With the large list of hugely hyped games that were released late last year, I had to be very choosy about which ones I decided to play. With both a dog and a girlfriend, free time isn't as abundant as it used to be. Here were my thoughts on the games that I was considering:

Halo 2: *yawn* I might get it later, but I've had enough first-person shooter LAN parties that Halo doesn't do it for me. Sure it has a few more features than DOOM or Quake ... but it's actually lacking a few as well (can you say BOTS) and I have never understood the HALO hype. I played the first one and it was Quake on the XBOX. Whoopedy do.

GTA: San Andreas: This is the one I ended up getting, and I have loved (most) every minute of it. I don't really enjoy the linear gameplay and I wish it was a TAD more free-roaming like Vice City. I had to complete a buttload of missions before there was anything to do in Vegas, and even then there only seems to really be one line of missions there. This is supposed to be VEGAS! By the time I got this far, I expected more. Still, great game.

Star Wars KOTOR II: I really want to play this game. Like, REALLY. But between GTA and my new baseball simulation I just don't have the time. And as much as I enjoyed the original, this looks a little too much like it to be anything more than satisfying. Plus it employs what I see as the all-time role-playing faux pas. My character has a limit. That's crap. That's why I always enjoyed games like Diablo ... you never know you have the best of everything. Even if they impose a experience limit on your character (which, in Diablo, it's so high that it's not an issue for a VERY long time) there's the randomness of the items and, guaranteed, there's a chance of getting something better than what I have. I love that. At the end of the original KOTOR I had the best armor, weapon, etc as far as I could figure and it was still a marathon to beat Revan (or Malak ... I forget). Who says I can't keep training and beating enemies who drop random loot and get to the point where I can absolutely dominate Revan if I choose to? If I want to spend another 30 hours I should have that right.

World of Warcraft: I played Ultima Online for a good 3 or 4 years from the first day it came out, so this fell under the HALO category for me. Been there, done that. Plus MMOGs have the dirty little aspect of playing with other people. And if you played UO for any length of time you learned one thing: people are jerks. It may be the minority, but when the minority's goal is to ruin it for everybody they always seem to do an extremely good job. And even though it was Blizzard, my favorite gaming company of all time, I just couldn't see how WoW could be any different.

However, after reading the 2004 game reviews and seeing that WoW won Game of the Year I started doing more research on it. And all I can say is OOPS. Or maybe PHEW, since if I had ever gotten this game I wouldn't have seen the light of day over the holidays, both my girl and my dog would have left me, and the recycling would be filled with pizza boxes. The graphics look amazing, especially for somebody who is used to MMOG graphics Ultima-style (their 3-D was a joke). And the gameplay looks great. Everything I have read says it is more friendly to those of us who want to play single-player and not worry about gathering 80 "friends," although I'm sure that if I want to do the neat stuff I'll still have to do that. Actual quests. All kinds of cool stuff.

So I ran off to the store to admit my wrongdoing. They're out. Everywhere.

Crap.