Crashday

Stunts and Carmageddon where two excellent (to say at least) games "back in the day". Crashday started as a personal project of two German programmers, inspired by the previously mentioned games. After two years or so, Atari picked this game up and gave it a commercial purpose. The new team announced a game in about a year, but was delayed for another one. The game looked very promising: sharp graphics, cool physics, guns and explosions and below all: lots of fun.

Finally, the game came out and, after over two long years of waiting I was able to play it. Boy, I tell you: I was disappointed. This game has no feeling to it. The graphics are good. The physics are there. But no feeling attached to it. Stunts was a great game. You played those tracks over and over again, trying to shave one lousy hundredth of a second. Carmageddon had very cool physics and sadistic addiction to crash your car into the opponents and the environment. Crashday doesn't not come even close of those games. Trackmania (another little cool car's game) is way better than Crashday.

No can do for Crashday: 6 out of 10!

Onimusha 3: Daemon Siege

Traditionally developed for the PS2, Onimusha 3 got it's way on the PC. I've also played Onimusha 1 and Onimusha 2 on the PC, but those where in original Japanese language, so no story for me and I've felt like losing the essence, so no long plays for those games. This version is translated in English (but has it's share of PS2 issues - all the help I've got from the game was an original PS2 help - "Bring it on!").

The game is some kind of adventure / hack-n-slash / RPG. Nice animations, nice cutscenes, nice levels. The game has lots of repetitive fighting with only few kinds of monsters (maybe 10, but with few variations like abilities, strength or design), so is not really boring. The core story involves aliens, time-travels and weird Japanese medieval demonic lords and has an strong oriental/Japanese feel to it. It's stereotype, but strangely interesting for a westerner (like a "ninja theme": stereotype, still cool :) )

Finishing the game gives you some replay value by adding modifiers that you can toggle if you're willing to replay it, and even a new chapter with an NPC that you've met during the game.

Overall, the game is addictive and gets a strong 9 from me.

Gamespot Onimusha 3: Daemon Siege review here.

Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30

Brothers in Arms is one of the first person tactical shooter games that emerged in the last years. It has some strong points (tactical view, diverse tactical commands, has a very nice "WWII feeling" to it, well documented and "true to the facts" missions) but also has weaknesses (medium graphics, very dumb AI, repetitive gameplay).

BiA is "one of those WWII" games. It's a good one, still, has its dose of WWII stereotypes: camaraderie, "those nasty Germans", the hero that "had them all", etc. The really bad thing in this squad based tactical shooter is the main attraction: the AI. You'll find yourselves screaming and moaning that your teammates are dead due to a wrong taken path, or simply because they refuse to follow simple (as you may think) orders (mostly because of a deficient pathfinding). You'll also be screaming because your teammates will actually attack in certain situations the enemy, even though the situation does no require any such drastic tactical maneuvers.

The enemy is confined to some fixed/scripted positions. So you must find "solutions" to clear the enemy outposts. It's all there is to it. There is some degree of depth into it, but not that much. The situations you'll find yourself into are a little static and that's a definitive feeling in the game: (outpost, clear outpost) x N, finish, cutscene.

The game has lacks few elements that will make this experience diverse and fun: 8.

Gamespot Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 review.

Flawed Video board

The new system works, except when it's not starting :))

It's true: the video board it's somehow broken: it starts in only about 20% of the power-ons. It's a very strange behavior, I mean, it's working or it's not working? How can this system work very well, but will start just once in a while? I've suspected my wiring, but it was done properly. I've suspected the power source, but that wasn't it (checked two other PSUs, with the same results). I've suspected some incompatibility between the motherboard and the video-board, but at the end, the guys in service told me the video-board does the same in their systems.

So that's that: I don't have a system right now and I wait a graphics card to assemble my system again.

Update: got my new board but this was even broken than the first: even lower start rate, weird sounds from the cooler (fan touching the metal cooler). Sent it back the next day.

