I do believe I've come within spitting distance of the end of the game. Though it starts a little rough (balancing your party's opinions of you and such), it goes from feeling overwhelming, almost suffocating, to the norm; the burden just seems to dissapear as you grow accustomed to it. That said, it's not an entirely well stuctured lesson; in the beginning you may find yourself reloading several times to get the best outcome, which can spoil the feeling of it all.

To those of you who may have not yet witnessed this, it may well be the only thing of equality to emerge from the Rogue Warrior game.

On a short side note, Wet is a good deal of fun, with both great voice talent and a perfectly suited soundtrack to boot. The gameplay is fun, though I must ask myself how long it will remain so...I suspect it will last at least until I've wrapped the game up.

Machinarium was a very solid game. Not only did the gameplay avoid growing dull (as can sometimes happen with adventure games, at least for me) but more impressively, it managed to remain consistently charming throughout. I found out that it's marketing budget was something like $1,000...and more interesting to me, is the fact that the dev team consisted of a scant seven people...here's hoping those fellows do well. At the very least, the fact that the games review made the main bulletin on the PC page (I don't know whether or not it's still there). With any luck that will give them something of a sales boost and by the quality of the game they've turned out I feel they certainly deserve it. Oh, the other thing was that they financed it with their own savings. Geez...

I'm a sliver over 20 hours into Dragon Age...I took it up on the PC after the PS3 rendition fell well short of my expectations in a couple of key areas. When it looks better, plays better and runs better on my PC (which only makes the minimum requirements, not the recommended)...well, what is the point of the console iteration for me? The textures are watered down on the PS3, which makes the fact that the camera gets choppy just spinning around your character while standing in place that more egregious. What's more, the gameplay has more depth on PC...much of which stems from a different pace of combat and a screen length bar on which to place skills and items for quick selection and use. I suppose there's not much use in describing it all...gamespot /gameinformer etc. have all brought all those things to light already. In any event, the game is excellent in every element of its execution; just as I had, to be frank, expected (it is Bioware...).

More later, likely tomorrow.

Once every year or so, I begin to read again. The way I go about reading is multiple books in a tight-knit timeline, with a veritable drought following that chunk of time. Such as it is, within the past three weeks I have read the Thrawn trilogy (astonishingly, given how many Star Wars books I've read, I never read the trilogy that is generally considered the pinnacle of expanded universe prose) - five collections of Star Wars: Knights of the Old republic (the comics), Star Wars Omnibus: Tales of the Jedi (vol. 1). I'm currently working on rereading Star Wars: Specter of the Past, running through a graphic novel called Whiteout that I picked up because it looked interesting (and found out that it had a movie based on it that was a sound flop) Star Wars: The Paradise Snare and Knights of the Old Republic vol. 6...on the menu for the near future and KotOR vol. 7, Starcraft: Ghost, Star Wars: The Hutt Gambit, Star Wars: Rebel Dawn, Star Wars: Visions of the Future, Battlestar Galactica Classics...the Lando Calrissian trilogy (old, but will undoubtedly be somewhat entertaining and perhaps funny, as some of the older SW books are; see Star Wars: Splinter of the Mind's Eye)...

What types of books do you all read? And just as interestingly, do any of you read in blocks as well? Or regularly? Not at all?