I've come to the obvious and rather painful resolution that while the games I'm playing now have been published by Microsoft (evil empire A) and EA (evil empire B), I have to come to the decision much like I'm sure our next presidential election will boil down to and choose the lesser of two evils.

And I have to go with EA with this one. I know, stings a bit for everyone, doesn't it?

Last week I bought Halo 3, a game which I didn't entirely want but it was there and I figured I might as well Finish the Fight™©. It was, to say the least, disappointing. The single player was stupid short, and I've never had much interest in multiplayer, not since I was called a fag at least forty-seven times by the high school kids at the LAN center we played Counter-Strike at near Smoky Hill high school in suburban Colorado (go Raptors!). I enjoy FPS games as much as the next mindless drooler but being beaten to death with my own appendix never much interested me as is what happens in most multiplayer games I try.

So to compare, I bought skate by EA (shudder), and turned it on.

5 hours later I'm writing this and wondering if I have enough 211 to get me drunk enough to sleep properly through the night. Probably not. Alcoholics have a fifth sense about this.

Skate kept me occupied about 4 times longer than Halo 3 did the first time I turned it on. It's a beautiful game with a hilarious opening sequence and if you're interested in seeing it I'm sure it's on Youtube somewhere. The gameplay itself is pissing me off, because EA is supposed to be the bastion of boring cookie-cutter been-there-done-that bullshit that we've all come to know and hate. But Skate's control is really, really fun, and depends on the player to figure out timing and height for every ollie on the fly. Flicking the right stick to do different tricks is incredibly compelling. I feel like a monkey who gets a treat every time he pulls off a 360 pop-shoveit into a 5-0 grind.

And then I think back to Halo, which is, by comparison, mind-numbingly dull. Lots of running and shooting. Flying the Hornet is cool, and if that was the whole game it would be awesome but then it'd have to be renamed Warhawk Minus Bullshit Sixaxis Controls, and that's too long a name to put on a box. The plot was lame, the environments were decent but not mind-blowing, and the Flood has been done better many times (See The Thing, Aliens, The Faculty, Snakes on a Plane, etc.)

For me, shooting people in a virtual environment got old a long time ago. But skate has this giant open world where you can cruise around and do challenges and just... you actually get better at controlling your guy instead of pumping points into his manual and jump skills, something that made me delete my Tony Hawk demo mere moments after starting it up. I guess Halo has a learning curve in multiplayer too, but at least in skate you don't get called filthy names by children the whole time.

So give skate a try. It's worth the money which is far more than I can say about the Haloez. Or Tony Hawk Squibbidy Doo 9 or wherever they are in that series. Stupid EA making fun games.