One more week of waiting... and an new board. And, like a bad nightmare: same symptoms. This time, I wonder if it really is the videoboard's fault or the motherboard. Having issues with 3 brand new videoboards raises some questions...

For now, I'm a little tired running with my system to the techguys... but I definitely have to do that in the near future.

Finally: A computer!

After a more than a week I finally got my upgrade. It's just hard with these retailers in Romania. Not as I expected to find (A64 3500+ and Leadtek 6800GS) but A64 3200+ and PixelView 6800GT.

With only 512MB of RAM (now I'm broke, so next month I'll have a memory upgrade) and with default mainboard and video drivers (77.77) got something over 2270 points in 3DMark06, which is definitely good.

I got some pictures of the process and I'll post them in this blog later.

Update:
With 81.89 nvidia video drivers and latest mobo drivers it got something over 2310 points easily. After a light 5% overclocking (processor/memory/video board) it scored in 3DMark06 over 2440 points. It has some OC potential.

X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse

So I've been playing this game for about a week or so. It's a cool mix between hack&slash RPG (Diablo style) and comix. It's a little addictive (I must admit). So let's get down with the pros and cons of this game:




Pros:

• Lots of characters to play with, right from the beginning (X-Men party and Brotherhood) + 3 unlock-able characters
• Characters have each lots of upgradable super-powers (at the higher levels, are very powerful and very cool to watch)
• Engaging story (yes, it's the old: the bad-guys are almost winning, do your best and save the world kind of stereotype, and the missions are all like: get that and put it there/go there and destroy that, that and that... with little variation of course). Even if stereotype, it's kind of interesting to see where would the plot go
• Nice comix like graphics, cool explosions and spell-effects (aka super-powers), very-very-good voice-acting, highly destructible environments, very cool animations, characters and villains. Bosses are well designed, though, some of them are a little disappointing (at least for me). The level design is very good and somehow varied (it's nicely themed but varied)
• AI of your party is satisfying. Auto-healing is cool. Temperament selections for your party-characters is also a good thing. Auto-spell and auto-equipment management are very good if you don't really want to waste your game tuning your characters
• All the characters evolve over time even if you don't play with them. A cool feature because you don't have to play some fixed party to optimize your experience points...
• Extra-content: artwork, original comix drawings, training sessions & exams, etc.
  

Cons:

• Right from the beginning, the controls seem dumb. KP4 and KP6 are your main attack buttons and W, A, S, D for movement. Special powers are stupid combinations of KP5 and KP4, KP6, E and [Space]. I mean, how do you come with these controls? Accessing some other power? No problem: B + 1, 2...0. Simple as that! :( There are also combos: KP4-KP6-KP4 combinations, but it's very hard to do one if you press them too rapidly or too slow. You need something like 500ms delay between pressing each key (and hold that for about 200ms). It's stupid!
• The stash, upgrades and buy/sell screen and party-management parts suffer from lots of control bugs! A mouse click doesn't always select that particular option, a up/down key could move the cursor way past the desired option, sometimes keys don't seem to work at all... Dumb-dumb-dumb!
• In good-old-Diablo-hack'n'slash-classic-RPG style, you have tons of enemies to kill and doesn't seem like you're really evolving, because of this stupid system: enemies evolve and give more experience points when you kill them, but no worry, because you need more-and-more experience points to advance your level. So, you'll always have the same fights, because of the constant distance the computer sets between your party and your opponents
• The camera sits in a high position to better catch your party smashing enemy's forces. But sometimes it's pretty annoying hiding your active member from your view behind a wall or something. It's true, that when your party approaches a certain obstacle, that particular object becomes transparent (and you don't always realize why your character takes a particular trajectory apart from a straight line :) )
• Breaking different objects throughout the level will sometimes reward you with money or objects that you can wear or sell. But it doesn't seem to follow any design pattern and always come in great-great numbers, so you can successfully fill your time with'em

It's a good title and if you like comix it will get you. It is well designed, beautiful graphics and a little flashy, lots of characters and things to do and let's not forget: addictive game mechanics. It's definitely worth a 9.

