I'm coming back to PC gaming, so I'm thinking a lot these days about the PC games I used to play. Back in the day, I played Myst, of course. I think everyone in the early '90s tried it.

A month or so ago I was rummaging through my childhood bedroom and found the official Journal of Myst that came with the game. It's a stapled, blank notebook with a cardboard cover and pages yellowed to look old on day one. The fine print on the back dates the notebook's printing as some time in 1993. I would have been 16 or 17 then, a high school kid.

What follows is what I wrote in the notebook. At the time, these were solutions I was sketching in order to solve the game's puzzles. They were the answers. Today, I don't remember what any of the puzzles were, so now it's these answers, scrawled in my handwriting, that are the puzzles in need of some solutions. What did they solve? I don't remember. I could check a Myst walkthrough, but, as always, that would be cheating.

In my weekly summaries of Guild Wars 2, I've looked at exploration, combat, and crafting. I've been chasing vistas, leveling slowly, and getting sucked into events as they pop up around me. I've even been cautiously exploring the big, boisterous, overwhelming experience that is world vs world PvP.

In total, I've learned a lot of things about Guild Wars 2. The full, formal review will be coming next week, so for this, my last log, I leave you with a list of all the miscellaneous things I've learned, experienced, and decided in Guild Wars 2 this week.

1.) There are several very kind players in the game who will wander by and resurrect you after you have fallen off a cliff.

1a.) Don't log out standing on the edge of a cliff. You'll pay for it when you log back in.

1b.) Also, if you happen to have a number of combat arts that involve "shadowstep" or other wide, leaping changes in position, don't use them next to a cliff either.

2.) There are jerks in the game who will train a half-dozen over-leveled mobs onto your sorry under-leveled self, and then will not only not help you fight them off, but will in fact stand right next to your corpse and not even toss a revive your way afterward. When this happens almost immediately after encountering kind souls at the bottom of a cliff you have unexpectedly and fatally traversed, the difference is rather jarring.

3.) There's just no good way to do underwater levels. Every game has them. And in every game, they're flawed. I do like that Guild Wars 2 allows players two switchable sets of underwater weapons in addition to two switchable sets of land-based weapons, but neither the spear nor the harpoon gun I have is as elegant and useful as the daggers and pistols I am accustomed to use. The harpoon gun also makes it easy to get in a lot of trouble with adds without meaning to.

Maybe it's just me. In theory I like the freedom of the Z axis but in practice I tend to find it cumbersome and awkward to navigate. And my thief swims so very, very slowly.

4.) I know it's called Lion's Arch, but I will forever call it Tortuga, at least in my head. Also it's my new favorite city. Like, ever. Anywhere. The whole thing is made of ships! Gorgeous ships! I want to live there. No, I don't care how structurally unsound it is.

4a.) There are PIRATES in Tortuga. Actual pirates. I would like all of their clothes now, please and thank you. Can I run away with them later (the pirates, not their clothes)? Oh, I hope so.

5.) It took a while for my character's personal story to get meaty. Now, I'm digging it, but that has a lot to do with the introduction of various world factions. And when given the chance to pick among scholars (the Durmand Priory), soldiers (the Vigil), and spies (the Order of Whispers), it turns out I will pick spies pretty much every time. Although should I ever get my Engineer alt high enough, I can see her as the Priory type.

6.) I only rarely get kicked to overflow now. Tortuga Lion's Arch is always busy, and whenever I hit the plaza with the Asura gates I can count on an overflow message. But aside from just once or twice at peak play times, I haven't gotten dropped in overflow while popping around the world. The combination of early-launch-rush on the player side and ArenaNet working out population loads on their side seems to have hit its balance point.

7.) The queues for World vs World, on the other hand, can be nuts. The first time I decided to go into the Mists, I had a five-minute wait. Tuesday night, I wanted to go in and the queue was so long that when I got the pop-up a half-hour later asking me if I was ready to travel, I had completely forgotten I ever signed up for the queue.

8.) The server-wide World vs World bonuses are really very nice. I am not particularly great at playing through the Borderlands zones; I find them overwhelming, if intriguing. But apparently folks on my server, in general, are. The bonuses applied to the characters I level have just been increasing for the last week, and now sit at the point where I am accustomed to getting four pulls from every harvesting node, and significant XP bonuses for every kill. Should our red and blue rivals (my server is green) sort themselves out anytime soon, I think I will notice the loss of the benefits rather sharply.

9.) The best way to get good screenshots in the Mists is to be dead. It's a surprisingly good vantage point.

