I’ve noticed something about my own habits playing games on the iPhone, and I wanted to see how common it is, so I set up a poll for it.

The games that get the most play-time on my phone are the ones that support portrait orientation (Drop 7, Words With Friends, Helsing’s Fire, Bejeweled, etc), partly because I can jump in for a quick game while I’m otherwise occupied (read: on the toilet). If a game only supports landscape or plays better in landscape, I treat it more like a “real” game: I only start it up when I’m ready to devote a big chunk of time to it. If you play games on your iPhone, iPod Touch, Android phone, or whatever, help me out by answering the poll.

(If you feel inclined to explain, feel free to leave a comment too).

StarCraft 2 came out last week, and statistically speaking, it’s likely that you’ve already bought a copy. But what if you’re like me, someone who hates StarCraft but hates even more getting left out of the next big thing everybody else is doing?

Maybe “hate” is too strong, but it’s fair enough to say that the first StarCraft and I have a troubled history. The troubles went way past any one game, though; this was an abusive relationship that soured me on an entire genre. Maybe an analogy will help clarify:

Before I played StarCraft, it was a completely alien concept that I could be bad at videogames. I mean, I can and will lose games if pitted against another human, and there are things like racing games that I’ll never be good at because I can’t be bothered to care. But the idea that there could be a videogame with robots and spaceships and lasers in it, that I could play by myself against the computer on normal difficulty, and lose? Inconceivable!

It wasn’t a quick and merciful smackdown, either, but a prolonged bare-assed spanking. I’d believe I was doing fine and then slowly, systematically, and rigorously corrected. My breaking point? As early as the third mission in the game, where I’d have to defend a base against Zerg attacks for 30 minutes. I’d try it over and over again, each time thinking Now I know what I’m doing! and each time waiting 25 minutes until my inevitable destruction.

I don’t even want to think about multiplayer. I’ve seen otherwise relatively normal people sit down in front of StarCraft and become transformed, like a cyber-nano-hacker from a syndicated sci-fi series getting jacked into the FutureNet. Their eyes glaze over, their fingers begin furiously tapping keyboard shortcuts, things start blowing up and they’re freaking out over choke points. Even if it were at all possible for me to win against that, there’d be no joy in it, I’d be more machine than man at that point.

So by the time StarCraft 2 was announced, you’d think I’d have learned my lesson. Here was a game tailor made for the Blizzard obsessives who get obscenely fixated on damage per second. For people who’d spent the last 12 years playing this game, presumably making it past the third mission. Screenshots of the sequel were almost indistinguishable from the original (and from each other). It was, by most accounts, more of the same.

But I bought it anyway. And it is, indeed, instantly recognizable and familiar. And I did progress through a couple of simple missions that convinced me I knew what I was doing before hitting one that had me defending my base against Zerg attacks for 20 minutes.

Except this time, I did it. I definitely haven’t gotten better at RTS games in the years since the first game, so I can only figure that Blizzard applied their usual level of exhaustive playtesting to the game to make sure that people like me could play.

The single-player campaign on normal difficulty is right at my level of comfort: easy enough that I haven’t given up in frustration yet, but not so easy that I feel as if I’m being patronized. Plus, the single-player campaign feels like a real game, not just a series of levels tied together with cut-scenes that say “Look How Much We’ve Seen Aliens!” You can choose between different missions to take, there’s a little bit of character building and customization as you collect research and money to make unit upgrades, and you get to hang out in different rooms of your own spaceship.

All the cut-scenes are done in engine, too, which is kind of astounding. It’s fairly standard redneck space marine stuff, but it looks great. And the storytelling within the missions is a huge improvement on the first game’s, too. My first reaction when seeing the game in action was that I’d spent far too long seeing games with short development cycles. There’s a ton of content in StarCraft 2, and you can see all the years of development on the screen.

