Ok, I took back Baldur's Gate.  The main problem in the end was that I had to cheat to win.  I didn't see any way to get to the end without cheating. 

There was this ridiculous section of dungeon at the end of the first act that is just a spiral inward.  There are no save points.  At this point, I have used a cheat to make myself invincible and give myself all spells.  I'm getting poisoned and bitten by spiders.  There are thieves that would otherwise have killed me in one good blow.  I killed everything and I didn't level up until after the very last boss.  I made level 5.

The bosses at the end could quite easily have eaten through any health potions I could have bought, since they were firing off magic without care.  The only reason I managed to get any spells off was that I was invulnerable.  Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to manipulate the klunky spell selector.  Not that I would have had any of those spells at level 4 anyway.  But the spells at level 4 (magic missile, burning hands) suck.

Did I mention that the character advancement is nothing like real D&D at all?  Isn't this a Wizards of the Coast property?  Weird.

I looked a bit at act two and decided that if that's all it had to offer then I wasn't interested.  So it went back to the store.

To replace it, I got Mario Party 4.  Yeah, I know, grand departure.  But I figured it would be nice to get something that Berta might also like to play.

I only got to look at the game briefly, but it looks hideously complicated.  Different colors of board squares mean different things as you move around on it - nothing's intuitive.  The graphics aren't really fantastic, and the one mini-game I played was not the best.  Er, not really good at all.

I just figured it would be a simple point-blank style game with the Mario characters.  Instead, there is this complicated system of stars and coins that doesn't even seem anything like the system in the original Mario games.  And you have to know how it works to win at the Party.  It seems quite befuddling.  I guess I'll have to get Berta to try it and see what she thinks.  At this point, I think that if I strike out with anouther game, I might give up console gaming, too.  Sheesh.

On a final note, though, to alleviate some of your "fears" that I might go completely over to the fluff games (and those of you in the know already know that I have), I have a couple of games that interested me recently that I thought I would share.

The first two are Palm games.  Rook's Revenge is a neat chess-based game where you can move any piece you like as fast as you like to any legal space.  There are no turns.  The only restriction is that you can't move the same piece twice in a row. 

The game also lets you build new pieces by double-tapping in an empty space in your starting row.  So if you move your knight and you want another one, you simply double-tap in the space where the knight starts.  In a few seconds (there's a timer) the new knight appears.  This is a neat feature, but I haven't had to use it to win yet.

>The second Palm game is an update to a game I already have.  Billiards is basically a pool game where you shoot balls into pockets on the palm.  If you've seen this game on my Visor before, you know how cool it is.  The new version is even more cool.  There is more, better control over the angle of the cue stick and the location of striking the ball.  Also, there are options to allow you to see where the balls are going to go when you hit them by drawing lines.  You can set it for none, first ball, or all balls.  It's very neat.  It just occurred to me while running the demo that there is a mode where you can play two-player 8-ball by handing the Palm back and forth when your turn is up.  I hadn't thought of this before, since I was always playing the computer.  Very neat.

Finally, the game that I've been waiting for.  Zelda: Windwalker.  I've seen the demo in the store, and this game is beautiful.  Tomorrow, I get to play it at home!

The cell animation looks so cool.  I love when the enemies explode in a big cloud.  Neat!  There is even some talk in the review about hooking a GameBoy to the cube to search for secret rooms.  How cool is that?  Anyway, if you can't tell, I'm excited.  This game is sure to be better than that ridiculous Baldur's Gate.