Recent reviews by all_meshed_up

Half-Life 2 is one of the most deserving works of any vested gamer's attention. It is a classic masterpiece of design and story-telling; the yard-stick of excellence for a first-person shooter.
Coupled with Halo, its release has brought about the most dramatic changes to the way games are made, presented, and judged over the past 10 years. It is for that reason that it loses little to none of it's deep, enjoyable experience when played today.

Braid is a nice, short, enjoyable game to put it simply. It's a 2D platforming puzzler set in a gorgeous painterly world with one of the best soundtracks in modern gaming. The gameplay involves manipulating time to solve clever puzzles that earn you jigsaw pieces to a painting that hints at further back-story and helps open the path to the final chapter… which is actually the first chapter in the story. It's refreshingly forgiving in that you can never die and need only rewind time to do something just right; this focuses your attention on trying to complete a challenge rather than needing to re-play entire areas or continuously try to make the same jump over and over again. I deeply appreciate that.
The ending sequence to a story that is told through hind-sight and recall is a level of brilliance that made all the time spent playing it worth every second.

Knights of The Old Republic isn't just a Star Wars game, and as a Star Wars tale it is not a simple side-step in that larger world. KOTOR is an entirely new chapter in the saga; one that rivals the original trilogy by capturing its classic sense of discovery and intriguing story.

Half-Life 2 may be a timeless classic, but the 1998 original needed a bit of a re-surfacing to hold up in a modern gaming environment. Half-Life: Source is the entire original game running on top of Valve's "Source" game engine. This gives the game much better lighting, physics and overall gameplay.
Strangely, though, it does NOT include the higher(er) resolution textures and models update rolled-out by Valve and Gearbox as part of the release of Blue Shift. Without it, it's the same low-res graphics through Source-colored glasses.
Fortunately a third-party has adapted the update for use in Half-Life: Source. I highly recommend downloading it to make this the definitive version of Half-Life.
http://hds.newmail.ru/eng_download.html