I have an unlocked copy of Half Life 2 on my machine -- via Steam of course.  I am quite amused by the follies of this weekend where people could buy copies of HL2 at Best Buy and yet still have them be unplayable. 

But... now I have an unlocked copy of Half Life 2 on my machine!!  And.... I'm forcing myself not to play it.

Well, I'm still having more fun with GTA:SA than I've had with a game in a long while.  I need to keep up my nightly 10PM EQ2 sessions with the other stalwarts playing from Ensemble.  I'm on the final boss battle of Ratchet & Clank 3 (which I'm mostly playing with Xaiver).  If that weren't enough, WoW is out next week!  Halo 2, Jak 3, Spyro: Hero's Tail, and Shin Megami Tensei are all staring at me balefully from the shelves.  NFS:U2, MGS3, and Baten Kaitos are out this week too!  Ach, me blueprints!

HL2 is certainly next in the queue after my current obsessions, but really, this is just ridiculous.  It makes me sad because I know some of these games are going to get lost in the shuffle, sales wise.  If they held on to them until next Summer, they would get a lot more attention (and I bet, sales). As an industry we've outgrown having just one big seasonal release time -- there's too much quality product, and plenty of demand to support a secondary cycle (just like movies).

Maybe next year will be back to normal and this will have just been an aberration... and for any individual product to intentionally move from holiday to summer would be risky for that individual product, so no one is incented to make the move.  Ah well...

At least I did manage to finish Sly Cooper 2...