San Andreas alternates between being really impressive and annoying the piss out of me.

The new Gang Warfare system is pretty cool: color-coded regions on the map show what gang runs them, and I can go to a rival gang's turf and start a war by shooting up some of their homies. This starts a wave-based Gang War encounter, and if I win, the turf becomes my gang's. But this really walks the line with regard to the dying penalty in the game: I can buy body armor and guns to better my chances, but there's a great chance of me dying anyway, and since none of the gang war's "progress" is saved I will have effectively wasted my money. You can bring gang members with you, too, but they're trigger-happy and their kills don't count toward starting a gang war. They also get run over and die a lot.

There are in-game girlfriends, which you can cultivate relationships with by going on dates. Rockstar did a pretty good job of making this an appropriate pain in the ass.

I spent a bunch of time doing the exercise minigames at a gym, and have maxed out my muscle and stamina stats. So I can run a really nice distance, and can beat people to death with little trouble. But it's still super-easy to die, especially when the guy I'm beating to death has a friend with a TEC-9.

The city is big. In many ways, too big: the map/radar is not totally adequate for finding my way from one side of the city to the other, and missions that take me across the map are irritatingly common. I haven't even gotten to the other two islands yet!

I like San Andreas's additions to the GTA experience, but it is still weighed down by failures of the GTA3 engine. That's what gets me the most, I suppose. It would be one thing if I was playing SA straightaway after Vice City, but now every time I have trouble getting away from a two-star wanted level I can't help but think about GTA4 or Chinatown Wars instead.

Progress: Having some coffee with Denise

I reached level 80, got my Explorer achievement, and have been defeating Naxxramas on a regular basis. As for the rest of Northrend:

-Zul'Drak is a shitty troll zone full of shitty trolls.

-Crystalsong Forest is ... why is this here? It's really just an empty space for Dalaran (the new capital) to float on top of.

-Sholazar Basin is like Stranglethorn Peninsula + Un'Goro Crater. With less dinosaurs, and more rhinos.

-Storm Peaks, wintry mountains that were once the home of the titans who shaped the earth, are, well, awesome. THERE ARE ROBOT GNOMES.

-Icecrown is Mordor with snow instead of lava.

Pretty exciting, all in all. There were a bunch of quest chains that I really enjoyed, and the best part is that they were all solo, so I didn't need to wait around for a group before I dove in and hunted dragons or lived through a flashback of Arthas becoming the Lich King. Quests also make gratuitous use of the new siege vehicle mechanics, where you take control of a tank, or dragon, or what have you, and gain new movement abilities and a new bar of skill buttons. It's different from some earlier implementations where you would effectively mind control a different creature- here, your original character is basically locked in a cockpit, and until you eject you can only pull the levers on your vehicle. And the vehicles have their own health, which is usually high enough for you to run through hordes of zombies lobbing bombs and going nuts with a flamethrower.

The dungeons in Northrend are all over the place. There's Azjol-Nerub, which start to finish takes about 20 minutes (and its neighbor, Ahn'Kahet, which is painfully long and mazelike). Then there's the Nexus, which is interesting in that you can tackle it in many different orders. And the Oculus, where for most of the dungeon you ride a dragon (and command it as a siege vehicle rather than use your own character abilities). The Violet Hold is like Burning Crusade's Black Morass, but in a prison instead of a swamp. And the new Caverns of Time instance, the Culling of Stratholme, is a new, frenzied take on the level 60 instance that we'd forgotten how tired we were of. All of these (and the other) five-man dungeons have Heroic modes, which are more difficult and have better item rewards, and unlike Burning Crusade you don't have to grind for anything to attempt a dungeon in Heroic mode.

