Well, Rockstar has determined when I'm taking my vacation this spring: April 29 release date for GTA IV.  Judging from the demo writeups, the game is well on track for that date.  A few people I know in the biz who are in a position to know have nothing but good things to say about the game, so my interest level couldn't be higher.  Until then, replays of San Andreas and Saints Row will have to suffice.

If GTA IV, Saints Row 2, and Mercenaries 2 all ship this year, 2008 will be an unimaginably good year for open-world games.

I'm not generally a huge fan of mods -- my limit on gaming is generally time, not money, and most mods have a lot of quality problems.  But a few definitely break that pattern, and Fall From Heaven is certainly one of them.  The epic fantasy mod has been updated for Beyond the Sword and continues to excel.  It is a large download, but totally worth it.  In practice, FFH is the closest spiritual successor to Master of Magic seen in ages. 

I'm also pretty sensitive to quality problems in a mod, and I have to say FFH is a quality job.  I haven't encountered any serious bugs, and the BTS version has had a good round of patches to sort things out after everything they added.  The biggest flaw still is probably documenation -- a handful of the Civilopedia entries are missing or empty, and it takes a bit of digging to figure out a lot of things like the bonuses for each of the civs.  Fortunately some enterprising fan has written a manual -- check it out here.