There was a kind of magic in the early Ratchet & Clank games, and then a competence in the later lesser games. The frenetic onscreen chaos of wacky cartoon monsters, smashed crates, imaginative gunplay, and a swarm of bouncing coins was a true joy as we all discovered it twenty years ago. These days, it’s all on offer in a hundred different games. But without the magic or at least the competence, it’s just a flurry of sloppy colors and shapes, a whirlwind of ineffectual nostalgia, absent any innovation, creativity, confidence, or finesse. It took many years, but now that it’s being used to prop up a piece of hardware, Ratchet & Clank finally feels like the soulless corporate property it’s become.

It’s not my place to second guess game design. As you know, you go to Civilization with the game you have, not the game you might want or wish to have at a later time. But it is my place to note that when I go to Civilization, I’m looking for more than just a laid back single-player cities builder with the AI frittering idly in the margins. I cut my teeth on Sid Meier’s grand strategy without a brain-dead tactical layer drizzled over the top. I admire a lot of what Firaxis is doing to move on from the mess of Civilization V. They’re headed in the right direction, even if they are dragging a lot of baggage.

A shiny old dog without any new tricks. I got more out of the Halo 1 remake, which at least had the appeal of nostalgia. Playing through an updated version of the original Halo was at times tired or tedious. But it was also a reminder of the raw genius that launched the series. There is none of that in Halo 4, which is a drawn-out retread without any fresh perspective or energy, and furthermore missing a lot of what I need to pull me through a Halo game. Halo 4 demonstrates that if there's one thing worse than more of the same, it's less of the same.

It’s a careful, intricate, and skillful creation that no one can accuse of being too short. But as a game that does nothing other than teach you how to play, it is perhaps the most meaningless game I’ve ever played. Considering the games I’ve played, that’s saying a lot.

The campaign is poorly written, poorly acted, erratically paced, full of pointless upgrades and meaningless choices, crammed full of overproduced cutscenes that fail to relate to the gameplay, and without a shred of creative insight into how to use a real time strategy game to tell a story, much less how to get me to click "next mission" without heaving a tired sigh. For all their incomparable game design smarts, Blizzard remains one of the worst storytellers in the business, partly for how hard they try and mostly for how spectacularly they fail.

The shootporn is satisfying enough, if you're into that sort of thing. I know I am. Which is why I have so little patience for how often the awful story and grim prattle get in the way.

The most disappointing thing about Forza Horizon 2 is how little it’s improved since the first Horizon. There is still no meaningful career progression or economy. The career is quite literally running a circle around six chunks of Europe, over and over and over again, in the pursuit of colored bracelets with, as far as I can tell, no significance. Canned bucket list challenges and barn scavenger hunts supposedly break up the action if you feel like heading off in that direction.

Cyberpunk’s running time is littered with familiar problems and zero interest in their solutions. It’s a design cluttered with the failings of a hundred other designs. The safe and familiar failings of the medium that can’t be pinned to CD Projekt specifically, but are nevertheless embraced with something that feels like enthusiasm. So I sigh and carry on to the ending of my choice, looking in vain for the actual cyberpunk in a sprawl of contrived and bland sci-fi.

It peppers the game with busywork where you’d normally be hitting “next turn” over and over, waiting to administer a beating to the game’s brain dead military. Now you’re playing on turf where the AI is stronger, managing the strategy level of the game, finessing the economy, wrangling trade routes, expanding out into the map. It helps the pacing in a not very good game where pacing was one of the significant problems. So if I’m going to play Civilization V, the best thing I can say about Brave New World is that this is the preferred way to do it.

So the prominent new feature in Magic 2014 is the ability to pay Wizards of the Coast extra money each time you play it. What a horribly crass presentation of a wonderful feature. It sits like a stinking hole in the middle of an otherwise presentable game and therefore completely undermines any reason to play this when you could instead be enjoying last year’s planechases.

Why not think of Assassin’s Creed: Origins as a lovely and chill sightseer sim? It only took about forty hours of game tax to get here, but you’ve earned it.

I recall Bastion feeling far more open ended, offering me a scoring challenge and plenty of incentive to boost the difficulty level. But Transistor commits the cardinal sin of not making me want to keep going. It feels as if it’s ended before it’s over. The new game plus should be the opportunity to flex everything I’ve unlocked and yet here I am using the same tools, with no reason to raise the difficulty because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all it has to offer.

