***

Of course I didn't play any games yesterday. Still too much to do with this job-change. Today will mostly be a house-cleaning day as well, though I will provide a couple more posts, including one about this blog's exciting -- but still somewhat secret -- future. Tracey will also have a new entry of her excellent daily game developer/publisher/publicist/etc Twitter report.

For those interested in the future of my daily Game Diary, I'm happy to say that it will continue. I don't expect it to appear at Kotaku. Instead, look for it to return on stephentotilo.com, a site that will be up and running as soon as I sort a little hosting issue out. I won't be at Kotaku until May 4, but I hope to have the Diary up and running this coming Monday. Follow me on Twitter if you'd like. I'll be sure to post a note about it there once it's up.

See you soon, Diary readers!

"Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts" - I'm a big "Banjo" fan, but haven't touched this game in several months. I'd like to get back to it.

"The Godfather II" - I have played only about an hour of this game, but was fascinated by the gameplay. I'm going back to it.

"Valkyria Chronicles" - See "The Godfather II"

"F.E.A.R. 2" - I've played through two levels and want to see this one through, if for no other reason than to experience at least one Monolith game in full.

"MadWorld" - Seems too important not to play.

"Run Factory Frontier" - I dabbled in this gardening/dungeon-crawling Wii game about a month ago. I don't see myself playing through it, but I'd like to go back.

"Order Up!"  - This is my favorite cooking game. I want to get a perfect rating in at least one of the game's restaurants.

"de Blob" - This game is fantastic. I finally have time to return to it.

"Mushroom Men" - I was going to abandon this Wii adventure game, but as I've written recently, the soundtrack hooked me.

"Persona 4" - I don't have this game, but a friend has offered a spare copy to me for my break.

"Cubello," "Bit.Trip Beat," "Bonsai Barber," "World of Goo" - I'm on a WiiWare kick and want to play more of each of these.

So... which of these would you play first?

On Friday I played "PixelJunk Eden Encore" with N'Gai Croal. We were enjoying the new triple-seed-activation move but were otherwise struggling to find what was good about the new levels. Then we discovered the madness of a level with moving platforms. Not bad, but I recall series designer Dylan Cuthbert saying to me at Game Developers Conference that he'd prefer to make new "PixelJunk" games instead of expanding existing ones. I'm with him.

N'Gai and I also played "Maboshi's Arcade," a collection of three simple geometrically based games for WiiWare. Each game can be played in a window on the screen, so I took the left window and played a "circle" game. N'Gai played a "square" game. Oddly, his gaming and my gaming had nothing to do with each other. (A glowing IGN review says I'm wrong about this, but I haven't seen what they're talaking about). I then tried the square game too, which is like playing "Snake" if the snake's tail was on fire and the goal was to set everything in the level ablaze -- it's a smart little game. The peculiar WiiWare game also allows you to unlock a version that can be sent to your DS, something I haven't been able to do yet.

We played some "Burnout Paradise Party" on the PS3. "Party" is the game's relatively new pass-the-controller multiplayer mode that is downloadable was an expansion to the core game. Players take turns tackling the same challenges. I'd played it with my wife and I'd liked it. N'Gai and I dug it too.

I showed him "Bit.Trip Beat," the latest critical darling on WiiWare. It's a music game that riffs on "Pong"-style gameplay and ranks with "World of Goo" as among the service's best offerings. But/and it's hard.

And… that's it. I watched my wife play some "PixelJunk Monsters" on Saturday, but, otherwise it was work, some nice weather and some other life duties that kept me playing. Signs of warm weather cutting into my gaming time? Could be.

Next: I keep waiting for the mailroom guy to deliver me "Excitebots," which so pleasantly surprised me at GDC.

***

One of the unsung gems of last year's Wii third-party flood was "Order Up," a cooking game that combined "Cooking Mama"-style interactive recipes with very light strategic management of a restaurant.

Last night, after cleaning enough dishes to appease the game's health inspector, I managed to serve every one of my customers a dish with the spices they each like. I still haven't been visited by a food critic, so I may play more until that happens.

