I was a little worried going into Fable II because WRPGs usually aren't my thing, and Molyneux has this tendency to overpromise and underdeliver. But thanks to the LBP delay, it was decided by outside forces that this would be my first game of the holiday rush. It was good, real good. It seems Molyneux stopped worrying about regrowing trees that were cut down and worried more about making the game fun. It was simple to control, and it was definitely greater than the sum of its parts. Sure there were some odd things - I didn't feel like I was interacting with villagers as much as I was pressing the button to do an expression that would get the desired response, after a short bit of property investing money rolls in so fast that it's a non-issue, and the co-op was rather disappointing - but it was very good all meshed together.

Sure, the main quest is short. But who cares? There's side quests. And not crap side quests that are a pain to do that reuse the same maps over and over like Mass Effect. No, they're good. Perhaps even better than most of the main quests! Many of them were often in their own small special maps that are used only for the quest. Finding a pirate's secret island is fun, among many other things, and all of these will be missed by the people who just stick to the path. Those reviews that point out that the main quest is 4 to 6 hours, yeah, I guess they're right. But there's no way you'd want to just stick to the main quest, and if you do you're seriously missing the point. In other words, don't worry about it, you'll probably get so sucked in that you'll snicker at the 4 hour tag just as much as I did.

LittleBigPlanet is just awesome. The story missions didn't create that much of an impression with me in the beta, but it was really the simple tutorial world, for a lack of a better term. The later ones are a bit challenging (when going for the no-death runs), and very creative. And you can tell that they created the levels in the same editing tools that everyone gets, given they don't hide many of the switches and audio boxes and so forth. They're simply great, and very creative. The small co-op sections that you need more than one person to get a few prize bubbles each level were also rather done rather well.

The big story is the user levels, and some of them are simply great as well. The cool levels feature does a relatively good job of getting you most of the better ones. Even better is that you can view the favorite levels of everyone else, so you can look at their favorites to see if they found something neat that you didn't. Really, there's a lot of possibilities here. The only bad news is that Sony has to screw it up somehow, and recently they've been modding levels without any word why. Some are pretty obvious, like say all the Mario ripoffs directly using the game levels as the original, but others are leaving people scratching their heads. It does steal some of the thunder, but it definitely seems like the game you can pop in every week or two and just lose yourself in neat new levels.

Resistance 2 was different, and as a result there's mixed feelings by many. Seems a lot that liked the original didn't care much for some of the changes, while those that didnt' like it are into it. They seemed to have ditched a lot of the unique aspects of the series and just copied CoD/Halo - full regenning health, can only hold two weapons at a time (and you have a weapon loadout for competitive mutliplayer), a lot of the more unique weapons were ditched, stuff like that. The story and characterizations were a bit lacking, the bosses were great when you first saw them but proved to be a little disappointing to fight, and there's just a lot of inconsistencies. That said, I still enjoyed it. But I can see why it's somewhat polarizing, ranking from mediocre to great depending on who you talk to.

The online, though, is fun. I'm playing an online game. That's crazy! I don't know what it is about R2 that caused me to play it when so many other games didn't catch on with me, but I did. The co-op in particular is neat - up to 8 players with 3 somewhat dependent c|asses to play and just swarms of enemies. Good stuff.

While I'll say more about them later, MotorStorm: Pacific Rift is excellent, and you should go and get it immediately. Valkyria Chronicles is incredible, and if you don't buy a copy and cause the sequel to not get made, I'll blame you. Even if you don't own a PS3. I don't care. Get it anyway.

The third episode of Strong Bad was probably just as good as the second. The fact that the season finale will feature Trogdor is awesome. I'll worry more about downloadable games once I get done with all the great new holiday titles though. Except the original Banjo, I'll have to get to that soon, along with Nuts & Bolts of course.