Resident Evil 7 has a strong opening, a sagging middle, and a disappointing finale. In other words, it hews closely to the arc of most horror. But to Capcom’s credit, this Resident Evil is taking pages from books it hasn’t previously read. I’m not convinced it understands those pages, but at least it’s attempting something other than the usual roiling mass of black goo with bright orange weak points you have to shoot. For a while at least. It’ll get to that. But before it plods through its sagging middle to its disappointing finale, Resident Evil 7 is at least trying.

A grand rogue's gallery stuck in a small world and a disappointingly familiar game design.

Wildstar, which has very little sense of identity, which has very little pull, which feels like a collection of features, which has a subscription fee, was a relic as soon as it was released. And I’m afraid one of the most trenchant facts about it is one of the worst things you could say about any MMO: it’s going to be easy to stop playing.

Gearbox is at their best when they’re engineering the act of shooting something. If their game would just shut up and let the gleeful gunplay speak for itself, Borderlands would go a lot further. Instead, the gunplay is clogged up with meaningless loot, smugly unfunny jokes, and lots of using the same ol’ gun while waiting for the parsimonious skill point drip to finally drop. Where’s the glee in all that?

All the decisions I’ve made have snowballed into a massive unwieldy clockwork of inconsequence, lumbering towards an inevitable conclusion like a giant Katamari ball consisting of all those little decisions, none of them steering it in any meaningful way, but each of them lending the monstrosity a tiny bit of mass. Then the ball reaches the requisite mass and a screen tells me I’ve won and I’m back at the main menu. No recap, no score breakdown, no map to admire, no ranking. Poof.

In the campaign, white phosphorus is a horrific set-piece accompanied by screams and whimpers. That’s some heavy shit. In multiplayer, white phosphorus is a reward for competent play that brings high-fives and fierce guitar licks. That’s some badass shit, Bro! You can have this cake and you can eat it, Modern Warfare assures us. In past installments, this dissonance would be funny, but here, it’s another reminder that these are really two separate games, and never shall the twain meet.

This is the same disappointing strategy game it was a year and a half ago, except that it now has two finicky and mostly unimpressive systems shoehorned in.

If only the Disney Infinity game had been crafted with half as much care, love, and attention as the Disney Infinity sculptures.

A middling open-world game can get by if it's well paced. The Saboteur and Prototype 2, for instance, weren't necessarily good, but they moved. Really moved. They pulled you forward, thanks in large part to great progression systems. There is no such sense of progression in Sleeping Dogs. You have a few tracks that gradually unlock moves you may never use.

Company of Heroes 2 might be the steepest tumble from game design genius to crassly missing the point that I’ve ever seen.

Valorant considers a standard match as best of thirteen rounds. Thirteen rounds! You don’t know which team is dominating in three rounds, Valorant? Because I sure do. It’s the team running rampant all over the map. Your Spike Rush mode is only slightly better at best of seven, but even that can drag. It’s all in service of the eSports focus. Anything quicker would be too fast for dramatic shows. Riot has made eSports their bread and butter, so it’s no surprise that Valorant is heavily skewed to that audience. Gone are the days of 1v1 arena fights in LAN tournaments with fullbright settings. One match. One result. One mistake and you were done. There were no upset wins or swings. You did a looping run from the railgun spawn and the keg of health and you didn’t dare deviate because it could all be over with one high-ping hit. Anyway, I’m old. Valorant has made me realize that I don’t recognize the landscape I grew up with. I’ll let the younger generation deal with Valorant’s sequel.

Second Son looks fantastic and from a technical perspective, it’s a pretty impressive feat especially given that the game is out less than six months from the release of the Playstation 4. Unfortunately the gameplay isn’t up to par with the light show. Like the neon that Delsin channels, it’s all light and no heat.

Dungeon Raid was based on building up your RPG character and earning high scores. But with its crass Farmville skin, Puzzle Craft is ultimately a variation on one of those godawful free-to-play play-now-m'lord microtranscation boondoogles. It's like a time waster wrapped around a time waster. Time wasters all the way down.

The problem with Orcs Must Die isn't necessarily Orcs Must Die. The problem is Toy Solders: Cold War, Plants vs. Zombies, Defender Chronicles, and Dungeon Defenders. Because a good tower defense game is just the first step to a good full-featured tower defense game.