But I don't see myself venturing deeper into the game to unlock the next three restaurants in "Order Up."

Why?

Because the basic mechanics of the game seem too easy. Shake the remote to chop a tomato. Dip the fries in a fryer. Flip burgers with the remote. Etc. Even juggling two orders at once isn't that hard. The prospect of playing this game for many more hours seems unexciting, like I'd just be waving my hands without much challenge rather than feeling like I was putting in effort to have fun.

What I'd like, I guess, is a Wii game that has the kind of "casual"-gamer design of an "Order Up," but has interesting enough gameplay mechanics that I would want to play the game for the long haul. That's what "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero" are: non-threatening, non-narrative games with mechanics that are fun to return to. I'd hope a cooking game could offer that too.

As much as I like "Order Up," I'm not sure if it pulls that off.

Next: Tonight, I'm going back to "Mushroom Men" on the Wii to give it a little more time, but I don't think it's a game for me.

***

Who am I to leave a free game a publisher sends me unplayed?

Even a game fellow reporters snicker about, like last fall's "Golden Axe: Beast Rider"?

I could take Sega's remake for about an hour.

I'm a sucker for a new concept, and the idea of a "God of War" clone mixed with the ability for my heroine to ride large beasts was enticing. Oddly, though, the game doesn't show this feature off in any fun ways in its first hour. I got my scantily clad warrior woman to ride the back of a fire-breating dinosaur, but she was swiftly knocked off. An enemy took over the dino. I killed it. Back to on-foot minor-league Kratos action.

Later, I had my warrior woman riding on the back of a large bear/tiger that could turn invisible. By this time I had claimed the Golden Axe, which I could throw. But riding this beast wasn't very fun. I mostly used him to bash through gates. And I got knocked off. Again.

By this time, the game had made me uneasy.

Two reasons:

1) The "Golden Axe: Beast Rider" combat is more crude than that of "God of War" or "Devil May Cry." So, for an all-games-for-free game spoiled reporter like me, I have the luxury of being able to dismiss a game that's not at the standard of its genre leaders.

2) There's just something about a game that stars a barely-dressed warrior woman, that uses the image of a woman hung from the tree as an early signature visual, and that shows its first naked woman as a corpse on a battlefield... hmm. There's just something about that I'm not eager to endure.

So, after an hour, I decided that unless someone gives me a good reason to go back to it, I'm done with "Golden Axe: Beast Rider."

Next: Tonight I think I shall finish another video game made with little tact: "50 Cent: Blood on the Sand."

Should the graphics of a game I possess give me pause about playing it?

***

I already have "The Godfather II." EA sent it to me.

I've already played "The Godfather II." I started it last weekend.

I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. It mixes street-level "Grand Theft Auto" gameplay with a god-level city-wide strategy game. That combination has me wanting to go back and play more.

But the game is ugly. The street-level graphics are inferior to those in "Grand Theft Auto IV," which I was playing heavily almost a year ago.

So, last night, when I had a choice of which game to play next from my backlog, I put "The Godfather II" aside, shuffled past the voice-controlled "End War" (I didn't feel like talking), and returned to "50 Cent: Blood on the Sand."

I know some people refrain from buying games because of bad graphics, but I think this is the first instance when I avoided playing a new game I already have because of its graphics. Could it be that graphics matter even once we get our games home?

What will bring me back to "The Godfather II" is my fascination with its mix of gameplay genres. What I've seen in my one hour of play time with the title is a game that might stitch my actions into the fabric of an open-world in the consequential ways that "Crackdown" has teased at and that "Infamous" promises to do. It's a model of small actions having grand landscape-wide ramifications that "Grand Theft Auto," despite so much of its strengths, has moved away from since 'GTA: San Andreas." This "Godfather" game feels too important -- and too potentially fun -- to ignore.

But it is an eye-sore compared to its contemporaries.

If I don't get to "The Godfather II" this weekend, blame its graphics or blame me. (Though, it might be more appropriate to blame Easter.)