I was reading the ArsTechnica's hands on with the Moblin platform and it really does like it could shake up a little the netbooks market. As a plus, leaving aside the fact that is backed by Intel, this is a project that tries to do something different (from a UI perspective) and could gain some traction.

We'll see if it can steal some marketshare fromWin 7/XP.

Resident Evil 5

I was pretty disappointed by this one actually. The Resident Evil series is defined by 2 important attributes : survival horror and clunky controls. In RE5 they decided to remove

the “horror” part and make a straight action game but they kept the clunky  controls. From a gameplay perspective RE5 is JUST a HD copy of RE4. The problem is that, while in RE4 the horror bits set up the atmosphere, RE5 looks like a shallow, broken (because of the controls) (HD) copy without those bits.

Wolverine

Over the top violence, silly storyline, great cut scenes and  a lot of bugs. Did i mentioned the over the top violence ? Must try.

Velvet Assassin

A good old stealth game set in WW2 played from a 3rd person perspective.

Pros :

- the atmosphere  is really great.

- graphics (really nice…especially the dark/light interplay).

- good stealth based gameplay ( i really missed this from the days of good old Thief)

Cons :

- use of firearms (the fact that you can use firearms and also the fact that aiming is a PITA )

- the last level can’t be played in stealth mode and the game simply turns into a crappy shooter.

- bad placement for checkpoints .

Conclusion : if you like stealth games then this is a must try.

I had high hopes for this trilogy but it turns out to be bad to mediocre. I think it would have been a lot better if the writing would have been more “focused” and everything would happen in one sequence of events. Instead the writing is pretty tedious and the plot is drawn out.

So…avoid.

efbog - the Entity Framework Business Object Generator is the project i mentioned  a while ago. Basically it generates DataBlock like business objects for Entity Framework. The project's page is here

I'm talking about :

- DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) - a common source of bugs in any project is duplicated code. Code which does the same thing with different implementations. The easiest way to fix this is to enforce a certain project structure : for instance in a business application all entity related task must be implemented in a single class/place/system ( call it the repository pattern, call it business object, called it whatever it tickles your fancy ...).

- SOC (Separations of concerns) - SOC is the process of designing a system in which the functionality is segregated in clearly independent (and orthogonal )  layers. This might sound more familiar by the name of some popular SOC patterns : MVP (Model Viewer Presenter) and MCV (Model Controller Viewer).  Failure in implementing a/any form of SOC results in fragile, brittle, hard to maintain (and extend) software.