It’s a bad sign that the weakest parts of Alien: Isolation are the parts with the alien. You’d think getting that right would be a priority. Instead, the best parts of the game involve running around space corridors and turning space handles and flipping space switches and pressing space buttons and getting through space doors and turning on space generators. But then an alien comes along and forces you to play something else entirely.

If there's no payoff - or, as is the case here, if the payoff is hidden behind such a clot of unavoidable tedium that it ultimately overwhelms how much I care about reaching that payoff - then hasn't the game failed? The balancing act for any game designer is to make me care in proportion to the challenge level you throw at me. And given how close I must be to the end, and how little I care to push on, Final Fantasy XIII-2 ultimately fails.

If only the game mechanics were as clearly laid out as the business model.

Imagine that your favorite history professor has written a sci-fi novel. You’re intrigued. You read it. It’s dry, bereft of imagination, and misses the point of sci-fi by light years. It’s even full of typos and some of the pages are blank. But you still read all 912 pages. It’s flat. It’s lifeless. It’s terrible. You’re crestfallen. That’s Stellaris.

All the cool stuff 1000000 gets right - the strategy, the long-term persistence, the loot, the leveling up - falls apart when I have to back up and align two tiles just so in order to convince the game that I want to move in the direction I want to move. It doesn't happen often. But it happens regularly enough to kill what would otherwise be a pretty cool game.

Ships that trip over each other and bumble around islands and pivot in the water and soak up an indeterminate amount of damage and, worst of all, relate poorly to the rest of the game. This is not the naval counterpart to Eugen’s smart implementation of air power. Why couldn’t they come up with a similarly graceful way to head out to sea? Why is Wargame: Red Dragon yet another RTS added to the wet heap of naval systems worth ignoring?

Get ready for a new generation of zombie-slaying thrills where there's only minimal gameplay to get in the way of the thrills!

The new character customization is either much better or much worse, depending on what you're looking for in character customization. If you want to put stickers on your cape or make a short Asteroth, Soulcalibur V is the game for you. But if you want Soulcalibur IV's indepth unlockable stat-based equipment RPG, well, Soulcalibur IV is the game for you. Because Soulcalibur V has none of that. What a disappointing step backwards.

Tomb Raider was personal because it was personal. But now it’s come full circle to yet another vapid videogame character muddling through bad writing, rote familiar gameplay, and fewer features than the last time. Wake me when the next reboot is here.

Grey Goo is a dry and forgettable B-side RTS with no advantage over other RTSs save the fact that it was more recently released.

Hero Academy is simple, simplistic, and ultimately unsatisfying. You might as well find a friend and take turns punching each other in the arm to see who gives up first.

These canned side quests are a pretty poor substitute for whatever entertainment you and your friends might normally wring from a real-world copy of Talisman.

It’s a dry exercise in competitive mathing that happens to have pictures under the numbers.

I am astonished at the state of this game. Did they think that I wouldn’t notice the clumsy interface, the wretched documentation, the absolutely untenable naval combat, the weird bugs, the lock-ups, the game-killing glitches? Did they think I wouldn’t notice the AI? Did they really think this was an acceptable AI for a single-player game? A single player game with disappointing multiplayer compared to the clever multiplayer in their last release?

With its forgettable competence, Dariusburst very nearly turned me off of the entire genre of iPad shmups.

Without a solid foundation — namely, a better RTS at the bottom of everything — Dragon Commander is a frail novelty that will fall apart shortly after you’ve handled it.

Perhaps most disappointing of all is the actual world. The map consists of long wending noodles of road draped over Frostbite landscapes. It’s built for you to drive fast and bang into cars, so it minimizes the concept of mastering a route or reacting to the road. It’s all long, thin, shallow. This means there’s little sense of place. There is minimal traffic. There are too few opportunities to actually turn onto another road or take a shortcut. The world even feels small. You’ll be chasing someone, or running from someone, and suddenly you’re back where you were just a little while ago. It all feels so constrained.

Is it a good game? That’s the wrong question. The truest thing about Far Cry Primal is that above all else, and at the expense of all else, it’s an effective game.

