Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon does not feel like a game you play; it feels like a game you complete. There is no challenge, there is no true engagement, and there is no fun involved. It's just a chore to be finished and crossed off. It is the very definition of a 5/10 game: it is playable, it does not have any glaring flaws, but it also is not in the slightest bit engaging or entertaining.

"A few neat tricks, but several significant flaws." Good: Brilliantly flexible level design; a varied, fun skillset; incredible subtle details; unique additional challenges; the right approach to multiple endings. Bad: Cripplingly restrictive controls; a terrible save/load structure; awful plot, story, and exposition; overly transparent choice system; too little action.

"Gambles, but loses." Good: Impressively satirical; well-implemented reactive and interactive battles; decently and properly varied gameplay; a strong ending. Bad: Inconsistent moral choices that sabotage the entire satire of the game; demands too much suspension of disbelief; poorly developed characters in a character-driven game; subpar for its genre; a strange ending.

"Like eating lobster: a tasty treat in such a difficult shell that it's barely worth the effort." Good: Incredible, well-characterized cast; compelling, twisting plot; a well-implemented interactive narrative. Bad: Too often plodding and boring; glitchy frame rate; a deceptively narrow story tree for the interactive narrative; not nearly enough gameplay to carry an entire 15-hour game.

This week in my series on gaming companies, I'll look at Sid Meier's second enterprise, Firaxis.

This week in my series on gaming companies, I'm looking at the first company to be associated with Sid Meier, MicroProse.

This week, I'll look at the developer responsible for the other half of the world's best-known real-time strategy games, Blizzard.