People better-versed in strategy games could describe the mission balance, unit variety, player matching, and multiplayer. I’m still early in the game; currently in the middle of a mission that has me defending my base against zombified colonists that only come out at night. That’s about five or six missions in, and each one has had its own hook to make it seem distinct. And even if things go downhill from here, I’m happy that the game’s already accomplished the impossible: I’m actually having fun playing the single-player campaign of an RTS. Everything looks, sounds, and feels like StarCraft, except I’m actually looking forward to getting back into it.

Now they just need to hurry up with Diablo 3 already.

Proust had a sponge cake, I’ve got a post from Richard Cobbett about how the comedy of Monkey Island 2 encompasses everything from the dialogue to the animation to the puzzle design. There’s been a good bit of Monkey Island retrospection since the special editions were released and Deathspank promised a return to form, combined with Diablo. Most of it with the same overall theme of “They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”

I’ve actually been surrounded by it for more than a year, since I was working at a studio continuing the series. And after sitting in on a couple of early design meetings, and reading posts on message boards, and reading reviews and retrospectives, and playing the special editions, I was forced to come to an unsettling conclusion: I don’t like the Monkey Island games anymore.

Inevitably, that’s going to be perceived as embittered grousing on my part, or at best an attempt at “I’ve outgrown adventure games” posturing. But I assure you that that’s not the case. There’s no shortage of people complaining and criticizing on the internet, because it takes absolutely no skill or intelligence to say something sucks. I don’t see the point in just knocking something, because there’s nothing to be gained from it.

No, for me it’s more like being the one person in the crowd who stares at the Magic Eye picture and squints and crosses his eyes until they water but just can’t see the dolphin that everyone else is raving about. Actually, it’s more tragic than that, since it’s coming from someone who used to be able to see it.

The Tales of Monkey Island series was in good hands, because the team was full of people who loved the Monkey Island games (at least, the first two). They could give details on even the most fleeting moments and briefly-seen locations in the games, where the names of the islands, governors, and various pirates weren’t just places and characters in a story but part of a collective consciousness. They had several favorite scenes — several of which I’d forgotten — and could explain not only what happened but how and why they worked so well. It was the best kind of egoless enthusiasm for the games, driven to make a worthy successor no matter what the constraints.

And for a while, I thought it was simply the case that I’d shared that enthusiasm, and then gotten it all out of my system while working on an earlier continuation of the series. But after hearing some people talk about the games, I’m not so sure. During the brainstorming for the Telltale series, and then again in Richard’s essay, people would talk about the “darkness” of the games. That the magic of the first two games was tied to the combination of anachronistic slapstick humor and a darker, more sinister story of ghosts, voodoo, graves, ominous fortresses, and menacing villains. Chris Remo, master of the concise encapsulation, said “I never really associated the Monkey Island games with comedy (I rarely actually laughed) so they aged well for me.”

Which implies that it’s not just that I can no longer see the dolphin, but it wasn’t even a dolphin that everybody else was seeing. It was a great white shark with rail guns on its fins. And powered by a Nazi brain. It’s bad enough not to be able to join in on nostalgia; it’s worse to hear that your nostalgia isn’t even as cool as everybody else’s.

I bought the special edition of the first game when it came out, and I played through it, and it was kind of painful. I could still vividly remember playing the original on my Amiga in college, and I could remember thinking that it was unlike anything I’d seen before. So it was frustrating trying to revisit it and being, well, frustrated. And annoyed. And simply not enjoying the early-90s comedy stylings as much as I had in the early 90s.

But the second one was always my favorite, so I bought the special edition for that as well, twice even. (They really should’ve labeled the iPad and iPhone versions better). And I played through the first fifteen minutes or so, and stopped, and I’m reluctant to dive back in. Partly because adventure games don’t appeal to me as much as they used to. Partly because I still remember some of the puzzle solutions, and I’d miss getting the “a-ha” moment of discovery. Partly because I used to be able to appreciate it as a series of corny jokes and goofy animations, but those don’t entertain me anymore. And mostly because I’m pretty sure my memory of the game is better than anything that could possibly be delivered.

