The Best Achievement / Release Calendar

Up until last night, the Achievement I was most proud of was finding the last of 500 Agility Orbs in Crackdown; last night, however, I got the Wax Off Achievement in Geometry Wars 2, and even though it's a substantially less Point increase, it was a HUGE monkey off my back. I like GeoWars2 a lot, even though I'm near the bottom of almost every leaderboard in the game, and Pacifism is my favorite of the game modes. The problem was, I was so obsessed with getting the Wax Off achievement that I wasn't actually playing the mode - I was simply trying to get the achievement, and that led to lots and lots of frustration, and I often wondered how I would ever get back to the sheer joy of the actual mode without getting the Achievement. After another 10-15 tries, somehow everything lined up and I was able to unlock it, and now (1) I don't have to worry about it anymore, and (2) I can go back to playing the mode the way it was meant to be played. That said, Wax Off - and a lot of the other Achievements in GeoWars2, for that matter - does a great job of teaching you how to avoid the enemies and how to strategically steer through gates.

The Olympics are killing my CivRev buzz; my wife keeps wanting to watch the Olympics on our HDTV. Good thing, then, that the upcoming release calendar is somewhat bland and uninspired; I'll probably still have a lot of open hours with it before the Next Big Thing hits.

I was going to do a Release Calendar, but there's really no need; there's no week-to-week insanity like there was last year. Some big titles are coming out, to be sure, though...

MUST HAVE / ALREADY PRE-ORDERED

• Mercenaries 2
• Star Wars: Force Unleashed
• Little Big Planet
• Fable 2
• Fallout 3
• Saints Row 2
• Gears of War 2
• Resistance 2

not a lot of original IP in there.

RENTING / MILD-to-VERY CURIOUS

• Too Human
• Tales of Vesperia
• Infinite Undiscovery
• Viva Pinata
• Harvest Moon (DS)
  
• Harvest Moon (Wii)
• Rise of the Argonauts
  
• Silent Hill: Homecoming
• Far Cry 2
• Midnight Club: LA
• Dead Space
• Motorstorm: Pacific Rift
• Mirror's Edge
• Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts
• Left 4 Dead
• Prince of Persia
• Tomb Raider Underworld
• Last Remnant

STILL HOPEFUL IT WILL BE RELEASED IN 2008

• Brutal Legend