Gamespot X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse review.

Buying a new computer...

Once every 2 years I upgrade my computer...

I started in 1996 with a Cyrix 486DX4/100MHz (remember those days - Cyrix was bought by VIA and now creates low power processors like C3). It was a good machine back then: 4MB RAM, Chips & Tech 1MB SVGA Video Board, a Seagate 540MB HardDrive, a KTeck/Ruffles(?) 14" SVGA Monitor (good old 800x600@60Hz and 1024x768@43Hz interlaced). I remember the motherboard had a respectable VL-BUS architecture, good for those days.
After about a year, I bought 4 more MB RAM, a OPTi SoundBlaster Pro compatible soundcard and a pair of active speakers that totaled about 7W.

In 1998, with the help of a friend of mine, got a Pentium Pro 200MHz, 32 MB RAM, a 4 MB ATI Mach64 (just temporarily) - a S3 Virge 2 MB VRAM. The speed increase was phenomenal! About 4x. It was on PCI architecture, a better videoboard. Cool! Also I've managed to replace the 540MB Seagate with a 1GB Fujitsu harddrive (way more capacity). Also by then I had purchased my first CD-Rom drive: 16x Funai.

In 2000 I had purchased an AMD 400MHz K6-2 processor, with a ACorp motherboard with the new AGP stuff :) in it. From the first day, I've kept that CPU overclocked at 450MHz (I just could not set it at 500MHz with that board...). The CPU remains as cool as ever with just a simple cooler... (these days, you have to have a real fridge glued to the CPU just to keep it at~40C). From a friend of mine I've upgraded my videoboard from a S3 Virge 2 MB to a AGP S3 Trio 3D with 4MB VRAM. I've also upgraded my RAM to 64MB Kingmax (slick memory those days). More memory was about to come to my computer a year later - another 128MB Infineon memory bar (Infineon was just as cool!) The hard drive couldn't last for long, so I've bought a 20GB Quantum LS drive (big mistake, because those drives had not 5400RPM but 4400RPM... and they've recently been introduced it... so with the element of surprise and a tiny bit cheaper, I've managed to screw this up). With the help of a friend, I exchanged the Quantum drive with a cooler 20GB Seagate Baracuda drive (way cool! 7200RPM and very quiet). An Aureal 1 sound board plus a pair of Phillips 50W speakers completed the system.

I don't know if you still remember, but my first monitor had been purchased was back in 1996, so, 6 years with the same old 14", was awful. In 2002, I've got myself a 17" DynaFlat Samsung 757DFX (way better than the "exploding bubble" that the old one was).
I was working on a project (a serious Java based Web application) and it really needed more RAM. So I've got another 256MB SDR, but when I've put it in there, the motherboard spelled 512MB and frozed. So no more joking around, I had to buy a computer to fit my memory... so I've got a 1200MHz Duron processor with a motherboard that could flip-the-chip and deal with DDR memory too. My 386MB SDR memory got upgraded a year later when I've sold them to a friend and bought a 256 MB Corsair memory. A merely month later, the price of the memory almost doubled (some trouble with an earthquake in Taiwan) and I've only got a 256 MB Samsung memory bar. So, with a new system, a 40GB WesternDigital drive would fit very well.

In 2003 I've won with a friend of mine second place in an software educational contest, so I've well spent my share on a 52x LG CD-RW (putting a rest on the little 5 year old 16x Funai drive) and a Gigabyte 9000PRO 64MB videoboard ("Shaders...here I come!"). At the end of the year, I've also got a Lexmark Z25 printer to help me with my papers.