(For the record, it’s not just nostalgia. Sam & Max Hit the Road has gotten better with age, and the animations of the Cone of Tragedy and Sam reading the robot instruction manual still crack me up).

So the comedy no longer works for me like it used to. The drama that other people seem to see has never worked for me. And I’m definitely not crazy about the puzzles; at one point I had the patience to spend minutes or hours working out some obscure adventure game puzzle solution, apparently, but those days are long gone. I’d almost think that my opinions were lining up with one of the writers on Rock Paper Shotgun, something I never thought possible.

But that’s not it, either. Paradoxically, playing through the special editions and not particularly enjoying them has given me a new appreciation for them. Nothing can survive that long on pure nostalgia; there’s got to be something that made those games (especially the second one) stand out in so many people’s memories.

That something, I think, is the sense of experimentation that comes from figuring out how to do something genuinely new: using a videogame to tell a story. Not to mimic a movie or a cartoon, not to use story as context for gameplay, and not as a backdrop for puzzles. Plenty of people (including, I believe, the guys who made the game) have tried to single out one aspect or another as the element that defines a Monkey Island game, but it doesn’t work without that overriding sense of purpose. The meanwhile cut-scenes, the insult sword-fighting, the dialogue trees, none of that’s as interesting or as novel as the environment that made them seem like good ideas.

Maybe there’s a lesson there: developers need to get out of their comfort zones and put themselves in situations that require more novelty. The Monkey Island games weren’t the first to use cut-scenes, dialogue trees, or adventure game puzzles, but I believe they were the first to recognize them as tools to tell a story instead of just elements of a videogame. Instead of putting so much thought into what a character says in this interactive dialogue, maybe we should take a step back and ask whether an interactive dialogue belongs here at all.

So I’m not anxious to jump back into Monkey Island 2, but I’m not going to dismiss the continued appeal as nothing more than nostalgia for a genre long since made obsolete, either. It’s more of a mindset than anything else, and that’s something that doesn’t require any particular group of people, isn’t tied to any particular genre, and isn’t something that could only happen in the 90s before budgets got big and games got complicated. I suspect it just requires a willingness to throw out formula and experiment.

The new game Limbo has been getting a lot of buzz for what seems like a year now. It’s the first release in Xbox’s Summer of Arcade campaign, and it’s been getting a ton of great reviews, many of which use descriptions like “close to perfect.” For the most part, the hype is completely justified: Limbo is an outstanding game I’d recommend to anybody with patience and without a fear of spiders. And playing it should be mandatory for anyone making games.

But the problem with Limbo is that it sets such an extraordinarily high standard for itself at the beginning, and the rest of the game doesn’t live up to that. I’m not sure that it’d even be possible to live up to it. You’re dropped into the game controlling the silhouette of a small boy in the middle of the dark woods. The premise is that the boy is in Limbo, looking for his sister, but the only way you’d know that is from the description text when you buy the game; there’s no story setup, no voice and almost no text in the minimalist presentation. So you begin by walking to the right, and you soon encounter the first of the thousands of things in Limbo that will kill the boy, instantly and brutally.

You’ll die a lot while playing the game. It’s not an issue, since you’ll simply restart at the most recent checkpoint, and the checkpoints are, without exception, placed perfectly and predictably. But the die-and-try-again cycle is pretty indicative of the entire game. At the beginning, it works brilliantly: the deaths are sudden, gory, vicious, and even callous. It creates a sense of dread and apprehension more effectively than any game I’ve played since Silent Hill 2: this is a genuine horror game, one that makes the increasingly photo-realistic attempts at horror games seem clumsy and amateurish. I was taken in completely, startled every time a trap snapped shut, wary of walking any further. And even though I’m not particularly put off by spiders normally, I was genuinely repulsed by the ones in this game.

But as you go further in the game, that shock and feeling of apprehension wear off. Seeing the boy get killed just becomes a minor impediment, and you impatiently tap the A button to give the puzzle another try. And that’s the other thing: they become puzzles. Early on in Limbo, everything feels natural and perfectly integrated into the experience — as with any other puzzle game, you’re presented with an obstacle and all the pieces you need to get past it, but everything feels as if it’s supposed to be there. The further you progress, however, the more the puzzles seem contrived and puzzle-like.

