And i have this feeling that i'm going to need to finish it again to fully make up my mind what i think about it.

Sometimes when i was playing it i was going "yeah... this game is awesome" and some other times i was playing it like a zombie paying minimumal attention to what i was supposed to be doing in the story and just going to locations, gunning down enemies, pulling switches, recovering files etc then going back for my reward.

The game has 7 endings depending on different things you do in the game.

I read someones summary of the endings and read the list of bad endings to see if mine was there (i avoided reading the good endings section so i wouldnt get any spoilers), and sure enough it was.

The only problem with this game is that supposedly if you dont get the good ending, you dont actually get filled in on alot of the details as to what the hell was going on and what you were doing whilst playing the game. So in theory the game makes no sense unless you get the good ending. For most of the game you follow a story that is presented in a way not unlike if there was a person who had watched a television show with a story. That friend told your friend the story and then that friend told you the story. By then not all the parts would be intact and you'd be left with fragments of a story that sometimes is interesting but half the time feel's like a sequence of events without anything in between to hold it together.

The game is open ended and you are free to explore, however the game except to sate your hunger for exploration doesnt give you very many reasons to do so. The side quests are very basic and mostly only give cash rewards. Most of the good item's can be found along the story mission path so you dont need to save up to buy them anyway. The openness is also pulled back by the amount of anomolies (phenomina that twists and warpes the fabric of reality and can be very dangerous to your characters life), and the vast amounts of radiation (especially outside the reaches of the starting area of the zone), and the pack's of mutated animals and patrol's of not so friendly mercenaries and monolith soldiers.

The game is a little buggy and doesnt seem to be very well optimised even on higher end hardware. It could be argued that since there are shadows on every piece of grass and the weather and calculations that the Ai Life system has to do warrents this. I'm not so convinced. Oblivion has better graphics than stalker and is more open since its world isnt broken up into obvious mini zones seperated by visible loading screens (however to stalkers credit the mini zones that make up the entire exclusion zone are very large). My friends AMD AM2 5200 X2, 2 Gig's of DDR2 memory, and Geforce 8800gtx video card still delivers slightly choppy frame rates from time to time and the graphics engine is rather dated on this game.

This is by no means a definitive review on my part and i seem to be talking more bad than good about the game, but as my friends know i tend to be very cynical and critical of even things that i enjoy. I plan on writing an entire review once i've been through the game a second time, i mostly wrote this to get a few things off my chest about this game.Hopefully GSC gameworld and THQ release some good patches that fix this game up a bit.

As far as the DSlite goes i've been playing Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin and New Super Mario Bro's the most with a bit of Phoenix Wright here and there. Hotel Dusk i've only played once and feel that its a game that i need to be in a very specific mood to play and enjoy which also stands for a game like phoenix wright. I dont always feel like playing a slow paced game that i have to be mellowed out and be in a thinking frame of mind to play. I keep buying more games when i already have: Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, New Super Mario Bro's, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, Phoenix Wright, Hotel Dusk, Final Fantasy XII, Resident Evil 0, and Metriod Prime 2 Echo's to finish...... but there are so many good games coming out especially when your both a console and pc gamer like i am. Hell even if your a console gamer if you own multiple consoles like i do. However i'm still waiting for good Wii games to come out. Since i got that thing almost 2 month's ago i've only had 2 games, zelda and wii sports. I'm still waiting for something good to come out. Because while i'm not a graphics whore, if a cross platform game comes out that has very inferiour graphics to another consoles with tacked on motion sensing controll's i have a right to be pissed off especially since there seems to be alot of these cross platform games. Graphics was never the focal point of the Wii so i'm not picking on its graphics. But honestly, do i really want to play for example a graphically nerfed version of call of duty 3 with its multiplayer cut out?, i think not. At least i have Super Paper Mario to look forward to next month.