PS2
Glass Rose (Capcom) - Quite an interesting and visually pleasing (although 3D characters are rather messy with saw edges) adventure game, yes, and ADVENTURE GAME from Capcom (famous from Resident Evil series). The events take place in abandoned mansion where you and your GF are suddenly taken back in time and soon you find yourself solving the sinister history of the place and trying to find your way back to your own time (present day Japan). The game got something like 60% from both Gamerankings and Metacritic and there are obvious reasons for that. For example - the main character meets a detective. Every time you start the conversation with him the main character is asking "Are you the detective?" - I found this quite amusing though. Second example - in conversations you need to select a word you would like to get more information. You need to pick the first letter in the keyword or keywords and paint the word or words till the last letter and then press X (in PlayStaion 2 controller). If you paint the space after the word you get no response, or if you paint too many words you get no response. This is really frustrating. Still - I've liked this game so far - the mood is rather relaxed, settings are beautiful and in game videos are stunning. The plus sides are for example - when you find something interesting you'll be picking that up automatically, and for another exaple, your journal gathers all the information you encounter.
Rez - on rail shooter. You are a system admin and try to restore computer system that has gone bad. Basically you need to shoot everything on screen and in right order. The probably most clever idea in this game is to mix music with shooting so that each time you hit an enemy the game triggs a short music sequence in a word as you play you'll be creating music. Look at the graphics as well
http://www.sonicteam.com/rez/e/visuals/index.html.
GC
Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life - you are a farmer, plant seeds, take care of kettle and stuff. The game has four seasons, changing weather, sun rises and sets, birds are singing and other villagers are visiting your farm. The game is actually not a game at all. More like a highly interactive simulator (if that's the right word). It's really relaxing just play the game, enjoy the colours and music, watch plants to grow and so on. All of you who like non violent, slow paced game - this is the one you'll need! Friends of Sims should feel at home too.
Baten Kaitos - another JRPG but the battle system is different. You'll be playing with cards. Each card has either an offensive / defensive values (swords / helmets) or healing / supporting values (bananas, honey, wine, crackers (bring dead back to life)). You have a deck in your hand that contains limited number of cards. Before entering into battle you deck is shuffled. In actual battle you have n number of cards (from 3 to 8) in your hand. You can play cards from your hand during the battle and once the card played it will be replaced by anohter card from your deck. In each round there's a time limit so you need to be quick and choose the right cards fast. The cards itself have numbers and for example playing rows and pairs gets you more bonuses. For exaple playing cards that have numbers 2, 4, 3 gives you total bonus of +28% or -28% depending are you playing offensive or defensive turn. The rest of the game is typical JRPG shit - pre rendered backgrounds, zero dialogue options, millions of battles, simple puzzels and "we gonna save the words this time" plot. So nothing new in that sense but the battle mechanics.
XBox
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory - I finished this game on PS2 but wanted to experience it on Xbox. A wice desicion I'll say. The game is a) a hell of a lot better looking than on PS2, b) contains a lot more details that the PS2 version and c) most importantly, has several alternative routes than in PS2 version. Sam Fisher is rather cool character and I really enjoy the some of the levels in this game too. So far I've tried to play so that I won't be killing anyone. Either sneak past the guards or knock them out after the interrigating them. Firefight and casualities are usually the result of my mistake so I try to keep it down and avoid alerts. I agree that this game doesn't have the "epicness" of Metal Gear Solid 3 but in other levels this is the best that can be in stealth / sneaking games.