I didn't spend very much time dead, honestly; I got fairly good at dodging attacks, and my teammates were lovely about quick revives. (I tried my best to provide the same service in kind.) Hitting F to finish off your opponent, meanwhile, is more satisfying than it probably should be. Sorry, red guys. I really did take joy in your demise. That wasn't very nice of me but, you know, war.

10.) Even the PvP zones need exploring. There are vistas in the Borderlands WvW zones. This means I need to explore them all. Thoroughly. I managed to branch off and grab a few already, but the ones in the heart of enemy territory are going to be... challenging.

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Overall, I am not particularly driven to level quickly, even as more and more of my guild-mates get characters to 80. Guild Wars 2 is encouraging me to take a careful, thorough approach to my playing. I tend to want to bring a map to 100% before I move on to the next, though sometimes I do overlap. (I started exploring Gendarran Fields at level 21, because I like getting in trouble.)

In short, the world is too much fun for me to want to race through it. Sometimes you just need to stop and smell the roses. Or, better yet, go swimming.

No hadoukens get thrown in these teasers for an upcoming short based on Capcom's legendary fighting game. But they do a great job of showcasing the single-mindedness of Ryu and Ken. You can feel the building tension in each clip and eagerly anticipate its release when the two martial artists clash. I personally prefer the Ken teaser. Love that sensei voiceover.

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Ryu and Ken are in a Fractured Illusion! [Street Fighter Media]

Big gaming distribution deals happen in the back rooms of E3. They happen in big metal skyscrapers and sterile board rooms in New York City and San Francisco. And sometimes they happen by exchanging pictures on Twitter.

This morning, the folks behind digital distribution website GOG.com tweeted at game developers Obsidian (whose Kickstartered game Project Eternity recently made a ton of money) with a picture. Obsidian tweeted back.

The full exchange is quite magical:

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Ahh, true love.

Click, kill, loot, level up. Click, kill, loot, level up. Loot, sell, re-equip. Rinse, repeat. Your weapons get more powerful as your enemies get more difficult, and the goalposts move, and move, and move. Click, kill, loot, level up. It's enough to make you wonder why we play video games in the first place.

Torchlight II, with its simple gameplay and tightly controlled loop of challenge and reward, is certainly enough to make one start questioning oneself: It's been twelve hours. Is this just a treadmill? Why am I spending time on this at all?

But each time I wondered that, I'd step back and realize how much fun I was having. And then I'd remember: I play video games because they're awesome.

As of this writing, my time with Torchlight II clocks in at just a hair under 30 hours—that includes the meaty three-act story, a ton of side quests, and a few hours of running around with alt-characters. As I started New Game+, I had killed 11,256 monsters (1638 of which exploded in gouts of blood), taken down 177 sub-bosses, looted 338 chests, caught 34 fish, gathered 231,070 gold and taken 67,272 steps. The game does not keep track of mouse-clicks, but I'm sure that if it did, I would be way past the hundred thousand mark.

Torchlight II is, on its surface, a very simple game. You control a heroic character on a quest. Using your mouse and some hotkeys on your keyboard, you maneuver him or her through a fantasy world, undertaking missions, gathering loot and gear, and clicking on enemies until they explode. It's no surprise that several staffers at Runic games worked on Diablo and Diablo II—where the original Torchlight felt like an homage to the original Diablo, Torchlight II feels somewhat like a modernized take on Diablo II. At its core, it's not a complicated game—anyone looking for strategy, contemplation, or deep tactical gameplay would be well-served to look elsewhere.

So, what compels us to play games like these? In the case of Torchlight II, it's pretty simple—the game looks and sounds splendid, and is a joy to play. Its world is inviting and rich, colors bouncing around the screen in a deadly, candy-colored fireworks show. Ex-Diablo composer Matt Uelmen's soundtrack is the perfect complement to the action, a blend of acoustic guitar arpeggios, industrial-metal dirge and dark fantasy caterwauling that stays out of the way without hiding. The feel of the game is spot-on as well, and it conveys a sense of easy empowerment—by the end of my first time through, my engineer was a walking bomb, capable of dropping seismic rifts with her boots before slamming her weapon into the earth, igniting all within her sizable reach.

If you're wondering how Torchlight II stacks up against Blizzard's recently released Diablo III, I've written a whole list of ways that the two games are similar, and different. But to sum it up, I'd say that Torchlight II feels smaller and more personal, while also managing to be more ambitious, in a rambunctious sort of way. It's a game that doesn't care about being perfect—it's much more concerned with showing players a good time.

