Yeah, hum… I’m not calling it the XBox 2 anymore, and I even bought one a couple weeks after release. 🙂

– XBox Live Arcade positively rocks. I tried to approach it as a dumb user, and found that the menus are not simple, but they are consistent, so once you get the hang of them, anyone should be comfortable. The ability to download game demos, trailers and such is great, now all it needs is more more more content. The likes of Zuma, Geometry Wars and Bejeweled should provide tons of fun to anyone with a knack for classic gaming. On the other hand, the coin-op remakes (Gauntlet, Joust) were very unpolished and just not worth any price.

– Project Gotham Racing 3 is very good. Fast, fun and with many options. Not in the same league as Gran Turismo 3/4, but certainly "good enough" to satisfy your racing appetites.

– Quake 4 rocks just as much as on the PC. Framerate is not exactly silk smooth, but certainly better than your average "gaming" PC (which should cost 3-4x as much as the 360). Including Quake 2 is a very nice touch, although the controls are much better in Quake 4 (Q2 seems a straight port without much finetuning).

– Perfect Dark Zero is… hm… ok. It’s well done, but I found it terribly confusing (which, for a FPS game, is weird). The funniest part is, with the excellent atmosphere imbued in the game, anywhere from the intro movie to the menus and game itself, I found myself missing some more backstory (who am I, what is my purpose, etc). And I’m not one to pay attention to storylines in games, so the fact that I miss it is surprising. The first mission looks like a bad copy of Halo, the second mission begins stealth-style without enough guidance, and at that point I put it down.

– Kameo is very well done, looks good and… well, if you like that sort of game, it should be very fun. I found it too much a collection of predefined puzzles with a "gotcha" to solve them.

– Condemned is dark, creepy, and… I never liked Silent Hill, so this game bored me to tears. Others are loving it.

– Call of Duty 2 looked great, I haven’t sat down to play it yet.

Also got my first crash, while loading Quake 4’s 4th mission. Heh.

On another topic, are developers playing less games than ever? You can bet I have played less games this year. In fact, I play less games since I started playing MMORPGs about 3 years ago. But the biggest impact wasn’t the amount of games I played, it’s the amount of games I actually finished (or got near the end, I was never a 100% kind of dude). In 2005, the number is one. In 2004, it was two. In 2003, I think it was one again.

Another thing I realized is that, since developing Praetorians, I haven’t touched another RTS. I barely touched our very own Imperial Glory. Similarly, I stopped being a basketball and NBA addict after working on Microsoft NBA Inside Drive. Interesting, huh?