Carrier Deck. It’s not a terrible game, but I really badly want deep fleet command games, and it just isn’t that. I knew that going in, but I was still hoping for more.

WARNO. I like Wargame: Red Dragon, though I play it as single-player, despite the poor AI. I like Steel Division 2 single-player. But WARNO just feels like it’s too fast-paced and like there isn’t enough tactics involved.

Gradius Origins. I mean, it’s a collection of good horizonal shmups. I have enjoyed Gradius games, years back. It’s just that my tastes have changed over time, and I feel like the genre has evolved. I remember enjoying horizontal shmups, and today, they just feel repetitive, unforgiving, and simple, not to mention requiring one to die, gain knowledge, and play again. The game was as I remember…but I’ve changed.

Tiger-Heli. Not considered to be a great vertical shmup, but I remember playing it in the arcade, wanted to have a copy. Gave me a brief burst of nostalgia, but not something I’d really play.

A bunch of almost-all-text Vampire: The Masquerade interactive fiction games. I want an interactive fiction game with a sophisticated, mature vampire story, and so much of the material seems like it’s aimed at a younger crowd. I’ve played good interactive fiction. I found the things kinda disappointing. Writing wasn’t great, plot wasn’t great, gameplay wasn’t great.

Quern: Undying Thoughts. Aimed at being a spiritual successor to Myst. I had some Myst nostalgia and looked it up. Didn’t like the world, which wasn’t as appealing to me as Myst’s. Didn’t like the puzzles. The world just felt bland. Felt like a slog to get through, didn’t have Myst’s or its successors’ ability to have all these fascinating little machines that suck one in.

The Close Combat series. Not really a disappointment — I know those games like the back of my hand. I’ve probably bought those things on about four or five different platforms (physical, digital from Matrix Games, GOG, Steam), but just couldn’t summon up the interest to play them on Steam. Bipped in and out. I really liked Close Combat II: A Bridge Too Far when it came out, played the first three games like crazy.

POOLS. Psychological horror walking simulator. Pretty much exactly what was described, and I felt like it might be interesting, but just didn’t draw me in for long. Was kind of in the mood for a “wander around and look at pretty things” game, and it didn’t really do that for more than a few minutes.

A long, long list of Pinball FX tables. In particular, I don’t like the Zen original tables — the good side is that they aim for a horizontal orientation, so are more-playable on a computer monitor, but everything else about them is just extremely disappointing. Grindy. Hard to get control of the ball. Generally unimpressive sound samples. I’d have thought that given many years of experience, a bunch of people who are super into pinball could have made better tables. The classic Williams tables are consistently, by a large margin, my favorites, even if they’re technically-dated. I am not an expert pinball player — I can do things like post passes semi-consistently, but I can’t death-save or rolling pass, and maybe building up more skill would change some of my opinions — I’m not a fan of tables that tend to drain down the side readily, for example. I also am disappointed that the lights in Pinball FX tend not to illuminate more area — IMHO, part of what makes a real pinball table exciting is playing it in a dark environment and having flashing lights crazily illuminating the table. Video game engines have, in the past, used what IIRC the OGRE engine calls “static dynamic lighting”. You basically pre-generate lightmaps on a per-light basis, then vary their intensity based on the intensity of the light, combine the lightmaps. So you can use some kind of super-fancy render process to generate your lightmaps, and then at runtime, all you’re doing is slapping some textures on surfaces and twiddling intensity to do the lighting. I think that that might be a good approach here, allow for illuminated lights on the table to have more-sophisticated lighting at low computational cost. I’d be willing to use a fixed-position camera to get that, take the camera position out of the equation so that the specular produced by a given light is always the same.