Games.

Well, I'm big into games. Like, massive.
I'm chiefly a FPS player, my favourites being Battlefield: Bad Company and Halo 3. I'm also big into RTS titles, like Tom Clancy's Endwar and Halo Wars.
Obviously you can see an overarching theme in my gaming preferences, but it's explainable.
Halo as a franchise is massive to me, because when I was 12 or 13, I bought the Halo: The Flood book by William C Dietz, unaware of the actual game Halo. Reading the book, which also got me into more military fiction authors like Robert Ludlum and Lee Child, I fell in love with Halo's plot. To date, I have every Halo canon novel released. I've skimped on the graphic novels and such because I find them too shallow to really grasp the scale of Halo. My favourite of the Halo books is Ghosts Of Onyx by Eric Nylund. It is the last book in the series chronologically and it details the story of the Spartan-II, Kurt, a member of the famous Master Chief's old squad, who is mysteriously kidnapped to lead a legion of new Spartans, the Spartan-IIIs, without the legendary green armour. The story details the doomed legion and goes deep into the story of the forerunners. I'd love to see a sequel ot it.

Anyway, back to games.
The most exciting games for me at the moment are Prototype, Mass Effect 2 and Assassin's Creed 2.
Prototype looks exactly like the kind of game that will be globally disliked, but I'll adore it, because it'll be stupidly easy to kill things and wander about breaking things. It may prove a disappointment, but it seems at this point to be unlikely. A Demo would not go amiss.
Mass Effect is probably the best game of 2008; although it wasn't released in '08, it was the primary game I played and had such an excellent style of play similar to Bioware's Knights Of The Old Republic titles, which were about the only RPGs I would play. Mass Effect 2's teaser trailer had me wetting my Captain America underwear in excitement, purely because I know there's more to it than meets the eye. If the pace doesn't let up from the last game, Mass Effect 2 will easily dwarf any game, ever. Co-op wouldn't go amiss
Assassin's Creed was again one of my favourite titles on the X360. A lot of people lost interest in it quickly because it was so repetitive, but to be honest I think it's damn near impossible to a game to be repetitive when it's on the scale of Creed. It was almost as fun to walk along the streets of Damascus just to look damn cool as it was to sprint around the city slaughtering every soldier you could. A sequel, set in freakin' Venice, will be 100% win, and I really, really can't wait.
Modern Warfare 2, also known as Call Of Duty 6, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2, Call Of Duty 4.5, Call of Duty 6: Modern Warfare 2, looks decent but if it's anything like its predecessor it'll be chock full of assholes on the online servers, and will be decreased in enjoyment unless there is a way to form a squad like in World At War.

Matt Out.