There's real creative chutzpah in some of the design ideas here. Torchlight II is fast-paced, with level-ups happening roughly every 20 minutes. You'll always get some new reward or learn some fun new trick, though if you make the right decisions, you can wind up wearing a single piece of gear for almost the entire game. There's also some welcome variety—90% of Torchlight II involves walking down corridors or through forests and killing everything in your path. But sometimes, the game will shake things up, and you'll have to work your way through challenge rooms, or stay within a moving beam of light, or even solve some environmental puzzles. (Though an encounter with the Sphynx, I'm sorry to report, resulted in nary a single riddle. What gives, Runic? A Sphynx with no riddles?)

Torchlight II is also a welcomely generous game. It offers a 20-25 hour quest (on normal difficulty), as well as a vast amount of replayability both in New Game+ and in its many multiplayer options, particularly given the four different character classes and myriad available character builds. And on top of that, Torchlight II is fully moddable, meaning that users can freely change everything about the game, from the graphics to the rules to the "level cap" of 100. Time will tell what wonders (or disappointments) this feature will bring, but if I know anything about the PC modding community, it's that they rarely fail to impress the living crap out of me.

The story of Torchlight II takes its structural cues straight from Diablo II, in that you spend most of your time tracking down the hero of the first game, who has turned evil. The Alchemist, one of the stars of the first Torchlight, has become corrupted and set off on a killing spree across the land. He's trying to unleash some great evil or another and open a gate to some neatherrelam or another… none of it's that important, because unless you have decided to make it a point to care about Torchlight lore, the story is just a mishmash of fantasy gobbledygook. But while the story of Torchlight II is a forgettable mess, rarely has a game's story had less of an impact on my overall enjoyment of it.

In part, that's because the world of Torchlight II is just such a pleasure to be in that I don't much care about the whys and wherefores. The world looks lush and painterly, with rich-hued flora and fauna offsetting the brighter neons of spells and powers. It's a simplified look, almost MMO-like in its broad shapes and low-polygon construction. It's warm and inviting while simultaneously foreboding and exciting. Torchlight II is a fine example understated art direction.

The world itself feels much more cohesive than the story. Enemies have a way of being connected to the environment in ways that, while not strictly "necessary" for the gameplay or story, make everything feel organic and of a piece. Giant bats swarm out of mud-nests in the desert while bugs skitter forth from nests that have grown up in the corners of a cave. Werewolves lie in wait high in trees or down in cottage cellars—everything feels like it was here before you walked onto the scene, and like it'll be there if you leave without killing it. (As if that would happen.)

One of the first things you do in Torchlight II is choose a pet for your character. This animal will follow you around for the entire game, fighting at your side, carrying your loot, and even making runs to the store to pick up more potions while you're in a dungeon. I almost feel as though this one inclusion says everything you need to know about Torchlight II. Yes, it will give gave you tasks and treasures, a lovely world and a grand quest in which to partake. And it will also give you a cat, or a dog, or a dragon.

Enemy design, too, is outstanding. It's a steampunk-fantasy via Brothers Grimm pastiche sort of deal: Giant, robotic metal centurions with huge machine guns (yep, machine guns) patrol one room, but in the next, a loping gravekeeper leads a pack of goblins. Add a touch of H.P. Lovecraft (Tentacle-face alert!) and a hint of the bizarre (Spear-wielding Fungus-men?) and you've got a highly enjoyable bestiary. Enemies are also interesting to fight, attacking in a number of varied patterns that can be strategically countered. It can really pay dividends to learn each enemy's tells, particularly on the higher levels—while it's possible to just potion-chug your way out of most tight spots, the game is much more doable if you watch for the enemy's attack patterns and move out of the way at the right moment.

If Torchlight II falls down in one notable area, it's that sometimes the loot can get to be a bit much. I write that in full knowledge that there is a subset of people who will read that and think "Yes! Finally, my game!" And okay, those people will love micromanaging the hordes of various weapons, armor, rings, necklaces and power-up gems they'll pick up over the course of the game. And while I like item-management myself, there is a limit to that, and Torchlight II goes beyond my limit at times. I simply don't care to weigh whether the level 37 axe with the 208 damage per second and the +110 poison damage over 30 seconds is better than the level 38 axe with 225 dps, a gem slot, no poison damage and a bonus to weapon speed. I'd love to have been able to quickly tell at-a-glance the exact effect that the weapons would have on my character (or failing that, at least have a sell-price in my inventory so that I can ballpark them), though I acknowledge that in a game with as many various stats as Torchlight II, that's a lot to ask of even the most talented UI developer.

