We dropped from orbit

The season's cool games are finally starting to drop out of orbit, and you know which one I'm talking about!

Fortiscule and I played through the campaign in Halo 3: ODST last night. It took us about seven hours, from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m. We loved it. The game is great. It's more human than any previous Halo game. The characters are real people, not genetically engineered, trained-in-a-crucible Spartans, and they are very well acted by Nathan Fillion as Buck, Tricia Helfer as Dare, and all the rest of the cast.

I'll write a full review for Techcetera in the next few days, of course, but that's my first impression of ODST: thumbs up.

I've been busy writing reviews all week. The busy game season is upon us, and I don't want to get behind!

If you're into racing, take a look at my review of Need for Speed: Shift.

If sexy woman armed with pistols and swords is your bag, baby, then take a look at my review of Wet.

If you're curious about Wolfenstein, here's my review of that one, too.

We have new blogging software where I work, and so I'm figuring out how to best display my reviews with it. The new software, a new version of Movable Type, allows for a user profile page that displays all my activity on al.com. If you want to quickly find all my reviews, just pop onto that page.

I invite you to please visit my page on al.com often. It doesn't cost you anything, but it helps put bread and butter on my table (or cereal on my TV tray, is more like it), because the more hits we have, the better our ad rates can be, and thus my job is more secure.

You can create your own profile on al.com, too, and leave comments on my reviews. Please do that! It's fun to get feedback, when different gamers have varying opinions on games.

It looks like both Need for Speed: Shift and Halo 3: ODST allow you to take screen shots, which are posted to a corresponding web site. If you grab some screens of yourself in action, e-mail me a copy at sythbane@gmail.com, and I'll post them! If we have enough, I can create a gallery of Sythbane Squadron members in action. That could be a hoot!

Back to the game at hand: ODST. It's reported to be selling a gillion copies. Not surprising, because the game is great, but also because it was heralded by the best commercial for a video game ever, bar none, period. Here it is again: