires both memorization and twitch reflexes. It's also fairly unoptimized, and I had to turn off most of the graphics settings just to be able to play. By the end, though, these issues made for a certain cathartic joy whenever I actually managed to reach the finish line. Although much of my time with Rage Runner was spent in frustration, I can't say I regret playing it.

Medal of Honor Airborne has an interesting conceit: rather than a linear campaign, its huge levels allow you to start anywhere. But the controls are awkward, the character models and frame rate are poor, and you're frequently punished for completing objectives out of the game's preferred order. (Excellent sound design, though!) Airborne gave me a few moments of legitimate excitement, but the long stretches spent running aimlessly through deserted levels ensure this isn't a game I'll come back to.