I finished RE4 yesterday evening — and at this point in time, me finishing a game is in itself a recommendation. It manages to revive the franchise in so many ways while still staying true to its core, coupled with amazing visuals and sound effects. Most in game cut-scenes look better than pre-rendered sequences used in other games and the game itself is equally well executed with plenty of atmospheric particle effects, good texture work and excellent character models. The only (small) mar is that it always runs in (non-anamorphic) wide-screen mode.
It is a fairly long game (a bit below 22h for me — with 908 enemies killed), but due a variety of nuances in the core gameplay (partner, vehicle, etc.) it manages to stay fresh and interesting throughout with an amazing intensity. The merchants with their different available weapons, upgrades and available mini-games improve replayability manifold as you can take your inventory and excess cash into a new game.

Darwinia is the new game from the folks at Introversion (the last of the bedroom programmers as they like to call themselves). They are a small independent game company and the only reason I found out about them, was that I liked their previous game Uplink, which is some sort of hacking simulator. Enough with the href-pimping, on with the impressions.
The box of Darwinia is green, and when I say “green” I mean “GREEEEEEEEEEEEN”. It practically yells at you. That way it’ll be relatively easy to find it should a retailer stock it (which may or may not habe been their intention ;)). The game itself seems to be some sort of action RTS, a bit reminiscent of “Cannon Fodder” or maybe even “Syndicate”. Graphics-wise, the Introversion-folks have made the best of their lack of graphic artists and implemented a retro-futuristic, texture-less “dreamscape” which fits the game well. The interface takes a no-clutter approach (using a separate gestures screen) and some clever computer-metaphors (ALT-Tabbing your units). I am not sure about their decision to compress chip-tune music as ogg, I would have much preferred an actual SID emulator (or code something akin to kb[fr]‘s software synths) — if only for the additional geek factor.
It is a labour of love, and it shows. Everytime I’ve started the game, I was greeted by a different intro, some reminiscent of 4kb-intros from the scene, others being digs at long out-of-business software companies (“Sensible”), and others still “emulating” a C64 loading process complete with flickering. And all have evoked feeling… Recommended (even for people like me that hate “proper” RTS games)!

I’ve been quietly playing “Dead or Alive Ultimate” for the past two weeks. I am new to the DOA-series, the last (and first) 3D-fighter I played was Soul Calibur 2.
There are (essentially) only three buttons: kick, punch and “hold / counter”. All the other buttons are shortcuts to combinations thereof. Guarding seems to be done by the classic SF2 method of holding the direction away from the opponent. The graphics are quite nice but I still don’t quite understand why for example the arms are separate objects and not properly skinned onto the main body. This is usually well-hidden by clothing, but still a bit annoying. Most likely this is not a technical limitation but due to the difficulty in setting up the bones for such an object. Also, there is quite often some slow-down (which may be due to me playing wide-screen mode (PAL) where more scenery is visible) — usually once for 1-2secs every 3-5 rounds — something like this has no place in a fighting game with carefully controlled environments and should definitely have been eliminated before release.
I have finally unlocked all the costumes yesterday (via the survival / collection method). The only difficult bit was getting the medal for winning 50 fights in a row. In the end, I managed to get 59 wins in the Tag-mode with Zack and Jann Lee with the health bar set to “Largest”, mostly playing Zack and using Jann as my backup for when I was in a tight spot. 😀
I still haven’t quite gotten the hang of countering, but at least I can block now. And it has made me want to play Soul Calibur 2 again, which is not online but I have not taken advantage of that in DOAU yet (except for uploading my scores for survival where I am somwhere in the 1750s). It’s not the best fighter ever (and no-one except Itagaki claimed it to be), but then it’s not crap either. Looks like the media-average of (currently) 83% is spot-on. 😉

Just finished Half-Life 2 (after about 18-20 hours spent over the last 5 days) on it. This — seeing my currently available spare time — is quite an achievement and shows the very high quality of the game. It is relatively hardware-friendly (i.e. it was fun to play on my machine — in contrast to the CPU-hog Doom 3).
I got the game over steam (via an ATI-coupon that I upgraded to “Silver” for $10) and had absolutely no problem activating it whatsoever; one advantage is that I can install the game on my laptop and on my home machine at the same time.
The graphics are amazing, although a good deal is independent of technical merit and is simply very good art direction; nevertheless there are some very neat effects in there such as distortion or good use of environmental cube-maps. One of the other highlights is definitely the animation system, in particular the facial animation and lip-syncing.
The story leaves plenty of things for you to infer on your own, but that has always been Half-Life’s approach.
Highly recommended.
(Plenty of other games left to play — this one jumped the queue so to speak ;))