In 2004, yes, two more years after the last big upgrade, I got a Gigabyte K7N400-L motherboard with a AMD 2500+ Barton processor. Assorted with that, came a pricey GeCube 9600XT 128MB. No way I could live with a Over that, I've exchanged one of my 256MB DDR 333 sticks with one Kingmax 256MB DDR 500, and then I've paired it. A good big, fast WesternDigital 120GB drive came in handy those days. No system should run without the appropriate powersource, so a 350W Hyper was enough for me. At the end of the year, I've also bought a Pioneer DVD-DL+-RW drive, a set of Genius SW 5.1 Deluxe sound system and a Audigy 1 LS soundcard.

In late october 2005, a good shinny Samsung 960BF TFT monitor arrived on my table (still not convinced the old CRT was such a bad monitor and this is new one is "wayyyy better...").

So here we are, in 2006, trying once more time to upgrade my computer. I think I'll change my system in a 939 style if you know what I mean, hoping that dual-core processors will drop next year: ASUS A8N-E, AMD64 3200+/3500+ and a Leadtek 6800 GS 256MB (so yes! I'll go nVidia way!). I should buy a 450W Hyper and a Geil 1GB Kit. Wish me luck at buying those!

AstroPop

I know you'll say I'm insane (and maybe you're right) but I've seriously enjoyed AstroPop Deluxe. This is a little arcade & puzzle game created by PopCap Games. It's one of those little flash games that you'll play during your boring office hours.

I'm a PC gamer, so why I've played these arcade games?
1. It's a very simple game to learn. Very simple game mechanics (destroy all the bricks, putting at least 4 of the same color bricks together). Also, the game evolves as the levels unveil: an exploding brick, a brick explosion-power modifier, a brick-line clearer, virused bricks, bonus bricks... and although it's easy to play, it's hard to master (level 15 and up are very difficult to pass).
2. Presentation is sensational for this little game: you control a little ship (at the bottom of the screen) and shoot colored bricks that stack continuously from the top, but the way they explode, the announcements made throughout the game, the tension that permanently rises as the game goes... it's just cool.
3. There are 4 different ships with 4 different drivers. Two of them are playable from the beginning, the other 2 are unlocked by playing through the levels with the first ones. The have different goals, different special powers, different way to upgrade their ships. It's like 4 little stories but fun to follow.
4. It has the advantage of being this fun little game that you'll install on your laptop and take with you on a trip. It's tones of fun and excitement.

This game runs on different platforms:
1. Flash game right from the PopCap.com site
2. AstroPop Deluxe on your PC
3. AstroPop Deluxe on Xbox360
4. AstroPop on your mobile :)

I'll definitely give it a 10 for being the fun little game that I enjoy so much.

Gamespot AstroPop movie.
Gamespot AstroPop for mobiles review.

Price of Persia: The Two Thrones

Prince of Persia: T2T is the third title of the series developed by Ubisoft. The first one was epic with a good prince. The second one had a bad-ass prince fighting for his destiny with the Dahaka (some kind of a time guardian) and the Empress of Time. The third one has a twist: the prince transforms sometimes in his dark self in his quest to reconquer Babylon and avenge Kaileena (the Emperess of Time became mortal, and was killed by the evil vizier).

The basic game mechanics are still present in this title: cool acrobatic movements, good or very good environmental puzzles, very tight controls (you have to press Jump at a precise time, or you have to put the dagger into a hole at the exact moment...), cool fights with the guardians...

New things in this title include:

• some kind of hole in wall, you can stick your dagger in and then swing to another point
• new traps with spikes that come in and out from the walls
• a more stealth approach "speed kill": you can kill in a cinematic way an enemy when you sneak behind him, or drop into his back
• the evil self prince: a more deadly/aggressive combat, new weapon (like a edged chain)

The gameplay is solid but the camera is plain stupid. The first PoP had a pretty good camera. This camera is so restricting and so itchy that will violently jump into it's preferred place and you cannot do too much about that.
The game is also pretty hard because if you have a difficult part and you cannot decide what to do in a specific room or you miss the precise moment to press a certain key you'll repeat a part of the game over and over again, and that's very frustrating, believe me.
The graphics are good, the animations have some discontinuities but is not that disturbing, the level design is very good, the textures are pretty good but a little repetitive.