Raid encounters have been made more accessible, which is cool, but so far the available content is pretty diluted. When your faction has control of Wintergrasp (which is not as fun as it sounds - the open world PvP only really happens for 30 minutes every three hours), you have access to a boss called Archavon, in an Onyxia-like dungeon where you fight some trash and then the boss. There's also a Chamber of the Aspects (again, Onyxia-like), where you can fight a black dragon boss, and have the choice of leaving three, two, one or none of his friendly drakes alive before the encounter - the number of drakes impacting the difficulty of the fight and quality of loot. And then there's Naxxramas, a retuned version of the dungeon no one was able to do at level 60, and a fight against the crazy blue dragon Malygos, which I have yet to do myself. Each of these raids has 10- and 25-man versions (where the 25-man encounters are "Heroic"), and while the Heroic raids are statistically harder, in reality they tend to be easier if nothing else, because of the built-in assumption that your raid suffers from organizational retardation at 25.

I digress; but it says something that I was able to jump right into Lich King's raid content. It was over a year until my level 60 went into the ass of the earth in Molten Core, or learned to exploit line-of-sight mechanics in Blackwing Lair, and I only did Karazhan a few times before I got bored of the Burning Crusade. Yet even having to pick up non-guild scrubs most of the time to fill out a 10-man group, we've had no problem consistently cleaning out Naxxramas. As far as enabling more people to see the end-game, with Lich King's clear path of Heroic badges and 10-man raid content, Blizzard has finally succeeded.

Progress: Level 80

So GTA3 was about organized crime, and revenge. Vice City was about excess in a city of sin - and revenge. San Andreas? I've only just started, but so far a weighty piece of the game's theme is urban decay. And revenge.

The game opens with your avatar, Carl "CJ" Johnson, flying back to Los Santos, San Andreas on news of his mother's death, after a five-year hiatus up north. The first thing that happens to Carl is being picked up by a local cop he has a history with, and getting accused of shooting an officer. The second thing, is meeting up with his old neighbors and friends, and watching them argue because of some local rival gangs. The third thing is fleeing from a(nother) rival gang on bicycle. Then, of course, the fourth thing is taking action against the rival gangs, in the form of spraypaint.

Already, Carl has spoken more than once about staying in the city because things are "fucked up," implying that he intends to fix said things. Though I have seen more evidence thus far for destroying the city than taking it back, I maintain hope that Carl will take the high road.

Early on San Andreas started giving me a taste of its character-building component. I got a haircut, which affects my reputation with different social groups?; ordered some food, which affected my energy and my fatness; worked out on a bike, which burned fat and made me more apt in bicycle riding; and gained gang respect from the first few missions I completed. Like an RPG character, Carl has an array of personal stats that can be leveled up, resulting in new abilities, stronger attributes, and new opportunities.

The engine has thankfully been polished up a bit since Vice City, but its age still shows. Honestly though, I'm not as worried about that as I am about the urban english that racially threatens me at every turn.

Progress: Just tagged some graffiti

Argh. I tried to like my Devil May Cry three-pack - I mean, I didn't try very hard. I started the first game several times, trying to get into it, but none of it took. On reports that DMC2 was total garbage, I gave the third a shot, and found a few differences:

• The over-the-top action tone was turned up, from melodramatic to cheesy/parodic

• As far as I saw, the insipid free-roaming areas were removed, streamlining the process between insipid fight sequences

• Longer cinematics? I think this actually makes more action in the cutscenes than in the game

Admittedly, I've come into the series from its future, which gives me something of a perspective bias. But I hesitate to give DMC too much credit. This is a completely polarized game: the combat is either monotonous button mashing, or impossible strings of combo sequences (how long has it been since combo sequences were fun?). In both the first and third games, I kept dying in ways that did nothing to illustrate how I might go about not dying, a cardinal sin of game design.

And don't get me started on the black hole that is the series' story and theme. DMC feels like God of War, but dumber. And to be frank, I didn't consider God of War very smart.

I'm sure there's something to like for someone in here. But I don't think it's for me, and I no longer care to look for it.

