Playing Dragon Age: Origins since it arrived yesterday evening. Brief thoughts:

Surprise at the underwhelming visuals. I know, "Gameplay > Graphics, etc", but Oblivion easily trumps it (and that's an old game). They suffice, but don't come close to most of the current crop of releases. It's supposedly better looking on PS3, while the PC trumps both.

Love the combat. Like Knights of the Old Republic but more in-depth.

Overwhelmed by the lore. There's a Mass Effect-style codex that details everything from characters to locations and all in-between. Very thorough universe for sure, but suffering from information overload; can't quite appreciate it as I did Cyrodil in Oblivion or the universe of Mass Effect (for the moment at least).

Really love the banter. Morrigan and Flemeth (daughter and mother) had some hilarious swipes at each other in the scenes involving them, as have Morrigan and Alistair. Voice acting misses the mark occasionally, but good overall.

Thoroughly enjoying thus far. Hope all who might read this are well!

Edit: Shale tops them all.

I've got a lot of good games that I've bought or received as gifts and never gotten round to playing them properly. I bought Final Fantasy V Advance a couple of years ago, and a few weeks ago I thought I'd re-start and have a go. Completed it yesterday (taking my FF completion to two: V and IX), very enjoyable. Review here if you're interested. With university starting again in two weeks, it's almost definitely the last RPG I'll get into until XIII hits 360.

I used to write a lot of game reviews, but I haven't enjoyed it for a while. I've sat down and attempted to write a few over the last six months or so, but they never got beyond a few paragraphs before I lost interest or started obsessing over how one paragraph flows to the next. But Shadow Complex came along on Wednesday, which I finished this morning. In between sessions, I thought "this is such a good game, let's see if I can actually get to the end of a review". And I did.

I do hope you'll read and enjoy if you're inclined towards or interested in Shadow Complex. Considering I haven't done this in a while, I think it turned out pretty decently. Reading the paragraphs in my head, they seemed to flow for the most part. Saying that, it's a bit of a speed job considering it was only released a few days ago; tired eyes might have missed some spelling and/or grammar mistakes, so if you see anything glaring, let me know. Also, the harvest analagy that sounded good in my head now seems to read awfully corny.