I played two newish games that I really liked. The Swapper is a great puzzle game with a very well done mood, like exploring those deep caverns in Metroid where you felt like you weren't supposed to be there. What really stands out for me is the puzzle design: Like Braid, most of them investigated a single new idea, and you have enough information to solve any of them from about 4 minutes into the game. Though they all had clean answers, a lot of them admitted alternate solutions without being too exploitable. It's my favorite thing to beat games the wrong way, so this one was super. Starseed Pilgrim is a somewhat hard to place indie gem. It's part figure-out-the-rules, part exploration, part polishing your skills, part puzzling. I played a really long time in this game without realizing a basic fact, and I have a feeling that there are a few more things to learn. (I have made progress towards what I think is the final goal, but haven't "finished" yet.)

I played some other games: A Dark Room has been making the rounds and can be played in your browser no big deal. It's a text-only game pretty akin to the now classic Candy Box. A Dark Room ended up disappointing me, but it's not too long and it does have some good fun. Call of Duty Black Ops II was pretty disappointing. I feel like I sort of know what I'm getting myself into with these Triple-A shooters (it grossed half a billion dollars in its FIRST DAY, the most ever, though I guess that speaks more to the quality of its predecessors, most of which I did like), but this game was really uninspired. It was like they just got a bunch of level designers to put together some "missions" that had nothing to do with one another and you jumped from one to the next lookin' at axis-aligned crates and then there'd be these random ass "team" missions that had nothing to do with anything where you'd be telling all these idiots what to do but mostly you just wanted them to just stand there to attract the enemy fire so you could do it yourself. Like real war. On the other hand, Bioshock Infinite was much better than its predecessors and I liked it a lot. At its heart it's just a shooter (and only a mediocre one) but the map design is so lovely, and some of the characters and storytelling is really cool too. I do think this one is worth playing.