Progress: Gave Up -- Almost finished mission 2

Another really cool thing this game does is progressive difficulty scaling. As you dive further into each area of the game world, the environment puzzles become more complex, which isn't exactly a "new" idea - but as you progress in the game overall (which you can do in a non-linear fashion), combat becomes more difficult as well. Enemies have more health, attack faster, and learn new defensive moves. Where the early combat situations are friendly enough to allow you to experiment, by the final boss fight you're expected to have a solid handle on the game's evasion, parry, and counterattack mechanics, which leads to some really cool boss fights.

Follow up on the magic plates: the Blue ones activate a non-interactive magical grappling hook, carrying you to a new area. It's effectively similar to the Red plates, but used more often in close quarters, as it takes an elliptical path rather than a straight one (not that this matters, since you don't actively control either one).

The game is not without its shortcomings. Combat arenas are walled off, and the quick-time events that occur when you repeatedly run into the edges can become pretty tiresome. The Prince's dialog and manner of speech may or may not be your cup of tea (I actually liked it). The ending is not much of a crowd pleaser, although I thought it was kind of cool. The mostly-seamless graphics are sometimes marred by Elika and/or the Prince clipping into walls. If you're not into the light seed thing, collecting what you need to get through the magic plate obstacles would probably be a pain. I found the light seed collection fun enough to be considered part of the main game, but if you don't, your hour-count will suffer for it.

So, yes, in many cases your mileage will vary; I really, really liked this game, but I can see why someone might not. The new PoP isn't perfect - but that's about the worst I can say about it.

Progress: 1001 light seeds

As with Assassin's Creed, my progress in HL2 was wiped by a hard drive failure. Unlike AC, I don't plan on going back and playing HL2 again.

Look, Gordon Freeman. We had a good run. But we're just not right for each other. Past the scientist technobabble and the robust physics engine, you're just about navigating through a dystopian future and shooting dudes, and that really isn't doing it for me.

Maybe, one day, when I'm super-bored, I'll try HL2 again. Maybe. Not planning on it.

Progress: Gave Up

So, my hard drive failure from a few weeks back irrevocably killed this save file, and now I'm thoroughly entranced by Prince of Persia (2008) anyway. I'll definitely have to come back to AC at some point though.

Minor gripe time, before I get into the excessively positive part:

Like Assassin's Creed before it, and as I've seen in the PC versions of many other multiplatform titles, the interface was designed with an Xbox 360 controller in mind. I mean, you can plug a 360 controller into Windows, but keyboards cost about 90% less and do the job just fine. So when a quick-time event prompts for a keypress, and the prompt consists of a small action icon (indicative of the key) and a bright face-button color, there is a clear feeling of neglect toward keyboard/mouse users. It's not a big issue, but it would be nice - and this is a general statement, not just for PoP - if key prompts indicated their associated keys more clearly.

Other than that, and some super-minor technological nags (on very rare occasions, the Prince will grab the wrong edge of a corner, or the camera won't do exactly the right thing - but since you can't die, it's hardly an issue anyway), I'm really enjoying PoP as it proceeds. Character development has continued at a surprising pace, revealing interesting backstories about not only Elika and the Ahura people, but the Prince as well.

More on the game structure: the world map is divided generally into four regions, each of which has six sub-areas (and as I mentioned before, some are interconnected Metroid-style, so the regions are separated more thematically than physically). Each of these regions has its own backstory, and an associated boss, a servant of Ahriman, each of which also has his/her own backstory. In five of each region's sub-areas, you'll fight the region's servant in a sort of sub-boss encounter before healing a fertile ground. And once they are all healed, in the sixth sub-area, you engage in the final boss fight with said servant. So I just did one of these today - the Alchemist - and the intensity of that fight, along with the more hectic battles I've seen in other areas as well, has me sufficiently impressed with the game's combat system.

Back to the sub-areas - although the first one in each region is freely accessible from the start, later ones have roadblocks in the form of magical plates used by the Ahura. These plates are inactive, and must be unlocked; that's why you're collecting Light Seeds. Think Samus's suit upgrades: certain areas are inaccessible until you can double-jump, or grapple, et cetera. There are four types of plate, each of which is a roadblock in four separate sub-areas (this is all illustrated very well in the in-game map, so you know exactly what you need to get where).

