Going through Halo 3 last week was enjoyable, and I admit I am motivated to finish Heroic and track down some skulls. I can't really put myself through the multiplayer as much as I should, or should want to, since I'm still very much connected to my mouse and keyboard. There is a difference between using a gamepad in single player than in mulitplayer. Something about unpredictability and effective turning radius... I'll keep practicing though, as Halo 3 is such a solid gaming experience to just ditch the gamepad entirely.

So it was back to the PC this weekend with the Orange Box, which so far, is excellent. Portal is a short but terrific game, with some humor and twists to go along with the amazing gameplay. I'll reiterate what others have said about the ending credits music: upbeat, catchy, hilarious... all of the above. I'm playing TF2 now, and I'm finding that it hasn't taken that long to get back into the flow of the maps even with the updated classes. I've read how people are miffed at how there are so few maps to play at release, but seriously, I think with TFC there were probably 10 total that people played most often. We are all waiting the TF2 version of "Hunted," however.

Finally, I picked up a copy of Psychonauts to play backwards compatibly with my 360, and it was worth the hype. A strong platformer although the difficulty ramps up quite a bit at the end... not horrible, but just a little off. My only complaint was the excruciating number of figments to collect through the maps... just too many to really want to bother with, even if there is an extra mini-movie to reward the Rank 100 players... still, a great game which, after finishing, slightly saddens me that so few others have ever played it.

Back to TF2.