The red lips suggest mentat but I'm guessing semuta.

I thought he was wearing glasses, and the darker areas under the eyes were the 'shadows' of the glasses... no?

What am I playing now?

Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars!

... And I'm absolutely loving it, to my surprise. It's wonderful. Plain old C+C, in the fashion of an excellent 3d conversion of the Tiberian Sun/RA2 gameplay, refined, detailed, with good features borrowed from Supreme Commander and truly satisfying gameplay. Anyone else got any thoughts on it?

I'm sorry to hear of your disappointment with Magic, Jarrod. I think I'm grateful that's something I never got into. Pokemon also passed me by despite me being the ideal agegroup during school and surrounded by obsessive collectors/players.
Hitman.. Gods, I don't even want to get started on Hitman. They're above and beyond the demands, expectations and even the capacity of most gamers. Stunning works of -real- game development, not mere cinematic shooting galleries, barely interactive. REAL games, modern adventure-combat-rpg-stealth hybrids. Every great game is a hybrid, I find.

I'd consider Contracts and Silent Assassin the weaker of the franchise, purely down to my personal tastes - 2 was the most action-heavy, 3 the goriest, but in that both lost subtlety. 1 had the finest level design, the most complex and varied (and challenging) missions - and four made a return to that tradition after the second and third explored different flavours.

NOW, I've finally acquired a copy of Singularity, Raven's latest - and having adored every silly, gorey, wonderful pile of junk that venerable studio have every produced - I am off to slaughter in the name of something cheesy.

I'll endeavor to return with thoughts =)

My impression so far is favourable. It is raw Raven. In other words it's a simplistic shooter that rips off whatever else is popular in the moment, but does it well and adds a veneer of stylish ultra-violence, bizarre and deeply satisfying weapons, and a vicious, 18+ only action comic storyline.

It has Bioshock's upgrades, it has DeadSpace's projector-interface upgrade systems, Half-Life 2's gravity gun object manipulation and throwing. It has Capcom's bosses with glowing weakspots, Call of Duty's ridiculously overdone scripting for Ultimate Dramatic Moments...

And it achieves all of these things competently, however blatant the theft, ties them into a broadly entertaining game, and fills it with truly unpleasant monsters while granting you to ability to blow your opponent's arms off and watch them screaming and flailing their stumps in confused shock while staggering around in circles. It's the guys who made Soldier of Fortune. They never changed. I'd like to see what they do with the Alien franchise, personally - if only Activision didn't keep them on such a tight leash.

This is the first time they've made their own game in many years - prior to Singularity they crafted the Wolfenstein remake (which has a LOT in common with Singularity, leading me to believe they were inspired by Wolf to finally make something of their own again) - and before that, the Wolverine: Origins movie tie-in, which might have achieved a world first; creating a shitty tie-in game which was actually massively better than the film it was based on! Even the plot/setting, even the characters and acting, hell, everything about it had a far better grasp of the subject-matter and ripped off God of War to create a game that unlike God of War, is actually really satisfying. Spinning in a whirl of glowing bladed instruments is apparently good enough for Kratos, but Wolverine likes it when the enemies are left with gaping rents across the torso, screaming and once again chasing those errant missing limbs...

And you can revert your enemies by twisting them both backwards and forwards in time, transforming them into horrendous, blind zombie-like monstrosities which then hunt anything which makes a sound, before curling up sobbing and twitching on the floor.

Just don't play it on Hard mode like I did - either Raven just didn't test it on Hard or they consider it good form to make a player reload an old checkpoint eight times over to surpass a single group of tiny little glow-in-the-dark bugfucks.

Sadly, I doubt this game will hold up to the more recent likes of Bulletstorm, so for anyone playing that, I might skip on Singularity until a future lull in releases when you feel like dipping into a simple bit of oldschool shootybanging.

I'm grateful to have companions at all, given the recent trends in game design.

I miss Baldur's Gate 2. 5 party members all arguing amongst themselves constantly, fighting, having nightmares, falling in love, betraying you, having bright ideas and personal connections with your quests.. That game felt alive. And you had total control of them all in combat! Active pause is a concept I want to see applied to a first person shooter o.o