I've activated three of these plates so far:

• The red ones are like the jump pads in Sonic - land on it and press the magic button, and you leap somewhere, usually to (or near) another red pad, so that you string the jumps together in order to reach some final destination.
• The green ones change the Prince's sense of gravity, and make him for instance dash up or across a wall or ceiling. The Prince automatically runs until the end of the "track" is reached, so in the meantime you move left and right to dodge obstacles in real-time.
• The yellow ones are similar to the green ones, except instead of running along a surface, you fly, and must dodge obstacles by moving left/right/up/down as Elika carries you along a pre-set route.

The plate abilities aren't quite as thrilling as, say, wall-running through a canyon, but they do add some appreciated variety to the gameplay experience. And aside from being critical parts of progressing through each region, they're also used fairly frequently in Light Seed puzzles.

At 10 healed fertile grounds and one boss down, I'm somewhere less than halfway through the game, and I feel like it's going to work out to a meaty length of time in the end (I haven't been keeping track, but an estimate on the order of 20 hours sounds right). I'm really, really happy about this. Usually when I anticipate a game as much as I have this one, by the time I've put a few hours in I've become used to it (or horribly disappointed). But with this Prince, I'm still satisfied, and surprised, every time I sit down with it. I'm looking forward to the next time I play, and the time after that, all the way until the final moment.

One more thing: some people have complained about the Prince not being Persian enough. In the sense that he isn't Persian, they're 100% right. This Prince is a cocksure upstart full of Americanized slang - he's like a gymnastic Han Solo. But, so what? In the earlier trilogy, the Prince had a pseudo-European accent, and that along with his style of narration helped mold his personality as a curious traveler in a foreign and mystical land. In this game, the Prince's persona as a pragmatic adventurer who lives in the moment is reinforced by his speech and mannerisms. I guess, if anything is an issue here, it's that the title of the game is more a result of the series it stems from, than of its setting. Who cares. I really think this is just another case of people bitching on the Internet because they have nothing better to do all day.

Progress: 10 grounds healed, 1 boss killed

A few things:

• I already knew that the 1-60 game had been trivialized, but apparently the 60-70 game has been, too. This is perhaps a design flaw in MMO expansions: adding content on top of a previous max level, means that new players have to do the entire old game before seeing new stuff. At the same time, shortening the earlier content makes it lose much of its gravitas, and makes the experience feel more tedious than adventurous. This time around, I never did any of the epic quest lines I enjoyed in my first playthrough, opting instead for an ideal experience-per-minute path; and I have no doubt that new players almost invariably do the same, thanks to the guidance of established friends and/or guildmates. A system similar to the one for Death Knights, where they begin at 55, makes more sense - but then, that's only for Death Knights.

• Leveling as Horde makes me realize certain conveniences I had previously taken for granted as Alliance. Mainly, town access: though there is only one zone in Azeroth whose Horde presence makes life difficult for Alliance, there are several examples of the inverse. It's not a huge issue gameplay-wise, and it doesn't crop up again in Outland or Northrend, but it does give a Horde player the feeling of being a second-class citizen.

• PvP servers are bullshit. Since all servers have battlegrounds and arenas (and the new Wintergrasp PvP zone), being on a PvP server isn't so much about wanting to fight as it is about picking fights. And no one ever picks a fight unless they know they can win. As a Mage, I am basically finished if the other person strikes first, and so this is how my PvP life goes: every solo quest is tempered with the anxiety of being stricken down by an Alliance interloper at a crucial moment. It's the Un'Goro Crater Devilsaur all over again.

Despite all this, I am rediscovering my hopeless addiction to WoW. The sampling of new abilities I've encountered so far (Living Bomb!) are a treat, and the new areas in Northrend are a real blast. Following on the design successes of Outland, in making less numerous, but more populous and distinct zones, the zones in Northrend all have very unique feels. The starting zones of Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord have you largely saving wildlife and fighting crazy viking monsters, respectively, where the intermediate area of Dragonblight puts you next to serious magical forces (e.g. dragons) as well as immersing you in a snowy wasteland that characterizes Northrend as a whole. (I skipped Grizzly Hills, so, who cares.) I've only briefly ventured into the further zones, but I'm hoping to have more to say on them soon.