As sprawling, generous and occasionally unwieldy as Torchlight II is as a single-player game, it's doubly so as a multiplayer game. Everything in the game can be done in singleplayer or in multiplayer, and it all seems designed with a completely open-ended approach. Want to take your level 40 mage back to help out your level 7 friend? Go ahead! Want to trade some ridiculous unique high-level loot for a low-level shirt? Have fun! Want to solo the game on the same server with your friend, chatting as you fight your way through opposite ends of the map? Go ahead!

It's difficult to truly evaluate Torchlight II's multiplayer at this early stage—I can at the very least say it's functional, and a good deal of fun to team up with friends and take down monsters. It can be tricky to match levels with someone, though, and you'll probably want to have characters set aside that you play with together. In the games I've played (all on pre-release code), I've also seen some weird bugs—enemies that stop attacking and stand still, other players' avatars engaging in nonstop attack loops, that sort of thing. That said, simply opening up your own server to anyone of a certain level who wants to drop in has a lot to be said for it. I plan to continue to play Torchlight II multiplayer over the coming weeks, and if anything substantive changes I will update this review. For now, multiplayer feels loaded with potential, particularly as player vs. player gets going and the modding community has some time to get their hands dirty.

For a game about crushing demons with a giant hammer, Torchlight II feels lighthearted. It moves with a spring in its step, bouncing you ever closer to that next level up, that next piece of shiny kit. It's a game designed around momentum, and it's stickier than anything I've played in a long time. It gives the player a simple task and focuses on making that task as pleasurable as possible, then does it again, and again, and again.

Play any video game for a long enough period of time, and you'll start to wonder why you're playing. Torchlight II, with its laser-like focus and medulla-tickling appeal, is a welcome reminder of why we play. We play to visit other worlds, to unlock incredible new power, to meet mysterious new beasts and destroy them. We play video games because they're awesome. Click, kill, loot, level up. Click, kill, loot, level up. More, please.

Editor's Note: The mysterious person known as Superannuation has dug through the depths of the Internet and uncovered some interesting facts. Today's batch gives you some insight to the status of a Contra reboot, the future of Riot Games, and what could be future Borderlands 2 DLC.

A handful of CVs from current and former employees of The Workshop indicate that the Los Angeles-area studio behind the PlayStation Move fantasy action game Sorcery is currently well into development on an expansion to Gearbox's very recently released Borderlands 2.

The resumes of a former senior level designer, current animator, and current level designer all mention work on Borderlands 2, and the latter two give the expansion the name "Torgue," a likely codename and a reference to of one of the weapons manufacturers in the Borderlands universe. In addition, the aforementioned animator also says that The Workshop has been pitching their very own multiplayer-oriented first-person shooter.

Another Workshop designer talks of a "Unannounced" "Expansion of a Highly Successful Triple-A FPS" — presumably the Borderlands 2 DLC — on their own personal site, stating that they are the "Sole Mission Designer and Scripter" for a pack with more than ten hours of gameplay.

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According to the resume of a former designer at Yager Development, the Spec Ops: The Line developer was working on a now-cancelled Contra title between June and December 2011. Given the development timeline, it seems likely that this title was the mysterious Contra reboot Konami teased during their pre-E3 2011 press conference. Additionally, the cancellation does provide an explanation for why we haven't heard anything of the game since that teaser.

Although there seems to be no Contra reboot in the works as of this time, Konami Europe development head Dave Cox recently suggested Castlevania: Lords of Shadow studio Mercury Steam hopes to reinvent the run-and-gun franchise once they wrap their current duties on the Lords of Shadow 2. However, that will likely be far less lateral than whatever Yager would have had in store for the game.

Details are scant about what the Berlin-based Yager is doing following the release of their controversial Conrad-inspired re-envisioning of the budget-priced military shooter franchise, but a senior game designer job opening on their site alludes to a AAA action title featuring multiplayer with microtransactions and such.

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League of Legends creators Riot Games are hoping to expand beyond their wildly successful online game and tackle new projects, if a handful of job postings are to be believed. While a studio hiring for unannounced projects is typically among the most self-evident and obvious of non-stories, Riot Games may be among the handful of exceptions given how much the company's synonymity with LoL — and the possible risk of new projects alienating their existing fan base.

