I'm a bad video game industry professional. I've hardly played anything in the past couple of months. My backlog is so large that I don't imagine that I'll be paying a full $50 retail price for a game in quite some time.

Right now I'm playing Painkiller for the PC. It's wonderfully mindless FPS in the spirit of Serious Sam or the original Doom. The action is frantic and furious. The levels are segmented into small, almost arcade-sized chunks.

I also spent some time this weekend with Mario Party 4! Whoo! That game rocks the house. Tons of competitive mini-games and sending ghosts to steal your opponents shit. What more could you ask for?