I want to declare my love for the Dusk. I want to shout from the rooftops. I want to show it off and parade it.

I completed Hotel Dusk last week, clocking in at 30 hours, which I put in over the space of four days. I was gripped. It was the first time in ages that a game had compelled me to stay up until 5 A.M. playing it, unable to quit, desperate to progress. I was, quite frankly, consumed.

On the surface it’s a fairly quirky little adventure game, where you use the touch screen to walk around a strange hotel, seeking out Bradley, the partner you lost three years ago. One screen presents a 3D first person view of the hotel, while the touch screen presents a birds-eye 2D view, where you can walk around and interact with objects and people.

The first thing people notice are the fantastically stylised graphics. People are presented as black and white sketches, with faint washes of colour occasionally flowing over them. But dig deeper and you’ll see even more neat, symbolic effects. As you unravel the adventure, the hotel begins to literally fade away. It’s hugely atmospheric. If you snapped the cartridge it would bleed noir.

The puzzles themselves are easy, and the gameplay is nothing more than walking into random rooms, hoping you bump into the right person. But I don’t care. This isn’t a game, this a novel with the occasional puzzle, and as such the story is what makes or breaks it. Luckily Hotel Dusk has one of the most fantastic scripts of any game ever made. The dialogue is spot on and each character feels completely real and believable. It just shows that better graphics aren’t making games more realistic, it’s the characterisation that’s present in Hotel Dusk that brings a game to life. I cared for all the characters, while at the same time admiring the cool, Maltese Falcon-esqe language. I wanted to unravel the secrets. I needed to know what happened. I wanted to spend time with these characters and to explore not the environment, but them. It’s genuinely touching and affecting, too. Full of subtle metaphor and the ending leaves just enough ambiguity.

And that’s the explanation behind the score. If you want a game, you’ll be hugely disappointed, but if you love Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet, and long for a noir novel every bit as good as the Big Sleep, you could do a lot worse than to read this.

Four new titles in the top ten – that’s not bad going, considering how quiet the last few weeks have been. God of War II has taken the top spot, with PC-thing Lord of the Rings Online in at #2. Oblivion on PlayStation 3 comes in at #3 – despite Game not stocking it, or whatever the situation is – and Singstar Pop Hits has popped in at #6. Like a pop tart.

DS carries on doing the business for Nintendo with Harvest Moon DS still in the top 10 at #8 and Hotel Dusk: Room 215 shooting up from #22 to #11. Diddy Kong Racing makes a mark at #13 too. As for Wii, Wii Play is down from #3 to #4 and Zelda: Twilight Princess and Sonic and the Secret Rings are back in lower down in the chart.

Free Running at #33 and Buzz! The Mega Quiz at #16 are the only other new entries this week that aren’t rubbish super-cheap PC budget games. 50 Games Green – what kind of name is that?

Today on the Virtual Console we have Final Fight for 800 points, Battle Lode Runner for 600 points and Mighty Bomb Jack for 500 points.

First up, Mighty Bomb Jack, and it’s making us see how rubbish our memories are. We spent hours on our NES, and still remember it fondly, so why is every Virtual Console NES release utter pap? The harsh, luminous backgrounds now hurt our eyes, and we can see just how limited the games were. Mighty Bomb Jack is a basic Mario Bros. clone, where you glide around, and jump so high you end up off the screen and have to wait for the thing you control to float back down to the visible area. For what seems like forever. Don’t bother with it unless you want your childhood destroyed.

Next up is Battle Lode Runner. I love the fact that Nintendo are putting on classic TurboGrafx games that you may have never played before, it’s what the Virtual Console should be all about, and Battle Lode Runner is certainly a classic. It’s got a great soundtrack, some gorgeous, clean sprite work and a huge amount to keep you entertained. You play a cute little guy who can destroy the floor around him, in order to trap enemies or reach platforms. There’s a puzzle mode where you try and collect heaps of gold, while avoiding enemies. It sounds rather basic, but some of the harder puzzles will have you crying, as you try and work out the solution, while also trying to avoid being eaten. The main selling point of the game is the multilplayer, though. I’m only going to say this once: It’s better than Bomberman. It’s a joy trapping your friends and the included level editor is a nice touch.

Finally, it’s Final Fight. A basic side-scrolling beat’em up. The best thing about the game is easily the character select screen. There’s a man with enormous tits and a guy called Cody with a joint of ham for a hand. You may remember the arcade port of Final Fight with joy, but for the SNES version there’s no multiplayer, and there are far less enemies on screen. If you fancy a bit of basic fighting action, then by all means get it, but it’s far too basic to be really worth the points.

