So the last few days were pretty good. Due to the long weekend for regular working folk, and the fact that during Winter-een-mas I expect to be fairly busy with the 7-day story and activities, Toby and I decided to get in some marathon gaming now. He came up from new York Friday night for three days of vegging.

We beat the Simpsons game on co-op, which was a pretty good experience. The fact that it was a Simpsons game written by Simpsons writers really carried the title where some technical areas would have lacked otherwise. It was like playing a really long episode of the show, and there were a lot of good laughs to be had throughout.

We beat Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, which remains on my list of “best games I’ve ever played”. It was cinematic and highly enjoyable through and through. If you own or purchase a PS3, you need this game.

We also played straight through Kane and Lynch on co-op. I had never touched the campaign mode, when the game came out I jumped straight to Fragile Alliance. Some friends told me the campaign was lacking a bit, so I wasn’t expecting much. So I was very surprised when the game turned out to be incredibly fun, and we played through the entire thing in a single eight-hour sitting.

The game has some flaws, and there are some minor annoyances (verticle split-screen instead of horizontal, for instance), but the overall experience was great. That may have been in large part due to the co-op nature of the title, as I’m not sure I would have enjoyed the game as much alone. I would even go so far as to say, if you aren’t playing Kane and Lynch co-op, don’t bother with the campaign at all.

The story and characters were pretty good. I found I preferred the earlier levels as opposed to the later, jungle levels, but I rarely like jungle levels in any game.

We filled out the rest of the weekend with some Ratchet and Clank on the PS3, and a bunch of random, older Xbox 360 titles. We even broke out Saint’s Row, which provided a lot of great fun. I had forgotten how enjoyable and tongue-in-cheek that game was.

My only gripe, and this is renewed every time Toby comes to visit, is the apparent slow death of single-console co-op experiences. It’s almost like developers decided gamers don’t have friends that come over for gaming anymore. Don’t get me wrong, online game modes are great, but it’s really frustrating to see games with great co-op or multiplayer that you can’t play split-screen.

And in the same token, it’s annoying that more companies don’t support “multiple people online from the same console” the way that Halo does.

Don’t forget to sign up for the second season of the animated series. If you do it soon, not only do you get all 12 episodes for a mere $19.99, but you get all 12 episodes of season one as a bonus.

Also, we still have some Winter-een-mas shirts and hoodies available, though it looks like they are almost sold out.

I’m going to go enjoy the rest of my long-weekend off, because tomorrow it’s back to work!