Progress: Level 73

After replacing a bad hard drive and a failed attempt at flying home for the holidays, I'm finally able to play my new Prince of Persia. And it's almost worth ruining Christmas! In all seriousness, it is a great game, and I'm very glad I've got it to keep me busy this week.

The basic concept is the same as the previous PoP trilogy: use gravity-defying acrobatics and fancy swordplay to save a magical kingdom from destruction. The story in the new Prince is nothing remarkable in and of itself, but it is told very well, through in-game cutscenes, optional dialog sequences (with heaps of character development), and the environment design itself. Together with the haunting soundtrack and unique graphical look of the game, it really does feel like playing a storybook.

Taking a note from previous criticism, the new PoP has de-emphasized combat somewhat. Enemy encounters are rare, you only fight one at a time, and the battle system is very free-form and forgiving: it reminds me a lot of the final boss battles in Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. While far from difficult, the system is as fast-paced as you want it to be, and is very cool in the sense that it allows you to strike, parry, and so on at your whim. The system also rewards you for stringing together creative combos, encouraging you to consistently try new things in battle.

The non-difficulty is a persistent theme in the new Prince of Persia. If you've read anything about the game, the one thing you're most likely to know is that, thanks to magical female sidekick Elika, you cannot die. If an enemy gets the better of you in combat, she'll save your ass, the only caveat being that her magic powers become unusable for a (very) brief time. And if you leap to your doom while navigating through a level, she'll pick you up and put you back on solid ground. You may be wondering, well, what the fuck is the point of the game then? The point is of course, to get to your goal and defeat the bosses.

If you're worried about the effect this has on the challenge of the game, don't be. Think about it: what's the difference between Elika saving you, and your last save file saving you? This system removes the hassle of incremental "just to be safe" saves, and the time involved in "dying" and reloading. Simply put, it cuts the crap out of the game. If anything is lost here, it's some of the catharsis of finally getting that jump sequence you've failed to do a dozen times. But you also don't have to deal with as much frustration from those dozen misses; and the forgiving retries also encourage you to take risky maneuvers, just to see where they lead you. What's the worst that could happen?

Warrior Within and The Two Thrones did a lot to mix up the game's pacing in the form of Dark Prince segments. These segments were super-fun because they pushed you to move as quickly as possible, pumping your adrenaline as the Prince jumped from falling ledge to falling ledge. The new PoP does something fairly similar, but again leans toward the side of forgiveness. Certain elements of the level design, such as slides and wall-running handholds, require you to move and think quickly: combine this with the hazardous objects you have to avoid on your first run through a level, and you're encouraged to keep the pace swift (although more often than not, there is no harm in slowing down).

"First" time through? Allow me to explain. Once you get to the boss of an area and defeat him, you can heal the land there, which removes the hazardous elements and opens up new paths. Glowing items called Light Seeds appear throughout the area, which you need to collect to help Elika learn new magical powers. So now your goal is to survey the land, see where the Light Seeds are, and try to figure out how to reach them. Thus, the basic pattern is: acrobatic platforming, then a boss battle, then acrobatic puzzles. Very cool.

Though the land is divided into distinct regions, they are all connected, Metroid style, into one large world map. You can get to any region from any adjacent region, which is a cool explorational touch. And to ease the collection of Light Seeds and the progression to new areas, you can use the map to instantly teleport from any healed area to any other healed area.

All in all, this Prince is a really impressive game. The theme and setting are great, the gameplay is great, even the length is looking great at this point (I've put in a few hours already, and I've only healed four of the game's 24 areas on the map). The only thing keeping me from giving it a perfect score is that I have yet to encounter a really thrilling combat situation. But I also haven't done any of the game's main boss fights yet!

Progress: Healed four fertile grounds!