I was taken by surprise yesterday when I stumbled upon the trailer for a new full-length feature Star Wars film that is set to come out in August. Completely done in computer animation, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, will be set between episodes 2 and 3 and will tell us more about the devastating Clone Wars. The movie will be followed by a regular TV series on the cartoon network this fall. I will go back to drooling now.

A few weeks back, my wife and I just tried out a new babysitter and went out to enjoy the movies. Of course, we already had my sister and mother-in-law look after the kids after they were in bed, but this was the first time that it was someone outside the family. Through the scarce listings, we settled on Iron Man. While the preview looked very cheesy, we decided to give it a chance and were really not disappointed.

Check out my review of the movie.

Now that we have a new option for babysitting, we’ll be able to enjoy many of the other comic book movies that are coming out this summer (The Dark Knight, Hellboy II, Incredible Hulk).

I have always been what I refer to as a “bargain gamer”. While I love playing games, I am not willing to pay the full price to get them when they first come out. I am also not one to always try to keep my PC up-to-date to be able to play the latest and greatest of game titles.

This approach is paying off right now since I just got myself a new mid-range computer for home and am now looking at all of the titles that I’ve missed over the past four years. The first thing that I did was to pull out a few games that I had bought as part of a collection but had never even played (yes, kind of lame, I know!), namely:

• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, a wicked remake of the classic action puzzler that got my hooked immediately.

and Splinter Cell

I have also been looking at the Best PC Games Compilations from the past few years and am currently looking at getting the following titles to augment my game collection:

• Orange Box: A collection of Half-Life 2, HL2 Episode 1, HL2 Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2. Since I have never even played or seen Half-Life 2, let alone all the other titles, this should be hours of fun.

• Company of Heroes: I’ve always loved RTS games and this one seems to be quite amazing from everything I’ve read. I have also tried out the demo version and am already hooked.

• Sam & Max: Season 1: Another type of game that I have also been fond of is adventure games (Full Throttle, Syberia). The return of Sam & Max in an episodic format seems like it would be a lot of run to play through.

You can click on any image to see a higher resolution version of them.

If you can think of any other memorable game titles that you’ve played in the last 3-4 years that you think that I should check out, just leave a comment or drop me an e-mail.