I wish I went to your college. If my books cost $120, I was lucky to get $40 for it. A whole semester's worth of books (usually four or five) would get me less than $150.

The load time seems dependent upon the length of the ad. The progress bar matches up to around 75% and then the ad infused run slows down only to complete just as the ad finishes.

Playtime has more to do with what you want out of the game than the "run through time". My first playthrough of Force Unleashed was on the hardest difficulty available with me looking for every item. I think it took me close to 30 hours to get through the game, and I consider myself a relativley seasoned and skilled gamer. You can beat Diablo in three minutes if you want (see the Speed Demo Archive), just because you played it that way doesn't mean everyone else has.

Mmmmm...collagen peptides. Does it make a tasty cake with mint frosting?

All you have to do is watch the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and catch his, I believe its called Jay Walking now but I recall it as "The Great American Pop Quiz", quiz of the common man on the streets of NYC to see that the vast majority of Americans have NO business selecting who should lead the US.

Yeah because the Tonight Show doesn't cherry pick from the worst responses of the group.

You can get Team Fortress 2 for around $10 and the community is very active. I realize that this is NOT free, but it is very inexpensive. The cost to activity ratio is probably nearly as high as a free FPS because there are so many servers with lots of people playing on each.

I've played Combat Arms (which is actually free and has quite good gameplay), and I just can't stand the type of players that gravitate towards free. The chat rooms before the games are just filled with swearing and racial slurs. I see next to none of this in TF2, those kind of people usually get booted from the server by an admin.