And it’s a shame that that’s a complaint, because Limbo is an excellent puzzle game. There are only one or two puzzles that I’d call unfair, and the rest range from very good to genius. And “genius” isn’t an exaggeration — many of the puzzles and obstacles later in the game are the best I’ve ever seen in a videogame. What’s more, almost all of them are presented perfectly: it’s clear within seconds what the obstacle is, you’re given ample room to experiment instead of passively waiting for the a-ha! moment, and you’re given adequate feedback all without words or voice. There are perfectly subtle clues and hints throughout; one example is the minimalist soundtrack, which kicks in during the later puzzles to give you the rhythm you need to get past an obstacle.

I was extremely impressed with the game design, especially as I’ve gotten more and more frustrated with the wordiness (see: pot, kettle) and lack of challenge in videogames. Limbo is difficult, but with just a couple of exceptions, it’s never unfair. The challenge is in being forced to think; with most of the obstacles, after I’d figured out what to do, actually executing the solution was straightforward. And the solutions were frequently clever and satisfying, and for the first time in years, I actually felt smart while playing a game.

But it was still a game, where before there’d been this completely engrossing and captivating experience. I stopped empathizing with the little boy and started getting frustrated at the mushy jumping physics, or the extra jumps he’d unpredictably take at just the wrong moment, or the fact that he’d never learned to swim, or how long it took him to respawn after he was crushed by a giant weight or impaled on a spike. I encountered too many puzzles where you have to die at least once to even see what the obstacle is, so I stopped dreading the deaths and started seeing them as inevitable trial-and-error. I stopped thinking about secret caverns and spooky woods and scary spiders, and started thinking about platforms, switches, boxes, and physics puzzles.

If Limbo had been released with just the last 70% or so of the game content, then it would’ve been an ingenious puzzle game, a little on the difficult side, with amazing art and beautiful presentation. And it’s still one of the most impressive games ever released on XBLA. But after being so completely taken in at the beginning, I have to wonder what a game would be like if it could take that sense of dread and exploration and complete immersion in a nightmare, and carry it through the entire game.

(And for an example of what I mean by perfect presentation of a puzzle, I’ll describe my favorite puzzle set-up after the break. It’s spoiler territory, so best not to read it until after you’ve “finished” the game).

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I already admitted to being a shameless fan of Blendo Games, creator of Gravity Bone and Flotilla. The newest release is called Air Forte, and it’s another brilliantly bizarre game, this time teaching multiplication tables, parts of speech, and geography.

Even if edutainment isn’t your thing, you should at least check out the demo — it’s available for PC/Mac OS X/Linux as well as the Xbox 360 in the Xbox Live Indie Games section. (And it’s only five bucks there, which made it a sight-unseen purchase for me). The graphic design is phenomenal as always, and I was a fan right from the title screen.

Air Forte takes some of the characters you run into in Flotilla and re-casts them as subjects of a kingdom whose multiples, words, and countries are being stolen. As the best pilot in the kingdom, you’ve got to take off and find the missing multiples while avoiding the mines. The story’s presented all in comic book format, set to a perfectly inappropriate surf guitar soundtrack.

As for the educational merit, I don’t have a kid present so I can’t comment one way or the other. (It was, however, an unwelcome reminder that I’ve forgotten all the multiplication tables). And I have to be a jerk and point out a couple of errors in the grammar sections — “smiling” can be a noun, and “lunch” can be a verb, for instance. But for me, the game wins on presentation alone, and I loved every second of it.

If you’re wondering about platforms, flying with the Xbox 360 controller is a lot easier than with the mouse.

I never would’ve expected that the follow-up to Flotilla would be an educational game, but that’s the consequence of dealing with an unrelentingly original game developer, I guess. At this rate, Blendo could release a game that’s nothing but quick-time events and I’d still be on board from day one.