A good platform game: should not be missed, so I'll give it a 9-9.5.

Gamespot Prince of Persia The Two Thrones review.

The fan is dead!

About 2 years ago, I've bought this video board GeCube 9600XTG (a good Radeon 9600XT). It had a fancy cooling system, it looked cool, it didn't had hardware monitoring features (like an ATI 9600XT board would - and this board respects the specs created by ATI). It certainly wasn't cheap and it fought many battles against demanding games... but it's weakest point: the stupid fan!

As I've told you, it has a fancy cooling system: big aluminum radiator, custom made fan... so I cannot do too much about changing or repairing the fan. If you do not have a fan... a 500MHz core and a 600MHz memory chips will probably get a nasty burn. So you cannot use the video board. So you cannot start your computer which includes: 160GB of information, a DVD-RW unit, a TV Tuner... Nice.

For a stupid fan...

For about 1 week and counting....

Update:
Got it up and running thanks to Xi, my buddy who got it oiled. Thanks buddy!

Star Wars: Battlefront II

Star Wars: Battlefront was a good game. It was original, it was some kind of fun, it had that feeling of you being one little gear of an infernal war machine...
The good:
Star Wars: Battlefront 2 is an enhanced version of the previous title. It has better graphics, sharper AI (for the opponent's, because your partners are just running as dummies on the field...), nice little galaxy domination game as a shell for the battles (you move your ships like in a chess game, only you'll do it on a special web and you'll get your missions from making your turns on the enemy's territory), it has more units that you can play (you can play as a Jedi now if you're good enough), you got to play space missions (cool!).
The bad & the ugly:
My complains have to do mainly with the AI of your companions. The enemy is doing some impressive moves, can protect itself shooting behind of some obstacles, jumps as a commando trooper, but their strength comes from their numbers. Your friends are nothing but "Look! I'm running over here, I'm running over there, I'm dead!" The radio is always giving you some nice little hints like: "We can't afford losing soldiers like that!", or "We can't afford losing any more check points!" (or whatever they call them). It's nothing personal but when the enemy's best soldiers kill as many as 15, 14, 13, 10..., you killed 47 of theirs but your guys only manage to score like 6, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2,... you realize that something is just plain wrong. You'll try secure those damn points, you try to secure your buddy's back and they make their stupid run-'till-shot dance. I'll say what you'll do: you'll curse few times and then you'll hit "Quit".

It's a damn shame, because all-in-all it's a good game, and we know it. I'll give it a 8.5 because all those nice features. But this game is intended only for those serious players or dedicated fans.

Gamespot SW: Battlefront II review.

The Movies

I've waited 3 years for this one and now it's out. I expected more of a "make your own movies!" kind of game, but you'll have to add a Hollywood tycoon with that too.
You'll be amazed of the value this game is getting. It's kind'a huge: actors, directors, crew, extras, script writers, builders, janitors... relationships between actors, actors have moods, actors get bored, actors can practice, actors have ratings, you have to change the "image" of an actor or let him change it for himself, actors have to be relaxed, actors can be stressed, actors can give good or bad acting, actors can be specialized, actors have good or bad reviews, anyone can become a star (even a janitor)... Tons of things to do.

I've only played for a couple of hours with this one, and I'll going to update this post.

Gamespot The Movies review.

Gun

It's an wild west adventure style game. You have your pistol, you have your shotguns, flask of miracle drink - it heals you instantly, you shoot bad dudes, thieves, rogue native americans (indians), save innocent people, help the sheriff, ride the horse, blow up stuff with TNT... it's cool. The save system it's pretty good - you don't have to repeat a large portion of the game just to repair a mistake you've made and missed the goal. There is a zoom feature for the shotgun and a "quick-draw" - more like a slow-mo effect - for the pistol. It has a straight-forward action and it's pretty fun to play. I would give it more like 8-9 for all the cool stuff in the game (game handling, gameplay, story mode, wild west feeling...).

Gamespot Gun review.

