Sorry for the lack of updates folks... I'm afraid it's not going to get too much better in the near future as life has a very high chaos factor right now.  Age of Empires 3 is crunching like mad and I'm pitching in where I can (plus just generally getting caught up in the wave and getting tons done on my own secret project).  Plus lots of non-work stuff with family and various business projects.  Whew! 

Fortunately I'm still finding a little time to chip away at my big stack of games... finally finished Jak 3 with my son Xavier this past weekend, which was great.  I really enjoyed that whole series through though I'm guarded about my reaction to the upcoming Jak X: Combat Racing.  I also managed to get to level 60 with my Mage in World of Warcraft and I'm checking out a few of the high level instances with my intrepid guild mates (mostly old friends from my MIT days).

Of course, the big deluge of games is about to hit... already this week brings Advance Wars DS and the interesting looking non-linear Hulk city smashing game. 

Mmmm, Advance Wars.  What a great little game that is, and I'm so glad they aren't trying to "reinvent" it for the DS but just extending that core gameplay onto the new handheld.  I'm a huge AW fan and there is more than a little influence from it onto the Age of Kings DS game (which I've been serving as a design consultant on). 

If you like AW, also check out Land of Legends, a small budget PC fantasy AW-style game.  They just released a demo and I think the full thing is out soon.

Also on DS-ish news, folks on QT3 are raving about this crazy game, which I can't even possibly begin to usefully describe.  I know that I ordered mine immediately when I read the hands on descriptions in threads like this one.