Game Of The Week: Battle Lode Runner

Sony’s PR team haven’t been at their best recently, what with the fake blogs and all, but they’ve really managed to outdo themselves this time. It has come to light that during the God of War II launch party – held in Athens around a month ago – guests were invited to eat warm offal from inside a dead goat’s carcass.

A two page report of the shindig was due to appear in the Official PlayStation Magazine, all 80,000 copies of which are now being recalled. Subscribers, however, have received their copies already which shows unedited images of the goat in question. Sony claim the animal had not been slaughtered for the event – or even during the event – but had been purchased from a local butcher. They go on to say that they aren’t sure how the goat was killed, but seeing as it was decapitated it’s pretty obvious.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare said it was “outrageous” that the animal’s death had been used “to sell a few computer games”. The Daily Mail has also picked up on the event and has managed to receive an apology from Sony. “We are conducting an internal inquiry into aspects of the event in order to learn from the occurrence and put into place measures to ensure that this does not happen again,” reads part of the statement.

Nobody seems concerned that those topless women were also present at the event, on hand to feed grapes to lazy sorts. Possibly because everybody the world over loves a pair of tits.

There’s a neat Lord of the Rings Online video over at GameTrailers showing the bard’s gameplay. Players can play their bard’s instrument ingame by tapping away at the keyboard, making their own sweet music. Quite a nice touch. How long will it be before someone makes something like World of Guitarcraft?

While you’re at it, you might as well look at the Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings videos. It’s shaping up to be one of the best RPGs on the DS. It doesn’t look quite as lovely as Final Fantasy III, but it seems to make good use of the DS’s touch screen, controlling mobs of characters with a lot of pointing and clicking. The Japanese version was released this month but there’s no date for the western releases yet.

“I’m a mechanical, I’m a mechanical, I’m a mechanical man! I cut down trees, I wear high heels, suspendies and a bra”… or something like that.

It’s been twelve years since the original Command & Conquer defined the real time strategy genre and Westwood perfected what they’d started with Dune II. Back then happy hardcore wasn’t completely ironic. Games were made with sprites – manly two dimensional sprites. And there was nothing better than a nice, overhead, ever-so-slightly isometric, fixed camera view. Those were the days.

It’s not surprising Command & Conquer’s been on a bit of a hiatus – for starters Westwood Studios got eaten by Electronic Arts in 1998, but there’s always the problem of updating a classic game. Command & Conquer spawned most of the real time strategy games that now flood the PC market. How could a modern Command & Conquer do the original justice and stand out in the crowded market full of its bastard offspring?

If you were worried they’d make everything bigger and brasher, throwing millions of bump-mapped polygons at the problem, worry not. Command & Conquer 3 is great, precisely because they haven’t really changed it at all. Yes they’ve sexed up the graphics, but it’s not too drastic – you certainly won’t get lost in spinning camera angles or buried under a million context sensitive menus. It plays pretty much just like the original, which could well be called perfect.

Build your base, harvest tiberium, create an army, point and click a lot, watch as you hopefully destroy the enemy army and win the battle. It’s pretty simple. You should know exactly what to expect, this is practically the definition of real time strategy. Before and after each battle you’re treated to cheesy but brilliant high definition video sequences, featuring the cream of sci-fi’s C list celebrities. Unlike most derivative RTS games, it really is worth playing this for the plot. It’s not particularly intellectual, but it’s entertaining to watch (there’s a full movie’s worth of video to sit through) and it’s nice to play the game three different ways, from each side’s perspective (those being the righteous GDI, the terrorist NOD forces and the alien Scrin invaders).

Online multiplayer is also stupidly well catered for. Comprehensive leagues, performance tracking, match making. The type of thing South Korea might consider as a national past-time. On a related note, the Xbox 360 version should be the king of console RTS games, integrated into Xbox Live and featuring video and voice chat.

So, that’s pretty much it. Command & Conquer 3 remains faithful to the original and sticks the fun right back up the real time strategy hole. To top it off, what other game features bad acting by Lando Calrissian, that bloke from Starship Troopers, Sawyer from Lost, the cute but intelligent girl from House, and the cyborg love bots Six and Boomer? Or the actresses that play them at least. It’s like a sweaty geek’s cameo-ridden dream.

This pinball game is as deceiving as a fluffy kitten with a fistful of semtex shoved up its arse. The first reason is that although it features cute and cuddly characters, there’s a very dubious overtone – according to the manual the big nasty boss man enjoys wearing ladies’ lace knickers while the game’s hero (a tiger called Tiger) once repeatedly jumped on a pregnant elephant’s stomach to try and get the baby out. Riiiight.

