I'm back to my backlog, playing through everything in order of shortest to longest play. I don't even want to think about that game that has to do with spelunking and fabricating. 

Defense Grid 2 wasn't on my list but I had to wait for Costume Quest. A good tower defense game like D.G. 2 is the best way to wait for an install.

Then I spent most of the rest of the day playing Costume Quest 2. Just as fun as the first one, I feel. The final boss was a little easier than I expected, but I loved the story and all the dialog in the game. There are so many little touches that I really appreciated, like when you choose to be the boy or girl, it's not just a dull, "choose a or b", but a moment fully a part of the overall story. You're never taken out of the experience to do some video gamey thing. I love that. I thought about going back to finish achievements after completeing the main quest, but I didn't feel like it. I'd done a lot of careful exploring and collecting in the game already and it kind of annoyed me that I only had 60% of the achievements done. That's pretty typical of most games I play though. No matter how thorough I am in my first playthrough, I always still manage to miss a bunch of stuff. I did enough for one day in this game. 

Then I loaded up Max: Curse of Brotherhood, which was a Games with Gold game a while back I got for free. It's got movie quality animated visuals. It's a side scrolling 2D puzzle platformer with a mechanic that lets you add or subtract platforms in order to solve puzzles and traverse the world. I get really impatient with these types of games. The pace always grinds to a halt at some point where I'm sitting there thinking of a solution. I really don't like that kind of thing when I'm trying to chill. I like continuous gameplay where I have to think fast of my feet. If the game stops me and makes me ponder a move, I get fed up. That's just me though. This game is likely very wonderful for those who enjoy the puzzle platforming genre. I played a little while and dug the platform building mechanic but quit out eventually. 

Then I played some Gears of War Ultimate for the last few hours. I couldn't play it co-op with Mark 'cause he didn't have it, but he bought it on Amazon while watching me play, so we'll play it maybe next week. I played solo for a while and marveled at the improved graphics and excellent controls of this game. All the mechanics came right back to me after a few minutes of play and I got into the groove of it again. I think the Berzerker in the beginning of this game is pretty memorable. It chases you and you have to make it bash some doors down so you can lead it outside where you can nail it with the satalite based weapon. That thing is a loud screamer and it's pretty tense getting chased by it. Gears is like the loudest video game I've ever played. Everything yells and screams and explodes. I love it. 

So tomorrow, Monday, Mark and I are going to Star Trek Beyond very likely and then I get into my under 20 hour games. Gears is right near the top, so I'll probably play more of that, but there's others too. Should be fun.