I have not one one of these in over a month. I should start doing them more often, or giving more thoughts on each game I finish. Oh well.

Disgaea 3 was great. Each game in the series just gets that much better in terms of gameplay, be it balancing in the main missions to lower the amount of grinding needed (I did it four times total in Disgaea 3, and even then I probably didn't need to), or linking new special abilities to purchasing with mana instead of using that weapon a lot. Really, the game system is all a Disgaea fan could hope for. I still consider the first game to be the best in terms of characters and story, but the third was surprisingly not far behind. I didn't think I'd enjoy them as much as I did, but going back to the whole spoiled child of an overlord is a great move since having a standard hero in Adell for the second game really lost some of what makes Disgaea, well, Disgaea.

I never got around to Super Mario RPG back in the day, so when Nintendo finally released it I just had to try it. It was good. I think all the hype kind of dampened the experience for me since it just didn't meet it. I think playing it so late after it was released hurt a bit, but then again I'm very good at judging RPG's in terms of their contemporaries when I play something old from my backlog. Of course, its competition late in the SNES days was Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, which may have had an impact. The Thousand-Year Door remains the best Mario RPG game, at least on a console, though. Super Mario RPG definitely opened the door for all the other Mario RPG games afterward, showing that it could be done well, however.

I never played a Tomb Raider game before, and had the PS2 version of Anniversary in my backlog so I gave that a go. I loved it, mostly due to its heavy use of platforming puzzles. Great stuff, and great design. Combat was a little lame in that half of the encounters (which are pretty much all animals) you can hop up on a ledge and just shoot them dead with them just standing there eating bullets. It would be OK if it was once or twice, but it was WAY more than that. The adrenaline dodge was neat, but it resulted in me just shooting to build up rage, then dodging for a one-shot kill. I think it says something that I didn't fire a single shot of any weapon other than my default pair of pistols and their infinite ammo, since they did just as good of a job of building rage, and all adrenaline dodges are one-shot kills no matter what you use. However, combat is such a small part of the game, as it's all about the platforming puzzles which were great. I picked up Legend on the 360 and hope to try that soon, though I'll definitely keep Shifty's little experience with the levers in mind.

Even on easy, Ikaruga is hard, especially the fourth boss. I did build up enough skill (and especially continues) to beat it on easy, though. It's well-designed, but very chaotic and you definitely need to memorize some patterns.

I enjoyed Secret Agent Clank more than I should, given my thoughts on Size Matters and much of the actual mechanics remain unchanged. Maybe it's because I adapted to the controls better, maybe because I just liked the inspiration better than Size Matters (which didn't "feel" like it belonged in the Ratchet series), but whatever. It's a great spin off idea, having Clank tossing around bow tie blades and cuff link bombs. Also for those that dislike how the Insomniac games are a cakewalk these days, High Impact certainly puts up some resistance in spots. The big complaint is that a portable device isn't the best place for this, as if you save after a checkpoint deep in one planet, if you quit you'll have to do the entire planet over again. I'd love to see this spin off continue in some fashion in the future.

Hrm, what else? The second Strong Bad is better than the first, if you ignore the lack of the awesome intro song. I'd love to play Castle Crashers with people, but you know, I still can't, two months after release. Behemoth makes good games, but what's the point of their QA is among the absolute worst in the industry, shovelware publishers included? Linger in Shadows isn't really a game, but it's... I don't know, weird, in a neat way I guess.

Wipeout HD is great - pretty much the first game that truly delivers on 1080p. As I understand it pretty much everything in it is from the two PSP games, just prettier and on a bigger screen. Probably a good thing I didn't play the PSP games yet. Getting many of the gold medals will take a ton of skill and practice, probably more than I'm willing to put into it, especially with Pacific Rift coming out in just days.

The new PS3 Buzz was something I got in September to give a try before the holiday rush, and it was pretty good. After a while questions got repetitive, but for a while there I was surprisingly addicted to it. Questions did eventually get repetitive. I like the new MyBuzz, where you can submit quizzes online for people to play, even if you don't own the game. That certainly adds a lot of life to the title.

And with that, the holiday rush begins for me, starting with Fable II and LittleBigPlanet. Given these two games, and all the great games coming out in the next three weeks, I expect to often neglect my friends, family, work, and my Wii.