NFS: Most Wanted

Looking good... (very good actually). The introduction in the game surprised me.

It's cool that they struggled that much to avoid the simple and obvious "Hello! You have to race to the top!" line.

Nice little features: Nitro will recharge (slow but it does), slow-mo action (you press a key and enter for a brief period of time in slow-mo, enough to cross that difficult section of the game perfectly), big free-roaming world, pretty good cut-scenes with real actors, lots-and-lots of blur and bloom/glow (so much that your eyes will start watering up), 32 excellent cars - presented right from the beginning, but not accessible, and ... THE COPS!

Update:

The game it's ok, but kind of repetitive after a while. Over NFS:U2 it has less items (good thing), it has preview even for locked items (also good), has shops, but only 3 kinds: upgrades, car-shop and home (also a good thing), the sections with newly unlocked items have an exclamation sign-icon attached to them (good), you have to change your car's appearance to loose heat, or use another car (pretty bad), once bought, a car will loose half it's price (bad), a car with lots of upgrades has an equal price with a plain one (bad), you'll always have a shortage of money (bad), if the police impounds your car 3 times, your car is lost, and if you don't have any more cars, Game Over (so-and-so).
It doesn't raise frustration but it's not so engaging. It's pretty much the best arcade car game of the moment and that's why I'll give it a 9.

Gamespot Need 4 Speed: Most Wanted review.

OS X 10.4.1 on a PC

I've got a developer DVD iso from a torrent about a month ago. Yesterday backed up all the important data from my laptop (in fact, my wife's) and installed it. It went smooth (but it did trash all my partitions at the install stage). In about 45 minutes it was installed. It has a cool interface, it's fast, no lag whatsoever. I configured the ethernet adapter but no wireless and no sound. One little annoyance is the tapping on the touchpad isn't working. Power-management is ok (but a little too lite for my likings). Safari is ok as a browser. Startup and shutdown are as fast as on XP (the shutdown sequence runs a little faster though).

It will not have a long life on my laptop though, because it isn't practical. Sure, it looks nice, it was a good experience, but that's it! Back to XP Pro.

One more thing: OS X is light-years away from Vista. Microsoft should hire some of Apple's developers and designers!

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

This is an amazing product. It's a picture browser, picture organizer and a picture editor. It pretty resource intensive, but I think it's worth it. I use Acdsee also (since Acdsee32 until Acdsee 8.0 - latest version), and it's much faster than Adobe's product, but it's also less refined.

As a picture browser it's slow. As a picture organizer it's very good. As a picture editor it's more than ok.

One feature that I like it's tags: pictures can be dragged onto a category tag and the tag appears to every picture in that selection. You can create Event tags, Place tags, People tags... and each tag has an picture (or a selection from a picture) to illustrate it. You can associate one photo with any of the tags (you can have multiple People or Event tags for one picture). Once you put the tags, you can select all the pictures from a particular Event, containing certain Person or persons... and even: every picture that wasn't made in a particular Place but it contains a certain Person... Displayed pictures can also be restricted to a certain time interval.


Other nice feature you have it's people's faces identification. It's not as high-tech as you would think but it does find almost all the faces in a particular selection. It presents a list of crops from your selection containing just the faces of those persons. If you have multiple persons in a certain picture, all the crops will be there.

It's nice to rotate your pictures with just Ctrl + Left or Ctrl + Right (and it's working on selections too).
Auto red-eye removal will do automatically the work if the photo's EXIF "Flash used" flag indicates true.

A good thing it's photo stack: you can select some pictures and stack them for whatever reason: they present the same scene, there are several shots of the same subject, they represent several edits/versions of the same picture... It saves your space (all the pictures in the stack are represented by one single picture), and it makes it easier to navigate through your collection. You can unstack them whenever you want.

Also nice it's the compare feature in the Full Screen Preview screen. You can split your screen and choose pictures to be displayed in either left or right panel (if you want this split screen feature).

