I am having some doubts. About my games. And about my systems. In truth, I have been having doubts since the Big Bang start of the current generation of gaming tech with 2006's release of the PS3 and the Wii, which then joined the 360, the latter of which had already been on the market for a year. In the months following those launches, I added a Nintendo DS Lite and PSP to my gaming entourage; and those consoles were all joining gaming PCs which were already in the mix.

Now into the second year following those acquisitions, I am having doubts. Doubts that the PS3 is ever going to get a library of games good enough to hold my interest. Right now, the last game I bought for the system was Ninja Gaiden Sigma. Doubts that the online component is ever going to become robust enough for me to sacrifice some of my time on Xbox Live for the Playstation Network. So far, it has not. I think the last time I played my PS3 online was back in February of 2007 when my 360 was turned in for service.

I have doubts about the Wii's library as well. And the control schema. The truth is that, as innovative and fun as the Wii's control scheme is, the fact is that playing it is such a paradigm shift in the user interface, that it is not well suited for existence in a multi-platform environment. Going back and forth between the 360's control scheme and the PS3 control scheme is almost seamless. But when it is time to jump to the Wii, I almost avoid it sometimes because I know that there will be a slight re-learning curve. And a lot of the games I have for the system are not save anywhere games. They are games with checkpoint saves that force you to play for a minimum amount of time in order to get to the next most logical place to save.

I have a healthy set of games for the DS. But I admit it; I am too self-conscious to pull it out in an airport and play. And frequently when I go on travel I get into whatever DVDs or encoded video I have brought with me before I start gaming, and sometimes I stick with that video to complete watching it, squeezing out any free-time available for gaming on the DS Lite.

I have a healthy set of games for the PSP, as well. But due to sheer randomness, it has not made any of the trips so far in 2008, so it has received little playing time.

There are tons of PC games that lay dormant. The Orange Box, Crysis, Unreal Tournament III, CRC Championship Racing 2006, Titan's Quest, Star Wars: Empire at War...there are so many PC games that I have that I have never gotten around to, that the thought of launching into them seems almost daunting. My gaming laptop is available, but the instability I see with legacy games in Vista means that my time gaming on it is frequently consumed with rebooting, patching, re-configuring games to be run as administrator or in compatibility mode. A downer that, again, discourages me from trying.

I have spent plenty of time on my 360. But, of course, 90% of that time winds up being spent in multiplayer modes on Xbox Live. So I have games from last year and the year before that I have never completed the single-player campaigns of.

I have thought and wondered, in these first two months of '08, if I am seeing the end. I have had many entertainment hobbies fall by the wayside when they got to the point that it was to hard for me to keep up. It is feasible that I have tried to game so much, that I have grown to a point where I do not want to game whatsoever if I can not play everything. In fact, it would be nice if the industry would go back to a time when there were only a handful of really great games on the market at a time and the rest were crap. But I do not think we will ever see a world like that again.

Yet in all of this, I am starting to get excited. I have my DS Lite with me on travel and am looking forward to getting back into Mechwarrior: Phantom War. I am supposed to be firing my Wii back up when I get home and I think it will be a good time. I am looking forward to getting back in touch with what is on the horizon for 2008. I think a lot of systems that have libraries that have not been satisfying me will see a turn-around. Sometimes, taking that break is just the thing that's needed to regenerate interest in a waning hobby. Getting home will be ok.