Firewatch probably should have been a short movie. Or a short story. Or a radio play. It should have been something other than a minimally interactive multi-hour first-person perspective videogame. It’s too modest an undertaking, too divorced from any meaningful player involvement. It is not the stuff of videogames. It doesn’t work.

I admire what League of Geeks has attempted because I’m their target audience. But it’s deeply frustrating to peer down through this smear of bad decisions at a design I really want to play. This should be a great fifteen-minute adventure. It has the necessary components: smart interlocking gameplay systems, snappy pacing, adorable artwork and animation, a truly imaginative setting. But it’s not a fifteen minute adventure. It’s an hour-long interface nightmare. Armello, which would be a great boardgame, is a terrible videogame.

Tropico 5 just doesn’t do anything with its new mechanics to advance the franchise. It’s an old man, wearing a shabby uniform, drunkenly partying in the palace. Sometimes it has moments of brilliance, but it’s mostly just waiting for the next revolution.

Dirt Showdown is all the in-between stuff from other racing games. It's those filler events you had to play to get to the next actual race. Basically, driving game gametax, now given its own game. It's as if someone lifted up all the rally races from the previous Dirts, swept out the detritus that was left, collected it into a tidy little pile, and then slapped a name on it. Dirt Showdown.

The problem is the way the game is balanced. Instead of being a cool rogueishlike clicker with interesting busywork and a coherent, connected storyline, it’s balanced like a level-based arcade game where you need to learn the tricks to beat a particular level, with the concomitant arcade mechanism of arbitrary punishment to make the highs more high.

The reason to play Our Darker Purpose is for a hopeful sense of what it might eventually become if the developers at Avidly Wild Games can make it less ponderous. Because it looks and sounds great, with scads of insidious Victorian style where Binding of Isaac has only its weird coarseness.

I really can’t figure out why this game exists other than the desire to cash in on the work done by Rocksteady. The combat isn’t as good, the story is weak and meaningless, all tension drained from it because we know that nothing bad happens to anyone as they’re all around in Arkham Asylum, and the gadgets are either exactly the same or have the barest of cosmetic differences to distinguish them from previous games’ gadgets.

Less ambitious MMOs break less dramatically. But The Secret World breaks differently, crushingly, almost tragically. There are various explanations and workarounds and excuses, and it mostly comes down to the simple fact that making games is hard and making MMOs is even harder. Funcom is simply unable to make the game they designed.

So as far as a tabletop game, Nightfall is just weird enough to be worthwhile. But as an iPhone port, Nightfall is a disappointing mess. That I'm no longer playing.

It's every generic shooter you've forgotten you played, come back to be forgotten again...Oh, did I mention there's bullet time? Because there's bullet time.

The constant parallels to Super Smash Bros. eventually undermine Playstation All-Stars, which has nowhere near the generosity, enthusiasm, or longevity of a Super Smash Bros.

When it clicks, the game is second-to-none which is why I’ll continue to play despite its many issues. With no campaign, spotty multiplayer, and poor canned scenarios, Arma III just isn’t a complete product at this time.

And so that’s the sum total of Call of Duty: Ghosts. The disappointing single-player, the usual multiplayer, the slightly confused squad bot matches, and a nifty co-op Infestation mode that could use more maps.

Really, it feels like shovelware.

What really kills Banished for me is the overwhelming sense of pointlessness. There are no goals, no scenarios, no unlockables, no longterm luxury goods or endgame wonders or upper level populations or advanced buildings. There is no finale. There is, instead, a world without end.

It’s no surprise Treyarch also has no idea how to establish or develop a character. Which is an okay thing to have no idea how to do. Treyarch is making a shooter, not writing a Chekhov play. But Treyarch’s sin is not knowing this about themselves. Treyarch’s sin is shoving your face into a trough of narrative slop and holding your head down for minutes at a time. And furthermore thinking this is what you want. Long bouts of serious and seriously incoherent story. I have a suggestion for people who make games: if your storytelling skills aren’t up to par, if your game isn’t conducive to telling stories, don’t spend so much time on the story.

In other words, not so much a game as a tool to drive traffic to someone’s YouTube channel. That’s not game development. It’s pandering.

