Sorry for the lack of posts, I've been "busy"...and by busy I mean wasting time with a vengeance.  This past holiday season went just great...with the minor exception being the $1200 we had to pay to fix the car.  I won't go into the details other than to say it was a bit of a stupid mistake and it wasn't me.

So WTF have I been up to aside from the standard holiday festivities?  Well...basically just games.  Several games.  Might as well do a blurb of a review of what I've played so far.

Neverwinter Nights 2:  Nice game if you like D&D stuff.  At times it's interface or the way it thrusts you into situations that you would NEVER let your character into are quite annoying, but all and all it's pretty good.  While the view is a fairly standard over-the-shoulder type of view, you can tilt, rotate and zoom.  Just so you know it uses WAY MORE CPU/GPU power than any game of this type should.  Generally speaking the gameplay is rather linear...or I guess it would be better to describe it as good/evil path linear.  Occasionally you can pick between being a bastard or a saint.  I'd recommend being nice...you get allies (not unlike real life) later on.  Later gameplay takes a bit of a twist and you get to run your own keep.  The game starts you out with a budget but never bothers to tell you that you can spend your own money (nor is there any indication that you can...guess it's just the game's way of keeping you from spending Keep funds on a new set of armor for yourself).  Oh, one annoying thing is that occasionally the game seems to slip up and not notice that you've finished a goal..failing to auto-initiate the character dialogs.  You can fix this by manually talking to them, but it's hard to KNOW that you have to sometimes.

Crysis: FUCKING AWESOME GRAPHICS. Seriously, many areas look real, as in compare favorably with pictures of real things.  See previous posts for an example.  No spoiler here, looks like some kind of aliens are involved.  I played it up to the point where I encountered the aliens then...it goes kinda screwy and the gravity gets turned off.  At this point SURPRISE it turns out that your armored suit (for running around on the GROUND) has THRUSTERS on it.  Ok, whatever.  Seriously though, the game would almost be worth getting if there weren't even any enemies to fight.  The graphics are just that good.  BTW, you'll need AT LEAST an ATI X1900/HD2600 or better to play it...or a GF7800/8600 or better to play it worth a damn.  Oh, and it'll suck down crazy amounts of CPU power too...you should probably have a dual core.

Portal (Part of "The Orange Box"):  This game is the funniest game I've played in ages.  No REAL violence...at least, not that YOU can see, because you're the only one getting shot at.  All the robots and the computer are EXTREMELY polite and well mannered...aside from the terrible danger they put you in.  Here's the basic concept.  You have a gun that can fire a blue and orange "portal".  Anything you put thru the orange portal comes out the blue, anything you put thru the blue portal comes out the orange.  Obviously, this includes YOU.  It's a very interesting concept.  It's also very disorienting.  You can often see yourself in the other portal, must pass thru portals in entirely different orientations (pop out the floor after running in a wall, etc) or you have to fall thru your portals repeatedly to gain momentum so you're tossed over a large span.  Again, lots of funny concepts and dialog...and THE BEST song/ending credits I've ever seen in a game.

Half-Life2 (Part of "The Orange Box"): I didn't actually play this one.  It's a fairly standard first-person shooter...just with some physics puzzles.  I don't want that to make it sound like a lack-luster piece of crap.  It's a very good game. Standard negative impressions including the crazy large swarms of enemy...er uh...things, of course.  Lots of story elements...lots of comments about prior events (from other games in the half-life series...but you don't need to know the story line).

All-in-all, the orange box is a great deal, BTW.  Half-Life-2, HL2: Episode 1, HL2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal.  And...if you've already purchased one or more of those, they let you give it away to someone else as a gift, via steam.  They just need to download it and it's theirs to play. 

So, that's basically what I've been up to.