Tomb Raider: Legends - God knows I hate Tomb Raider, and especially how Matt & co. natter on about how much better the Saturn version was, but this was actually fun. The animation is well done, the renderer is decent, controls are fun. Cut-scenes are atrocious, mostly because of how ridiculous Croft is still modeled, but whatever, you can skip them. Huzzah.

Rise of Legends - Wow, this didn't last long. I installed it, started playing the demo, read the insanely retarded introductory text, then uninstalled. Something about the setting and language used instantly turned me off. "You are Lord Giovanni and visiting the desert kingdom of al-Fazarul--watch out for the UFOs!" Next.

Blazing Angels - Good job here, PC guys. Installed game, tried to run, missing DLL. Figured it was because I didn't install their version of DX 9.0c (which I already have), tried to reinstall just the DX 9.0c portion, apparently that just uninstalled the app. PC gaming is awesome! Because I am a kind and benevolent man, I actually tried to reinstall rather than just quit on the spot. Alas! that did not fix the problem, and thus we were deprived the joys of trying this demo. Ridiculous.

Black & White 2 - I really got a kick out of this demo, but the interface is clunky enough that I can't see myself playing it for long periods of time. I think I grok what they're trying to do, and I'm sure there are some folks who are quite proficient with it. But compared to playing a session of Civ 4 -- well, it just has too much of the mundane given the interface (select follower, drop on other gender to create one Breeder, etc.). You don't want to know how long it took me to figure out the whole "deselect object" movement thing. My wife was really curious about it, though, the two characters they have doing the tutorial narration are really well done. Close but no cigar.

GTI Racing - Mega points off for not letting me skip intro logos. And let's face it, you really can't play a racing game with the arrow keys, so you really shouldn't listen to anything I say. Except, lordy, those mip artifacts on the racing lines make my developer heart wither away. Come on guys, you the track lines are on the screen every second, I'm sure you could make custom mips that don't blur into gray at mip level 3. Also, it's called anisotropy.

Condemned - Everything was going well, then, the unskippable intro cutscene; ah well. Anyway, I liked the little forensic system they had, some interesting stuff there I imagine. The settings were interesting, their shadow tech especially. However the pace of gameplay was just too slow for me (run speed is an action FPS's walk, and there is a fatigue bar), especially combat. Huge, wild, sweeping, axe strikes that take forever. Get punched, get disoriented, unable to fight back. I'm sure this is all excitingly realistic but boy does it make the game boring. I suppose they want to penalize the player to prevent them running through a level, thus spoiling all of their carefully planned suspense, but meh. Meh, I say.