There are some sly nods and winks in-game too, including some kids fed up of hearing about that “plumber that jumps around a lot”. Another reason for being misleading is that even though this has been put together by a small team and is destined for the bargain bins from day one, the 3D graphics are rather impressive. The artwork however, we can’t be quite so positive about. Budget games will be budget games we suppose.

In the nuttiest of shells, it’s pinball with a platform game style story attached. The characters magically morph into balls then you whack them around a bit, knocking down bridges to access new areas, setting off fireworks, hitting targets to make new objects appear and so forth. If you come across a new character they’ll re-morph and have a chat, then it’s back to business. The touch screen is used occasionally – early on in the game if the ball gets stuck in a pile of leafs you have to rub them to free it – and the top screen shows different views of the playing field.

It’s not particularly demanding but there is a degree of skill required for aiming the trickier shots, plus there’s the odd splash of interactivity such as cannons that you can aim and fire yourself out of. It’s quite easy to lose a life by reading the messages and hints that appear on the pop-up top screen instead of concentrating on what’s going on down below, but other than that it’s a neat little game if a bit limited. Let’s face it though – a pinball game with animals was never going to be the height of sophistication.

PlayStation Eye is the next-generation equivalent of the EyeToy, but it’s not a toy. Oh no, it has “sophistication”, and comes with editing software EyeCreate rather than anything fun. Sony: taking the ‘play’ out of PlayStation, one step at a time.

The built in microphone sounds a bit interesting though. It can track voice location, which is neat if hard to imagine a use for, and more practically be used for chat without the need for a headset thanks to fancy background noise suppression.

Full body and close-up zoom camera modes are likely to be handy addditions too. And of course the basic technology in the camera is all spanked up.

It’s due in the summer, at – going on recent form – an unappealingly high price.

There’s nothing out on Wii or PlayStation 3 this week, and the only title out on 360 is the Game-exclusive Tetris Evolution. The humble PlayStation 2 is literally ‘sorted’ for new releases though.

God of War II is the biggest thing to appear on the console for a while. The original was a very good hack and slasher, but had a few irritating bits like a spinning tower covered in spiky things that took forever (or thereabouts) to climb. Apparently this sequel has a better structured difficulty curve, although Sony has had to take out the progressive scan mode from the PAL version as it wouldn’t fit after the French, Italian, Spanish, German and Russian voice-overs were added.

Novelty peripheral fans can also celebrate this week as Singstar Pop Hits and Buzz! The Mega Quiz are out. Then there’s RPG Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner and a Dynasty Warriors clone from Konami entitled Demon Chaos. There aren’t any reviews of the latter on the internet yet – at least according to GameRankings – but the screenshots look quite nice.

The PSP is playing catch-up with a belated conversion of Burnout Dominator, which has been a flop so far on PlayStation 2, and if you’ve finished Final Fantasy XII then you might be interested in Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth as it’s also by Square-Enix. Well, published by them at least. The largely anonymous Tri-Ace did the developing.

Next week we’ll all be doing whatever a spider can.

The new DS version of Transformers will come in two separate versions, à la Pokémon.

You can choose the Decepticon version, which will see you destroying the Earth, or the Autobot version, where you save it. Both games include wireless multiplayer for up to four people and customisable vehicles, while each version will have some exclusive levels.

The game will be released alongside the movie, which is virtually guaranteed to be awful. A toy line is not a good basis for a film.

Apparently it’s true. Within the first four days of its release, Pokémon Diamond & Pearl sold over a million copies in the US, making it the fastest selling Pokémon game to date. More than half a million people pre-ordered a copy, which must be some kind of record.

On the surface it doesn’t look like much has changed since the original ten years ago (and that’s the reason I haven’t even bothered playing my copy yet), but now you can battle other players and trade Pokémon online. Which sounds quite spiffing, though with Nintendo’s closed-off friend code based network most people above school age will be left playing by themselves, too ashamed to ask other people if they’re ‘Pokémon Masters!’

Neatly you’ll be able to hook up your DS Pokémon to Pokémon Battle Revolution on the Wii, and make them fight it out in glorious hyperdimensional-technicolour. That sounds really nice. Pokémon Diamond & Pearl should be out in the UK in two months time, and the Wii version whenever Nintendo feel like it.

It wasn’t a secret that God of War was heading to PSP – the back page of the God of War II manual told us so. A video has now magically appeared on the internet, revealing Ready at Dawn as the developers. They worked on the Daxter spin-off for PSP, which was quite good.

God of War: Chains of Olympus is the full title and it uses the same engine as Daxter, so it should look the part even if Kratos himself looks like an extra from Mortal Kombat. The video doesn’t show much – just Kratos swinging his blades around then taking a tumble off a giant cliff as he sticks a blade into a giant beast.

Have a look for yourself here.