These new heroes are a joy to discover, but the game doesn’t give you any incentive to explore them. Without a new game plus mode or even difficulty options, Guild of Dungeoneering feels very once-and-done. This is a terrible way for a rogue-like to feel. Just as the lack of documentation and tuning is a terrible thing to do to such a clever, addicting, and charmingly presented concept like this. If there’s one thing worse than not telling me how to play your game, it’s revealing to me I no longer need to play it once I’ve figured it out. Sadly, that’s the case with Guild of Dungeoneering.

Van Helsing starts out slow and takes a while to get not terrible.

But still, it’s a Lego game, and it is Star Wars. Mindless, cute, without any meaningful gameplay, crassly but effectively premised on the need to collect, that modern drive that makes merchandising a crucial part of a franchise. It’s counting on you to push forward for want of more, more, more, even if you don’t know who Ello Asty is. And now with paid DLC on the side!

Dirt 5 can afford to be vain, because it’s the kind of game you play because you think the levels are pretty. And you’re not wrong. They’re very pretty. But it’s not the game you play if you want to play a racing game. It’s barely the kind of game you play if you want to play a driving game. It’s the kind of game you play if you just want to move through pretty levels, which is something lots of videogames do these days. So Dirt 5 at least has that going for it.

A group of disparate people with unique strengths and weaknesses come together to try to save London from a high-tech dystopia. Unfortunately, I couldn't care less about any of them.

Speaking of shameless, Guardians of Middle Earth is unabashedly grind-based. As you play, you earn ingame currency you spend on new characters, on slottable character improvements, and on potions that you can use once. Potions that drain your resources so you have to keep playing to stay competitive. Weak potions are cheap. Powerful potions aren't. Spend to win.

Don't be fooled by the bobbled headed kart racers! Overfall is intricate, smart, and demanding. Maybe a bit too demanding.

For all the RTS experience Eugen brings this game, for all the carefully calculated resource management, for all the probably meticulous unit balance, for all the competent interface features, for all the map design and fiery explosions and destructible building and dynamic cratering, Act of Aggression feels like leftovers when it comes to action RTS thrills. An RTS without personality just isn’t an RTS worth playing.

The scripted sterility of a Ridge Racer and the destructibility of a FlatOut go togther like peanut butter and fish oil. This arcade racer deserves credit for elevating the Ridge Racer name above the level of a punchline. But it doesn't manage to crucial task of giving you a reason to play it instead of the current standards of arcade racing likeSplit Second, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, or Driver.

If you want to play a shallow fighting game that combines bad humor, cheesecake, and gore, Splatterhouse would be delighted to get a little of your attention. It knows what it is and it delivers. But the gravest insult in Lollipop Chainsaw is that it's such an obvious and vapid attempt at Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Bayonetta. You, ma'am, are no Bayonetta.

But Beyond: Two Souls is far worse than convenient, facile, and ridiculous. It’s overall tone is low-key and morose, without energy or enthusiasm. Scenes drag out, with long pauses. Glances shift awkwardly. Character models fidget. This is about an eight hour game, but I’d estimate two or three of those hours are pregnant pauses.

What it all comes down to is this question: Is Caylus a good candidate for porting to the iPhone? Given the length of games, given the poor multiplayer support, given that the elegance of the boardgame is lost entirely, I suspect the answer might be "no". Which is a real shame after Big Daddy Creations so successfully ported Neuroshima Hex to the iPhone.

The bottom line is that Zombie HQ is not a game. It's a shameless business model.

Ghost Recon Wildlands is what it would be like if Disney World had a section called Shootland. A swathe of geography dedicated to the theme of shooting guns, expensive looking, consisting of simple and contrived thrills interspersed with waiting in line, built to impress in a compressed burst rather than entertain over the long run. Great place to visit, sure.

It's all such an uninspired riff on Rocksteady's Batman masterpiece, with the stink of a mandate from a boardroom to make it like that Batman game that did so well. But Arkaham City was built from the ground up because it suited the character. The Amazing Spider-Man is entirely borrowed.

Red Wasp Design seems to prefer detail to elegance, and that's exactly the wrong call to make on the iPhone. It's also a damn shame in a game with such an obvious affection for its own characters and the Lovecraft mythos.

For the most part, this is a game about running around for five minutes and then a long grind of the winner winning until he wins while the loser loses. Press "F" to watch.

As I played - or tried to play - these games, I found myself wondering if Tiffany Melson is on Facebook. Which would never happen if I had playable versions of Gauntlet, APB, Rampage, and Defender.

