Here's how my yearly foray into trying to like video games again is going down. I'm buying a 360 this time with:
Sleeping Dogs
Dragon's Dogma
Max Payne 3
Kingdoms of Amalur
Skyrim
If those can't pull me back in I might just have to pretend I quit gaming forever again, sell everything again, until I get the itch next year again. The Circle of my gaming life.
FWIW, I downloaded the demo of
Sleeping Dogs a few days ago. I wasn't impressed. Hard to judge the immersiveness of the world with just a demo, but I found the combat very unsatisfying. It's a lot like the combat in the recent
Batman games, but while
Batman's combat is poetry in motion,
Sleeping Dogs is infinitely more clumsy. Besides the controls being unresponsive if you press a button at the wrong moment, there appears to be no way to walk rather than jog, which was really driving me insane, since it made it difficult to make small adjustments in a game where spacing is important.
You've seen my giant write-up on
Dragon's Dogma. It's certainly the most original one on your list. Hopefully you'll enjoy it.
I've done a playthrough of
Kingdoms of Amalur. It was pretty good as action RPGs go. But it was too easy (I played on the hardest setting from the get-go, and rarely had a problem), and there's no post-game to speak of. Once I beat it, I really had no desire to jump back in again. I was also annoyed by the fact that the controller layout forced you to pick only four abilities when you'll likely have six or seven useful ones by the end.
I still haven't played
Skyrim, but it looks about the same as
Oblivion, which I've played into the ground. A good game by all accounts.
You'll have to tell me what you think about
Max Payne, though. I've never played any of them.
You might consider picking up
Borderlands 2 when it comes out in a week. I fully expect it to comfortably fall within my top 20 favorite games ever. I picked up the original
Borderlands months after it was released because it looked like just another shooter, of which we have entirely too many. But I became a believer almost as soon as I began playing it, and with any luck the second game will be a lot better than the first.