UT3 has been worth the investment. The speedy gameplay and balance are the best of the series so far.

Warfare mode is a little awkward with a strange CTF element mixed into the Onslaught format. The vehicles are a mixed bag, and the hoverboard is simply idiotic.

But I'm in it for the straight DM game, and it's great. It is surprisingly smooth on low-end systems and very nice looking on good hardware. 

Thanks for the info, reckon I'll give that a look. 

Have you ever played GoW on the XBox360?

I would put it down as 'highly recommended', brilliant graphics balanced out with good gameplay, love the way that you can reload faster if you press you reload button twice with the correct timing, also love the combat system, the way it incorporates the environment as 'cover', where you can do blindfiring as well as ducking then shooting, love the squad stuff...
...well concieved and executed game!

A bit short, but some of the more memorable scenes make up for that threefold, good replayablity!! 

I'm D/Loading the Orange Box . . . my mapping will suffer as a result. 

I wish I could play through Portal again for the first time. 

I've ordered COD4. Trendy realistic warfare bollox, hmph. 

love the self-hate there, Shambler. 

Giving in and admitting that you actually rather enjoy something that you have a firm standpoint of hating....ugh. 

Yeah - the first few moments of looking at yourself, endless mirror effect or portal-sickness (as in sea-) are amazing.

I see now what everyone was talking about, and I've only managed to play for a few minutes so far.

Still have episodes 1, 2 and TF to look at as well. Also Peggle extreme - ? 

Dont be afraid to admit it!!
Ep2 was great also, a little short. HL1 was for me the best of the bunch, it was just so HUGE!!

My new system is due to arrive on Tuesday. I'll be starting out with either D3 or Q4, purely to examine the technicalities of mapping, play some custom maps and stuff. I'll finish my current work before I do anything else tho ;-) 

and I forgot how it was good !! 

prettty cool, simple game -- Qix gameplay, plus expanding balls, plus ball physics. Elegant controls.

http://filler.fizzlebot.com/ 

I couldn't get much over 25K after playing for a while though. It starts to get stupid-hard... 

ok idea, but really annoying. 

kind of cool, though the portal references were kind of lame...

http://armorgames.com/play/751/shift 

Yeah, it is a really good puzzle game, quite simple, but needs a lot of clue sometimes to finish the levels... 

I actually seemed to enjoy it more this time around, when I get a new game I always play through it in "gotta beat this" mode first, so this time I sat back and enjoyed the experience a lot more.

The hunters really are great, and the enormous amount of polish that must have gone into this is insane.

The commentary nodes are very interesting also! 

As well, very nicely done. The huge internal changes of Ep1 meant less mapping was done (for some reason, they're different disciplines) but Ep2 made up for the smaller gameplay time of Ep1 maybe twice over. Really looking forward to Ep3, and more stuff like the Lost Coast + commentaries would be good as well.

Out of the orange box it seems I don't like Portal as much as everyone who posted here when it was released. It's a very well executed concept, but next to HL2-Ep1+2 it just fades into background. Having said that Portal2 would be a very interesting must-have. The end song is great as well. 

I really like this. I think it could have been a bit longer though. HalfLife was the best for me! How long is that game??!?!

Ep2 - Played on the 360, and I thought the Graphics were tremendous, also the NPC interaction was really good! What I miss was the early fights out of HL1 where we first get to meet the soldiers. That stuff was so cool, they had the best AI of the time! I dont quite think that any of the sequels have managed to create the same type of atmosphere as what we had there. Period.

The end battle of Ep2 was really smart though. Also theres a fight where you loose your escort (the alien-dude) and you have to take an elevator up whilst he stays down below and hold off the marauding zombine and ant/acidlions. That was a good battle. 

Just checked and I see that commentary is available in Ep1, and I assume Ep2 . . . might have to play through again. 

and the world rejoiced... 

http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2008/02/stop-press-portalized-open-source.html 

The Collision thing impressed me. 

http://www.igf.com/02finalists.html

Some of them look quite interesting.
(starbuck?) 

I saw all those recently while researching, some amazing stuff there for sure.