Long ago, indie games were simple little distractions, easy to pick up and put down. I have nothing but admiration for the thousands of programmers with versions of Brickout where the bricks say "moo," but those days are over. That doesn't mean that all indie games have succumbed to feature bloat. On the contrary, some of the best ones stick to one thing, make it look pretty, and add a few hooks to keep people playing. Audiosurf takes your music, turns it into a racetrack, and lets you drive on it. Everything else is window dressing. The core experience is identical to blasting your favorite song while speeding and rapidly changing lanes in time with the music. Audiosurf is just as much fun, but without the cops.

Meet Travis Touchdown. Despite being marked for death by every assassin in town, he's still the coolest cat in the violin factory. He has a cool name, a cool car, and his weapon of choice is a beam katana. (A "beam katana" is the the closest you can get to a light saber without George Lucas tossing you into a pit with teeth.) He also doesn't force the player to swing the Wii remote around to pull off his coolest moves, which is a true blessing. Instead, he allows us to calmly mash A most of the time, and "recharging the beam" involves a simple, dignified gesture familiar to all of us.

But Travis is also the lamest assassin you'll ever meet. He lives in a tiny apartment filled with collectible figurines of underdressed teen witches. The closest he gets to social interaction is renting videos in the "How to Make Love" series and returning them after watching the first two minutes. His friends barely tolerate him and his enemies always get the drop on him. His only motivation is to kill the top 10 assassins in the world, which is a noble endeavor, but what really keeps him going is that his employer Sylvia might sleep with him, once, when he gets to #1. Before every match, Sylvia gives him a pep talk about how stupid and pathetic he is, telling him he's sure to die. What a flirt! Ah, love in the time of beam katanas.

Everyone thought I was crazy for wanting to play Lost: Via Domus. My friends balked at the notion, my co-workers snickered. Even the clerk at Blockbuster, certainly a man of exquisite gaming taste with his unkempt goatee and vaguely hung over stare, wondered out loud if the game would be worth the outrageous rental price I was about to pay. I just smiled and placed a twenty on the counter, confident that I knew what I was buying into.

Yes, I thought, this game is going to suck. But I'm going to play it anyway.

Lost: Via Domus does indeed suck. With its creepy wax mannequin models, bland voiceover work, excruciating gameplay design and complete disregard for anything that made the source material appealing, the game practically has a black hole in its dark center, eager to pull you into its event horizon of frustration, ineptitude and cheap gimmicks. I'm hard pressed to find a license tie-in that is as terrible as this. And yet, I'm still playing. And I'm going to finish it.

Paulie is incredulous. He's a year older than I am. He has money - or rather, tokens - that I can only dream about. And yet, his high score has fallen to his overweight 12 year old friend Julesy. Me. For the last 20 minutes I've been in a groove, milking my quarter for every second, shooting every spindly vector ship that flew past me in reverse.

Tailgunner was my first railshooting heartache. Rez HD is my latest. It's been almost 30 years, and I'm still falling in love.

I was fifteen. Gangly. Pimpled. Wrapped in an outmoded flannel shirt, rocking a bad haircut and even worse glasses. So hesitant, so unsure.

But he was persistent. "C'mon, just try it," he wheedled. "We'll do it after school. I promise, you'll love it."

He was the love of my life/month. He knew I liked Rush and R. A. Salvatore, and still he sat next to me at lunch; he knew me better than anyone. Surely he wouldn't steer me wrong; surely he'd only suggest something I would, in fact, love.

That day, after school, we went to his house. His parents weren't home. Fumbling, smiling nervously, he led me gently by the hand to his basement, and then - that's when it happened.

That's when the little bastard made me play Risk. I still haven't forgiven him.

As SimCity's leading titan of industry, nothing gives me more pleasure than to spend my entire fortune building a thriving metropolis, and then watch it collapse into chaos thanks to my hubris and incompetent stewardship. I do so enjoy a good downfall. Over the years, and in several versions of the game, it was something of a specialty of mine. I founded New Hopetopia, Retryopolis, and West Crying-upon-the-Sofa in a spirit of boundless optimism, carefully placing buildings, connecting up roads, and bulldozing mistakes, knowing full well that it would all end in empty coffers and packs of wild dogs roaming the streets. Lately, I've been playing SimCity Societies, which I've found enjoyable, if a bit sedate, and very easy. Unlike the original SimCity series, Societies offers so few opportunities for failure that the first patch added a new, more challenging Strategic Mode. I really wanted my first Strategic Mode city to begin in hope, end in tears, and need to be nuked from above like Raccoon City. In that spirit, I founded the small but plucky town of Garbage Hole Gardens.

I didn't expect much from Alpha Prime. All the warning signs were there: the small, foreign developer (Prague's Black Element Software), the discount price ($20 on Steam), and the fact that every review quote on their site reads like, "Graphically, at least, Alpha Prime doesn't disappoint . . . rest of game [is good]." After about five hours, I began to pity this unlovable FPS. It isn't a bad game, or more precisely, it isn't merely a bad game. It's an unbelievable fiasco of a game, a brazen travesty that continually displays its own hindquarters like the world's ugliest mammal attempting to mate. Alpha Prime is the Half-Life of suck.

Objectively speaking, is Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Trials and Tribulations, Capcom's goofy courtroom adventure for the DS, a great game and worthy purchase? The answer is an explosively resounding "Yes!" Disclaimer: this opinion is in no way objective and neither Gamers with Jobs nor its parent company Investors with Money can be held liable for hearing damage from resounding explosions.

"Pain is personal ... I like mine."
- Henry Rollins

But in my brief stint as a PS3 owner, the highest praise I've had for the black monolith has been "it's so heavy and shiny" and "dang, BluRay rocks!" Uncharted: Drakes Fortune had been an entertaining launch title (since I define launch as when something falls into my lap, not someone else's) and the known-good titles of Everyday Shooter, Flow and Calling All Cars had certainly shown that fun PS3 games are, theoretically, possible. In other words, I wasn't expecting much when I dropped $10 on a whim to get Pain from the PlayStation Network store.

And while it didn't shake my core belief systems or reinvent a genre, it did make an impression.

I really like Assassin's Creed. It's a technological marvel with impressive control features set in a world that is an absolute joy to explore. I recommend it to anyone with thumbs and a console. Hold this knowledge close to your heart as you read my imaginary patch notes containing the things I think would take Assassin's Creed into a whole new realm of greatness -- rather than a really good two hours of gameplay stretched out to about ten.