Just a note to let you know that SecretLemur.com is not dead. It's merely hibernating.

Between work kicking my ass, my main PC giving up the ghost due to a power outage, holidays and their concomitant family get togethers and the lack of new games coming out, I'm getting crap-all done in the review department.

You can expect reviews to start ramping back up to their regular volume as the new year begins.

I have a huge stack of games to both play and review, and it's going to take me a while to get through them all - especially the good ones. But, since I know holidays are coming up and people are starting to look at what games to buy for themselves and as gifts, I figured I'd at least give you my first impressions.

That way, I can play Assassin's Creed without feeling guilty.

Tabula Rasa seems to be some sort of MMO-RPG-FPS hybrid. Apparently, nobody has told Richard Garriott that the people that play MMOs and FPS games aren't the same people. And if they did, he clearly wasn't listening. He was probably busy buying Sputnik off Ebay during that meeting. Good god, I just don't know what to say. I haven't hated an MMO this much since Neocron and I've never given up on an MMO in less than 10 minutes before now. This thing is just awful. From what I read the fundmentals of the design philoshpy are sort of interesting. But they don't matter because the superficial experience is so utterly horrible that I can't be bothered to look for anything that might be interesting.

It can be summed up in two words: modal interface. Or, more tersely: craptactular.

Puzzle Quest is a deceptively simple RPG set in the Warlords universe. The thing that differentiates Puzzle Quest from just about every other RPG in existence is the method of combat resolution: it uses a series of gem matching puzzles. Surprisingly, this means that combat is less random than in your standard RPG which uses, well, random numbers where PQ uses random numbers plus skill.

That's all you need to know. So, stop reading this, crank up your 360 and go download it from Xbox Live! In addition to the XBLA demo, there's a PC demo available as well, and it turns out you can buy a digital download of the PC version here. Or you can get it from Amazon.

Part RPG and part arcady space-sim, Spaceforce: Rogue Universe has a clichéd story, awful voice actors reading awful lines, and a slightly wonky control scheme. But so what? It's a fun space shooter.

If you can contend with its quirks, and get past the so-called tutorial fight, then Spaceforce has a lot of open-ended universe potential in the same vein as its genre predecessors Freelancer and Elite.