On Wednesday, fellow PopMatters writer G. Christopher Williams wrote about remembering to save often in Dishonored, a post that seemed oddly prescient considering my own experience with XCOM: Enemy Unknown (“Remember to Save Often”: The Meta-Game Tactics of Dishonored, PopMatters, 7 November 2012).

When beginning a new game of Enemy Unknown you’re asked to pick between four difficulties: Easy, Normal, Classic, or Impossible, but this list doesn’t do the game justice. Its difficulty is actually more varied than just those four general categories. The real difficulty level constantly fluctuates depending on how much time the player wants to invest in “save-scumming,” the process of saving and reloading constantly to ensure things go your way.

The release of Halo 4 earlier this week put an end to both the excited and nervous anticipation of the renewal of a franchise in transition. Now in the very capable hands of 343 Industries, Halo is with us forever now or at least until the studio rounds out their own trilogy. The smooth transference of ownership—and more importantly the community’s positive reaction to it—reflects a continuation of the changing relationship between player communities and developers.

For fans of the series, Master Chief’s return has been a long time coming. Halo: Reach launched two years ago, but the game was a side story and mechanical departure from the standard Halo series. Master Chief has been slumbering for over five years since the release of Halo 3, longer than his actual cryogenic sleep between the events in Halo 3 and Halo 4.

A few years ago, the Moving Pixels podcast decided to go back and playthrough Max Payne and Max Payne 2, two well regarded shooters from the early 2000s (”Moving Pixels Podcast: The World of Max Payne”, PopMatters, 12 July 2010 and (”Moving Pixels Podcast: Max Payne in Love”, PopMatters, 2 August 2010). One topic that came up while discussing both games was how the use of save games and especially the quick save feature becomes a kind of meta-game tactic in shooters of that era and the previous decade.

Playing both titles on PC, it becomes a force of habit to “Remember to Save Often” because the game is fast-paced and can be brutally unforgiving to a player who makes a bad split second decision. Max is, indeed, a one man army, who with the advantage of the possibility of popping a time slowing, bullet-time mode can generate an incredible amount of havoc when played effectively. However, as Max enters room upon room of antagonists that far outnumber him, understanding the layout and general movements of his opponents “ahead of time” is what leads to the most spectacularly efficient gun battles.

Journey is a game about discovery, but there isn’t a whole lot to discover in the game. When we think of games about exploration and discovery we generally think of large open world games or deep, procedural system-based games. Journey is neither of those. It is a linear platformer. Yet, the very ethos of the game is based around discovery.

The game in its cutscenes and in a few key moments does hint at a theme of spiritual discovery. The journey up the mountain to the bright light is as strong a symbol of enlightenment as possible, but the majority of the game is spent dealing with the visual spectacle of environments that you’re traveling through at any given moment. It is only during moments of reflection that the larger implications and meaning of the game filter through. There is a spatial component to the sense of discovery that allows players to replay the game with a continued sense of wonder.

Gearbox hasn’t reinvented the wheel with Borderlands 2, but they have managed to improve the wheel in just about every way.

This week our podcast crew discusses how tweaking a title in even the smallest ways can result in some generally pretty appreciable advances.