Update

Not that much new to add. I decided to skip Lost Planet. The reviews lead me to believe that the story followed your typical Japanese tripe (which is one of the reasons why I hate Japanese games) so I decided to skip the game. The multiplayer demo didn't really interest me either.. it just felt tacked on for some reason.

I did nab the Crackdown demo and enjoyed it. I had to force myself to delete the demo because I want to enjoy the retail game and too much time on the demo may burn me out. I'm a sucker for sandbox games so it's no surprise I liked Crackdown.

While waiting for Crackdown retail (out near the end of Feb) I'm trying to clean up some achievements. I'm trying to get Veteran in CoD3 but god I'm starting to hate the game. The checkpoints are WAY too sparse and in general the game just pisses me off. I enjoyed the single player game on normal mode but veteran is an exercise in frustration. The Nazis use laser sighted weapons, can see you through buildings and brush and never miss. I'm stuck on the "Forest" level campaign, the end where you have to use the mortars. The teammate AI is nearly retarded and don't help so I'm swarmed with endless wave on wave of germans running the hill.

I wanted to like the multiplayer portion of CoD3 (the reason why I bought the game really) but couple buggy game lobby interface with seriously switch-like gameplay and you have something really frustrating. The previews I saw at gametrailers lead me to believe that CoD3 would be a lot more tactical than CoD2 but the class type mechanism doesn't really change the fact that everyone pretty much still plays for themselves (no teamwork) and the shooting is very twitchy. Overall I'm really disappointed in CoD3, maybe with friends it would be great but in ranked matches the game sucks.