The biggest problem for this game is every stealth game that has come since Thief: the Dark Project. Thief can’t match the visual flair and supernatural powers of Dishonored. It doesn’t have the lean efficiency and murderous creativity of the Hitman series; it trails the razor’s edge stealth and gadget lust of Splinter Cell; it lacks the vision and bombast of the Metal Gear series. Hell, it doesn’t even have a very good thief.

The draw of the Cold War setting, the visual aesthetic, and the soundtrack only last so long. And all too quickly, Counterspy gets left out in the cold.

Yes, this is just like Raccoon City all over again: stilted, awkward, ridiculous, embarrassing, tedious. Except for the parts where it's like Call of Duty, which are equally stilted, awkward, ridiculous, embarrassing, and tedious, but with more NPC soldiers milling about. Resident Evil 6 is thoroughly oblivious to so many of the things that make a good game these days.

Biomutant is what happens when someone makes an Ubisoft game, but without Ubisoft’s resources, experience, talent, or even willingness to take risks. With the exception of the art design, everything about Biomutant feels safe and familiar, but without the confidence or polish needed to make it effective. Safe, familiar, and hopelessly lost in the detritus-littered wasteland between design document and actual game.

What a delight to re-appreciate The Crew all over again! The first one. Not this underdeveloped and terribly misguided sequel.

In the 80s, these choose-your-own-adventure books were novel and exciting, particularly on your way to discovering some of the well written Infocom adventures. But today, on an iPad, Blood of the Zombies is a tedious relic, not unlike playing Adventure on an Atari 2600 emulator. It might sound like a cool idea until you're actually doing it. Some things are better off remembered instead of experienced.

Danger Zone is good for a couple of fancy crashes, and not much else, before an uninstall. It’s like a mild hit-and-run where it was never really worth taking the other driver’s insurance information anyway.

Defiance is mostly lacking meaningful connective tissue. It fails at the fundamental task of feeling like a thoughtfully designed and polished game. It fails at feeling like a world. It fails at giving you much to look forward to once you’ve realized you’ve seen most of what it’s ever going to do. You can only get so far with “it’s fun to shoot stuff”. About Defiance far.

If Electronic Arts is going to make a game with the basic premise being that no city is an island, if they're going to stress the interaction among cities, if they're going to make playing alongside other people a cornerstone of the design, if they're going to force my creations into tiny boxes that cannot exist past a certain point without the help of other tiny boxes, they're going to have to do the hard work of making it actually work. And ideally, that hard work should be done before they sell people the game, not after they've been caught flat-footed for botching it so completely.

I don’t mean to make light of someone who’s obviously — maybe too obviously — writing about things that make her sad. I get it. But being sad doesn’t make your poetry worth reading. I’m sorry, I know that’s a dick thing to say, but I’m not your therapist. I’m not even your friend. I don’t know you.

It’s clever enough, I suppose. But is it worth 100 floors of bare-bones rogue-like? Hardly.

Sir You Are Being Hunted has revealed all it has — much of which is tedious or repetitive — after a few hours.

A creative new take on space-themed videogames that merges the deep, thoughtful gameplay of real-time strategies with the intuitive accessibility of physics-based games.

Features writing so sophomoric, so unfunny, so stale, so trite, and so unskippable that it all but kills the game underneath.

Someday, maybe, the Mafia series will find its footing. It will stand tall, secure in its own skin. Until that day, Mafia III will sit at the back of the bus, waiting for something braver to defy convention.

The lack of variety is just another bad call in a series of bad calls. With only a single faction, with nothing resembling a tech tree or upgrades, with maps having only a single shape (a sphere inside a sphere) that negates terrain, Planetary Annihilation misses many of the elements that make a good RTS a good RTS. It instead is so in love with its concept, which isn’t very good in the first place, that it never gets around to the vital business of being a good game.

Since there’s no way to play the campaign multiplayer, you’re stuck beating up the sad confused AI players in space, while falling prey to its ruthless efficiency planetside.

Unfortunately, Betrayer falls apart quickly, and it can’t afford to do this given how short it is.

A little Startopia, a little Bridge Commander, a little Don’t Starve, a lot of FTL. But it’s all so awkwardly strung together, so charmless, so spreadsheety, so plodding, so dry.