What else have I been doing? Playing a lot of games, actually. The most recent acquisition being Lego Star Wars - it's as silly as it sounds, and entirely too much fun. The downside is that it covers the prequel trilogy (although the newly released follow-up covers the original trilogy and promises even more silliness). The idea is that you play through six or so sequences from each film, playing a variety of different characters (you can switch between members of your party on the fly). In free-play mode, you can choose to be pretty much any character of note from the three films (often in several versions), which does have the upside that you can be General Grievous laying the four-lightsaber smackdown on Jar-Jar Binks, or have Darth Vader lop the head off young Anakin Skywalker. And all in the form of LEGO. Genius!
On the PC, I've been getting all first-person-shootery with Half-Life² and its spin-offs (if you have said game, I highly recommend the single player mod MINERVA - it's an incredibly polished piece of work, and I'm eagerly awaiting the final instalment.) Today I've been online with Day of Defeat: Source which was good fun, despite my utter ineptitude. I am, however, getting increasingly frustrated with the online pay for Age of Empires III - this is no reflection on the developers, it's just too difficult to find a fun game. Even if you do manage to find players of a reasonably similar skill level, there's no guarantee that your opponents won't blatantly ignore the agreed rules of engagement - or simply drop out of the game (actually, the latter usually happens with my allies, but today, after investing the agreed "no-combat" time in building up a strong economy and a formidable army, the entire opposition team quit, leaving an utterly hollow victory).