It does some complicated slide shows. Has lots of transitions and effects and the working environment resembles with a non-linear editing software.

One of the best features is by far Quick edit and Standard Edit. It's more like a lite version of Photoshop. You have all the tools, plus new ones over CS2: relating to selection and color matching (You can select something by drawing with a red pen over the desired area. The program will try to select in a continuous area all the similar pixels you've drew over. You can balance starting from a neutral - white/gray color. You can balance colors based on skin color tone. etc.)

It's a realy good, polished product. You can see it here and you can download a tryout version here (you'll need a username/password pair and you can obtain it from bugmenot)

Bought a Sony DSC-H1 digital camera

I've purchased a DSC-H1 after about a month of reviews reading. I'll continue with kind of personal review.

Update:
Pros:
- Fast AF, nice "Focus" button, pretty nice manual focus
- 12x zoom (36mm-436mm - 35mm form) and quite speedy optics (2.8-3.7)
- Quick review (~0.2sec)
- Easy to handle and operate (nice jog-dial, good positioning of the buttons, fast and clear menus)
- Feels firm in your hands, good construction
- Good Anti-Shake system
- Medium quality (slightly better than the concurrence, but still medium)
- Very good value (small price for such a camera and delivered accessories)
- Nice 48 smart zoom in low-res (640x480-VGA) captures
- Good flash (adjustable power, but nasty powerful AF infrared light helper - it's like a lantern!)
- Good WB
- Bracketing

Cons:
- The batteries life will be pretty short (~200 pictures with 2 2100mAh NiMH rechargeable batteries)
- Little AF hunting at tele (but not that slow)
- Just a few size & compression choices for the capture (5, 3:2, 3, 1, VGA sizes at Fine or Standard quality)
- Pretty small EVF

D&D - Dragonshard

RTS with D&D creatures. It has an interesting story, it's full of side-quests, it's pretty straightforward, has 4 main heroes, with it's own special abilities and specialization, enough unit types to try some strategies, has nice graphics (if you run your characters through the snow, there will be snow-paths, if you run your characters through the nice high grass, the grass will bend realistically), nice animations, etc.
All in all: it surprised me. For a first impression I would give it a 9.

Gamespot Dragonshard review.

Serious Sam II

Serious Sam II it's the sequel to Serious Sam and Serious Sam Second Encounter, two fun games. It's a FPS, not a classical one (find the exit, search for the key, shoot those guys, open the door), not a team-based FPS, no RPG influences... just mindless shooting and mindless fun.

It has beautiful colorful graphics, nice little animated characters, functional physics engine, LOTS-and-LOTS of BIG-BIG-or-FUNNY-LOOKING monsters, IMPRESSIVE-BIG-SHINY-GUNS, some sarcastic comments...

It's cool with me but I was somehow bored by it. You always end up locked in a room and somehow, the bad guys are spawning everywhere. You have to have a minimal strategy but in the end you'll run like crazy, spinning and mindless-shooting everyone in the room, even the last object ('couse it just might get you a medical pill or some bullets). Yeah, it's fun, but you get tired of running like that. "Hey man! If you can't take the pressure, don't play it!" would be the comment, but it isn't like that, because games should give you fun and accessible.

I would give it a 8.5 for the crazy-spinning and disorienting shooting, but else, for the graphics, for the fun, for the comments, for the engine, for the content (characters, monsters, animations, fun, crazy and variated weapons, vast levels) I would give it a solid 10.

Gamespot Serious Sam 2 review.

Fable - The Lost Chapters

I've played Fable (The Lost Chapters) on the good side. It was a realy cool game in my opinion: very fun, very addictive - good hack-and-slash (something like Enclave, but much-much deeper), nice RPG, nice Good-vs-Evil option, vast world, extremely nice graphics, very good sound, etc.

Now I'm going to play on the evil side to see what would have happened if I'd taken the other decision.

I would give a 10+ to this game and advise anyone who enjoys games to play this one.

Gamespot Fable - The Lost Chapters review.