Other than two positions pertaining to regional versions of LoL, all of the game design openings at Riot's Santa Monica headquarters allude to "unannounced projects." In the lead level designer posting, Riot curiously asks that applicants be well-versed in "good level design for multiple game types" including "shooters, RTS, MOBA, [and] open world." For the most part, those genres are fairly dissimilar from one another, and Riot Games, of course, only has a released product in one genre listed — multiplayer online battle arena. Not to mention that gaming industry job postings usually just ask for expertise pertinent to specific genre that a studio is exploring.

Riot's aspirations beyond LoL are not anything new either. A lead game designer posting from mid-2010 lists helping the "Design Director on initial steps of new projects separate from League of Legends" among the job's responsibilities. Despite this, chances are probably not high we will see anything in the near future of a non-LoL Riot project with the highly monetizable precedent from their flagship title — something that could ostensibly take years to recreate. (And given parent company Tencent's deep pockets, they could probably afford Blizzard-esque development cycles.)

In the meantime, Riot is getting into mobile applications and prepping a new LoL game mode.

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Every few weeks or so, EA posts something on the San Francisco Craigslist board pertaining to its public playtesting initiative called the EA Game Lab, located at its Redwood Shores. These postings ask for a specific subset of gamers to fill out a survey to see if they are right for a specific playtest, and the postings and surveys mostly allude to still-unannounced games that are weeks or months away from being announced — franchises like Simcity and Dead Space showed up on surveys just a bit of time before they were revealed. But the latest playtest is a little different than usual.

On Monday, EA posted to Craigslist hoping to ascertain people's "mobile usage and photography habits" to see if they are the right fit for a "Paid [mobile] photography study" vis-a-vis "an in-development mobile app." The actual survey features the EA emblem and quizzes about items like: what music apps they use, the frequency they take photos, what photo sharing sites they use, what kind of ways they modify photos (filters, effects, etc.), and what derivative products they make from their photos (collages, cards, etc.). Could EA be working on its own Instagram-esque social photography app?

Recent rumors had the undead returning to Treyarch's upcoming installment of Activision's hit shooter series. This trailer confirms the presence of zombies and teases a bit about how they'll be integrated in Black Ops II's near-future sci-fi setting.

Over the last week, local news anchors have been struggling to describe the Wii U and been struggling just as hard to make funny jokes about it while seeming completely natural.

Here are some lowlights. Enjoy!

I'm not generally a big fan of tilt-control in my mobile games. Over the past few years only one mobile game that used the accelerometer as its primary means of control has really grabbed me, and that's One Man Left's Tilt to Live. 2K Play's GridBlock makes it two.

Gridblock is a game about matching colored blocks to colored spaces on a grid via tilting your preferred mobile gaming device. Blocks slide across the playfield in groups or individually, locking into place when they come into contact with the matching space. It's rather simple, at least initially.

As the player advances through the game's nine worlds (two come free with the app, the other seven can be purchased in-app for $2.99), new mechanics are introduced. Some blocks are multi-sided, requiring the player tap the screen to flip them to the right color. Color-changing devices warp the hue of blocks coming into contact with them. Explosive squares will destroy blocks that come into contact with them, but also free nearby locked blocks into play. Viral blocks transmit their coloring like a disease.

GridBlock is quite challenging. Thankfully that has nothing to do with the tilt-controls, which are spot-on. This is a game that requires precision movement via a generally imprecise control method, yet a heavy-handed lummox like me had no problems driving the blocks around the board at all.

With more and more mobile games trying to achieve console-level graphics and gameplay, it's refreshing to see a game like GridBlock — a game that embraces one of the features unique to the mobile platform.

Gridblock - Free [iTunes]

While Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai is helming the upcoming Smash Bros. titles, Namco Bandai is developing the games. But does that mean the Tekken team will be making the games?

When asked by Kotaku whether or not the Tekken team was involved with the new Smash Bros., Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada stressed this: "Sakurai is directing." Harada also added that Namco, of course, has lots of experience making fighting games.

However, said he would not be saying how the new Smash Bros. should play or saying what characters should appear in the game. Harada was very clear that even though Namco is developing the new Smash Bros., Sakurai is in charge of them. They are still very much Sakurai's games.

"We'll be providing our expertise when asked," said Harada, "but it's not like we'll (the Tekken Team) be making the game."

That does not mean developers with Tekken experience won't be working on the Smash Bros. games. When asked for clarification, Namco explained that developers who might have worked on the Tekken games or even as part of the Tekken Team could be assigned to work on the Smash Bros. games.

Semantics, maybe, but Namco seems to think it's important to keep Sakurai and his vision at the forefront.